0:02 okay mr smith recording your review video for your first test of the year uh do keep in mind that i'm not recording two videos i'm only recording one um so i'm not doing but there is going to be two different tests though so the honors class is going to get one test which is going to be 30 open-ended questions the regular class is going to get 30 questions as well but it's only going to be 10 open-ended and the rest will be multiple choice okay but the questions are almost exactly the same and they are almost in the exact same order too so
0:48 even though i'm only going to show you one of these tests and even though there's only one video if you pay attention to the video and you write down the questions and you know how to answer them you're gonna be fine um for the people so right now i have the honors test in front of me and i'm only gonna pull up the honors test i'm not gonna pull up the questions for the non-honors test these are word for word gonna be the same exact questions literally when i hand you this test is gonna look exactly like this word for word and again this is gonna be on january 4th 2022 okay so um i encourage that while you're watching this
1:33 hey it would be good if you're not watching it all in one session because it's a lot of information to kind of take in at once our brains kind of don't really work like that um you know maybe watch it over a couple different days that's why you really sh that's why that's why cramming doesn't really work very well in terms of studying uh so that's the first thing i want to say uh second thing is it also really helps if you're like writing stuff down at the very least like at the at the very very minimum you should probably be like uh taking pictures of the questions so you know exactly what they are um even though during the video like if you have screenshots of it on your phone that way you can kind of swipe through
2:18 your different photos and say okay yeah this is question one this is question two but another thing that would be really helpful is to take notes you know like write down a sample answer or something like that you could pause the video literally you could pause the video write down a sample answer um that would really be helpful so anyway without further ado i'm going to go ahead and get started all right so at the beginning of the year you know like the first day of school i get to know you guys second day of school i kind of ask you like what you already know about us history um and then pretty much after that like i get into like you know like what history is and like what different things can like
3:04 affect how history is recorded because you always got to ask yourself like who's writing this why are they writing it you know and this is something for me that i feel like my history teachers when i was in high school i'm not talking about college but i was in high school and even below that they would always just kind of teach it like oh well this is what happened in history and it's like okay according to who though because not all historians agree on what happened in the past you have and and the crazy thing is is like when you think about politics you think about like what's one thing that can like really make people mad at each other make people want to fight each other at the dinner table it's politics
3:50 right you know it's less than a month ago i was at thanksgiving with my family and i started talking about politics and stuff and my mom was like i don't want to talk about this right now i don't want to ruin thanksgiving that's the case with a lot of people's families those politics gets people imagined why does politics get people mad well people don't see political issues the same way they don't agree on what's going on in the country or what's going on in the world so why would they agree on what happened in history as well so you have to understand like who's writing this history why are they writing it what is their bias these are all different types of questions that you need to ask yourself did were they a primary source were they there
4:36 do they have a history of lying right do they have a do they have a history of being like an honest witness something like that these are all questions you have to ask so bias what is it and how can it affect how history is recorded and by the way bias can also affect sports too so you know you guys know me a lot of people try to make fun of the fact that i'm a jets fan hahahaha and with with good reason right the jets currently have the longest uh streak of not making the playoffs in the nfl it's been uh it's been over 10 years since the jets last made the playoffs uh so about about a third of my life the last third of my life i haven't seen the jets in the playoffs
5:21 anyway um but you know like so like i have a couple giants fans and they swear that their team is good the four and nine giants they swear that they're good daniel jones is in his third year and he sucks he's one of the biggest turnover quarterbacks ever literally there's a kid who's a senior in the school right now who at the beginning of the season he he picked daniel jones to be the mvp i mean it's like bro i have do you even watch the games do you know how horrible daniel jones is he's got a bias he's a giants fan he likes the giants he wants to see them do well he follows them closely he follows them more closely than any other team he could probably name 40 maybe even every player on the giants
6:07 so sometimes when you have a bias towards something when you like something that can affect the way that you talk about that thing this kid i don't even say his name his name is devin devin is so biased he loves the giants so much that he actually thinks they're good what's because he wants them to be good so bias can affect how you talk about things similarly can also affect how history is recorded let's say you're like a really like you know strong-leaning republican you grew up in a republican family you love republicans blah blah blah blah blah well you know if you decided to write a history about ronald reagan who's a republican you're probably going to write really nice things about ronald reagan
6:55 so bias can affect how history is recorded for sure absolutely okay um you know let me let me give you the converse example of that so let's say that let's say you're very much to the left let's say you're like a bernie sanders type of person to the left or as a matter of fact you know i i i'll actually bring somebody up might go more i might have brought this guy up in class before i'm not sure i feel like i have brought him up this year at one point okay here's michael moore michael moore is a filmmaker um i've watched a couple of his films his film sicko his film bowling for columbine
7:41 and his film uh capitalism a love story and you watch those films and if you know anything about politics you could tell like okay this guy is clearly way to the left and he admits it he doesn't he doesn't try to hide it um i think i might have also seen his film fahrenheit 911 too but i don't think i've seen anything else other than that um while i really don't agree with a lot of his views like his films are pretty good in the sense that they're uh entertaining like a lot of documentaries can be boring so you got to find a way to like you know keep people interested and he's good at that anyway he's very much to the left of the political spectrum and by the way the very last question on this test is going to be about the
