Author: Andrew Baeder

Ideally every city is one where people live in homes where everything is accessible and nature still feels natural. This is why the idea of Utopia exists for it is near impossible for something like this to exist. Humans by nature destroy to pave way for their own need if you can call them that. We demolish countless acres of forests and untapped nature and for what you may ask? Homes? Extraordinarily extravagant homes for suburban white moms to write live laugh love all over like a mantra. Despite the best efforts of many famous city planners things almost never work out perfectly in the long run.

I come from a city that is the definition os what a planned suburb looks like when you slap it on an existing real community. Sure Ohio can spare a few soy bean. fields to build a neighborhood or twelve but this mentality os taxing on the environment. Replicated environmental consciousness in the form of a park or trees lining streets does not compare to what has been lost in the long run. But beggars can’t be choosers. For example the completely planned Russian city of Magnitogosk looks actually quite green and vibrant from a satellite perspective but what was lost in the making of a green city like that? Apartment buildings and government offices take up monumental amounts of space and with the human global population increasing exponentially soon making room in a city plan for green may not be an option.

City planning will of course evolve to adapt to this need as it has always done for need in the past. Just hope it comes soon enough. Since the majority of cities are firmly established already it may be hard to make that kind of switch so late.

My family’s migration is extraordinarily common amongst people today. Aside from one very distant relation from early America most of us came from industrial revolution immigrates looking for opportunity. My family’s many decedents came from Germany, Ireland, and apparently Switzerland. During this time, 19th century, America was the worlds industrial power house and the focal point of all migration in the world at the time, especially those coming out of Europe. So this makes it absolutely no shock that when they came here, they came for money.

Many of them ended up in Cleveland and surrounding areas but despite that none of them worked in the Steel industry which at the time was one of the sole reason s to come to the area at all. Its my understanding that many of them worked in the education system and one for sure worked in the Akron chemical plants later on.

Its hard for me to describe struggle when it comes to migration since other than the cookie cutter description of how one manages life in the new American world since there were language barriers, and there were small communities of migrant ethnic groups that are still extraordinarily prominent today in Cleveland.

As far as I’m concerned my family has almost never left the Cleveland area despite all the separate peoples coming here and having zero connection to this place as a whole. I’m sure this template is applicable to many other major industrial cities as well such as Chicago, Cincinnati, and New York.

1. In terms of structure and content the two declarations are strikingly similar. Its almost as if once copied the other but changed the worlds slightly. Israels starts off with a brief religious history of the people and ends with a list of statements about this independence. The Palestine one is identical in this regard as it starts off with a brief history of the Palestine Arab people and ends with a list of statements about the independent Palestine state. As an extension of this statement the histories provided seem remarkably similar as well. Both resemble a long tragedy of displacement and strife and place the land that is Israel in a holy position.
2. Religion plays a massive role in both as not only the defining factor of both groups but also the catalyst on which they fight over the “holy land” that Israel as claimed. So religion is huge for both groups.
3. The Israeli nations sees Palestinians as trespassers almost. people who settled on land that did not belong to them and now seek to reclaim what isn’t theirs. Israelis feels a natural right, a god given right of existence and ownership to the land that Palestine is fighting against. meanwhile Palestine goes as far as to call the Jewish people infidels and invaders who have taken their land on a bases that holds no grounds and no place in the Palestinian nation.
4. the Jewish peoples seek peace and neighborly status while all neighboring nations regardless of religions since that is how they are taught to exist in their religion. Palestine on the other hand wants no part of peace and wants to reclaim this land from the invaders that are their. There is no future where Palestine wins and the Jewish people are still in Israel.

Its honestly odd how little the general population thinks about Latin america from a historical standpoint. The United States have had their hands deep within it for a long time in an effort to shape it to their desires and before that there were the original colonizers of Spain and Portugal who set up their own Africa like imperialism throughout the continent. Latin America has seldom had the chance to progress on its own terms without outside influence.

