Native Americans and today

Last Book portfolio

I read the book Bury my heart at Wounded Knee by Dee Brown which is an oral history about the struggles of Native Americans during the civil war. Life is the constant struggle to survive. During the 1800's the Native Americans struggled to maintain peace even though the white men were taking their land away from them. Also, they murdered many to get what they wanted from them in many massacres like Wounded Knee and Sand Creek.

Life is hard and we all want to live as long as we can, so we would fight to survive. In the book all of the Indian Chiefs try to make peace first but when treaties are broken and their people are killed they fight back. But sometimes you can't fight back and have to submit and move like in the Cherokees situation with the Trail of tears. The theme is significant because it is true and it is seen throughout the book.

To live is to survive and to survive is to live. This is true because for the Indians they lived of of the land by hunting and foraging. Which was made harder by white men invading their land and forcing them away to have barely enough to survive. This is very personal and historical because it tells the story of events through someone that was actually there. It's historical because it shows the affects of Manifest Destiny it tells about Wounded Knee and the Trail of Tears. It is important to know how hard it was back then for them and compare it to how hard it is now for us. So we comprehend how different it was then.

American Slavery Narratives

Exam presentation: American greed

American Imperialism

American Empire
Theodore Roosevelt wrote to a friend in the year 1897: "In strict confidence . . . I should welcome almost any war, for I think this country needs one."....
There was heated argument in the United States about whether or not to take the Philippines. As one story has it, President McKinley told a group of ministers visiting the White House how he came to his decision:
Before you go I would like to say just a word about the Philippine business. . . . The truth is I didn't want the Philippines, and when they came to us as a gift from the gods, I did not know what to do with them. . . . I sought counsel from all sides -- Democrats as well as Republicans -- but got little help. I thought first we would only take Manila; then Luzon, then other islands, perhaps, also. I walked the floor of the White House night after night until midnight; and I am not ashamed to tell you, gentlemen, that I went down on my knees and prayed Almighty God for light and guidance more than one night. And one night late it came to me this way -- I don't know how it was, but it came: 1) That we could not give them back to Spain -- that would be cowardly and dishonorable. 2) That we could not turn them over to France or Germany, our commercial rivals in the Orient -- that would be bad business and discreditable. 3) That we could not leave them to themselves -- they were unfit for self-government -- and they would soon have anarchy and misrule over there worse than Spain's was; and 4) That there was nothing left for us to do but to take them all and to educate the Filipinos, and uplift and civilize and Christianize them, and by God's grace do the very best we could by them, as our fellow men for whom Christ also died. And then I went to bed and went to sleep and slept soundly. What is disturbing about this is that people back then thought of the Philippines as a business deal and not a place where actual people live. The Filipinos did not get the same message from God. In February 1899, they rose in revolt against American rule, as they had rebelled several times against the Spanish. Emilio Aguinaldo, a Filipino leader, who had earlier been brought back from China by U.S. warships to lead soldiers against Spain, now became leader of the insurrectos fighting the United States. He proposed Filipino independence within a U.S. protectorate, but this was rejected. It took the United States three years to crush the rebellion, using seventy thousand troops -- four times as many as were landed in Cuba -- and thousands of battle casualties, many times more than in Cuba. It was a harsh war. For the Filipinos the death rate was enormous from battle casualties and from disease. The taste of empire was on the lips of politicians and business interests throughout the country now. Racism, paternalism, and talk of money mingled with talk of destiny and civilization. In the Senate, Albert Beveridge spoke, January 9, 1900, for the dominant economic and political interests of the country:
