On October 17th, we had a riveting class discussion that shocked me. We learned that African Americans fought with The Confederacy. All I can think is what in the world? I had never heard that or learned that before and was partially flabbergasted. What you can conclude from African Americans fighting with The Confederacy is that slavery wasn’t as bad as we were told and Confederacy had state rights that the blacks agreed with. To contradict this, Abraham Lincoln did not want blacks fighting onside with the North because it would be harder to reach an agreement with the confederates. Mid lecture we were showed historical pictures such as a recruitment picture from Philadelphia for the Union. I think it’s incredible after all this team these extraordinary pictures have not been lost or damaged. We also talked about the 1st Louisiana Native Guard, whom I have never heard of or been taught in any history class before, which blows my mind because it is so important to know that there were free persons of color that were apart of a Militia unit. The 1st Louisiana Native Guard in 1861 protected North from New Orleans. Another fun fact about free persons of color in New Orleans was that they sent their kids to France to be educated or they even owned slaves, so blacks were owning blacks. We concluded this class by discussing how Frederick Douglass wrote about all the black lives that were lost fighting for The Confederates in Manassas, which I found so cool because of how local that war was. I’m from Haymarket, which is about 10 miles from Manassas, and my high school actually is named Battlefield, because of the war that was fought in Manassas, so I felt a deep connection when we learned about what Douglas wrote. Then on October 19th we learned about the history of the internet. The class began by showing us Ngram Viewer and how to use it, which I wasn’t even aware existed. Then I learned how Google Books has digitalized 30 million books, while the Library of Commerce has 37 million books. That means Google Books has nearly digitalized every book in the world. Prof. O’Malley taught our class how to navigate google books by showing us the key on the side which was labeled advanced search and how you can pick your search and limit it by dates and various other things. Copyright unfortunately can limit you on finding what you are searching for which is a huge problem for Historians, but besides that Google Books is an awesome tool to be aware about. An interesting point discussed regarding copyright is that Happy Birthday recently was copyrighted, so technically every time it is sang you are suppose to pay for it. Which is ridiculous because who is actually going to pay for it because when it is sang in your private home no one would ever know. We concluded this lesson with talking about the thousands of dollars (my tuition money) that is spent a year maintaining the GMU Proquest Database, which makes me realize I really should take advantage of it while I am still a student here. Learning about all the free online databases and Google Books that I should be taking advantage of has shaped my new perspective to researching!