Thursday, April 11, 2019
American history Essay Example for Free
American history EssayIn the course of American history, the American people make water been confronted with antithetic threats to its politics, economy and way of life. At present, the continuing threat of international terrorism and the unceasing wave of Anti-Americanism are constantly putting the lives of simple Americans towards fear and uncertainty, notwithstanding all the different social issues they face each passing day, such as gay marriage, abortion, and stem-cell research, among many an(prenominal) others.These threats had their make counterparts in previous years, and it is worthy to note that different side of the American political fence all had their own ranks on various matters of serious concern then, and seemingly, those old issues remain as hotly pass ond up until this moment. The authorship will examine the actual threats and pre-conceived threats by Americans through the different decades such as racism, immigration, government regulation, evolutionis m, and many other issues and social questions that have made the United States the brimming democracy of ideas it continues to be until today.Evolution and the fountain of Man and the Earth In the twenties, a most important concern has been the continuing discourse on evolution vis-a-vis fundamental Christian preaching on the ancestry of human beings. In rarified Dixons Sermon on the Evils of Darwinism and Evolution, he is clearly mistaken for lumping the possibleness of evolution per se, with the racist theory of social Darwinism of Herbert Spencer.He is clearly mistaken in doing so, because neer had the theory of evolution posited that evolution is further a matter of survival of the fittest, thus, the weak may necessarily be oppressed, thus, may be finished in the conduct of human evolution. (165) Such a placement is clearly misinformed, because what the theory of evolution solely suggests is that humans, as per the evidence culled in the development and evolution of other species, may have descended, not from the scriptural Adam, as many fundamental Christians believe, but from apes and monkeys.The trouble with Reverend Dixon, and all other purveyors of the biblical description on the origin of man is that their answers to the scientific question on evolution was never based on a scientific reply itself, but merely on a reassertion of Bible verses that never could man have descended from apes, precisely because he descended from God himself. Then and now, the reason why creationism remains utterly discredited among scientific circles is the basic fact that no scientific reply has ever been posited to the Darwinian repugn on the origin of man.The evolutionary scientists are no less Christian by continuously asseverate their Darwinian position. Defense Attorney Darrows interrogation of Prosecutor Bryan during the Monkey Trial is helpful in better understanding the fundamentalist Christian views of the day, which permeates a better deal in the e volution debate of today. Darrows edge of questioning clearly seeks to debunk the literal biblical interpretation of fundamentalist Christians, which in this case magnate be Prosecutor Bryan.While Bryan asserts that the creation of the world occurred six-thousand years ago, Darrow insists that the Chinese civilization had been in human race thousands of years more than that, and rightly so, but Bryan remains unfazed with such statements, firmly believing, in mocking fashion, that the truth is on his side. (167) In the discourse of the origin of man, and the creation of the world, fundamental Christians have remained unfazed, in the face of overcome scientific evidence, especially on the age of the earth, that the truth as stated in the Bible is the just(prenominal) truth that deprivations to be believed by any God-fearing person.Such a position is dangerous, because it creates a faith that is blind and dogmatic, and obscures believers from the well-intentioned truth provided by science in determining previously secret facts about humans and the natural world in which they exist. Unfortunately, this position remains the subject of intense debate until today, with creationism advocates appealing School Boards and lobbying Capitol Hill to cut funding for the instruction of evolution, and/or to provide equal educational exposure to creationism and its corollary theory, Intelligent Design.White Supremacy and Racism Another threat during the twenties was the vacate of washrag supremacy in the face of a nascent anti-racism and black civil rights movement as delineated in the literary works of Langston Hughes and F. Scott Fitzgerald. The Klan treatise on Americanism is nothing but empty rhetoric on the need to assert white supremacy in all corners of America, through patriotism, Protestantism and the glorification of the white race.(171) The trouble with their position on Americanism is that much of their assertions are based on their normative conception of the world and its history, without due move to other history narratives on the founding of America, the role of Protestantism in exposing the excesses of Roman Catholicism, and the absolute poverty of a discourse based on the mere historic successes and failures of races.It is clear, however, the Klan remains stuck on their unrepentant Southern position on the continuing subjugation and slavery of African-Americans to be treated like chattel, and the relegation of other gloomy races as mere secondary citizens to American whites, precisely because the conflicts and contradictions that occur in this world is race-based, instead of class-based.It is a successful racist position though, because rich whites American obfuscate the apparent class contradictions between peasants and landowners, disregardless of race, in order to completely gain the trust of poor white Americans against the hapless African-American who remains to exist as chattel in the racist eyes of the white suprema cist.On the other hand, the Klans position on Protestantism is without any causal connection to their white supremacist cause, except for the assertion that without Protestantism, there would have been no America. (171) Sadly, it is based on this simplistic formulation on Protestantism vis-a-vis Americanism that the Klan discriminates against whites who do not allot their same belief system, in much the same manner that, precisely because other races are non-white, they be to be discriminated, ipso facto.Nonetheless, such simplistic and flawed logic is also the reason by which the Klan has only remained and self-degenerated in the poorer, uneducated sections of the American South, and never really expanded into the large coastal cities where racial prejudice is much less because of continuous racial intermingling and higher levels of educational attainment. It must be stated, however, that despite the apparent rise of white supremacy in the American South, the seeds of the black c ivil rights movement of the fifties and the sixties had been ingrained as early as the twenties, through the prose and poetry of Langston Hughes.In his poetry, One-Way Ticket, it laments about the situation in the American South, and the persona would rather be in the cosmopolitan cities where African-American are better esteem and given their fair share of human dignity, in comparison to the lynching and ridicule of the South. (173) It is a good thing, nonetheless, that the struggle between white supremacy and black civil rights had been quite successful for the latter, not only from Brown v. Board of Education and desegregation, but until today, with the election of Barack Obama, African-American, and 44th President of the United States of America.
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