#6 - 10/25/'14

For the 2014-2015 National History Day project, I chose Andrew Mellon as the topic for the leadership theme. I am not fully sure if I made a correct choice, for it is unclear if he is a leader or not. To give a brief summary, Andrew W. Mellon was born to a rich family, and later in his life, he was appointed to serve as the Secretary of Treasury, which he did for ten years and eleven months. In 1913, he established a memorial for his father, called the Mellon Institute of Industrial Research. It soon became to be known as Carnegie Mellon University, and there, he was an alumni president and trustee of University of Pittsburgh. Even though he spent and devoted a lot of his time to serve the position of a "leader", it is vague to tell if he deserved the title of a "leader". Nowadays, the college accepts 18% of its applicants, and the applicants must be admiring Andrew Carnegie and Andrew Mellon for what a huge contribution they had made for the people. Moreover, he did succeed; as he offered many people an opportunity to better education, him and his school gained fame, and he lived the rest of his life as a wealthy person. My question is, is this information enough to endow him the title of a leader, and if not, what other information is required?

#5 - 10/11/'14

In the first American Studies test, we were asked to address the Origin and the Purpose, and assess the Value and the Limitation of two texts: David Walker’s Appeal and Dred Scott’s Case by Roger (aka OPVL). Although it was very easy to provide the Origin, the Purpose, and the Value, it was difficult for me to give two examples of Limitations for each source. I think this was the case because these texts were sort of challenging to interpret. Just by looking at the documents, I was not able to identify factual inaccuracies or omissions, because in my opinion, they were being as honest as possible, and there were no reasons for omissions. Next, I could not find anything that we could NOT learn from the document, other than what the founding fathers actually meant when they wrote “all men”, in the Declaration of Independence. Lastly, I could not recognize what the author left out of the story. Quite frankly, these two were pretty challenging texts to analyze and OPVL, especially the limitation, other than them not putting themselves in the others’ shoes. It would have been way easier if I had prior knowledge about the appeal written by Walker and Dred Scott’s Decision.

#4 - 10/7/'14

On today’s American Studies test, we were asked to analyze liberty or natural right. In it, I wrote that the word "liberty" was manipulated in that time period. This was so because the people of America had been using the term for their own advantage. For example, it is stated in the Declaration of Independence that "all men are created equal". In the document, Thomas Jefferson and the men of Congress believed that all people were endowed the rights by their Creator or their God. Using this strong statement, they conveyed their message, and forced their way to acquire their freedom from the Great Britain’s rules. Now that they were over with the British oppression, they soon began to show some tyrannical action towards the black men and the slaves. In consequence, a group of angry abolitionists rose up to fight against the immoral and unjust society. In return, the white men, including Taney, manipulated and “tweaked” the Declaration, in so claiming that what the founding father meant by “all men” was a group of “rich, white males”. Thus, the blacks were silenced each time like this. As I was writing this on the paper, I remembered the first journal from American Literature, which was “Is man born good or evil?”. Even though people’s opinion may differ due to their impact from religion and others, the fact that men are evil still stays the same. Throughout the American history, there were lots of evil found in the action, the men, and the country itself, and it all started from “liberty”.