What Do Us History Teach Us About

Sacrifices Essay, Research Paper

what do us history and literature teach us about sacrifice and values worth dying for

From nursery school to senior year of high school, I have been taught that America is a country that is governed by one of the greatest constitutions in the world. We are the true symbolism of freedom, and equality. I was always told to take pride in the fact that I am a national of the U.S. With leaders such as Harriet Tubman, to JFK, we are a country filled with courage, ambition, and intelligence. It is no wonder that we are now considered the strongest power in the world.

Our success did not come over night though. Although we were considered the ?New World? a place of new beginnings and a place that would be a place where everyone would be free from the Church of England as thought by the pilgrims. At the same time, the ?new world? was a place for the great slave trade, and many murders of Native Americans for lands. With a beginning like that for the young America, it was evident there was yet a long struggle to truly make it what it was dreamt of as.

It is so ironic that in class we learn that Columbus discovered America. Yet, evidence proves that so many American Indians were inhabitants of America for thousands of years before Columbus sailed the ocean blue. In books we read how the pilgrims had the first Thanksgiving dinner with the Indians, but we never hear about the way those same pilgrims paid back the same Indians who helped them so much by taking their land, killing their children, and raping their women. My favorite is the fact that the writers of our own Constitution, brilliant men such as Ben Franklin, helped to state the fact that America is a land in which all men are equal, yet they also owned slaves in their own household. Something is definitely not right in our curriculum if we as students are not being taught the truth of our country which despite its own defects has risen to a level which no other country has reached.

I feel that U.S. history and literature classes teach us

It is so ironic how we learn that America was built on the foundation that promised equality and freedom for all no matter what race religion or caste you are. Yet this very country that preaches such concern for the right of a human being went against everything it stands for now in order to obtain land. The very first Europeans not only used the Native Americans for survival but took their land away from them and labeled them as uncivilized. Thousands of slave ships were sailed from Africa to America in order to work under white men that would torture them.