Mr. President, the times call for candor. The Philippines are ours forever. . . . And just beyond the Philippines are China's illimitable markets. We will not retreat from either. . . . We will not renounce our part in the mission of our race, trustee, under God, of the civilization of the world. . . . The Pacific is our ocean. . . . Where shall we turn for consumers of our surplus? Geography answers the question. China is our natural customer. . . . The Philippines give us a base at the door of all the East. . . . No land in America surpasses in fertility the plains and valleys of Luzon. Rice and coffee, sugar and cocoanuts, hemp and tobacco. . . . The wood of the Philippines can supply the furniture of the world for a century to come. At Cebu the best informed man on the island told me that 40 miles of Cebu's mountain chain are practically mountains of coal. . . . I have a nugget of pure gold picked up in its present form on the banks of a Philippine creek. . . . My own belief is that there are not 100 men among them who comprehend what Anglo-Saxon self-government even means, and there are over 5,000,000 people to be governed. It has been charged that our conduct of the war has been cruel. Senators, it has been the reverse. . . . Senators must remember that we are not dealing with Americans or Europeans. We are dealing with Orientals. Again with the business deals and The Philippines being "ours forever". Along with the fact that it was used for trading products with China, making it extremely valuable to America at the time. The fighting with the rebels began, McKinley said, when the insurgents attacked American forces. But later, American soldiers testified that the United States had fired the first shot. After the war, an army officer speaking in Boston's Faneuil Hall said his colonel had given him orders to provoke a conflict with the insurgents. In February 1899, a banquet took place in Boston to celebrate the Senate's ratification of the peace treaty with Spain. President McKinley himself had been invited by the wealthy textile manufacturer W. B. Plunkett to speak. It was the biggest banquet in the nation's history: two thousand diners, four hundred waiters. McKinley said that "no imperial designs lurk in the American mind," and at the same banquet, to the same diners, his Postmaster General, Charles Emory Smith, said that "what we want is a market for our surplus." William James, the Harvard philosopher, wrote a letter to the Boston Transcript about "the cold pot grease of McKinley's cant at the recent Boston banquet" and said the Philippine operation "reeked of the infernal adroitness of the great department store, which has reached perfect expertness in the art of killing silently, and with no public squalling or commotion, the neighboring small concerns." James was part of a movement of prominent American businessmen, politicians, and intellectuals who formed the Anti-Imperialist League in 1898 and carried on a long campaign to educate the American public about the horrors of the Philippine war and the evils of imperialism. It was an odd group (Andrew Carnegie belonged), including antilabor aristocrats and scholars, united in a common moral outrage at what was being done to the Filipinos in the name of freedom. Whatever their differences on other matters, they would all agree with William James's angry statement: "God damn the U.S. for its vile conduct in the Philippine Isles." The Anti-Imperialist League published the letters of soldiers doing duty in the Philippines. A captain from Kansas wrote: "Caloocan was supposed to contain 17,000 inhabitants. The Twentieth Kansas swept through it, and now Caloocan contains not one living native." A private from the same outfit said he had "with my own hand set fire to over fifty houses of Filipinos after the victory at Caloocan. Women and children were wounded by our fire." A volunteer from the state of Washington wrote: "Our fighting blood was up, and we all wanted to kill 'niggers.' . . . This shooting human beings beats rabbit hunting all to pieces." It was a time of intense racism in the United States. In the years between 1889 and 1903, on the average, every week, two Negroes were lynched by mobs -- hanged, burned, mutilated. The Filipinos were brown-skinned, physically identifiable, strange-speaking and strange-looking to Americans. To the usual indiscriminate brutality of war was thus added the factor of racial hostility. In November 1901, the Manila correspondent of the Philadelphia Ledger reported:
