1910s Decade Quiz

For the song lyrics I was trying to think of every war song from that era I could - The Caisson Song, Over There, etc. Never would have thought of the beautiful "Danny Boy".

I was about to get on my high horse about Danny Boy actually being called the Londonderry Air, but when I looked up Londonderry Air on Wikipedia I discovered that the melody is called Londonderry Air. Danny Boy was a separate song originally written with a different melody in 1910, and only put to the music it is so well known by today, in 1913. I learn something new every day!

Same thing here. That's why I enjoy these quizzes so much. Adding to my wealth of completely useless information. Except when on this site. Then it's invaluable.

Please accept abortion/abortions for Margaret Sanger.

Cooldrive: Margaret Sanger was a great woman and humanitarian. You've been fed ridiculous lies by whatever anti-abortion websites you frequent.

Kalbahamut, she was an racist who wanted to "weed out" minorities from America.

haggy: source?

This is completely wrong. More lies.

More lies and conspiracy theories.

She was actually against abortion, but she did in fact want to limit the population of African Americans through birth control.

This is a misrepresentation. She did not want to "limit" the African-American population any more than she wanted to limit any other other population. What she advocated was that people should have children only when they want to -- i.e., they can decide with birth control when they will get pregnant. She said at points that this should apply *as well* to African-Americans. She was highlighting them because they were often left out of social programs at the time (I can't imagine why). The sentiment was "everyone should be having fewer babies, because people should only have babies when they want and can comfortably support them. That includes African-Americans, even though we always leave them out." And some enterprising propagandist turned that into "Margaret Sanger said we need to limit the African-American population through birth control."

I'd also add that, in addition to being inaccurate, this criticism about Sanger being racist gets under my skin because it's always intended as a swipe at the merits of Planned Parenthood and contraception. "Planned Parenthood is bad because its founder was racist." I have some unfortunate news for you: the Founding Fathers were racist as hell. They owned human beings as property because they felt entitled to control a supposedly inferior race. Whatever Sanger is accused of doing to African-Americans pales in comparison to what was done to them by almost every historical American figure from the 1700s. I say this not to indict those figures, but to point out that the quality of an institution and the sins of its founders are totally separate issues. And I am not inviting a debate on the merits of Planned Parenthood because we all know how that will go. Just saying (at the appropriate time and place, which is not here and now), judge the institution by what it does now.

Sanger did not want women to be slaves to their husbands treated as little more than baby factories. She saw the enormous strain that having huge families had on poor families in America and wanted to help them. She saw how women had very little choice in whether or not they would be required to produce children, as they had no control over their own bodies (could not deny their husbands whatever they wanted, and even giving out information on birth control was illegal in the country at the time). Any efforts on her part to educate minority women on birth control was meant to help elevate those women out of the shackles of poverty. The people who want to smear her reputation, because of, as jmellor pointed out, the ridiculous logical fallacy that somehow if the founder of Planned Parenthood was bad then the organization itself must be bad, spread all sorts of vicious libelous nonsense about the woman.

"Who was President of the United States for most of the decade?" what?

The question's very straightforward. Who was the President of the United States during most of the 1910s? Why is that confusing?

English mustn't be your first language!

What's wrong? It's a straightforward question.

It was many years after I finished school that I learned of the Armenian genocide of this era. Once you learn about it, it's staggering that it is so largely unknown. From what I understand, Turkey refuses to call it genocide, which would go some way to explaining why it doesn't seem to get the attention you would assume it would. Especially since it seems to have laid the blueprint for how Nazi Germany conducted its genocide years later.

"Who, after all, speaks today of the annihilation of the Armenians?" -Hitler, August 1939

shouldn't Greeks and Assyrians be accepted as answers for groups targeted for genocide in the ottoman empire?

The US has only recognised the Armenian Genocide, and that just recently, a couple of years ago. Turkish military strength makes the West really "cautious". The British still refuse to recognise the Genocide.

Sanger advocated for sex education. That was her main thing. It was illegal to give out information on this in the United States (and many other places) at this time, and she and her associates were jailed for this multiple times. She also imported and distributed condoms and other contraceptives. But mostly she wanted to educate women on sexual health and different ways to avoid getting pregnant and to enjoy sex without the fear or burden of pregnancy. She also pushed for and secured funding for research into oral contraceptives for women which led to the invention of the birth control pill. She founded Planned Parenthood and led the organization until her 80s, disseminating sexual education materials all over the world.