I attended the table talk on the Making of Urban America. An interesting fact that I learned during this event was that Halloween did not originate in America, but rather it originated in Ireland and Scotland. This was really interesting to me because it always seemed to me that America was the one that celebrated that holiday the most out of any other country. I feel like nowadays people associate halloween with America. I thought this fact perfectly symbolized how Americans take things from other people and other countries. For instance, the talk was about how the colonization of America entailed eliminating a majority of the Native American population. America belonged to the Native Americans, but we have depleted their numbers to approximately 1.2% of them in our current population. The Native Americans had their own history in America that the textbooks never mention, but rather that Americas history starts when Christopher Columbus sailed the ocean blue. The reason is because we as Americans feel a huge guilt for eradicating a huge portion of these Native Americans and stealing all of their land, claiming it as our own. This is all symbolized in the holiday of Halloween. We have taken the celebration of Halloween, which was intended by Celtic paganisms to celebrate the new year where ghosts and spirits would come out to haunt them, and turned it into a day where children and adults dress up in costumes while sharing and eating candy. It is the American way to take things that were not ours to begin with, but make it our own.