The present war is no bloodless, opera bouffe engagement; our men have been relentless, have killed to exterminate men, women, children, prisoners and captives, active insurgents and suspected people from lads of ten up, the idea prevailing that the Filipino as such was little better than a dog. . . . Our soldiers have pumped salt water into men to make them talk, and have taken prisoners people who held up their hands and peacefully surrendered, and an hour later, without an atom of evidence to show that they were even insurrectos, stood them on a bridge and shot them down one by one, to drop into the water below and float down, as examples to those who found their bullet-loaded corpses. The unneeded loss of life (mass genocide) just to take over a place that the U.S. didn't need in the first place but captured just for business with China. Early in 1901 an American general returning to the United States from southern Luzon, said:
One-sixth of the natives of Luzon have either been killed or have died of the dengue fever in the last few years. The loss of life by killing alone has been very great, but I think not one man has been slain except where his death has served the legitimate purposes of war. It has been necessary to adopt what in other countries would probably be thought harsh measures. Secretary of War Elihu Root responded to the charges of brutality: "The war in the Philippines has been conducted by the American army with scrupulous regard for the rules of civilized warfare. . . . with self-restraint and with humanity never surpassed." In Manila, a Marine named Littletown Waller, a major, was accused of shooting eleven defenseless Filipinos, without trial, on the island of Samar. Other marine officers described his testimony:
The major said that General Smith instructed him to kill and burn, and said that the more he killed and burned the better pleased he would be; that it was no time to take prisoners, and that he was to make Samar a howling wilderness. Major Waller asked General Smith to define the age limit for killing, and he replied "Everything over ten." In the province of Batangas, the secretary of the province estimated that of the population of 300,000, one-third had been killed by combat, famine, or disease. Mark Twain commented on the Philippine war:
We have pacified some thousands of the islanders and buried them; destroyed their fields; burned their villages, and turned their widows and orphans out-of-doors; furnished heartbreak by exile to some dozens of disagreeable patriots; subjugated the remaining ten millions by Benevolent Assimilation, which is the pious new name of the musket; we have acquired property in the three hundred concubines and other slaves of our business partner, the Sultan of Sulu, and hoisted our protecting flag over that swag. And so, by these Providences of God -- and the phrase is the government's, not mine -- we are a World Power. American firepower was overwhelmingly superior to anything the Filipino rebels could put together. In the very first battle, Admiral Dewey steamed up the Pasig River and fired 500-pound shells into the Filipino trenches. Dead Filipinos were piled so high that the Americans used their bodies for breastworks. A British witness said: "This is not war; it is simply massacre and murderous butchery." He was wrong; it was war. For the rebels to hold out against such odds for years meant that they had the support of the population. General Arthur MacArthur, commander of the Filipino war, said: " . . . I believed that Aguinaldo's troops represented only a faction. I did not like to believe that the whole population of Luzon -- the native population, that is -- was opposed to us." But he said he was "reluctantly compelled" to believe this because the guerrilla tactics of the Filipino army "depended upon almost complete unity of action of the entire native population."

