http://www.josephsmith.com/
I have chosen this site as my historical site becuase Joseph Smith was the founder of the Mormon Church and was considered to be a true prophet, he was murdered by both his religious and political foes. He was murdered along with his brother Hyrum while they were spending time in jail after giving themselves up to the governer Thomas Ford's accusations that they were dangerous men. I thought that this was a good website becuase when I looked at other websites Joseph Smith was baptising different people throughout Illinois and this would have been considered in that time to be against the work of God and therefore creating both his religious and political foes. His religious foes becuase he was turning people towards a new religion and his political foes becuase he was turning more people to support and trust him that the political party could have seen this as a threat that they could be overrun. He would have gained many foes very quickly becuase what Jospeh believed in was against the normalilty of what people knew and believed.
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/assault/billyjack/
I have chosen this for my contempory website becuase this website is about the death of Billy Jack Gaither, he was a thirty-year-old gay man who was brutally beaten to death for talking about "queer stuff". This goes to show that America still has not got over the idea of there being gay communities living amoung them, however some more accepting than others the people who murdered Billy Jack knew what they were doing and then owned up to the murder. It is as if they wanted people to know about what they did as a statement that being gay was outside the normality of the life they knew. There was also the question raised about what was the signifcance in this killing. as I was reading the report I could see that the signficance behind the killing was a hate crime. If they were just murderers then they could have targeted anyone that they chose, however the killers confessed to killing this man with a small sense of pride.
Whereas some people have become more accepting of the fact that there are Mormons living amoung them the idea of being gay still aggravates people to take action against them becuase of them being homophobic and the fact that it is still out of the norm.
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I feel that this was the one blog I did best on because firstly, I enjoyed researching about different peoples stories about why they are outside the american norm. It was both interesting and shocking to discover what some Americans did and how they felt towards people that were outside of their "normal" society. It was also suprising to find out that the iea of mormans was becoming more and more accepted by americas society whereas the idea of being homosexual as you can see from my post was something that some people still felt strongly against. The idea stood out to me was that america would eliminate anything that was outside their normality
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