It was a long and quite ride up north, to wherever they were going. They didn’t really have a designated location to end up at. They took highway 25 all the way up north into Canada. They thought about staying in Canada when they were hit by a super cold storm or blizzard. The temperature was at about -50º F for the entire rest of the week. The five of them wanted to be more isolated so, they came up with a bold decision to go all the way to Alaska. It would be a long grueling drive even farther than they had already driven. It took them roughly 62 hours or so to drive from Denver, CO through Canada and finally to Anchorage, AK. When they arrived there it was winter so it was naturally cold at about -10º F but with the storm, it was about -55º F.

“Alright guys, we’re finally here. Make sure you have all of your warm clothes on, including multiple pairs of socks,” said Charles.

“We did that a while ago. It has been like this the past week,” replied David.

“Ok. Let’s get out of the car and go find shelter,” broke in Cole.

All five men hopped out into the fridged Alaskan climate. They weren’t in the town, they were outside of the town in the desolated Alaskan woods. The men spread out and went in different directions to seek a nice cabin. After 30 minutes in the insanely cold weather they rendezvous back at the truck to warm up. They gave up and went into town. While they were in the market there was a man who looked like a hunter or trapper. Thomas approached him.

“Hello sir. My name is Thomas, that’s Cole, David, Charles, and Jack. We just moved up here to Alaska trying to get away from the disease. We have nothing but what we packed in our truck. We need a shelter, do you know where we could find one?”

“My name is Hunter. I’ve lived here everyday for my entire life, except the first 19 years. I have a spare secret cabin just incase something happens to mine. What’ll you give me to use the cabin?”

“We have cash. $1000 for 6 months?” asked Cole.

“$1000 for 4 months and we have a deal,” replied Hunter.

“We’ll take it!” replied David.

He gave them the address and told them where the keys were. They arrived and went to the tree that contained the keys to the wonderful looking cabin. There were no problems entering the cabin and no one had any complaints about the inside. They showed themselves around and chose their own rooms. For the rest of the time that they lived in Alaska, they had no problems.

It was a long 4 hour flight from LAX to Iaxtapa, Mexico in the month of August. When we arrived it was very humid, and hot. After we arrived at the International airport we had an hour drive to our hotel. It was a large beach front hotel with access to the beach and two pools. It was so spread out that we had a 5 minute walk to our room. After we got settled in our room we all took naps and showers before dinner.

After we got cleaned up and ready for our first dinner, we had another long walk to the restaurant in the super humid conditions. Before we got there we were talking to one another trying to guess the cuisine for which we were going to be eating from. Naturally we all guessed that it was going to be strictly Mexican food. However once we got there we were shocked to find out that there was no Mexican food. We all looked each other with the “wait what” look on our faces. It was so strange to us that we were in Mexico but there was not Mexican food being served but, Italian food. For the rest of the time at the restaurant I continuously thought about how weird it was. We talked about it on the way back to our room and then we let the subject go.

Dear GoPro,

Hello, my name is Jake Fritzges. I am an 8th grader at Old Town Academy in San Diego, CA. I own a GoPro and I really love it. I use it on exciting adventures like swimming with leopard sharks (You can check it out on my school blog otacharter.org/jakef), and I also love to do Time Lapse photography with it. Our school is going to be holding our fourth annual Gala. The Gala is used raise money for things such as new outdoor equipment like basketballs and footballs because they either go over the fense and down the street or get rolled into the cactus or for help opening a high school. I was wondering if you could donate a GoPro Hero 4 black edition to help us raise money. The Gala is currently our biggest fundraiser. Thank you for your consideration. Our address is 2120 San Diego Avenue, San Diego, CA 92110 and you can reach our front office at 619-574-6225. The Gala will take place on Saturday April 25, 2015.

Sincerely,

Jake Fritzges

P.S. I would sign it with my hand but my arm is currently broken.

Martin Luther King Jr’s “I have a dream” speech and John F. Kennedy’s inaugural speech have different purposes, but they do have some things in common. Martin Luther King Jr was a black leader striving to get equal rights for African Americans. John F. Kennedy was the 35th president of the United States of America.