8:27 differences between the left and the right so i'll go into more detail about that later on in this video but if michael moore was to make a documentary film about the reagan years as president or if he was to write a book about ronald reagan's presidency he's going to obviously talk about ronald reagan in a not such bad in a not such good light he's going to talk about ronald reagan in a bad light and as a matter of fact if you watch his film capitalism a love story he blames um he actually in large part blames the 2008 financial crash was which was which came 20 years after ronald reagan wasn't even president anymore he blames that in large part on a lot of reagan's policies
9:13 quote unquote deregulating the economy so michael moore's bias is obviously affecting the way that he's talking about history and even myself mr smith right i like to think that i'm pretty good at seeing different political perspectives and trying to be as honest as i can but i'd be lying to you guys if i said i didn't have a bias about things and early on in my career i used to like not even try to talk about my political views and stuff but honestly uh i just felt like i'd be lying to the students and stuff um when i do talk about my views and stuff i try to be very fair and nuanced and as balanced as i possibly can but it's not always easy what i'm trying to say is
9:59 everyone has a bias and it does affect the way the history is recorded and it does affect the way that you know people teach all right so that's question one um i'm not gonna say anything else about that by the way if you're if you watch this video and you're still not understanding what i'm saying you can feel free to message me on remind and i could try to provide further clarification for you okay all right number two in detail please explain the concept of quote history is written by the victors please provide examples all right well this is something that i kind of spoken about recently with you guys um so let me try to pull up the founding fathers
10:47 by the way guys the founding fathers are it's not every president all right barack obama's not a founding father had a student say that barack obama was their favorite founding father before no abraham lincoln is not a founding father the founding fathers are some of the guys that helped create america as a country helped create the government okay so here are some of them like here's washington ben franklin john adams thomas jefferson alexander hamilton etc these guys they helped come up with a lot of the ideas that would basically form the american system um like what's what are the first ten amendments to the constitution what's in article one of the constitution article
11:34 two et cetera et cetera et cetera they helped come up with a lot of the ideas now why am i mentioning them the reason why i'm mentioning them is we beat the british in the revolutionary war and a lot of these guys they actually wrote histories about what happened in the war why the war was fought who won the war um what happened as a result of winning the war they wrote the history books and they called themselves founding fathers they obviously spoke about winning the war in a very good way hey we won if you look at our history books these guys are portrayed well right here's a picture of alexander hamilton right here alexander hamilton's got his own play on broadway right it was one of
12:19 the biggest broadway shows ever it's on hbo man because by the way i tried watching it i thought it was terrible but i have a bias i i really don't like alexander hamilton for many reasons um which is something i'll probably talk about with you guys later on in the year um so anyway um they spoke about themselves in a nice way and if you look at our history books they speak about these guys in a nice way thomas jefferson has a school in elizabeth named after him george washington has a school named after him and elizabeth i think students tell me john adams has a school named after him alexander hamilton has a school named after him i think there might even be a john marshall school and elizabeth john marshall's another founding father he was
13:05 chief justice of the supreme court for like 35 years so really really really long time on the supreme court history has been kind to mostly kind to these people i'm not saying there's no history books that aren't critical these guys know there are there are plenty but mostly they're portrayed in a very nice way i mean mount rushmore look it you know uh i think i saw a picture of him here's here's some people on mount rushmore um here's washington and jefferson on mount rushmore so history has been nice to them but you have to understand that americans won the war so they were the ones to write the history books so there's this concept the history is written by the victors which is mostly
13:51 true i would i usually like to say i put a little um asterisk on that quote history is mostly written by the victors is what i like to say um so let's see benedict arnold okay here's benedict arnold benedict arnold i mentioned him in class he was on the american side during the revolutionary war he betrayed the americans he went over to the british side he sold out some of the americans war plans to the british and told the british what americans were going to do he's portrayed very badly in the history books and i showed you guys that clip from little rascals
14:39 maybe i didn't show it to all you guys so you know what i'll pull it up and i'll show it now let me stop sharing my screen for a moment okay so little rascals i saw this movie when i was a little kid loving i've ever seen don't talk to me you benedict arnold you you judas priests this is all your fault oh my fault you torched the clubhouse and it's all my fault okay so alfalfa called spanky a benedict arnold wow and when i was a
15:25 kid watching that i thought what an insult i didn't know what he meant by that but i knew it had to be bad benedict arnold it means you're a traitor you're a traitor benedict arnold is portrayed very badly in american history books well benedict arnold was on the losing side he went over to the british side i'll tell you this if the british won the war i bet you benedict arnold would have been considered a hero he was the guy that helped us win the war he knew that the british were really the the right side and he went over to the british side betraying the americans helping the british empire to keep their their rightful colonies that's probably how he would be portrayed so you have to understand that when when wars are won who are the people around to write the
16:11 history books you know if you look at a lot of american history native americans were portrayed very badly it's only really recently um that native americans are starting to be portrayed nicely in history books well part of the reason why um native americans were always portrayed very badly in history books is there's not too many native americans around to really write their history why because they get kept losing the wars to the americans all right so hopefully that that explains question number two um explaining the concept of history being written by the victors okay question three question three and four uh obviously go together uh they're both about the boston massacre and i used the boston massacre
16:58 at the beginning of the year to explain to you guys that this is one historical example that's very famous kids have usually seen the picture of the boston massacre they've probably heard about it i know that some of you guys watch the hbo john adams things in your history class before and some of you guys have saw the boston massacre scene so it's a pretty famous event in american history but if you actually like dig into like the documents from that time period you're gonna see it's the same event but it's told from two very different perspectives all right so i'm going to explain that all right so if you look at paul revere's version of