A- Bomb Zinn

A People's War?
Howard Zinn


Still, the vast bulk of the American population was mobilized, in the army, and in civilian life, to fight the war, and the atmosphere of war enveloped more and more Americans. Public opinion polls show large majorities of soldiers favoring the draft for the postwar period. Hatred against the enemy, against the Japanese particularly, became widespread. Racism was clearly at work. Time magazine, reporting the battle of Iwo Jima, said: "The ordinary unreasoning Jap is ignorant. Perhaps he is human. Nothing .. . indicates it." ....

The bombing of Japanese cities continued the strategy of saturation bombing to destroy civilian morale; one nighttime fire-bombing of Tokyo took 80,000 lives. And then, on August 6, 1945, came the lone American plane in the sky over Hiroshima, dropping the first atomic bomb, leaving perhaps 100,000 Japanese dead, and tens of thousands more slowly dying from radiation poisoning. Twelve U.S. navy fliers in the Hiroshima city jail were killed in the bombing, a fact that the U.S. government has never officially acknowledged, according to historian Martin Sherwin (A World Destroyed). Three days later, a second atomic bomb was dropped on the city of Nagasaki, with perhaps 50,000 killed.

The justification for these atrocities was that this would end the war quickly, making unnecessary an invasion of Japan. Such an invasion would cost a huge number of lives, the government said-a million, according to Secretary of State Byrnes; half a million, Truman claimed was the figure given him by General George Marshall. (When the papers of the Manhattan Project-the project to build the atom bomb- were released years later, they showed that Marshall urged a warning to the Japanese about the bomb, so people could be removed and only military targets hit.) These estimates of invasion losses were not realistic, and seem to have been pulled out of the air to justify bombings which, as their effects became known, horrified more and more people. Japan, by August 1945, was in desperate shape and ready to surrender. New York Times military analyst Hanson Baldwin wrote, shortly after the war:

The enemy, in a military sense, was in a hopeless strategic position by the time the Potsdam demand for unconditional surrender was made on July 26.
Such then, was the situation when we wiped out Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Need we have done it? No one can, of course, be positive, but the answer is almost certainly negative.

The United States Strategic Bombing Survey, set up by the War Department in 1944 to study the results of aerial attacks in the war, interviewed hundreds of Japanese civilian and military leaders after Japan surrendered, and reported just after the war:

Based on a detailed investigation of all the facts and supported by the testimony of the surviving Japanese leaders involved, it is the Survey's opinion that certainly prior to 31 December 1945, and in all probability prior to 1 November 1945, Japan would have surrendered even if the atomic bombs had not been dropped, even if Russia had not entered the war, and even if no invasion had been planned or contemplated.

But could American leaders have known this in August 1945? The answer is, clearly, yes. The Japanese code had been broken, and Japan's messages were being intercepted. It was known the Japanese had instructed their ambassador in Moscow to work on peace negotiations with the Allies. Japanese leaders had begun talking of surrender a year before this, and the Emperor himself had begun to suggest, in June 1945, that alternatives to fighting to the end be considered. On July 13, Foreign Minister Shigenori Togo wired his ambassador in Moscow: "Unconditional surrender is the only obstacle to peace.. .." Martin Sherwin, after an exhaustive study of the relevant historical documents, concludes: "Having broken the Japanese code before the war, American Intelligence was able to-and did-relay this message to the President, but it had no effect whatever on efforts to bring the war to a conclusion."

If only the Americans had not insisted on unconditional surrender- that is, if they were willing to accept one condition to the surrender, that the Emperor, a holy figure to the Japanese, remain in place-the Japanese would have agreed to stop the war.

Why did the United States not take that small step to save both American and Japanese lives? Was it because too much money and effort had been invested in the atomic bomb not to drop it? General Leslie Groves, head of the Manhattan Project, described Truman as a man on a toboggan, the momentum too great to stop it. Or was it, as British scientist P. M. S. Blackett suggested (Fear, War, and the Bomb), that the United States was anxious to drop the bomb before the Russians entered the war against Japan?

The Russians had secretly agreed (they were officially not at war with Japan) they would come into the war ninety days after the end of the European war. That turned out to be May 8, and so, on August 8, the Russians were due to declare war on Japan, But by then the big bomb had been dropped, and the next day a second one would be dropped on Nagasaki; the Japanese would surrender to the United States, not the Russians, and the United States would be the occupier of postwar Japan. In other words, Blackett says, the dropping of the bomb was "the first major operation of the cold diplomatic war with Russia.. .." Blackett is supported by American historian Gar Alperovitz (Atomic Diplomacy), who notes a diary entry for July 28, 1945, by Secretary of the Navy James Forrestal, describing Secretary of State James F. Byrnes as "most anxious to get the Japanese affair over with before the Russians got in."

Truman had said, "The world will note that the first atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, a military base. That was because we wished in this first attack to avoid, insofar as possible, the killing of civilians." It was a preposterous statement. Those 100,000 killed in Hiroshima were almost all civilians. The U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey said in its official report: "Hiroshima and Nagasaki were chosen as targets because of their concentration of activities and population."
The dropping of the second bomb on Nagasaki seems to have been scheduled in advance, and no one has ever been able to explain why it was dropped. Was it because this was a plutonium bomb whereas the Hiroshima bomb was a uranium bomb? Were the dead and irradiated of Nagasaki victims of a scientific experiment? Martin Shenvin says that among the Nagasaki dead were probably American prisoners of war. He notes a message of July 31 from Headquarters, U.S. Army Strategic Air Forces, Guam, to the War Department:

Reports prisoner of war sources, not verified by photos, give location of Allied prisoner of war camp one mile north of center of city of Nagasaki. Does this influence the choice of this target for initial Centerboard operation? Request immediate reply.

