On September 6th, we started class by discussing many of the key themes of the world during the 1900s. Although we discussed many, the main five were imperialism/colonialism, industrialization/urbanization, rise of global trade, changing roles for women, and changing political structures. After this we went around and shared how these themes related to the cities we picked for our mini research project. It was fascinating to me that everyone saw at least 2-3 of these major themes present in their city during the 1900s. I chose to research Helsinki Finland, and during this research I didn’t even have these themes in mind. Once completing this project, I realized changing roles for women and imperialism/colonialism were the two most prevalent themes for my city. During the 1900s Finland was attempting to fight off Russian nationalism in order to receive independence, which they eventually did in 1917. Also, during this time women began to receive jobs in the classroom for the first time, and they were given the responsibility of showing children at this time what a true humble submissive woman looked like.

For the second half of class we had a guest speaker who was informing us about Dakar in Senegal. Throughout this discussion he related many of the themes we just discussed to Dakar in the 1900s. For example, he mentioned how Dakar had many trade routes in West Africa where commodities and ideas were shared/exchanged. He took us through Dakar’s history from the late 18th century, where they were the Lebou Republic, all the way to present day, no longer French West Africa. Overall, it was very interesting to me that even though we are looking at different countries all over the world, with very different cultures, they all were experiencing very similar things during the 1900s.