17:45 the boston massacre it looks like this oops wrong button okay looks like this this is the famous i i really should probably hang this photo up in my classroom being that it's something that i i usually teach every year so yeah i should i should hang this up i should hang the other one up too i should hang both of them up and put them both side by side that's a good idea i don't know why that idea never came to me before okay anyway look at this photo what's going on in this photo you got the captain he's commanding the british soldiers those damn redcoats he's commanding them to fire on the americans you can see blood squirting out this
18:31 guy's head blood squirting out this guy is oblique right this guy's got his back turned you wonder they shoot him in the back that's a cowardly move shooting him in the back this guy's falling over man what a massacre there's a dog here it makes you sad that you wonder and the dogs on on on these people's side did they shoot the dog the dog's kind of like in the line of fire look at look at this guy it's dark on this side it's light on this side hmm the hell does that mean that was done intentionally by the artist guys why because it was it was made to if you look at the biblical language
19:17 light is associated with good dark is associated with evil okay they put dark on the side of the british to make them seem bad light on the side of the american colonists to make them seem good all right sometimes it's hard to notice this uh little subtle detail when i showed this to you guys in class a lot of you guys couldn't really see it from like far back but if you if you look closely um you can probably see it on your computer it says butcher's hall a butcher another word for a butcher can mean like a killer slaughter things that kill people so this that was intentionally done that was intentionally put there to make it known that hey the british they were butchers
20:04 all right so this painting and this depiction by paul revere is in a way it's a piece of propaganda it's a piece of propaganda that was made to make americans hate the british and to make it seem like they were a bunch of blood thirsty blood-soaked killers so that's paul revere's version of the boston massacre angry british soldiers indiscriminately killing innocent american citizens you look at this picture it doesn't look like the americans are doing anything wrong like you can kind of see the fear and stuff on their faces they don't look like they're being aggressive they look like they're running away if
20:49 anything now question four is about captain thomas preston now by the way i didn't just show you guys these pictures i also made you read the documents if you remember i said draw what you read and i gave you guys um poster paper and i said all right you got document one you got document two you got document one you got document two i said basically just draw what you read and you guys um tried to draw what you we could read the documents weren't super easy to read i admit that um but when you read stuff from history they usually use old english and things like that so it's not always easy to
21:35 understand especially if you're not used to reading that type of stuff but this version of the story and this picture is very different than the other one how so we'll look at it in this picture what do you see you see that the american colonists actually look super aggressive throwing snowballs all right this guy's got some type of club or something in which he's using it to hit some british soldiers right see you can kind of see that i mean here's another american colonist right here he's got some type of club in his hand right some of these guys that might they look scared but they also look angry too all right
22:21 and and by the way it also looks like there's it looks like the british soldiers are kind of being surrounded and they certainly look outnumbered too which they were but probably the most important detail of this photo is what you see the captain doing here what is the captain doing here he has his hand out telling the british soldiers to stop don't shoot and if you read his account of the story if you read what he said he said i told basically one of my soldiers shot and i looked at him i turned and said why did you shoot i never told you to shoot don't fire so this is a very different story and
23:08 the captain also gives more details in his story he also says that um he says that an angry mob tried to attack the king's money and try to steal the king's money so we were simply defending ourselves and even when we did defend ourselves i told my soldiers not to shoot that's a very different story than the paul revere version where it just seems like the captain was ordering his soldiers to shoot and kill people for no reason and a matter of fact if you read paul revere's version of the story um basically it says that when the cat the
23:55 captain was actually ordering his men to shoot and when he was ordering them to shoot he basically said you know god damn you you know fire at will be the consequences of it may you damn bloody backs or something like that in other words the captain was basically saying we're gonna shoot you and who cares if you die you deserve it basically i'm paraphrasing but that's basically what he's saying and look at him he's commanding his soldiers to fire in this photo that is extremely different than this account so what's the point of me showing you these photos and explaining this what i'm telling you is that as a historian you kind of got to be and you guys are
24:41 not historians i'm technically not even historian um you're kind of like an investigator you have to find the truth and finding the truth is not always easy sometimes you might study something for years and you still might not know what the truth is like there are people who've been studying the jfk assassination by the way jfk was killed um a day before my mom was born so you know and my mom's getting close to 60 now so jfk was killed a long time ago there are literally people who are alive who've been researching it for almost 60 years and they don't know exactly what happened they've read hundreds and hundreds of books on the topic and stuff
25:28 so when you study history sometimes it's not always easy to find out what is really the truth but you have to understand that there are differing historical perspectives you can look at the same event jfk assassination 911 right boston massacre civil war the death of trayvon martin i just saw a documentary about that so that's why that's on my mind one event can be told from different perspectives so the same event depending on who you ask they might say different things happen that's what i'm trying to teach you and it's your job as a historian or a student of history
26:13 to kind of investigate the evidence and to kind of see what the real truth is and my personal opinion is is that people who don't really know [ __ ] about events who didn't really spend time studying it should really not have a very loud opinion on something things that i don't really know much about i try to say listen i'm not really that i don't really know that much about it i try to sometimes i might run my mouth when you know like i know you some of you like i mean you guys do that i side with quiz recently and one of the questions was about the dakota access pipeline i don't really know too much about that so i kind of said i don't really have a strong opinion on it anyway so i'm going to go to back to the test all right so i've gone through questions
