Andrew Jackson

To further our studies about Democracy in America, we learned about Andrew Jackson, one of the first presidents to lead the new Democratic nation. There are many conflicting views on whether or not he was a good president, and our essential question is "Is Andrew Jackson's long-standing reputation as "the people's president" deserved?" Personally, I do not think Andrew Jackson should be remembered as the people's president because he made some really bad decisions. The worst decision he made was to force the Native Americans to abide by the United States laws and not even giving the basic rights as U.S. citizens causing them to lose their land and go on a forced march to relocate called "the Trail of Tears". By doing this, Jackson violated the definition of democracy,  a form of government in which eligible citizens may participate equally – either directly by voting for the passing/ rejecting of laws. To learn in-depth about Andrew Jackson, we looked at three of his defining points as a president, the Bank War, the Spoils System, and the Indian Removal. We split into groups to analyse the primary sources about each topic and then each group made a presentation about a particular aspect. My group performed a skit about the Indian Removal and unfortunately I don't have the script. Overall, it was fun to use the knowledge we learned from the documents and turn it into our own presentations and everyone learned a lot.

Andrew Jackson

L.A. Revolutions

         Transitioning from The Haitian and the Revolutions of 1830/1848, we learned about the Latin American Revolutions. Our essential question for the unit was, why is it essential to acknowledge human value regardless of race? How are the events in the Latin American Revolutions evidence of this social
imperative? This is important because the Latin American Revolutions were based completely off of race. For our lesson, our class split into different groups and each analysed one of the various Revolutions. Then, each group created a timeline of events for their particular revolution and shared it with the class so we could figure out the essential question.

          The group I was in studied the Mexican revolution. We came up with the timeline shown below:

1. Early 1800s: Napoleons occupation of Spain led to the outbreak of revolts across Spanish America.

2. Miguel hidalgo y costilla launched the Mexican rebellion with the "cry of Delores"

3. He was defeated at Calderon and fled north but was captured and defeated.

4. 1820 liberals took power of Spain and the new government promised reforms to appease the Mexican revolutionaries.

5. In 1821, Agustin de iturbide negotiated that Mexico would be an independent constitutional monarchy

6. August 24, 1821 Spanish viceroy Juan O'Donojú signed treaty of Córdoba which makes Mexico an independent constitutional monarchy.

7. 1822 iturbide becomes emperor of Mexico

8. 1823 Santa Anna and Guadalupe Victoria set up a republic, with Guadalupe Victoria as first president.

This shows how the Mexican revolution changed the government from a monarchy to a republic and it eliminated the racial advantages of the Spanish-born peninsulaires. By comparing all of the revolutions, we discovered that they were against the establish monarchies and they all fought to instate a new government system. They wanted to change the government so that the various races could be more equal. Some differences we noticed were that the Brazilian Revolution was mostly peaceful, the Gran Colombian was very violent and the Mexican was between the two. Also, their social climate made them act out in different ways. Race played its part in all three revolutions by the following: 

Mexico: the mestizos and Indians revolted against the Spanish rule and wanted redistribution of land and race equality.

Brazil: the ruler after independence would only let Portugal born people in his office and became very unpopular. Everyone but the peninsulaires felt wronged and revolted against the corrupt system. 

Gran Columbia: the South Americans didn't want to be opposed by the Spanish. Bolivar wanted to get rid of Spanish rule and the race system.

       Similar to the Spanish American societies, race is still an issue today. A clear example of this is in the Ferguson Missouri case where people are violently protesting that the victim was shot because he was black and the white police officer was not punished. I find it sad that race is still an issue in our country because it has been a very long time since slavery and we are all human beings. I think we need to treat people the same regardless of race, much like the ideals of the Latin American Revolutions.

Democracy in america

To demonstrate how democratic America was in the early 1800s, our group created a poster. We showed how the three source documents supported our argument that the united states slowly became more democratic over the years.