Five Points

During orientation here at Stonehill, I was one of the lucky candidates asked to take the CLA testing. A portion of this exam included writing an essay to support or refute a statement regarding America's nickname of "the land of opportunity" and how the growing gap between the rich and poor might suggest otherwise. I chose to support the statement, with one of my focuses of the paper targeting urban American centers where poverty was common and the living conditions were anything but sanitary. Five Points in New York (circa 1860) would definitely be a section of the nation which would immediately refute any inclination of America being a land full of wondrous opportunities.

According to the primary sources, Five Points was filthy, it was filled to the brim with gangs making their name known, prostitutes flaunting their bodies because it was the only thing they possessed, and men and women who had no where else to go. Five Points encaptures its victims; "those who once enter into this diabolical traffic are seldom saved" (Foster, 220). There are no means of escape form the dreadful and horrible life of those unfortunate souls who befall this fate. It is an easy ride to the depths of this mess and an impossible climb out.

During the prime days of Five Points, the Civil War had also overtaken the United States, inclusive of the Draft which Lincoln had to utilize. New York draft riots emerged as a consequence of the draft as angry civilians rebelled against the government. The citizens of Five Points, primarily the gangs, were suspects of these riots. Destined for a terrible and rancid life, war might not be a far step from the life the gang members were living already. After all, the gangs waged war against each other all the time. Why then would members object to being sent off to fight for a greater cause?

I believe that the gang members and citizens of Five Points in New York did not object to the actual act of fighting for the nation but held objections to the politics behind the draft. The draft allowed for the rich upper class men to pay their way out of fighting to spare their lives while the poor and unfortunate people had no choice but to answer their country's call for help. They had lived lives of destitution and were enslaved in the American system and the only means of escape that America was providing them with was to fight, and almost inevitably die. America as a land of opportunity should not place higher value on some one's life based solely on the amount of monetary profits which a person makes.

The question I hold after reading these articles and analyzing the pictures, lays in the necessity of a run down area of a city like Five Points in the seemingly grand and opportunistic view we hold of America. I want to know how Americans can be so indifferent to this level of poverty in the 1800s as well as today in our very own country. How did a place like this occur in our history and how can education of similar situations help to teach Americans about what they can do to help?

"Historical Thinking and Other Unnatural Acts"

I have never thought about how someone should go about studying history before reading this article. In all of my previous years of learning, history was always taught either through text book readings or lecture notes in class. This is the manner which I figured history would always be taught. It never occurred to me that a more intellectual way of figuring out what occurred so many years ago is to uncover details and information from the primary sources themselves. When Alston was trying to deduce whether Lincoln was a racist or not through a series of documents handed to him, "his expertise lay not in his sweeping knowledge of this topic but in his ability to pick himself up after a tumble, to get a fix on what he does not know, and to generate a road map to guide his new learning" (21). Alston did not assume anything, as did other participants, but instead drew questions from words which Lincoln used which he himself did not understand the context of. I myself have never used this technique, but instead assume many things based on my previous knowledge, which I now know is not the smartest tool to use. Also, the majority of the time I have come in contact with historical documents, I have been searching for articles which support some thesis that I have already created. Reading this article has taught me that primary documents should not be used to find information but to search for new knowledge and formulate more questions.

Another idea which I found to be intriguing is the idea that the past should not be looked at as a culture to relate to and is not one that is to look familiar. Instead, the past should be looked at as unfamiliar and unrelatable as if the American culture 100 years ago was a foreign nation to America today. The idea that if you don't study history you are doomed to repeat it, does not ring true for all events. An event in the past may have resulted in terrible consequences then, but just because it didn't work then doesn't mean it will fail now. As we learned in the book How We Decide, the brain is quick to learn from its mistakes and often times our intuition picks up on the bad choice to make before we even realize it with our logical mind. We may see a historical mistake and our mind might steer us away from the same error, but put into a different year is a whole new context for a situation to be in. What might seem like the wrong decision may actually be the right one or the other way around. We can't look at the past through today's eyes and apply the same rules and guidelines to the present.

The biggest question that came to my mind while reading this was the section regarding how history should be presented through writing. I was wondering if addressing the readers in the form of "you" or by using "I" would be more beneficial to the readers in terms of how they interpreted the information they were given. If the text spoke more to you would it be more engaging or too biased?