26:59 one two three and four so far now i'm gonna go on to question five who is bartolome de las casas and why is he significant okay so bartolome de las casas i uh he was a spanish missionary he was a priest like figure if you will all right now i showed you guys some of these pictures of him okay so do this one you can see there's a picture of him with the native american that's interesting he's got like whitish skin why does he have whitish colored skin well he was from europe right you can see the cross on him he was a very religious man now pretty early on in the year i think it was right after we did the whole boston massacre thing
27:44 i made you guys read a primary source now bartolome de las casas wrote this book called a brief history of the destruction of the indies mr d used to have a copy of it in his room uh i don't he gave me some of his old books but that's not one of them i don't i don't know um i don't know where that book is but anyway such an old book uh it was written like almost 500 years ago so you can find the whole book online if you really wanted to read it but what's interesting about him is he talks about all the [ __ ] up things that the spanish did to native americans and trust me it was a lot of [ __ ] up things and he's from spain and he's kind of
28:32 like exposing his own people now what should his bias be his bias should be that he says nice things about the spanish because at the end of the day you know those are his people oh you're you're an op you're going to snitch on us you're not you know the king and the queen of spain basically gave him permission to go to the americas right his people not only from the same country but the other spaniards that came up they also have the same religion the native americans have a totally different religion than him but what's interesting about him is he talks about how many of the native
29:18 americans were very nice people they kind of welcomed the spanish with open arms but many of the spanish took advantage of them and killed them and do did very cool things like they burned people alive in like rows of 13. he says that they would chop people up like as if they were like sheep in the slaughterhouse so the reason why i think that he is significant is because not only is he a primary source and what do i mean by a primary source i mean he was someone who was there by the way it's really hard to write history if you don't if you don't rely on any primary sources in order to write history you have to look at what the people who were there
30:05 said about that thing so like if i were to write a history book today like i obviously was not alive 500 years ago so how do i know what happened 500 years ago well i have to read from the people who existed 500 years ago in order to get that information so bartolome de las casas he was someone who was there he witnessed a lot of this horrific stuff with his eyes and at the end of it he was honest enough to say hey listen my bias should be that i should be on the spanish side but i got to be truthful and my side my people the people from spain the people who share the same religion as me we did some [ __ ] up [ __ ]
30:51 so i think that's why he's significant all right okay questions six and seven are about christopher columbus uh question six says i want you to tell me some reasons why he could be considered a hero and question seven says i want you to tell me some reasons why he can be considered a villain so i'm going to pull up some that resource guide about columbus to show you some things okay so um i debated a couple students on this topic of columbus and the reason i did is because most students usually want to take the columbus as a villain side which is very much understandable i i totally get it okay um but anyway
31:36 one of the things that i tried to say is a lot of people try to blame columbus for bringing over diseases so this picture is basically a picture of like the colombian exchange which started after columbus came over uh now he did bring diseases over like the spanish but here's the thing it's not like columbus was trying this oh yeah we're gonna i'm gonna come over there i'm gonna infect these native americans with diseases they did not know spanish didn't know that they were gonna bring diseases over that was not their intention so i think it's hard to blame him for that however it is true that columbus and his people did want to trade and when spanish came over they did start trading
32:24 with native americans with the americas and in my very i think that world trade is a very very very good thing i really really do um because you have to understand this guys there are certain foods crops other types of resources that are native to certain countries they might not grow in other places of the world or not just that but the people in certain different parts of the world they have certain skill sets and they're really good at making this thing or whatever so when countries trade things that they're better at making or that they can make that makes everyone wealthy trade is mutually beneficial
33:11 you get something you need i get something i need trade is good that's why i'm like i don't know how many trump fans uh as students but i do have a couple of uh students that are trump fans like i think one of one of the bad things about trump's policies is his tariff policies you know he's been slapping a lot of like tariffs on china and stuff which honestly this is just making it harder for americans to trade at a desirable price that they want to trade at that's not making americans overall richer it's only helping out certain industries in america anyway that's a whole different economic discussion that i don't really have the time to get into but that's something i don't like about trump um
33:57 which there's a good amount of things to not like about trump if we're being honest and that's definitely one of them and but here's the thing nobody really a lot of people don't talk about that a lot of people say oh he's a racist he's a homophobe he's uh he's sexist okay maybe he is those things but those are mostly the only thing when people criticize trump those are pretty much the only things they say they don't talk about like his economic policies his foreign policy the wars he escalated those are some other things which are big reasons to be upset with him anyway so columbus helped trade things from the old world to the new world i don't know if you
34:43 ever heard these expressions before old world new world the eastern part of the world is considered to be the old world and the western part of the world is considered to be the new world but you have to understand who who really made up that term it was like europeans europeans would basically say oh this is the it's the new world to us because europeans most of them didn't really know that there was such a thing as the americas so this is a pretty good picture at which explains which foods and animals for that matter we're native to which parts of the world all right so here's some things i like to bring up like if you think about italy and you think about italian food what's one of the first things that
35:28 comes to your mind pizza or maybe like spaghetti and meatballs okay let's talk about pizza for a moment how can you make pizza without tomato sauce well guess what guys tomatoes came from the americas so what does that mean that means that prior to columbus's arrival no europeans were making pizza why they didn't have tomatoes however they did have lots of grains in terms of breads and things like that okay so what you needed was you needed some you needed the tomatoes from the new world that is the americas and you needed the grains from the old world to make pizza so by combining these different ingredients
