Napoleon Dynamite, er, Bonaparte

"All You Need To Know About Napoleon Bonaparte,"
a documentary we watched in class for a brief
review of Napoleon's life.

Ah, Napoleon. A name famous for two things: the 2004 comedy film Napoleon Dynamite, and the early 19^th century French military leader Napoleon Bonaparte, who nearly turned the whole of Europe into his own personal empire. As much as I’d like to cover Napoleon Dynamite in history class, Napoleon Bonaparte is probably much more important to world history. Born in 1769, Bonaparte found his fame as a general during the French Revolution. After a coup d’état in France, he became ruler and started to conquer Europe bit by bit: Italy, Austria, Belgium, Holland, Spain, Portugal, and so on. A brilliant strategist and charismatic leader, Napoleon brought radical (and controversial) change to Europe in all forms.

"Portrait of Madame de Stael."
Image from wikipedia.org.

Politically, he rebalanced power in the economic classes by establishing a meritocracy, which elevates people on personal merit, rather than the former aristocracy, which only accounted for a family tree’s social prestige and wealth. This improved life for the lower and middle classes, but enraged the higher class, such as Madame de Staël, a former noble. Unable to enjoy the former perks she had as a noble, her thoughts on Napoleon are fairly negative: “What particularly characterizes Bonaparte’s government is his profound contempt for all the intellectual riches of human nature: virtue, dignity, religion, enthusiasm…” (source: lesson notes) This also applied to the Church and royalty, who lost political power due to Napoleon’s rebalancing.

Economically, he encouraged the growth of industry, rebudgeted France, and controlled prices on goods to make them accessible to the poor, all of which were influential in advancing the world economy. He also sold the Louisiana Territory to the United States, which was an important part in American westward expansion. On the other hand, he stole large amounts of money and art from Italy, causing a negative impact on the Italian economy.

"Portrait of Marshal Michel Ney."
Image from wikipedia.org.

Socially, it was a time of human rights. Norwood Young, a British author, wrote: “Of his civil reforms the most to be said is that they may be on the whole, be described as making for progress.” (source: The Lost Voices of Napoleonic Historians) Bonaparte made education far more accessible than it had been before his reign. He removed the feudal system, which allowed former serfs to move up in life. One of Napoleon’s generals, Marshal Michel Ney, claimed that “Liberty triumphs in the end, and Napoleon, our august emperor, comes to confirm it.” (source: lesson notes)

Napoleon Bonaparte was a controversial character in his time and he remains a controversial character today, but his impact on the world is unquestionably widespread, from France all the way to the New World, and from the French Revolution to the present.

Chocolate + Communism = Chocunism! Or is it Choconism?

As a start to the activity, everyone in the class was handed 2 Hershey kisses, with the exception of two random people, who received 8 each. The initial reaction was calling favorites, that this was unfair and that everyone in the class should’ve received the same amount. However, rock, paper, scissors was then brought into play. Between two people, each would bet one of their chocolates and play rock, paper, scissors to determine who won them both. Once people ran out, they went to go sit back down.

Different tactics were deployed during the course of the activity. Some of the chocolate-poor asked the rich to “invest” in them in exchange for half of their chocolate when the activity was over. Of course, this didn’t always work out, and the investors were furious when their investments ran out of chocolate and sat down. I found myself having good runs and bad runs, bringing my chocolate up to 8, and then coming back down to 1, up to 6, until I ran out. Additionally, there were a few “Robin Hoods” that gave away chocolates to get people back in the game, which is how I got back in. I made it back up to 5 chocolates before the game ended.

When it was over, all the chocolates were collected and then redistributed so that each person once again had two, including the favorites. Those who had built up large stocks of chocolate, especially having started with two, were disappointed that their chocolate had been given away, but those who had run out were glad that they once again had some. The class was given the choice to either continue with the game, or to stop. Some of the ambitious and gambling ones decided to take another chance, regardless of whether or not they had run out before. However, most of the class decided not to take the chance, as two chocolates was better than none. Because of the majority vote, it was decided that the class could no longer play the game and everyone had two chocolates each. This is a great model of Karl Marx’s theory of economics, known as Marxism.

"The Invisible Hand," the first in a six-part series on economics
from ouLearn. It explains the system of capitalism as
imagined by Adam Smith.

