Gibson Girl

The Gibson Girl: How she changed the American Image

     Charles Dana Gibson started out just a cartoon artist who drew a picture of a beautiful woman. Well little did Gibson know that this young woman inspired by Evelyn Nesbit would become the famous "Gibson Girl". The images of this so called Gibson Girl were published in Life, Collier's, Harper's weekly, and Scribner's. After all the publicity of these images, Gibson Girl became the woman that all American women aspired to be. An article in the New York Times called her the "dream of american femininity". She was tall, stylish, well-educated, artistic, and  athletic, she was Everything that women aspired to be, and she was the dream girl to every man.  

     Charles Gibson took his inspiration from, as I stated earlier, Evelyn Nesbit. She was discovered at the age of 16 and became the Gibson Girl. Some people believe that Gibson Girl was Gibson's wife or even his sister, but I believe that I was truthfully Evelyn to inspire the creation of the Gibson Girl.I believe so because when comparing an image of the Gibson Girl to Evelyn's features, they align almost perfectly. Evelyn became famous for her likeness to the Gibson Girl, making her as stated by an article on evelynnesbit.com,  "America's first bona-fide sex godess". She was the Marilyn Monroe of her time. 

      Gibson Girl wasn't entirely perfect though, she, like any other human being had problems. This is what made her realistic, she experienced love and loss, This is illustrated in Gibson's comic,"The Widow and her Friends"

Obviously based upon the drawing's title, She has lost her husband. She has fallen into depression. 

These men look at her as in she is a prize to be won, rather than a woman with a broken heart and great sadness.

Note that in image 2 she is "exercising" in a graveyard, perhaps after all she has been through she is visiting her husband.

6) You can see the unhappiness in her face as she is hated by other women
7) Gibson Girl was always shown as a well educated woman. 

After much distress and heartbreak, she finds where she is happy in spite of the troubles she has faced.

     As it can clearly be seen, Gibson Girl wasn't perfect, but every woman in the USA wanted to be just like her. They aspired to be the woman who every man wanted to have. The Gibson Girl was originally a "marketing tool", a way to get women to shop, she was a way to update women on the latest fashions and trends of the time. She then went from said marketing tool to an inspiration for women all over the country.

     

Sources:

PBS on Evelyn Nesbit
I used this source to find out more about Evelyn Nesbit

New York Times article on Gibson girl 

I used this source to read more about how the Gibson Girl was perceived in her own time

scalar,usc.edu on the Gibson Girl 

This was the source that sparked my interest in Evelyn Nesbit. After seeing this source, I began to do further research on Evelyn Nesbit.

Library of Congress 
This website helped me to find the different themes and characteristics of the Gibson Girl

Wikipedia on the Gibson Girl

I used this source to get initial and general information

Korn, Jerry, ed. "The Gibson Girl." This Fabulous Century 1900-1910. N.p.: Time, 1969. 183-91. Print. This Fabulous Century.

This was the source I used for my pictures

Research on Human Migration Patterns

     During class today, I did research on how people move around the world. Some of what I found was actually very surprising. For instance, based upon data from just 2 years ago, the United States has one of the smallest populations of refugees. This really surprised me because of all of the wars going on in the world, I had always thought that people would at first flee to a neighboring country to escape but then make an attempt to get to the US. I can see now that this was a naive assumption, because not everyone can afford to come to the US, and not everyone wants to run that risk.
     I also took a little quiz on "Human Sorting" which again surprised me, but also in a way was not surprising. Now I know I just completely contradicted myself, but allow me to explain. This quiz asks you to classify people based solely on their looks, and to guess their ethnic background. I got mostly incorrect answers which initially I was shocked to see that answers which I thought through carefully were incorrect. But at the same time I wasn't very shocked to know that I was wrong. I'm sure that my answers were very common misconceptions, which goes to show that we can't judge a book by its cover. behind every person's face and skin color is a whole family history.

Philanthropy Research Summary

     Today we discussed what philanthropy is and how different it is from charity. I heard Alexa say something that really made the difference clear to me. She said something along the lines that charity is to fix a problem in the moment, and philanthropy more about the future and how to make it better. If I had the money, I would be a huge benefactor to trying to help people, not just in the US but around the would, to get a safe and affordable home and to help them put food on the table. I believe that there are too many people in the world who can't afford basic human necessities. What ever I could do to help to fix that would be one of the most amazing feelings in the world to me. I strongly identify with why Carnegie wanted to "benefit all mankind"

Thinking About Success

     When given these four words: luck,opportunity,skill and hard work, it isn't hard to discover how I would rank them. I would rank them the following way: luck, opportunity, hard work, and skill.
The reason that I rank them this way is because I can apply this ranking to every aspect of my life. For example, I have a job as a hostess and curbside server at a restaurant. The way I got to success in my job was first by being lucky enough to have known someone who was leaving their job at the restaurant, and to have them put in a good work with my application. By being given the opportunity to have the job, with hard work I developed a skill and become good at what I do around the restaurant. I believe in working for what you have. This same order can be applied to my school work.I was lucky enough for my family to have moved to Huntsville in 2009. From that luck,  I was given an opportunity to go to Randolph, and after lots of hard work I have developed certain skills or aptitudes for certain subjects. At other subjects I have to double the amount of work I apply.
The process for analyzing the success and happiness in my life is really owed to these 4 simple words and the concepts behind them. I can apply this to my friendships, to sports and even to my life at home.