36:15 you get more food that's great here's another thing um tacos tacos what do you think what tacos we think about oh mexico right taco bell something like that chipotle all right okay now look where's corn from corn comes from the americas right a lot of people put corn in there in there like chipotle or something i i haven't gone to chipotle ever since they had that e coli outbreak years ago but there was a while where i was eating some chipotle i thought it was pretty good and they'd always put corn in their burritos okay we get corn and things like avocados avocado see that's another thing whenever you go to chipotle if you wanted avocado it costs
37:02 you like two dollars extra or something like that avocados are good they're really healthy too by the way they're a good source of healthy fat but anyway this is a nutrition lesson right now so avocados and corn are new world foods but what about again the grain the wheat the tortilla the wrap where are you gonna get that from you're getting that from the old world so you wouldn't have some of these amazing foods that we have today if you weren't combining ingredients from the old world and the new world um there's not a picture of a horse here but there's a horse here now when we think of native americans we used to think like if you guys noticed in my classroom i have this picture of a crazy horse who was uh
37:48 that was a nickname uh he was a native american and uh he was you know a very skilled warrior and in that picture you see him riding on the side of his horse and he's shooting a gun while he's riding on the side of his horse and he's basically like using his horse as a shield anyway um so we'd like to think of native americans as always riding horses what if i told you that no native americans are riding horses until columbus came over and brought that stuff so the colombian exchange i think was an overall good for the world yes did it bring diseases yes it did but it also helped people eat more and because people ate more they lived longer lives because people can trade more goods and
38:34 things like that trade also helps people live longer lives helps technology grow and things like that so i think that one reason you can consider columbus a hero is because he helped foster trade between old world and new world and that helped people benefit okay here are some other things that you could say that you know uh columbus brought over to the americas you could say that columbus kind of brought a western-style judicial system whether or not that's a good thing all right because native americans didn't really have a judicial system like that per se all right the scientific method columbus brought that over to the americas you could say
39:19 um you could say that columbus brought over capitalism you know this idea of you know free trade and things like that the industrial revolution brought over you know manufacturing and things like that here's another reason you could say columbus was a hero though uh columbus and by the way uh i have the link to that dbq that i gave you guys it's the very very top link at this page columbus was a very very good explorer even the people who hate columbus the most you can't take away the fact that he was a very good explorer um
40:05 and a lot of let me go back to that infographic that i just had up if you look prior to columbus a lot of european explorers who who sailed they always tried to not they always try to sail really close to the coastline in case their ship ever got wrecked they wouldn't be that far from sea okay um but columbus on the other hand he was kind of like the first explorer that sailed across the huge ocean and didn't really know it was on the other side and he made the journey not just once but he made it several times so he was definitely a very very good explorer he knew a lot about astrology and
40:51 astronomy he knew a lot about geography he was very skilled map maker so there are arguments to say that columbus can be considered a hero however personally i'm not a fan not a fan personally i do think that he is more of a villain and i say that because he was extremely cruel even for his time now if you go back to this research guide you'll notice that i don't have too much stuff for reasons that he's a hero i mean i got a decent amount of things i guess but notice how i have a lot more stuff to say that he's a villain
41:36 and man you watch some of these videos or you read some of these articles about the [ __ ] up [ __ ] that columbus did it's it's pretty it's pretty tough to think man you know he's a hero however we still have a day off for now you know like how you guys told me that they changed it's not called ronald reagan's school 30 anymore it's now called this and that recently they took down thomas jefferson's statue thomas jefferson founding father a guy who wrote the declaration of independence he's the dude who wrote all men are created equal right he's the dude who stopped um he stopped the slave trade in the northwest territories he actually stopped the importation of the slave trade he basically put a cut-off date on it
42:22 he was a huge advocate for the first amendment freedom of speech freedom of religion i mean thomas jefferson like don't get me wrong there are reasons to dislike him definitely he was a slave holder he owned hundreds of slaves i get it he was definitely a hypocrite no doubt about it but jefferson did a lot of good things too there's no doubt about that they took his statue down i'm kind of shocked that there's still so many columbus statues hanging up throughout the country to be honest especially being the fact that he wasn't even technically american i mean american wasn't even a country yet if you're taking down thomas jefferson's statues you should certainly be taking out christopher columbus statues in my opinion but whatever i mean if we're just going
43:09 to tear down all historical statues then what's the point of having a studying history i don't know especially like when you're putting up statues like people like george floyd i mean like i get it george floyd was killed in a very [ __ ] up way but what good things did george floyd ever do i mean he did also beat up pregnant women and things like that but anyway i shouldn't get too sidetracked with things like that she's just like listen you can put up a statue whoever you want i'm fine with that i don't have a problem with that but tearing down statues i i think that some people who are doing this stuff aren't aren't thinking about they look at like one bad thing that a person did oh let's
43:54 let's tear down a stat dude i mean if you're gonna tear down a statue for one one bad thing that a person did then there should basically be no statues up of anybody sorry that was a complete tangent but anyway some things uh sometimes i just say what's on my mind okay i'm not gonna go into too much detail right now about columbus being a villain but um if you click this video right here this one was really good i actually directed a lot of you guys to watch this video uh so this guy he mentions a lot of the horrible things that columbus did columbus i mean maybe you can't call him a rapist himself
44:40 although he i think there's at least a decent chance that he was he's definitely at least at the very least an accessory to rape i mean literally you have primary sources of his crew members saying that columbus gave me a woman so that i could do with her whatever i wanted now why would this why would his crew member make that up like he's actually speaking about columbus in a favorable way like hey columbus is my boy he gave me this hot native american woman so i could do with her whatever i wanted i mean columbus was he was the governor of hispaniola for a period of time and when you're the governor um you are the head political authority in
