Mattie Di Giovanni
Investigation: 400 Years of Inequality
Curriculum Disruption Week
Next year, 2019, will mark 400 years since the first Africans landed at Jamestown, to be sold into bondage. The “400 Years of Inequality” Project has called for a national observance of this anniversary. An effort led by Mindy Fullilove, William Morrish, Robert Sember, and Maya Wiley, the Project reports a growing number of partners, including schools of public health across the nation, the American Journal of Public Health, Farm & Wilderness Summer Camps in Vermont, the Ballroom Freedom School, and the City of Newark, New Jersey.
In this week’s investigation, we will study a large timeline created for Curriculum Disruption Week by students enrolled in NURP 522: 400 Years of Inequality last year. The timeline is broken up into two large PDFs, which you can find early years here and later years here.
- Find three (3) entries in the timeline from three different decades. For each, identify the entry and in a short paragraph write about how the entry relates to the themes of our course. You should do additional research to better understand and explain the event described in the entry and its relationship to the course themes.
- Entry 1:
1789- This entry is about the 3/5s voting rule saying that slaves only counted as 3/5ths of a person. This is when slaves were finally given the opportunity to vote however it was only 3/5ths of a vote so they did not have as much say in who was voted into the house. This is related to the fair voting and voting games themes that we have discussed the last couple of weeks. This obviously was not a fair voting method because some people have less say than others on who gets elected.
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- Entry 2:
1850- This entry discussed which territories would prohibit slaves and which ones would allow slavery after the mexican war. California was the only state on the west coast at the time that was a free state along with the rest of the north. New mexico and Utah were left up to the people to vote on. This was a big deal during westward expansion and helped spread the same democracy that was in the north. Defining territories is similar to gerrymandering and actually drawing the lines because how they drew the territories could have been vastly different with the same agreement which is similar to how gerrymandering works. I see similar ideas in themes because the way the territories were drawn seem to be based on ideals of each area which is like partisan gerrymandering.
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- Entry 3:
1910- This entry talks about representation statistics at the time in the labor force. There were more women than ever working and majority of African Americans were in the labor force but they still were not recognized by the American Federation of Labor so they were not protected under certain laws and factory owners were able to pay them less because of that. This is an example of fair representation and follows along the ideas of Census and who is counted versus who is not. Those groups were not being fairly represented and weren’t for a long time which is very discriminatory. The idea of census comes into play because this wasn’t exactly a fair count of who was working and who wasn’t, especially if the AFL only counted whites males.
- Identify an event related to fair representation that is not in the timeline and you think should be included. Write an entry for this event in the style of the timeline (2-3 sentences). Include an appropriate image (with photo credit) and your primary sources.
- Entry date and text:
1941- Rosie the riveter, Women were working in factories and taking over majority of men’s jobs while world war two was taking place. However, These women did not have the same rights as men still and not paid the same amount. Plus despite the fact that women became the head of the household and were doing everything men could do they were not given the right to vote until much later on and to this day are still fighting for equal pay and other privileges men have. Which is not fair representation concerning women are 50% of the population.
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- Photo (with credit):
- Photo (with credit):
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/during-world-war-ii-thousands-women-chased-their-own-california-dream-180967357/
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- Primary sources used:
- http://www.pophistorydig.com/topics/rosie-the-riveter-1941-1945/