There are two prevalent theories of economics from the time of the Industrial Revolution. The first was what Adam Smith called "the invisible hand," which is known today as capitalism. It is a system in which government takes a hands-off approach to the economy. The Invisible Hand is what moves people to buy goods in their own self-interest: the highest quality goods for the lowest possible price. Under this system, businesses compete with each other to get low price, high quality goods to their consumers. Honest businesses win, while businesses that cheat their customers go out of business. All classes can take part in trade and commerce, because even the poor have enough money to buy the low priced goods. The main problem with this system is that the economy takes time to stabilize, which means that there will be hard times before the invisible hand has fully done its job.

The main opposition to this theory is from Karl Marx, who created Marxism. It begins with capitalism, in which industry is privately owned and have the freedom of competition to raise their quality of life. Capitalism results in unequal economic classes, so those that end up poor revolt and progress capitalism into socialism, where the industry is government-owned and wealth is redistributed to bring economic equality. Although the former wealthy would want to switch back to capitalism to have more control over industry, the poor instead revolt, using force to keep classes equal and insure that they will never have to experience poverty ever again. This turns socialism into communism, a truly classless society in which government is not needed to redistribute wealth.

Each of these systems has strong points and weak points. I believe socialism to be the weakest because it requires some level of altruism from the people: if people know that any excess wealth they make will be redistributed, and that they will receive money from the government if they make too little, then why work at all? I find this an innate problem with socialism because there is no incentive for people to work, innovate, and succeed. Communism also has this problem, but to a lesser extent because there is no government for people to fall back on. The population knows that communism is a group goal, because any and all wealth they get is directly derived from the people. I prefer capitalism over communism because capitalism promotes ambition and innovation. In a communist system, there is no “success,” only the collective population sharing wealth. In capitalism, it takes hard work to get ahead. I think that individual success should be encouraged, to keep the world moving forward. However, the downside of capitalism is that as a consequence, it creates economic classes, meaning that someone will always be on the bottom of the economic ladder. It’s impossible to make any money in capitalism if you’re completely penniless. I think the tax system is a helpful step to solving that problem: it resembles the redistribution of wealth in socialism and communism, but doesn’t go to that extreme. The government takes taxes (not enough to drive anyone to poverty, but a reasonable amount) and invests it in the country and in the poor, so that the poor can also take part in the free market and rise in economic standing. Of course, no system is absolutely perfect in reality, but I think we can get close enough.

The Mill Girls

During the Industrial Revolution, many young women and girls in America went to work in the Lowell mills, which was precisely the aim of the Lowell Experiment. As opposed to England, where overcrowding and poverty meant there was no shortage of people willing to work in the mills, America had plenty of space for families to continue farming and were less likely to go into the mills to work.

The Lowell Experiment was the Lowell mills’ way of attracting workers to work for them, mostly seeking for young girls that were not yet of marrying age. Girls were not needed to work on the farm like boys were and normally were married to boys who could farm. At the time, married women weren’t supposed to be working and were instead meant to be doing things at home. Additionally, women didn’t need to be paid as much, and were essentially raised to be obedient. That meant that the ideal worker for the Lowell mills were girls who were old enough to be out of the house, but not yet old enough to be married.

"Print by Merrimack Company." From American Textile
History Museum. This picture, showing a peaceful and happy
lifestyle in the mills, was used to attract girls to the mill
life. The happy couples indicate a good place to settle,
and the clean environment gives a pure feel to the scene.

To make the mills enticing enough that daughters would be willing to leave and families willing to part with their daughters, the experiment set up restrictions, the first of which being that working in the mills was a temporary job. Once they came of age, girls would leave the mill and find a husband to settle down with. They also set up the mills like a home: an older woman in the boardinghouses to serve meals and behavior, and strict rules of conduct. Girls benefited by getting money for them to send back home, to spend or to save. They also got a taste of independence from their families, made friends with other mill girls, and got an education. However, this came at the cost of leaving their homes, and chances of accidents with the machinery. In addition, the idyllic mill lifestyle was not to last: overproduction in American mills led to wage cuts, which the girls protested and went on strike against.

Clip from "Daughters of Free Men", a documentary by the American Social
History Project, from the City University of New York. It tells the story of Lucy
Hall as she goes to work in the mills. This clip focuses on the wage cuts, which
get protested by the rest of the girls.

Although the Lowell Experiment ended when the Civil War broke out, the mill girls left their mark on society. They changed America’s perceptions of women by working outside the house, living away from their parents, and getting a good education. When they could no longer work in the mills, many girls found they didn’t want a simple farm life anymore. They became writers, labor reform activists, women’s rights activists, and even abolitionists. These Lowell mill girls helped to shape American society today, even all the way from the 1800’s.

We Talked with an English Museum!