45:26 the place you're supposed to literally stop crimes and there are stories and stuff about how they were selling young children nine ten years old to be sex slaves native american young children and the europeans were raping them columbus had political power he could have stopped them now i understand that there were there were a lot of bad people that columbus was forced to take on a ship but he didn't do anything to stop them in fact he actually encouraged this behavior there's other stories like he stole one of his crewmates uh pension and he basically lied about how he was the first person to spot the land um when he came over
46:13 he um you could literally read his journal and he says he says that it looks like the native americans would make good slaves and that's not just him saying that he actually took some native americans back with him as slaves literally chained them up brought them on a ship sailed them back to europe to show the king and queen of spain why he's like hey listen king and queen of spain look at what i found over here these are strong looking native americans you give me more soldiers you give me more european soldiers i can come back and i can enslave a ton of them we can enslave all these native americans and we can make them dig for gold while we while we basically sit on our ass so you have to understand that the world was a harsher place back then
47:00 it definitely was but i think that even when you do that columbus was still even an [ __ ] for his time and you could also even make the argument that like okay yeah did columbus trade and stuff yeah he did but he actually he actually wanted to take more than he wanted to trade and just because other great traders and stuff came after him can you really thank columbus for them trading and you could also say that there were other europeans that came to the americas before columbus which is actually true the difference is that columbus kind of he was the person who was basically after he came over europeans had a
47:45 permanent foothold in the americas they never left after that although certain europeans did come over before they they usually they didn't stay too long and they left okay so so far i've done questions one two three four five six and seven and the next one is about indentured servants okay so i'm not gonna spend too much time on this question because quite honestly i didn't spend that much time on indentured servants i gave you guys this little worksheet uh was an indentured servant contract so we spent maybe not even like a full day on it or whatever for one day why were a good amount of people willing to become indentured servants here's what you got to understand indentured
48:31 servants came to the americas before slaves did inventure servants were white they were from europe they were poor um a decent amount of them were criminals it's hard to get a job when you're a former criminal it was back then it is today um however in the americas people were desperate to get workers so they would take chances on indentured servants basically you sign a contract you're gonna work for me for four five six seven years something like that and then when your contract is up you're a free person now the the master of the indentured servant would basically pay for their
49:16 travel because traveling on a ship back then was not really cheap so basically the master had to do certain things for the servant usually from a financial perspective paying for their travel over giving them clothes feeding them giving them a place to sleep etc with that being said the servant had to work really hard you know they had to follow certain rules and obligations that the master held on them so what's really the answer to question eight why were a good amount of people willing to become venture servants they couldn't really get work over in europe maybe they wanted to own land in the americas but they had no way to afford to get to
50:01 the americas by themselves so they basically you know put their life on the line worked in conditions that were kind of similar to slaves but not exactly slaves because they saw it as the best opportunity just like you know i mentioned my ihop story to you guys how i worked at ihop with different people and one such person was mexican and you know he was a busboy i would not want to do busboy work why do i say that well one time he had to clean a whole bunch of [ __ ] in the bathroom which was everywhere i'm talking balls sink mirror everywhere it was his job to clean that he was a hard worker all right you have to understand from his
50:46 perspective this was a better opportunity for him than back in mexico where it was harder to get a job so same thing for indentured servants they saw that as the best opportunity for them to better their life so that's question eight okay question nine if christianity is all about loving your neighbor as you love yourself by the way this word thy that's like old english you see that in the bible so that's why i didn't read that then why did so many very religious christians own slaves in order to get full credit you need to mention at least uh one story from the bible that was used to justify slavery okay so big questions about slavery
51:32 you might remember this powerpoint you might be familiar with it okay so i have this slide slide a cane in able okay so you have to understand this back during the times of slavery a lot more people were religious in general no matter where they were north south both parts of the country were really religious but especially the south and even to this day i would say that the south is more religious than the north is there are various cultural reasons for that and stuff but it is true okay so how could many of these so when i really started to study slavery the thing that kind of amazed me was
52:18 how somebody these people could be really religious and read parts of the bible where you know jesus didn't harm people jesus said love your neighbor as you love yourself yet they could be a slave holder and treat people so badly like how could they be both it didn't make sense to me until i kind of you know started to understand history a little bit more and i started to understand bias a little bit more and the truth is is that a lot of these slave masters had what's called confirmation bias they wanted to be a slave master but they also wanted to be a christian they wanted to be a christian because they wanted to have the promise of the afterlife
53:04 they wanted to go to heaven they don't want to go to hell but they also wanted to be a slave master because being a slave master could make you lots of money because you're going to play a slave that well so you can make lots of profit from them you know starting a business is tough because like you know as a little kid i used to think like oh wow there's a lot of money in the cash register like and they get to keep all that money they must be rich if you own a business not necessarily because you got to take a lot of that money and you ought to spend it to pay your employees and things like that but if you never had to pay your employees or you had to pay them just like a little you know pennies worth you could make a lot of money anyway so basically slave masters wanted the best
53:51 of both worlds they wanted to be a religious christian and have the good promises of the afterlife but at the same time they wanted the good benefits of this life that is making more money so using confirmation bias they found ways to twist stories of the bible in order to make it seem like slavery was okay according to the bible and by the way i do think there are some parts of the bible which especially old testament that do make it seem like slavery's okay but then some other parts of the bible like you know they really kind of stretch some of these meanings and i'm gonna explain at
