Ang's Adventures in Writing

The Great Depression was not just an American concern, it spread throughout the world rapidly, creating a worldwide economic crisis. One of the main causes of the Great Depression was the fall in total demand. As people lost money in the Stock Market Crash of 1929 and the banks began to collapse the demand for products decreased significantly. This decline could only be restored by an increase in government spending to stabilize the industries. A reason that the United States Stock Market crashed was that too many products were produced too quickly. The production succeeded the demand. One article written in 1931 states the issue that was created “We have instead the paradox that production has increased so rapidly as to bring with it poverty, unemployment, government deficits, and high taxation.”1 This quote sums up the created problem beautifully.  Some other issues contributed but the main issue was the lack of demand. After the Stock Market Crash consumers began to become uncer...

Maggie Lena Walker, 3/4 Length, Studio Portrait, Washington DC, c 1905., Maggie L Walker National Historic Site (National Parks Service, August 12, 2019), https://npgallery.nps.gov/MAWA/AssetDetail/8ecdf83c60a84551ad0c4374131d08fc. Many men are celebrated for their business accomplishments during the early twentieth century. Some fewer women are even mentioned. Maggie Lena Walker is of the even smaller group of people that did great things during this time being African American as well as a woman. She had to fight harder for her place than most others, yet she is rarely discussed. This article is a tribute to her greatness during a time when African American women were looked at as less than nothing. After the Civil War, there was not an automatic integration of the African American population. The reconstruction is viewed by many as a failure due to the events that took place. The segregation laws and what became known as the Jim Crow laws hampered the African American community’s ab...

During what is known as the Gilded Age there was economic growth within the United States. There was significant growth in the labor section between the years 1870-1920 according to the article “Understanding Economic Change in the Gilded Age”. What is interesting is which sectors contained growth and which decreased. Between 1870 and 1920 farm production and land increased significantly while labor in the agricultural sector decreased significantly. The job sector that increased the most was the industrial sector. “This growth plus new positions created in trade, services, and administration proceeded at a fast pace so that the agricultural workforce actually shrank proportionately between 1870 and 1920 despite its absolute (numeric) growth.”  This leads to the question of why this happened. What was happening that more people had jobs in industry when America was largely an agricultural economy just a few years prior? How were the farms able to increase production while decreasin...

Dorothy Day’s life did not start out all sunshine and rainbows. She was born on January 14, 1912, in Rockford, Illinois. She was a tiny baby only weighing about four pounds and was born with a clubbed foot. Her mother, Edna Day, and father, Harry Day, worked hard to provide for their children. When she was about five years old, she gained a little sister named, Shirley Loraine. At the age of ten, her parents divorced, and her father moved out East. He rarely contacted the family. In school, she was often teased for having a clubbed foot. They called her “Little Crippled Girl” all through her school years. Edna raised the two girls with the help of her grandma Ledgett. She worked hard at multiple jobs in the early nineteenth century which was difficult for a mother. Dorothy often told the story of Saturday nights when they would take their baths, crawl into bed with their mom and she would read to them. Edna Ledgett remarried a man named Harry Rose, he was not fond of the two girls Doro...

Early America was built on the back of slaves. Slavery was viewed by some in the church as something that was part of the divine plan. One of the most notable church leaders that supported slavery was John Henry Hopkins. He would often quote passages in the bible to support his ideology on slavery. “In his writings, Hopkins noted that slavery is mentioned in numerous stories in the Bible as part of the daily life of the time and place described. These biblical stories, together with the absence of explicit condemnation of slavery in both the Old and New Testaments, Hopkins contended, suggested a scriptural sanction for slavery, and the exhortations of Paul and Peter for slaves to obey their masters removed any doubt.” 1 He often preached in support of slavery in a way that has always been and always should be. His most important writing was a pamphlet called The Bible View of Slavery published in 1863. In this text, he discusses how the ideology of slavery was written into the bible a...