To supplement our unit on the Industrial Revolution, our class recently participated in a Google Hangout with the Textiles Gallery of the Museum of Science and Industry, in Manchester, England. To prepare for the chat with MOSI, we spent a little time exploring their site. There are a few articles on their site, which we read through to get a background on textiles during the time. We were also sent a video by their Explainer, Jamie. He quickly gave a rundown of the parts that went into making cotton cloth, and when we found an unfamiliar term, we noted it for later and once the video was over, we used Google to figure out what each of the terms meant. We also drafted questions that we might ask during the live chat.

I thought the chat was really interesting, since I learned a lot about the cotton industry (probably more than I would ever want or need, but the point still stands). I had never known how clothmakers got the tiny threads to alternate up and down, but from the prep video and the chat, I learned that the machine has alternate lengthwise (“warp”) threads on separate bars, that separate them while the cross-thread (“weft”) gets thrown across their gap by the shuttle. Then the warp threads get switched from their up or down locations, while the weft thread is thrown back across, creating the crossthreads that cloth is made of. Another interesting tidbit is that long, clean cotton threads were the best for cloth, so short fibers were separated out and used to make lower quality or “shoddy” goods, which is where the word shoddy comes from, and dirty cotton was used to fill mattresses, which gave rise to the phrase “one man’s trash is another man’s treasure.” 

A photo by Lewis Hine of a
young girl working in the mills.
Her mirthless expression is
indicative of the deplorable
conditions in mills.

Jamie also gave us a brief look into the horrific lives led by some of the mill workers. For example, some jobs in mills were so dangerous that the owner wouldn’t want his wife or child to do it. So instead, he would “buy” an orphan from an orphanage and set them to work in exchange for food and board, essentially making them a slave. The mill’s machines were so loud that the workers often could go deaf later in life. Workers could inhale cotton fibers from the air in the mill, which built up over time and caused breathing problems. Arguably the worst part was when he stood in a space and explained how if a child got stuck in that spot, they would be crushed between the machine’s moving parts. Also, since floors were large and machinery loud, any accidents far away from the floor’s off switch could go unnoticed for a long period of time before the switch was pulled to save the worker. 

It was interesting to hear a museum worker talk to us about being a museum worker. Jamie hadn’t been necessarily interested in the history of the cotton industry, but he was interested in working at a museum from a young age, and ended up at MOSI. It occurred to me that Jamie had to know a lot more than just how the machines worked, since he could get questions that had very little to do with the machines, and had to be knowledgeable about a lot of the background history and random facts surrounding the industrial textile mills.

I don’t think the discussion with the expert was particularly necessary, but I found it more engaging than simply learning the material. It was especially helpful to see the machinery at work and see how complex each part was. Overall, I really liked the chat, except for a couple issues. The technical issues like the dropped call at the beginning and the wonky audio/video, in addition to a bit of the accent, occasionally made me confused on what was happening. Other than those slight issues, I thought the experience was awesome, and it’d be really nice to do it again with other experts on other topics during the year.

How to Curate a Museum

Group B's exhibit.

The aim of our exhibit was to educate others on how steam powered transportation progressed during the Industrial Revolution. We started by analyzing all our sources one by one, filling out the chart and asking sourcing questions. This is important because when you analyze the sources, it gives you a good idea of which are the most relevant, and what order to put them in that will be the most interesting and have the most logical progression. Then we split up work on the exhibit itself, between preparing the sources to be mounted, creating captions for them, and creating a layout/design/theme. We wanted the title to be clever, but also informative, and so we came up with “Steam-powered Transportation: Now We’re Getting Somewhere!” However, we realized that the paper didn’t have enough space for everything we wanted with the current layout, so we had to scrap the whole thing and redo it, but I think it turned out just fine anyways. The exhibit consists of six sources. The first is a diagram of how exactly a steam engine works, with an explanatory caption supplementing the diagram. The second is excerpts from letters by Robert Fulton, who steered the first steamboat. Third, there is a pair of pieces of writing side by side: one a poem from William Wordsworth arguing against the railroad, and one an informative piece by Samuel Smiles in support of it. There is also a piece of art by James C. Bourne, a depiction of a railroad, and a map of coal and metal production in Great Britain. The final source is a timeline of transportation in America from 1804-1853, which we wound around all the other sources and connected with a train track.