54:36 least one of them to you right now which is the story of cain and abel so this picture right here you can see i got the wwe wwe wrestler kane at the bottom he's supposed at least when he first came to wwe he was supposed to be the evil brother of the undertaker right flames you know he that was basically his thing he's he's the evil brother from hell so to speak it was a good storyline i'll give him that and the reason they called him kane even though cain from the wwe is not spelled the same way as cain from the bible it was still done intentionally because cain is the evil brother in the bible they're both adams and eve's sons abel's the good brother the bible speaks
55:22 highly of abel and basically cain got jealous of his brother abel so he attacked him and killed him according to the bible if you believe that and what does the bible say if you read the bible um genesis chapter 4 verse 15 it says then the lord put a mark on cain hmm that's interesting god put a mark on cain what does that mean that's all it says that's all the bible says god put a mark on cain birthmark is it a metaphorical mark who the [ __ ] knows that's all the bible says but see you can read into these stories you know let me get sidetracked for a little moment because
56:08 it's sidetracked but i promise you it's on there like i so when i used to study the quran with some people the muslim it's basically the muslim version of the bible i remember like there's this figure in in the quran his name is called the vulcarnay right you guys probably never heard that before and a lot of muslims wonder who's dulcanine and some muslims will say oh this is alexander the great it's like well the quran doesn't say that it's alexander the great so like basically you can kind of if you think that alexander's are great alexander the great's a good dude which by the way
56:54 i heard a lot of egyptians say that it's alexander the great well there's a city in egypt called alexandria why is it called alexandria because it's named after alexander the great so like some of these egyptian muslims that i know they would say oh this this person in the quran who is named vulcan and that's alexander the great it's like i don't think that's alexander the great i mean maybe but like i think your bias is making you want to believe what the quran is saying that this person is alexander the great so i'm saying is you can look into any ancient religious scripture and you can kind of make it seem like it's something you want to believe so going back to the story of cain and
57:40 abel what did slave masters say this mark was slave masters would look at this verse and say you know that mark that god put on cain that mark is actually black skin and because black people are the descendants of king that means they're evil and because black people are evil it's okay if we enslave them now i know that that sounds really [ __ ] up it really really does sound [ __ ] up that's because it is [ __ ] up to have a mentality to think like that
58:26 but i will tell you this this stuff was taught in churches and stuff throughout the south during the times of slavery this stuff was written in pamphlets and other types of literature that went around and even some slave masters read this stuff to their slaves basically some slave masters would say something like you guys are my slaves because you're the descendants of cain and cain did something really [ __ ] up he killed his brother his good brother so god cursed you guys and that's why i'm here to take care of you and to basically be superior to you that's why i'm your master
59:12 and they would get slaves to believe this stuff and you're a slave you can't speak out against it you're not even allowed to read the bible for yourself so you can't read the bible and decide whether or not that's real or true okay so um there's other stories too but um i don't need to mention all that stuff so i read the question that's the answer to question nine basically all right let's go on to 10. all right 10 is a bit of a long one answer one of the following questions number one why is it hypocritical to say that the united states was conceived in liberty you can answer that one or you can answer question two but you know what i don't think i'm sharing in my screen i think i'm sharing the wrong
59:58 thing right now okay here we go why is the hypocritical say the united states was conceived in liberty or number two can the united states uh really be considered the land of the free when there are a plethora of instances where people were fleeing the united states in order to get to the land of other nations explaining why or why not okay so here's my thing there are a lot of things i like about the united states of america and personally right now i don't think that there's any other country that i would really want to live in personally and there's various reasons why but there's a lot of things i like about america but america has a lot of [ __ ]
1:00:45 problems it really does and it seems to be getting way way way worse but there's a lot of things about early american history that i like there's like when they say that america is the land of the free there's a lot of [ __ ] behind that statement there is some truth to it like there's a good history of free speech in this country there's a good history of gun ownership there's a good history of privacy in this country um you know there's the judicial system in comparison to other nations is pretty good um the at least historically speaking the ability to start a business is pretty
1:01:31 good the immigration the you know the open immigration policy welcoming people from other countries that's pretty good too there's a lot of history of innovation and creating new technology so there are things to like about the united states but this idea that the united states was founded from the beginning upon liberty is [ __ ] because the united states was one of the biggest countries that had slavery i mean literally there was a war that was fought which wasn't it's it's kind of wrong if someone says the civil war was fought just over slavery because then it makes it seem like the north was trying to abolish slavery in the south it's not that simple um the south was definitely fighting to keep slavery i can say that for sure
1:02:17 i'll explain this more at the end of the year so there slavery was a big big big part of american history and i went and i pointed to all the different founding fathers that i had on the war wall and not just founding fathers first i said 10 out of the first 12 presidents owned slaves like there was a lot of slaveholders so if you're talking about the most important people and i'm just [ __ ] owned a couple states i'm talking like own hundreds of slaves like washington and jefferson like these guys own hundreds of slaves jackson madison [Music] so the idea and not just that too i also showed you guys uh this framed picture that mr d has
1:03:04 it's uh it's a copy of the declaration independence it's a copy of the us constitution it's a copy of uh lincoln's gettysburg address and like there's uh what's the other thing that i'm missing the bill of rights literally when they first wrote the us constitution it says that slavery is okay you know what i might as well actually share my screen and show that to you let me do that do i have it written down here yeah here we are so uh u.s constitution article 4 section 2 clause 3 this is what's called the fugitive slave clause this is basically the part of the
1:03:50 constitution that it didn't just say this is the law of the united states that was first written when united states first became a country and not only does it not just say that slavery is allowed it allowed slavery but it even went a step further it also says that it's the government's job to capture runaway slaves the government will basically protect slavery so you know when you say the united states is conceived in liberty born upon freedom i mean that's just it's [ __ ] to say that it was founded upon freedom for everybody you know actually i meant to show this clip before but i never actually uh showed it to people