The reply: "Targets previously assigned for Centerboard remain unchanged."
True, the war then ended quickly. Italy had been defeated a year earlier. Germany had recently surrendered, crushed primarily by the armies of the Soviet Union on the Eastern Front, aided by the Allied armies on the West. Now Japan surrendered.

Teddy Roosevelt Quotes

Weekly Reflection #2

This week we learned about the Yalta Conference, FDR's death and read Hitlers Will. Then we talked about the bombing of Japan, mostly Nagasaki and the civilians between the targeted factories. We were assigned to comment on a paper whenever it was biased against dropping the bombs.

Weekly Reflection #1

This week we learned about D-Day, how the Normandy beaches were fortified and watched part of Saving Private Ryan when they landed on Omaha beach. We also watched some of another movie that showed an assault of a Japanese machine gun nest and an encampment. We were told to choose a name from the list on the website and write comments about what happened to them in the Pacific and send it to someone else to comment on it also. This assignment was easy for me because nobody sent me one to comment on. I liked watching the clips because it showed us somewhat what it was like for them fighting.

Tom Lyons

The Marines on Guadalcanal

TOM LYONS, 1st Parachute Battalion

Outnumbered and running out of ammunition, Edson's three hundred defenders faced their gravest threat when a large element of the Japanese III Battalion, 124th Infantry seemed poised to overrun the left side of the knoll. Edson ordered the Marine parachutists holding that side of the knoll to counterattack immediately. But the parachute battalion's commanding officer was nowhere to be found. He was relieved on the spot by Edson, and Captain Harry Torgerson was placed in command. Torgerson assembled two companies of parachutists and launched them in a desperate counterattack, saving the left flank of the line. After the Marines regained the line, the fighting became hand-to-hand, as parachutist Tom Lyons vividly remembers.

When they started raking us with a machine gun, that pissed me off, so I got up and crawled through the grass. The grass was about a foot and a half tall off the side of that hill, and I crawled up and around to the side of the machine gun. Bullets were flying everywhere, but the grass was high enough that it would partially hide you. I got almost to the machine gun before I was detected. They didn't see me until I stood up. There were so many people running around you couldn't shoot anybody. I stood up and threw a hand grenade, and just as I threw the grenade, they swung the gun around and ripped me up through the middle. I took several bullets; most of them went all the way through, and one missed my heart by about a half an inch. I would be in shock that I was still alive. -Michael Bryant 3/28/09 5:38 PM It knocked me ass over tin cup down the hill. The first one stung like hell. It really hurt. But the others after that didn't hurt at all. It seemed like I just left my body and was floating up in the air looking down at everything going on.

I saw a Jap come out, and he stepped on my stomach and he stabbed me in the throat with his bayonet. It went through the side of my neck and into the ground behind me but it didn't hurt. Jesse Youngdeer [Robert Youngdeer's brother] was coming up the trail with a box of hand grenades, and this Jap stepped off me and instead of finishing me off, he made a thrust at Youngdeer. [Youngdeer] stopped it with the box of hand grenades, and then he grabbed the Jap's rifle and was trying to wrestle it out of his hands. The Jap had stabbed him just above the knee. Another Marine ran up with his bayonet, and he tried to stab the Jap, and he got confused and stabbed Youngdeer right in the leg.

My eyes were wide open. I could see everything that was going on. I thought I was seeing it from fifty feet above. When they started firing the 105s [artillery] right in my area, I got some shrapnel in the right side of my chest. The bullets and shells were passing right over where I was floating around up there, and I was afraid they were going to hit me.