For starters I’d like to look at the era post colonialism where the countries were left to their own devices, or so they thought,  now that WWII is over. Most of these nations had some form of government in place as a post colonial regime and many of which were indeed democratic. This is where america steps in. America according to Bayly was in ,”full swing” both from an economic standpoint and a world influence stand point and at the top of their hit list was communism. Since there wasn’t much on the home front except McCarthy’s rampant witch hunting they looked at a world view. Where did this lead them? To Vietnam and Korea for armed conflict and to Latin America where the people came first and sometimes the “threat” of socialism arose. The Pink Wave is the term for the wave of democratic reforms that spread throughout. Its also no secret that Nixon and Kissinger were heavily involved in many of these revolutions as a way of protecting their own interests but justified through containment. Bayly remarks that Chili is a rather strong example of this.

As an earlier example of how Latin America struggles to exist on its own is early civilizations being collapsed by Spanish existence on the continent. As Professor Holt stated on Monday the Civilizations in the area, namely the Aztecs and Inca were extraordinarily advanced and their cities rivaled many European cities both in structure and population. The Aztec capital of Tenochtitlan was 120,000 residents strong but was whipped from the face of the earth by Smallpox. The Inca which a population of 3-12 million suffered a similar fate and this cataclysm of the Latin america population basically hit the reset button on progress and caused most of the country to become imperialism by the Spanish and Portuguese.

1. Initially Just expresses that there is now over arching theme of European history but rather many smaller ones that contribute to the whole. One of these is that of the fading “master narrative” in Europe. This came about as a direct result of things simply calming down in a way. The heat of the 19th century ended and many nations sought to co-exist with others. Furthermore he argues that people began to lose political faith and more importantly faith in revolutionary tendencies fueled my Marxism.

2.Much like how Europe’s master narrative began to fade the large political divide began to become muddled as well. To think of it in term of topography its easy to look a ravine where one side is the Left and one side is the Right. On comes the 20th and 21st centuries and now its a crater with a large intertwined center where moderates exist in large numbers but there not a gradual shift between extremism and moderates. This could be seen in places like Germany and Britain where there are more parties than can be counted on two hands. This helped people define their political leanings better in the long run since you didn’t have to completely agree with a side to be a part of them.

3.The shift taken in the 21st and late 20th century caused many issues. For starters the idea of safety provided by the UN made everyone into a patriot for their country. Yet post 9/11 we see this pride for a country being used as a method of hate towards another. Safety in the destruction of others. That is of course if you yourself do not have to be the destroyer. The UN’s militant presence in the age of terrorism makes people from every country in the Union believe it is their purpose to express the generally accepted view point which was anti- islam. The uneducated crowd really enjoyed this and it even happened in the U.S. Back when France claimed that Iraq had no nuclear weapons the good red blooded Americans back home decided France was the enemy. Our oldest ally lost because of the UN’s ability to get everyone involved. Who remembers freedom fries. Likely not many of us since we were too young but the point still stands. Safety breeds violence and hate.

From our discussion last week on Friday we can see there are people who see the reformation and modernization on Japan to be a good thing. In the end that can be said with decent certainty but that of course is ignoring the human aspect of it all. The Japanese empires history in east Asia is one paved in horrible conditions and death.

Japan made the switch to be an empire in the 20th century. This to them meant adopting the industrial life style ad reforming the position of men and women. Women especially were effected by this. While education was made available to them it was a vastly different education as it focused around their new role in society rather than literacy and subjects of great importance at the time. In the end woman had it rough, and that may be an understatement. Countless reports of women being forced into role of sexual servants to the military and others of Women who have achieved power being seen as false figure heads who get places because of connections alone. That last point reminds me a fair bit of our own political sphere in the U.S.

So why is this all important. well for starters it did not help the role of women in society at all. There were trapped in a sense because they received and education but in the end were treated as tools to the government more than anything else. The Japanese government justified this as their role in the new society but it certainly lead to unrest within. Japan hardly managed to maintain its protectorates and their main focus, Korea, easily broke off to form its own national identity, yet remained mostly unsuccessful but that doesn’t help the point here. Japan built a military that stepped on its people rather than with them. So in the end it really is hard to justify that Empirical rule in East Asia was a good thing but without it Japan probably wouldn’t be anywhere near where it is today.