1:04:35 so i want to show that now so give me a moment to pull it up okay here we go so this is the comedian george carlin now i have showed you guys at least one of his little comedy bits before it's the one where he it's called like the big club and i actually have the quote hanging up in the room where it says it's called the american dream because you have to be asleep to believe it and i do remember aaliyah pointing to that poster and saying like yeah that's the american dream when she was talking about something anyway so i'm gonna go ahead and play this clip for you hey i'm the first one to say it's a great country but it's a strange culture we got a strange culture this has got to be the only country in the world that
1:05:20 could ever come up with a disease like bulimia gotta be the only country in the world where some people have no food at all and other people eat a nourishing meal and puke it up intentionally this is a country where tobacco kills 400 000 people a year so they ban artificial sweeteners because a rat died you know what i mean this is a place where gun store owners are given a list of stolen credit cards but not a list of criminals and maniacs now they're thinking about banning toy guns and they're going to keep the
1:06:07 [ __ ] real ones this is a place where alcohol ruins more lives than cancer and everybody gets upset when some athlete gets hooked on cocaine you know time magazine and newsweek they put cocaine on the cover but they put the liquor advertisements inside the magazine it's the old american double standard you know say one thing do something different and of course the country is founded on the double standard that's our history we were founded on a very basic double standard this country was founded by slave owners who wanted to be free
1:06:57 am i right a group of slave owners who wanted to be free so they killed a lot of white english people in order to continue owning their black african people so they could wipe out the rest of the red indian people and move west and steal the rest of the land from the brown mexican people giving them a place to take off and drop their nuclear weapons on the yellow japanese people you know what the motto you know what the motto of this country ought to be you give us a color we'll wipe it out okay now the first minute and 30 plus seconds he wasn't really talking about anything that i really wanted you to hear so i probably should have fast forwarded it but i forgot exactly when
1:07:43 he brought up but like i like the part where he starts talking about how this country was founded on double standards you know you say one thing you do another aka hypocrisy and he starts talking about you know different like think about it yet the country was founded by slaveholders that wanted to be free anyway so let's see let me put this down [Music] okay so i'm gonna show i'm gonna go back to the question okay okay now let me go back to the powerpoint
1:08:31 go all right so i also had a picture up of these maps now if you look i'm gonna make this bigger so this is a picture of like the underground railroad now it wasn't like an actual like railroad in that sense it was just like basically routes that people took if you notice anything about this these routes on the underground railroad basically it's all about getting to canada why because canada if slaves went all the way to canada they would actually get their freedom going to the northern states wasn't safe enough
1:09:17 like you couldn't just if you were escaped slave you couldn't just go to new jersey and think oh you're good no no because the fugitive slave clause that part of the constitution that i told you about that said that slaves basically needed to be resold back into the south so slaves knew that they weren't just safe just in the northern part of the united states they needed to go all the way to canada or slaves in the deep south went to florida at the time when spain still owned florida eventually eventually the united states would come to own florida but before that spain owned it and sometimes slaves in the south would escape to florida because the spanish king would basically grant their freedom so the reason why i bring all this up is
1:10:02 to say that um [Music] if you go back to the question let me share that and go back to share question [Music] the second question the land of the free is this really the land of the free i mean there are two countries that at the time bordered the united states spanish florida before hispanic before florida became a part of the united states and canada and both of them gave slaves more freedom so yeah anyway so question 10 is kind of really stomping on the mythology of the united states so to speak okay question 11 why didn't slaves rebel more often rebel means fight back
1:10:47 well that one should be pretty easy for you guys i think the movie 12 years a slave does a pretty good job explaining why but um i mean slaves couldn't read or write i mean some of them could but they weren't really supposed to it was actually illegal in many parts because they wanted to keep slaves ignorant so they couldn't read maps they couldn't read signs and things like that they couldn't read books to get educated so it was it would be hard for slaves to know where to go but even if they did know where to go what are the chances of them actually getting there all right so the guy that you see in this picture he's a slave patrolman and the other guys that you see are slave patrolmen you can see that they have dogs and they have guns
1:11:34 and they had a huge incentive to capture runaway slaves if you look at some of the statistics that i have on this slide you'll see that these paddy rollers which are basically they're basically like slave police is basically the way that you can define them because they're paid by the government just like cops are paid by the government to capture runaway slaves that is their job and they got huge bonuses when they did actually capture slaves so i mean you know like these guys are experts on knowing the territory of the south slaves are not experts and these guys know that if they do capture these runaway slaves they're gonna get big money so they had big incentive to actually capture slaves
1:12:20 there's another thing you can consider too um let's say slaves actually rebelled to the point where like they fought against um slave masters and like killed slave masters that's like a full-on rebellion there's a good chance that actually the friends of the slaves might be killed um so like let's say that like you had a slave like i'm trying to remember the one guy's name from the film there were some slaves in the film that were just willing to just be obedient just so that they didn't get beat and even solomon was like that for a little bit but there then there were some other slaves that were
1:13:07 that really really really wanted their freedom all right like the one slave who gets stabbed on the ship and then he dies and he gets thrown overboard so i bring them up to say that okay they might be willing to die for their freedom where they would fight back but the thing is is if if they weren't successful their friends the slave the slave masters might get mad at them and want to kill their friends as a result and that did happen when you look at something like that not turn a rebellion because nat turner and a bunch of other slaves led this rebellion and killed
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