Morning came, and they came around, and all the Japs were gone. There were dead Japs all around me. They were picking out the Marines and throwing all the bodies on a truck, and they cut all our dog tags off. They hauled us down to the cemetery in the coconut grove, and they dumped our bodies out. I ended up at the top of the pile. The driver came around close to the tailgate and thought I was coming alive, so he started running into the jungle screaming, and he didn't come back. I would think this is kind of funny, but not happy that he didn't try to help me. -Michael Bryant 3/28/09 5:45 PM

An hour or so later, two corpsmen came by in a jeep, and they put me on a stretcher and hauled me to the hospital. They put me under a palm tree. From the stretcher, doctors told them to take this one out and bring in someone they can save. I would be angry because they didn't try to save me, and sad that I would probably die. -Michael Bryant 3/28/09 5:41 PM So I was there under a palm tree, and fresh troops started coming up the road. A ship came in with reinforcements, and an officer came over and said, "Take all the people out of the field hospital and put them on my ship and I'll take them back to Buttons [Base Buttons in Esp�ritu Santo]." And he said, "And that one under the palm tree, put him in my cabin and call the ship surgeon." He said, "You're going to be on the bridge all the way back to Buttons." I was conscious but couldn't talk. My mouth was full of caked blood. I was wearing the same clothes for almost two months.

This ship surgeon got my lung uncollapsed, and he pumped all the blood out of it and had me all cleaned up. After we made port, they put me on a plane to New Zealand. My mother got a check from my insurance saying I was dead the same day she got a letter from me written by a nurse at hospital in New Zealand. I bet she was surprised when she got those -Michael Bryant 3/28/09 5:53 PM

Book portfolio #3

I have read some of the book "The Good War" by Studs Terkel, which is about World War II. The book tells of many thousands of POWs and civilians dying by friendly fire, and of how the POWs were mistreated in the pacific. Also, how the Japanese-Americans were mistreated in America. War affects everyone, it affects those who die, family, friends, and whole families even if they have no direct association. WWII is the most infamous war in history I believe. Because it is the most discussed and many of us have relatives that fought in or were affected by it. This books theme is historical and personal perspectives because the war is over and is a part of the past, and it is personal because it is from the perspective of someone that was there that fought or saw the effect in the home front during that time.

War affects everyone, the War on Terror affects us every day whether we know it or not, it affects prices on everything from houses to toys to the kitchen sink. One of the people interviewed was going somewhere at night and there were crowds of people in the street that were throwing rocks at street lamps, screaming blackout, and smashing cars headlights because they were afraid of a Japanese bombing that didn't happen. Another interviewee was a young boy of 5 years at the time and was in California with his grandmother. While they were waiting for a trolley he was offered a piece of gum by a Japanese man about 55 years old, and his grandmother picked him up and ran 2 blocks and waited for another trolley. A Hawaiian that had helped clean up after Pearl harbor was interviewed and he said that a few weeks after the attack his girlfriend was killed by some sailors who were shooting 5-inch guns(have a ten-mile range) at Japanese planes. She was in her house getting ready for church, many people were hurt and killed in the city also. All of these people were affected by the war in some way and they weren't even fighting.

The affects of war are everywhere during WWII in America, Europe, the Pacific and the rest of the world. On the home front in America where women begin working in factories and children collect tin and rubber from wherever they find it. In Europe and the Pacific where civilians are basically forced from their homes because of the fighting. It affects all of the soldiers who fought, from all perspectives of life, it gave them all a different perspective on the world. War changes all that are affected by it. It changes how you think and how you act.

War changes everyone around it, in it, and not in or around it. It affected the whole world even generations after the war it has an influence on us. The theme affects us personaly because wars affect all of us personaly in some way even if it's just your opinion on it. Also, historicaly because is was about 60 years ago that it took place, and of course we learn about it in history class because it was a world wide event. This theme is important because it changes everyone even in the slightest way or in a very big way.

depression ?s

1. How does a person make money on an investment?


make people want to buy something for more than its worth to make it





2. What makes 'cheap credit' mean?


economy is doing well, people believe it getting better, the people don't think so anymore





3. What is 'buying on margin' mean?


10% of cost to buy stock, bad idea, don't have money





4. How is 'speculation' different from 'investment'?


speculation you dont care about the company you only want to buy and sell quickly, Investment you actually believe in the company and stick with it





5. How does 'panic selling' start?


everyone wants to sell and no one wants to buy





6. How can high unemployment start a negative economic cycle?


dont have a job so you dont buy stuff from companies and companies start making less products and fire people because the arent needed, cycle keeps happening, "dog chasing tail."