John F. Kennedy’s inaugural speech was to inform the country of our current problems and explain his path to fix them. Here’s a quote from his speech, “Ask not what your country can do for you–ask what you can do for your country.” This proves that he was trying to fix the problems. Martin Luther King Jr.’s purpose for his speech was to get racial equality for colored people. Here’s a quote from MLK Jr.’s “I have a dream” speech,“I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed.” He was saying that he believes that black people will have the same rights as white people, as it says in the constitution that all people are equal.

John F. Kennedy’s tone of his speech was formal. “Our last hope in an age where the instruments of war outweigh the instruments of peace…” Martin Luther King Jr.’s tone of his “I have a dream” speech was formal. “I say to you today, my friends, that in spite of the difficulties and frustrations of the moment, I still have a dream.” Martin Luther King Jr. was letting people know that even though times were tough and it wasn’t looking like

The tones of both men’s speeches are similar, both use formal tones in their speeches. The speeches of John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr. have different meanings, and their purposes for their speeches were different.

Both these speeches are important because they changed the course of civil rights and a presidency. MLK Jr.’s speech will be brought up in history more times. JFK’s famous quote, ” Ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country” will be taught to more teenagers. With these two speeches, the course of history was changed forever.

Chapter 12:

This chapter is about the separate but unequal claus and homer plessy. Homer plessy was very well educated man. He had gone to Harvard to study law and got his degree and PhD. Homer Plessy was arrested for sitting on a whites only train car. His arrest sparked the creation of the 14th amendment, “Separate but equal”. After his case ended, he went back to being a normal man.

Chapter 13:

Brown v Board of Education was a lawsuit to end racial segregation in public schools. Linda Brown was seven year old girl who had to walk over train tracks, and take an old beaten bus to school to her crammed blacks only school. It would be a lot easier for her to go to the school five blocks from her house, but it was a segregated “white only” school. Her father was outraged by this and thats how the Brown v Board of Education was created. It was Thurgood Marshall vs. John Davis. Thurgood Marshall was trying to get public schools desegregated and John Davis was trying to keep things the way they were. During the trial the chief justice had died and a new chief was chosen by Dwight D. Eisenhower. After he chose the new chief justice, it was a unanimous decision to end racial segregation in schools.

Chapter 14:

Martin Luther King Sr. a.k.a Mike King had grown up in the country and with an alcoholic father. When he was old enough, his mother bought him a car and he took off to the city of Atlanta, Georgia. When he was there he met the woman of his dreams, Alberta Williams. He was 20 years old, and didn’t even have a 5th grade education. There was no way that her parents would allow a un-educated country boy to be accepted into the family,(her father was the leading African-American preacher in Atlanta) so that motivated him to go back through elementary school and up to college to get a degree so that he could be accepted into Alberta Williams family. Michael Luther King had also became a pastor during college. After he finished with school he finally married Alberta Williams. They had three kids one of them was M.L. When Michael King  changed his name to Martin Luther King Sr., he also changed M.L.’s name to Martin Luther King Jr. He went through school and went to the same college his father did at the age of 15. He then went to another college to become a minister. While there he learned about Gandhi, and was inspired by the fact that he could take violence and punches, and not fight or hit back. He then graduated and got a job as minister in a small church in a quite unknown town, Montgomery, Alabama.

CHapter 15:

Rosa Parks was a quiet woman who on December 1, 1955, was just taking the bus home after a long, painful day at work. She was sitting in the back of the segregated Montgomery bus like she was supposed to. Her body was aching and she was told to get up and give her seat to a white man. She refused to move and then she was reported and arrested. E.D. Nixon, the president of the NAACP, raised money for her bail and then asked her if they could use her case to fight segregation. She contemplated the idea with her family, and finally said yes.They came up with the genius idea to boycott the bus company for one day, or so they thought. All the African-Americans didn’t ride the bus on the day of her court hearing. And then something unexpected happened, they skipped another day, then another, then a week, then a month, and pretty soon they had gone a year without riding the bus. The whites were beginning to bomb houses and churches. They started shooting people, but the african-americans still didn’t ride the bus. 13 months later, the supreme court ruled segregation on buses unconstitutional. Rosa Parks, E.D. Nixon, Martin Luther King Jr. and a few others all rode the first desegregated bus.