Group A’s exhibit, “Spinning a City,” was about the evolution of the loom. The Industrial Revolution consisted of multiple leaps in weaving technology, like the spinning jenny in 1764, followed by the British handloom in 1771. The exhibit at Group C, “Pollution in the Revolution,” talked a little about some of the negative indirect consequences of the revolution. One professor, Michael Faraday, dropped a strip of paper in the murky waters of a river, and it hadn’t sunk very far before it was completely obscured by the pollutants in the river. Exhibit D, “Condemning the Innocent: Child Labor,” informed about some of the younger constituents of the textile mill workforce. Interestingly, before industrialization, the most popular age group for working was 10 and under, but after, it became 21+. The last exhibit by Group E, “Spinning into Slavery,” explored the role of slavery in the Industrial Revolution. For example, high textile production rates in the North caused slaves picking cotton in the South to have to work harder to keep up the pace.

I appreciated this project for its creative aspects. I found it almost similar to a DBQ, with document analysis, just in a different format. This was enjoyable, and I hope we do something like this again in the future with other topics.

Recordbreaking Speeds: 5mph!

The essential question for the activity we did was “What was ‘revolutionary’ about industrialization?” Each group got a section of the Industrial Revolution to read about, and took notes on the advances that made the Industrial Revolution a revolution. Groups then presented their notes to the other groups.

The advancements during the Industrial Revolution were a great benefit to the people. Through new farming technology, both the quality and quantity of agricultural products swelled. Farmers started using fertilizer and new methods like soil mixing and crop rotation to grow crops easier and better year round. Dikes were built to keep the ocean out of coastal farmland. Landowners during the time took part in enclosure, in which they took over land formerly from peasant farmers and farmed more land using less work. The result jobless peasant farmers often moved into cities, becoming a major part of the labor force. The increase in food production also boosted population by a lot, since people were no longer dying of starvation.

Fulton's boat, the "Clermont." 
www.digitalgallery.nypl.org.

There was also a huge leap in transportation technology during the Industrial Revolution. With the invention of the steam engine came
the steam locomotive and the steamboat. The steam locomotive, used to pull carriages along rails, encouraged the growth of railroads in the shipping of goods over land rather than building railroads by rivers. Robert Fulton used the steam engine to send a boat up the Hudson River at a new record: five miles per hour! Eventually, this led to steam powered cargo ships with ten to twenty times more holding capacity.

The Industrial Revolution was an integral part of world history, one that jumpstarted the growth of modern technology. Without the Industrial Revolution and the innovations made during it, the world would be a lot different today.

Searching for Dinosaurs?

To start off history for the year, we needed to review a bit of media literacy. That means knowing how to search the Internet for information and how to tell if sites can be trusted for good information. We used two sites in class: A Google a Day and the Pacific Northwest Tree Octopus.

A Google a Day is a challenge for the tech-savvy. It presents you with three questions each day: ones that can’t be answered with a single Google search, but rather with multiple searches to put together puzzle pieces that lead to the final answer. I found it fun while uncovering parts of the puzzle, as a string of answers. Searching up John Waters led to Divine led to Clarabell the Clown, leading to the final answer, The Howdy Doody Show. What I didn’t find fun was having an answer that was right, and that fit the question, but was still wrong. A question like “Under modern classification, what clade do birds belong to?” is somewhat broad. It got especially frustrating when the hint was “D_____” yet Dinosauria, the clearest answer given by most sites, didn’t work. It took until after the whole challenge was over that someone figured out the answer was “diapsids”. At the very least, I learned that birds are diapsids, along with some fun facts about random celebrities.

"Tree Octopus." www.zapatopi.net/treeoctopus.

The second site we looked at to talk about media literacy was the Pacific Northwest Tree Octopus. We checked the site in three categories: accuracy, authenticity, and reliability. Accuracy is how truthful and up to date information is, because you can’t have wrong or out of date information if you’re using a source for school. The site fails this test because it makes multiple references to Sasquatch, which sets off alarm bells as to where this information is coming from. The site has very few links to sources outside the domain zapatopi.net, which gives the researcher no way to cross-verify any information on the site. Authenticity is the genuineness of a site, or if it is what it seems to be. The site also fails this test because it appears to be a movement to charitably help an endangered species, but upon further searching, you will find two things. One, no proceeds from the tree octopus merchandise on the site go to help the species. Two, a quick search on the Internet reveals the whole thing to be a hoax, which certainly removes the site from usable sources. Reliability is how dependable the information is, which normally falls to how trustworthy the person who wrote the site is– that is, if the author is an expert in the field or not. The site creator is one Lyle Zapato, who disclaims association with any educational organizations other than the Kelvinic University, a fictional school also under the zapatopi.net domain. The site clearly fails all three criteria for usage in school research, and should be avoided in favor of other, more trustworthy sites.

These two activities on media literacy were a nice start to the school year, and I am glad that we went through it a little before getting into many research assignments.