2010 Health Care Reform Bill

Just recently, President Obama has signed for a new comprehensive health reform, known as the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, into law. This new health care reform bill offers health care coverage to 32 million Americans who are currently uninsured. I found this current event to be very significant and similar to what we have recently learned in history (although this is not very relevant to what we are learning today). I found this Bill to be very important because this is merely another example how "science" and medicine is all around us. Our society is becoming more and more advanced with what we do on a day-to-day basis, and how we are changing to help our society grow.

Having this new health care law shows how much more civilized we are today. It is weird to think how people in the olden days didn't even think it was necessary to take a daily shower. Although this does not relate much to what we are discussing in class, it is always interesting to compare our modern society with the past community our ancestors once lived in.

DGP 7: Kingdom of Hawaii

I found DGP chapter 7 to be quite interesting, since I have lived in Hawaii my entire life and have learned Hawaiian history for quite some time. Looking through the chapter, I came across the Kingdom of Hawaii Constitution of 1852. This is something that I have never read before (or at least don't remember reading) and some of the articles really stood out to me. One article that was really interesting to read was Article 12 starting with, "slavery shall, under no circumstances whatever, be tolerated in the Hawaiian islands: whenever a slave shall enter Hawaiian territory he shall be free..." This article really stood out to me because slavery was a really huge topic in history, and I am glad to read that Hawaii was against it early-on.

WW Chap 19: "New Motives, New Means"

This section of chapter 19: Internal Troubles, External Threats, starts off by reminding us that the nineteenth century was Europe's age of global expansion. During this century, Europe became the center of the world's economy, with numerous ties of trade and investments all over the globe. This section of chapter 19 introduces us to the great expansion of the Industrial Revolution. This revolution gave rise to a newly formed economy in which there were much more productivity of industrial technology, and an economy that also found a greater need for extensive raw materials and agricultural products.

In regards to our potential midterm question, my opinion of the Industrial Revolution is very in-between. I like to think that the Industrial Revolution has its share of both positive, and negative effects towards our society and way of living. With positive results, the Industrial Revolution had evolved to form an economy that raised the standard of living. The Industrial Revolution introduced us to a time that allowed our society to grow as a whole, that ultimately shaped and affected, the way we live today. I find that the Industrial Revolution is partially positive, because without that revolution, we would not be anywhere near where we are today. Our society would not be as financially independent (excluding the current economic downfall we are currently facing today), and neither would our society be as advanced as we are today.

Although, besides the Industrial Revolution having just positive effects, I also think of this time period to be slightly negative as well. The Industrial Revolution brought upon a time period where factories and buildings were fairly new. These inventions made rise to a lot of pollution, that probably at the time, they did not know about. Because in our society today we are striving to become more earth friendly, it is partially the Industrial Revolution's fault, that the world is so polluted. If we did not have as many factories, cars or machines, our world would definitely not be as polluted as we are today.