Chapter 16:

Central High was a segregated whites only high school in Little Rock, Arkansas. In 1957, that changed. 9 african americans, 3 boys and 6 girls, began to attend the school. On the first day there was a mob out front of the school with people yelling disturbing things at the teenagers. The governor of Arkansas, Orval Faubus, called in the National Guard. He called them in not to protect the teens but to keep them out of the school.He didn’t want to lose votes so he wanted to keep them out. President Eisenhower sent federal troops to Central High in Arkansas but this time it was to help the teens. The troops helped them enter the school through the front door, protecting them from the mob out front. At the end of the year, one of the Little Rock nine, Ernest Green was the first black person to graduate from Central High.

Chapter 19:

In 1962 in Birmingham, Alabama all the public facilities were being shut down. Parks, pools, playgrounds, and golf courses were shut down. They were all closed because the white people couldn’t stand to see them integrate. After that the black people began to protest because they wanted the same rights as white people. The chief of police, Eugene “bull” Connor was very violent. Children were marching and Bull Connor was arresting them. 600 went marching and singing peacefully and then they were locked up. Another time 1000 kids were marching and they too were arrested. Kids went marching and they were blasted by a very powerful stream from a fire hose. Another time he let police dogs bite three black teenagers so bad they were taken to the hospital. The national news was there filming the violence and putting it on the local and national news. Bull Connor was relentless.

Chapter 20:

The March on Washington took place on August 28, 1963 in front of the Lincoln Memorial. There was an estimated 250,000 to 300,000 people in attendance. Everyone came to hear the black leaders speak about the Civil Rights Movement, Integration of schools, and an end to job discrimination. Although most if not all the speakers were black it wasn’t only intended for blacks. The  last speaker of the day, Martin Luther King Jr., was only supposed to speak for four minutes instead he ended up speaking for 16. That day was also the day that MLK Jr. also gave his famous “I have a dream” speech and an interesting fact that most people don’t know is that he actually made that speech up on the spot, straight from the heart.

French Indochina

• France Ruled Vietnam Laos and Cambodia
• Vietnam had to fight for their freedom                                                                                 Ho Chi Minh was their leader

• Ho Chi Minh founded the Democratic Republic of Vietnam. We aided the French in Fighting the Vietnam
• The French lost and Vietnam was split in two
• So there was a civil war between north and south Vietnam

War in South East Asia

• The war in Vietnam was costing the US billions
• The war in Vietnam was a big mistake, but the idea of communism scared and blinded the US
• Then a US ship that wasn’t supposed to be in Vietnam was fired at by a torpedo, then again two days later. The allegations turned out to be false, but it gave President Johnson a reason to go to war. So the Vietnam war kicked into high gear.
• The war became a national nightmare

Nixon: Vietnam, China, and Watergate

• 1968 was a big year for America in the second half of the 20th century

There was the Vietnam attacking on Tet, Protests and riots on college campuses, and Nixon was elected President

• Richard Nixon used unsavory campaign methods he didn’t care about truth or honor

• He claimed he had a plan to end the war, but he never said it and kept the war going for five more years, he even got Laos and Cambodia involved without telling congress
• We left Vietnam in a phased withdrawal
• Then Nixon had his people break into the Democratic Party Headquarters and steal documents, it was called Watergate
• He almost got away with it but he didn’t, and fifty-six men in his staff were convicted of Watergate related crimes. Some even went to jail.
• Nixon was going to be impeached

So he resigned instead (the only President ever to do so)