This is a picture of what I find to be the symbols of my hard work that ultimately yield success

Industry and Innovation

     I spent this class period reading a few articles about how the fashion industry, specifically Zara and H&M, have done so well in such a competitive retail market. They accomplish this by having strong company to lay the foundation that gets their product our into the world. while have a solid brand is very important, it is also key to have a company full of people that can get the job done and work cooperatively as a network. 
     As explained by a Forbes article I read about H&M, "An all-important shared pursuit of the three companies is a deep understanding of their customers’ wants and needs. All three have built systems for identifying consumer preferences." The pieces are designed and reviewed over and over again until they are deemed high enough quality to be hung on racks for consumers to buy. The lower prices in combination with their quality of clothing is what makes them such a success. 
     Zara has a similar network to that of H&M, but they do have one more advantage, a technological advantage. Zara has technology that allows them to produce new items at an extremely fast rate. With constantly changing collections, they have the edge of bringing in consumers more frequently to 

19th Century Textbook

https://archive.org/stream/conciseschoolhis02camp#page/n21/mode/2up 

For this activity I am using a 19th century textbook (link above) to discover how kids during that time learned about colonists first interactions with Indians. They were seen as "savages" and this was a term used mostly when the book wanted to discuss Indians in a negative light.

If I were a student being taught material from this textbook, I wouldn't have a very positive view on Indians, nor would I appreciate their way of life. The observations written in the book seem to have a skewed point of view, as though written from the point of view of a white individual or group of white individuals who wish to teach kids in this time to be frightened of  or even hostile toward Indians. I believe that of this way of writing could be due to what was going on in the 19th century in the west with Indians.

Diary from February 22,1872

I read this absolutely tragic article in the paper today. It was about some Indians attacking this small little neighborhood during the French war. They stole the supplies from the settlers all up and down the colonies, then these savages had the nerve to turn the colonies weapons onto the places from which they stole them!

Killburn was the name of one of the first settlers of the area, and the hero of this thrilling story. As these savages crept up to killburn's house, he got the first shot. And with much help from a Colonel Bellows and his men, the savages were taken down. Killburn suffered a bullet to the hip and died from a lack of proper medical aid. 

It is the stories such as these that make us remember how lucky we are and how we are progressively ridding ourselves of the "Indian problem".

Social media vs. newspapers

Our use of social media is selective and intentional so that we tend in only things we've already been interested, whereas newspapers expose readers to information on a broad range of topics, this can connect communities by providing information about what others may be interested in. It may raise questions I never thought to ask

Newspaper history

So what is a newspaper? 

As defined by Merriam Webster is "a set of large sheets of paper that have news stories, information about local events, advertisements, etc., and that are folded together and sold every day or every week".

Where did they originate?

It is said that the first newspapers came about in Europe in the mid 17th century.

What are some of the oldest papers in the US?
The Hartford Courant is the oldest newspaper that is still published today in the United States. It was founded in 1764, and is still up and printing everyday!

"leading stories" in newspapers today!
Taking a look into the Atlanta Journal Constitution website for October 14, 2015, the biggest stories are about the Democratic debate that had taken place the night before, there were also stories about computers at sever airports across the country being down, and a former NBA player being honored for his service as a PE teacher in a school in Georgia.

What is a "Newspaper of Record"?
It is a newspaper that is of large circulation and is very professional. The origin of the "newspaper of record" began in 1913 with the New York Times. Other examples of  newspaper of record are the Los Angeles Times and The Washington Post.


Think about it:
 Social Media vs. Newspapers:

There are many obvious ways that social media and a newspaper are different. Social media is meant to be just as the name implies, social. it is to engage with friends, and to discover new ones. Social media should be as it is designed for: fun and entertaining. It is not the best way to gather truthful fact or news about current events, because people can and do lie in social media. therefore the information isn't always credible.  If I see something that is on social media that I want to learn about, I almost always look for more information on credible websites to make discoveries. Newspapers are a much more credible source, because these stories are based on investigation and fact written in a story.
Social media allows discussion on issues, newspaper doesn't have a way to allow discussion other than in person and over something people have all read.

Indian boarding schools

     In the 1870s, the US government was struggling to introduce the "American lifestyle" to Native Americans. Two men named Herbert Welsh and Henry Pancoast, formed a school for Native American children just off of a reservation in Washington. Their purpose was to teach these children how to be more like all of the white Americans living around them. Their logic was that if they could teach the children the best way to act off of the reservation, then the children could teach the parents how to act. Children took classes in reading and writing, but the most important class that they took was learning how to speak the English language. These classes were to help break the cultural divide between the  By the end of the decade, over 60 schools had been built in different parts of the US. 

