Emily Harris
10/21/2014
SOC 229
Question #1
(a) The sociological imagination is a way of looking at the world to try and figure out why things are the way they are in society. It examines how social context influences individuals and groups. The four components of the sociological perspective include historical analysis, cultural analysis, structural analysis and critical analysis.
Historical analysis examines the past in order to explain the present (Willis 2011). This type of analysis looks on how a society came to be, how it is changing from the previous history of that society and how a new history is being made. In order to make this more concrete I will give an example we talked about in class. We examined how the history of African…show more content… Chinese immigrants weren’t permanent because men weren’t allowed to bring families here and weren’t allowed to marry white women because laws were put in place preventing them form becoming citizens. The Chinese women had to stay back home in China and only the men were allowed to come to America. The end goal for Chinese men was to earn money and go back to China to return to their families. They came to America and were brought over to help working but when they got here they were paid horribly and never given what they were promised. Historically the Chinese husband would leave family and go to US temporarily. This type of Chinese man was known as a sojourner. The Chinese woman would move into the husbands home to take care of parents and her own children. There was a split in that the males would do the productive labor and the women were responsible for the reproductive labor and taking care of the parents and families. The exploitation of overseas labor led to this form of family life. Racial domination was also responsible. Historically, young girls had little value and were considered temporary members of their own family and once they married into their husband’s family they were apart of that family. Their job then became to take care of their in-laws. In the US Chinese women were able to come overseas if they were prostitutes or merchant wives. The…show more content… Assimilation for Native Americans happened around the late 19th century and early 20th century. Cultural genocide was part of assimilation. The US separated families and broke all of the treaties made in the first place. The first way was through federal franchising and forcing Christianity upon the Native Americans. The new settlers forced religion, boarding schools, and language onto them (Harjo 1999). They also broke up tribal land holdings and posed taxes on the land, making it almost impossible for Native Americans to get their land back. The introduction of diseases led to the death of a good part of the Native American population. Not all this exposure was unintentional. Settlers used to give Native Americans intentionally infected small pox blankets. This was intentional so that colonizers could obtain land without having to pay for it. Most Native American land in the east was stolen. The Indian Removal Act of 1830 destroyed all of what the Native Americans had built and created and moved them all to Oklahoma. Almost all Native Americans in the south and east were forced to move to Oklahoma because it was a desolate part of the country that the new settlers didn't want. In the 1850s there was a huge influx of settlers because of gold, silver and land. The railroads were also being built. The US government forced Native American