Interesting Story

Today we are discussing documents focusing on the people of the Gilded Age.

We have read harrowing accounts of tenement life in New York, which I was familiar with thanks to Caleb Carr's The Alienist.

We read the cliche 'rags to riches' stories of Horatio Alger, such as "Ragged Dick" about a young boy who achieves the American Dream by working his way up from a shoe shine boy to a self-made man in New York. Alger is known for his unrealistic view of life.

I remarked how, after reading Carr's novel which details the child prostitute trade in New York at the time, that I kept waiting for something tragic to happen to the protagonist. However, in Alger's biased world, every adult sought to help Ragged Dick. I kept waiting for him to be abducted or beaten or worse.

A quick look up on Alger's biography reveals that it is strongly believed that he himself was a pedophile and was in trouble for grossly inappropriate behavior with young boys.

This afternoon we discussed the tragedy of the St. Louis, a boat of Jewish people, many children, fleeing Nazi Germany. However, they could not land in Cuba and they were turned away from America.

http://www.ushmm.org/wlc/article.php?ModuleId=10005267

One thing my students were shocked at when reading Night was how America didn't step in to do something about the holocaust.

I was always told that America just didn't know the extent of the tragedy. However, that might not be true. Even in America there was strong anti-Semitism. Not to mention that we would round up Japanese Americans and place them in camps.

I could only reply, "Why don't we do anything today about the holocausts in Darfur or Rwanda or Burma?"