     Some people didn't feel as though the schools close to the reservations were getting through to the children. So Col. Richard Henry Pratt chose do take a slightly different route with his school. He opened a boarding school, so as to remove the children from their everyday lives as Native Americans. He was headmaster of his school for 25 years, and all of those years, he lived by the phrase "kill the Indian, save the man", and that's exactly what he tried to do. He gave the children uniforms and new names to go by, as well as white families to live with and be a part of when school wasn't in session. He tried to absolutely destroy the background that these children knew from birth, all because the Indian way of life wasn't suitable to white people. 

     I personally don't believe that these schools were necessary, nor were they morally right for these kids to be uprooted from their families and the culture of their ancestors taken away from them for the comfort and convenience of others. 

Sources:

http://americanindian.si.edu/education/codetalkers/html/chapter3.html

http://www.pbs.org/indiancountry/history/boarding.html

http://www.nrcprograms.org/site/PageServer?pagename=airc_hist_boardingschools

1st Quarter Reflection

     Looking back on what I've learned in history this first quarter, I realize that I've come much further than I thought I would have. I came in on day 1 expecting a class where we sit and have a lecture on historical events that are touched on almost every year in history classes. But after just the first class, I realized that this isn't just a course with a lecture and a project to follow. I've learned how to really think deeply about what I see in a film or how empathy, act like a time machine to take us back in time to aid our understand of these historical events. In addition to developing my knowledge of the subject and my critical thinking skills, I've learned a few tech skills as well. 

     Every time I come into class I expect that I'll have a good discussion, and I will walk away from class with a new thought or perspective in my mind. I have stretched my mind more this year between English and History than I've ever done before. I have learned in this class to think about films in new ways, realizing that they can be seen as ways to tell a true story that not just for amusement for the audience. This new way of studying history has really made me fall in love with the subject.

     My research skills still needs improvement, with better research skills, I will have an easier time writing. Writing and research have always been "good" but what I want is to be an absolutely amazing writer. 

Film Essay

I very strongly believe that the study of film in US History can teach so much more than what is in a textbook. It teaches students to make correlations between the culture of film and American history. These films aren’t pure entertainment, some scenes are a struggle to watch, they thrust empathy upon the audience, to help us to understand the true stories. The films Glory and 12 Years a Slave are both stories that would often be glanced over by a history textbook.

Preceding my first viewing of the film, Glory, in the 8th grade, I thought the Civil War was white men from the south fighting white men from the north. I thought that no one on the north had any slaves and everyone in the south was a cruel slave owner.  I had never been exposed to any stories to know any better. All I had was what a middle school textbook told me. Following my second viewing of the film, with more matured eyes, I discovered that there is so much more to the story of the 54th Massachusetts regiment. Some of these men were runaway slaves, some free men willing to fight. All of these African American men led by white officers was so groundbreaking, if not to many other people than abolitionists, most certainly all of these men. The film really shows how powerful and meaningful it was for these men to be able to fight. Edward Zwick, the director of Glory, said in an interview, “The coming together of the regiment, in all its aspects.”

Another film that opens the eyes about this time in history is 12 Years a Slave. The film’s director, Steve McQueen had grandparents who were descendants of slaves. So this story was personal to the director, and with his personal connection came his inspiration to tell the story of Solomon Northup to its fullest and most accurate. McQueen did a brilliant job with this story, seeing as it won 3 of the 9 Oscars it was nominated for, and 1 of the 7 golden globes it was nominated for.

McQueen went into the process of making the film by just knowing that he wanted to tell the story of free African American people living in the north that were kidnapped and sold into slavery. McQueen had no idea what story to tell until his wife discussed the true story of 12 Years a Slave with him. He knew just then that this was the story that he wanted to tell.

Both of these stories were absolutely brilliant in the way they were shown in film. With the time periods being having an overlap, the stories themselves overlap. Frederick Douglass an extremely active abolitionist is the link in the history. Douglass had 2 sons in the 54th regiment, and he co authored the novel 12 Years a Slave with Solomon Northup and Harriet Beecher Stowe.

These films aren’t just stories to entertain, they are truths both beautiful and ugly which should not be ignored. The study of film is one of the best ways to look into the past and understand the history of our country.


Sources:

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0097441/

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2024544/awards?ref_=tt_awd

http://www.history.com/news/glory-regiment-attacks-fort-wagner-150-years-ago

http://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/assault-of-battery-wagner-and-death-of-robert-gould-shaw

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2024544/faq?ref_=tt_faq_3#.2.1.6

http://www.interviewmagazine.com/film/steve-mcqueen-1/

http://ushistoryscene.com/article/12-years-a-slave/

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