Art and Technology

While discussing popular entertainment and how it played a major role in shaping the culure of America, s a class we examined some U.S. history to get a better grasp on how entertainment evolved in our own history not just in that of the world. A major part of American culture in the 20th century was the beginning of the Jazz music era. This was a defining segway into defining our own sense of unity. The origin of jazz music is by African American musicians in the south during the early 20th century. At this time many black musicians were trying very hard to get into the music game, and took musical traditions from both Africa and Europe to develope this popular style of music which consisted of notes from "blue's" songs along with polyrythms and improvised playing as well. The most interesting link I found while researching this topic is named "A Passion for Jazz" http://www.apassion4jazz.net/ and has links discussing everything about jazz music from milestones in the history of this genre, to a timeline, to musician tips and a photo gallery.

While still discussing American culture and how it was shaped by not only entertainment, but by many other major factors in our country's history, there is no way to skip over the stock market crash. The "stock market crash" of 1929 was when all the stocks on Wall Street crashed leading to a major downfall that lasted an entire month. This was preceeded by a period of decline in industrialized nations and also by declining real estate values. During these days, a majority of the population of Americans decided to sell or trade shares from the stock market, or to try and liquidate their funds from the bank. When this happened  all at once in a big panic, the market could no longer keep up and inevitably crash. The loss during this single week in 1929 was $30 billion.

The eonomic crisis we are currently in today is said to be the worst fincancial crisis since the great depression of the 1930's. Triggered by a shortfall of liquidity in the U.S. banking system, the effects have been grand and significant. These include the need for some national banks to be bailed out, the failure of several large financial institutions, suffering of housing markets, and even risidual effects that have caused downturns in stockmarkets across the world. With so much new technology and banking systems, much more seems to be at stake during this crisis (which could cause a tidal wave of crashing markets across the world).