7. How did increases in technology contribute to overproduction in the 1920's?


technology took away jobs because it made jobs easier, made too many things that nobody could buy





8. What is meant by 'uneven distribution of wealth? Is it a bad thing?


dividing money unevenly to people, different classes lower, middle, higher.





9. What is a tariff, and why don't they seem to work in the modern economy (post-WWI)?


tax that is put on goods from other countries.





10. What is 'rugged individualism? Is it real?





11. What is a Hooverville, and why is it called that?

cities of homeless people on other peoples land, they blame President Hoover for being homeless and poor.

Jimmy Carter

Yellow: llamasong7: according to carter the problem with our country is not gas, inflation, or recession me: he says that the loss of confidence is the problem chemical.kay: a big problem :) 

I think that it is still a threat today because now that we have to rely upon other countries for everything we buy and buy it with, we have lost much confidence in America and ourselves.

Red:

He is saying that most Americans are giving up, being lazy and not caring. Instead of seeing people as who they are we only see other people for what they own.

Green:

Nixon (Watergate)

On June 1972, five men broke into the Watergate hotel and were arrested and the five were charged with attempted burglary and attempted interception of telephone and other communications. Two other men were also arrested and all were indicted for conspiracy, burglary and violation of federal wiretapping. They were either directly or indirectly employed by President Nixon's Committee to Re-elect the President (CRP or CREEP).

Book Portfolio #2

I've read Flags of our Fathers By James Bradley, which is a book that tells the story of the Iwo Jima flag raisers during WWII. This book tells how fast life changed for six men because they put up a flag. Anything you do can change your life for better or for worse, depending upon how you look at it. The battle of Iwo Jima is one of the most infamous battles in histoy, and the image of the flag raising has been immortalized by the memorial that was made of the scene. When you search Iwo Jima on Google images the first few are of the flag raising with about 5 more on the same page.

Everything you do big, small, or medium will change your life at least a little. For the three flag raisers and one that was thought to have helped, life changed. They were instant celebrities whether they wanted to be or not. They went on a bond tour to many citys and did reenactments of the flag raising for big crowds. The lives of the parents of those that died changed to they didn't have their sons anymore. The life of Joe Rosenthal the photographer also changed he also became famous. The theme states that life changes no matter what and it is shown many times throughout the book.

Iwo Jima was one of the fiercest battles that was fought during WWII, fought by 110,000 Americans and 22,000 Japanese. Which seem like bad odds for the Japanese, but the island was heavily fortified, with vast bunkers, hidden artillery, and 11 miles of underground tunnels. This did not stop the Americans though after 35 days of battle the island was ours with 6,821 dead and 19,189 wounded Americans. The Japanese suffered many loses because they were ordered not to surrender with 21,703 dead and 1,083 captured by the end of the battle.

L.B.J Food Stamp Program

The Food Stamp Program is a federal assistance program that provides food to low and no income people living in the United States. Most food stamp benefits are now distributed using cards but for most of its history the program had actually used paper denominational stamps/coupons worth $1, $5, and $10. On January 31, 1964, President Johnson requested Congress to pass legislation making the FSP permanent. The bill eventually passed by Congress was H.R. 10222, introduced by Congresswoman Sullivan. In April 1965, participation topped half a million, 5 million in March 1970, and 15 million in October 1974.

I believe that the Program was a good idea giving people money for food because they can't afford it. But it can be taken advantage of easily because if someone is without a job or with a not so good one they could chose not to do any work because they are getting food for free.