Friedan, Schlafley, and friends

• The number one TV show in the fifties was I Love Lucy
• In the fifties most middle class white woman did not work
• Betty Friedan decided to do a article about suburban woman, and she found many of them were not happy, but they didn’t know why she called it “The problem with no name”
• She said the woman were not given a chance to develop their talents
• Woman were not allowed by society to have most of the jobs men had
• Woman had a separate and unequal role, they were expected to stay in the kitchen, and the nursery
• Friedan could get any of her research published in a magazine, so she turned it into a book
• The book sold over a million copies, it carried an important idea that all people, including women, have the right to develop their potential
• Suburban woman may not have been working but 6.5 million others were during WWII when factory making supplies for the war needed workers
• after the war ended many women kept their jobs, but attitudes did not change, but the came the civil rights movement and many women took action and brought activism to the Women’s Liberation Movement.
• Feminist were making daily headlines in newspapers
• Many started to get jobs which were previously just male jobs
• For Women of other races, especially poor woman things did not get better however
• Some Women were traditionalists
• By the mid 80’s educated woman could now make choices

Picking and picketing

• The Mendozas’ lived in Mexico and went to America each day to work on farms
• Cesar Chavez was the Leader of the Farm Workers Association he had been a migrant farm worker himself

• Cesar started helping people through a organization which helped found people homes
• He quit that job to form a union for farm workers to get better working conditions
• Cesar was inspired by Gandhi
• He organized a grape boycott which got migrant farm works better pay and working conditions

Summary:

Vietnam was a mistake for America. We left with a loss. Richard Nixon was involved in the Watergate scandal and resigned with the threat of impeachment hanging over his head. Only few woman were allowed to work, and those who couldn’t stayed at home. The feminist movement came and women’s rights eventually got better and all of them had the opportunity to get a job. Women today still aren’t all treated equally. The first farm workers union was created by Cesar Chavez. He also got better conditions for working, and got pay for migrant farmers, using ways such as peaceful protests like Mahatma Gandhi, and Martin Luther King Jr.

Racism is and always will be a problem. In 1896 in the supreme court case, Plessy v. Ferguson, the supreme court decided that separate was equal. About 50 years later, segregation was no longer on the baseball field.  Baseball took a big step forward by integrating, the first African-American to play baseball was Jackie Robinson. Everywhere else, everything was segregated. Black people had worse and unequal situations compared to white people. After about 70 years segregation was finally ended. Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I have a dream” speech and the Montgomery bus boycott, Little rock nine, and Brown v. Board of Education all played huge parts in the desegregation of America.

I interviewed my teachers father, Dee Christensen. He was an army engineer and he was in the Army for one year. I asked him questions about his experience in Vietnam. Here are his answers.

Q: What was the coolest thing you fixed?

A: The supply chain

Q: How old were you, what where you doing, and did you try to avoid being drafted?

A: I was 21-22, I was in college, and no I didn’t try to avoid being drafted

Q: What were the living conditions like? Where did you live?

A: I lived in a hooch. It was a hut with a tin roof surrounded by sandbags

Q: What were the battles like?

A: I was never in one

Q: Did you get hurt in Vietnam?

A: Yes. I got a really bad infection in my thumb. It got huge and I was taken to the hospital

In 1945 Vietnam declared independence but France wouldn’t allow that. France was going to fight back but asked the U.S. to help them and we decided to help them because they were our friends. We began sending troops over there by the ship fulls, we were taking charge of the war in Vietnam but everything back at home wasn’t going so well. War protests were taking place all over. In 1969 over half a million people took part in an anti war protest in Washington D.C. College kids who were unarmed anti-violent protesters were shot by the national guard at Kent State. Nixon said he had a plan to stop Vietnam, but it lasted for about five more years. Burglars broke into the Democratic HQ at the Watergate hotel and stole sensitive documents. Nixon was thought to be a part of the scandal and was being threatened by Congress to be impeached and to this day he is the only president to resign. One year before he resigned in 1973 the troops in Vietnam were brought home. The feminist movement came along and woman got better working conditions, and were allowed to work. Cesar Chavez helped form a union for migrant farm workers and got them better working conditions. Rachel Carson helped remove poisons chemical pesticides in our food. From the 50’s up until the late 80’s people were working hard to get equal rights and independence.