Rosa Park Celebration Day
Topic need to be narrowed down not too general can not be the life of my grandfather or family need to be about a specific topic.
Exploring your American Heritage
For this assignment, you will define your own American heritage by interviewing a family member on their experience with a historical event, series of events, or time frame. Your essay can be on anything from an explanation of how your family became American (assuming that you have a living relative who experienced it), to your grandfather's experience in World War 2, to your aunt's experience of the Hippie movement. All are significant and will serve to put your life and the lives of people you know into a greater historical context. Alternatively, if you are unable to interview a family member for this purpose, you may interview a friend or acquaintance.
In addition to the interview, you will need to use at least two (2) additional sources (other than lecture and your textbook) to "set the scene" for the story you tell. You must cite these written sources and your interview both in the body of your essay (at least three times each) and in a bibliography (see below for details). Please note: Wikipedia is not a valid scholastic source.
This essay will be five (5) pages long and will follow the same format as your unit essays: 12 point font, 1" margins, double-spaced, etc. It will be worth up to ten (10) points on your essay average, which translates to four (4) points on your final average.
Please submit your topic to me by email or in class by Monday, April 28, so that I can give you recommendations and/or direction. The completed essay will be due by or before class on Monday, May 5, either in class or via email. I will not accept essays after the due date!!
Bibliography Help:
♦ To cite a source in the body of your text, put the name of the author/editor and the page number in parentheses at the end of the sentence. If there is no author or editor, use a word from the title of your source: (Divine, 147) or (Britannica, 498). For quotes or ideas from your interview, simply refer to the interviewee's name in your parentheses: (LaForge). Please note, if you use the author or interviewee's name in your sentence, then you don't need to repeat that name in a citation. Just mention the page number.
♦ Model your bibliography entries after the following examples, which are based on guidelines found in A Pocket Guide to Writing History, 2nd Ed. by Mary Lynn Rampolla (Boston: Bedford/St. Martin's Press, 1998):
> For your interview, list the interviewee's name, what type of interview it was, and the date on which you spoke.
-* Hector LaForge, telephone interview by author, 4 April 1993. >■ For a book with an author, you need to include the author's name, the title of the book, the city in which the book was published, the name of the publisher, the year of publication (or most recent publication), and the page numbers used.
-> Marjorie Spruill Wheeler, Votes for Women: the Woman Suffrage Movement in Tennessee, the South, and the Nation (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1995), 44-46. j> If your source gives only an editor's name, you will include all the same information as the last example, replacing the author's name with the editor's name and adding "ed." after the name. -» Gyan Prakash, ed., After Colonialism: Imperial Histories and Postcolonial Displacements (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995), 9.
> For an encyclopedia or dictionary entry, include the name and edition of the work, followed by the abbreviation "s.v." (meaning sub verbo, or "under the word") and the title of the entry in quotation marks. -» Encyclopedia Britannica, 15th ed., s.v. "steam power."
For websites, include the author's name, title of the work or essay, date of publication (if unknown, type "n.d." for "no date"), URL address, and the date you accessed the page.
-* Robert Brigham, "The Wars for Vietnam," n.d., <http://www(dot)vassar(dot)edu/vietnam/index.html> (30 October 1997).
Rosa Park Celebration Day
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Rosa Park Celebration Day
When Bernard was growing up, he had a great dilemma of his origin since his family’s color was different from a few others. Among the people with different skin color, some appeared whiter than Bernard’s kind, while the skin of some appeared almost red, and these were called Indians. Bernard would occasionally hear people referring to them as Blacks but could not comprehend what it meant. Just like the name suggested, their family’s skin color was black and he often wondered why people had to look different (Gannon, 2011). American citizens held different events, amongst that would be celebrated by people from different origins such as different groups of Native Americans and Black Americans. Bernard decided to end his dilemma by enquiring from his elderly aunt about the Rosa Park’s celebration day for blacks, after realizing that she had witnessed the events of the particular day.
The aunt started by emphasizing on the importance of the event that contributed to the advancement of the freedom of black Americans. Rosa Park’s day contains American observance in honoring the activist of the civil rights, called Rosa Parks. Rosa became popular after her refusal of giving up her seat to a white man on a Montgomery bus. In addition, this day is marked for legal observance in the state of California on the fourth day of February, while in Ohio; this day is celebrated on the first day of December. According to Bernard’s aunt, the act of setting apart the African Americans or Afro-American’s historic event was one of the honorable things that American government permitted. This is because it reminds the black people of the past heroes that led to the provision of civil rights. In addition, such an event would always bring into the lime light the history that is continuously narrated to people like Bernard, enlightening about the values and traditional practices and other contributions made to America. This day is undoubtedly respected throughout the land and even though the American citizens from other origins may not appreciate it as the blacks, they acknowledge that it has played a role in their lives too. It is beneficial to young African Americans who know little about their roots or origin. The elementary, as well as secondary schools are enlightened about the event. The heritage day contains activities and ceremonies while education enhances the understanding of African American people through provision of classroom instructions that focuses on our history. The instructions and other practices of ceremonies also help in familiarizing the young people to their values and history. Numerous schools practice activities which focus on the struggle of Rosa Park for achievements and equality against discrimination.
Further, the aunt mentioned briefly about the history of the black people into America. The story that Bernard had studied in his early learning but could not understand properly; yet when the aunt narrated, he felt like it was the first time he had heard it. This could be because she had witnessed some of the events that had happened in her tender age and thus narrated them very emotionally. One thing was clear; that the African Americans were initially foreigners in the United States. They had come to the Northern America as slaves to work for the Europeans that had settled there. The continuous mistreatment from their masters took place especially in the southern sides. However, some of the free blacks had come for business benefits while others as sailors and they held forces with some whites to act against slavery. Later on through court ruling, the government declared slavery practice illegal enabling most of the slaves to be freed and attain citizenship (Jeffrey, 2013). Nevertheless, the struggle did not end, as racial discrimination and inequality had just begun.
When Bernard’s aunt was born in the year 1940, she was not conscious of the ordeal that awaited her. She later understood why the people in her school had to look like her and the reason that causes the white children to tease her whenever they saw her. It was because she was born of slave desc...