Review The American Revolution in Indian Country - 720 Words

Malcolm X once said â€Å"We (African-Americans) didnt land on Plymouth Rock, the rock was landed on us.†1 While not comparing it as such, nor discounting in any way the tremendous suffering and struggle for equality African-Americans have endured, this work presents a very strong argument that the native peoples of North America, have suffered as much or arguably more so. Indeed several bands had already been obliterated by disease and war with the White invaders from the sea before most of the English colonies were even well established, a pattern which would only continue to get worse. For the Indians living in what is now the eastern United States in the 1770s, the revolution was merely the continuation of a generational war they had been steadily losing for over a century already. Native peoples all across the vast hinterlands had coped with the destruction of their lives and livelihoods as they always had, by adapting and evolving as their situations changed which contin ued through the revolutionary and beyond. The prologue presents a sweeping, but well described overview of the complex network of interwoven societies that existed in North America on the eve of the American Revolution. America was already well on its way to becoming the great melting pot of societies and cultures by the mid-1700s. It had become a world where boundaries, bloodlines, and loyalties were all largely fluid and often blurred, with many of the key players being of mixed race of Indian,Show MoreRelatedBook Review of Liberty and Power Essay959 Words   |  4 PagesWang, N.Y. Review written by Richard Foust Book Review Harry L. Watson’s book, â€Å"Liberty and Power, The Politics of Jacksonian America†, takes an analytical look at America and her politics during the Age of Jackson. 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Imperialism was one of the causes because thisRead MoreRevolutionary Mothers : Women During The Struggle For America s Independence By Carol Berkin1612 Words   |  7 PagesIntroduction A critical analysis entails the review of the book Revolutionary Mothers: Women in the struggle for America’s independence by Carol Berkin. This comprised of details on women who had been involved in struggling to fulfill the independence of America. Women played their role at facing or creating impact towards the war. This outlines on myriad of women,s lives as well as getting to know the obstacles that they encountered during the war. This aids in bringing out the idea that not onlyRead MoreBook Analysis: The Texas Rangers and the Mexican Revolution1280 Words   |  6 PagesThe Texas Rangers and the Mexican Revolution: The Bloodiest Decade, 1910-1920. By Charles H. Harris III and Louis R. Sadler (Albuquerque: Univ. of New Mexico, 2007. Print.) This is the most comprehensive collection of The Texas Rangers during the Mexican revolution that has been published. Charles Harris III and Louis Sadler share the details behind this unstable period by uncovering the views and actions of the Rangers during the highest point of border violence up until that time. The RangersRead More`` The Legend Of Sleepy Hollow `` : How Did Irving And Sedgwick Use American History?1520 Words   |  7 Pagesa remote period of American history, that is to say, some thirty years since, a worthy wight of the name of Ichabod Crane† (Washington Irving, â€Å"The Legend of Sleepy Hollow†, 1820). How did Irving and Sedgwick use American history in their writings? Well into the early 19th Century the idea of ‘The American’ was far reserved from what we recognize now, due in a large part to the the lack of a credible sense of culture and history emitted from the settlers. 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In the first stage, it contends the positive effect of the Industrial Revolution on economy and urbanization. There was a colossal benefit picked up from the Industrial Revolution by the privileged and the government. However, the working populationRead MoreA Delegate Of The Constitutional Convention1257 Words   |  6 Pagesthe constitutional convention in Philadelphia made this statement about James Wilson Government seems to have been his peculiar study, all the political institutions of the world he knows in detail, and can trace the causes and effects of every revolution from the earliest stages of the Grecian commonwealth down to the present time. This statement describes James Wilson to a tee, he not only had how the government worked memorized but he also could take that knowledge and infuse it into the constitution

What is Psychosocial Development - 948 Words

What is psychosocial development? Psychosocial development is development on a social realm. Psychosocial development is how one develops their mind, maturity level, and emotions over the course of one’s life. The rate of development depends on different factors such as biological processes as well as environmental factors. A man named Erik Erikson who was a psychoanalyst who believed that early childhood successes and failures were responsible for influencing later developmental stages developed this theory. Erikson’s theory of psychosocial development is based around the theory that social experience has an impact over an entire lifespan. There are eight stages developmental stages of development in the psychosocial theory and I will†¦show more content†¦These plans could include things such as what kind of career they want, their sexual orientation, and who they are in life (Cooper, 1998). The intimacy vs. isolation stage is between the ages of 19 to 40 and is very important to the relationships one will hold during these years. Erikson believed that it did not matter how successful one was financially, they are not truly complete developmentally until one is capable of true intimacy. People that have not successfully created a sense of identity will have a fear of commitment however, someone that has successfully developed a sense of self is able to form bonds and create successful relationships as an adult (Davis Clifton, 95). Middle adulthood is the generatively vs. stagnation stages in which an adult must care of others and realize that they need a family or a legacy. During this stage, people will nurture their own family or find ways to nurture others that need to be nurtured outside their immediate family. If an adult does not overcome the crisis during this stage, then they will not grow which will result in them being selfish and self-centered. The last stage in Erikson’s theory is the integrity vs. despair important s tage. This is the time in one’s life when they begin to look at their life and the role that they have played in life. As one reflects on theirShow MoreRelatedReflect Upon Your Own Life in Terms of the Eriksons 8 Stages of Psychosocial Development and Write About What Was Your Experience Like Handling Each of the Eight Developmental Tasks/Conflicts.3296 Words   |  14 Pagesexperiences eight crises or conflicts in development. During each of the eight stages of personality development, a specific developmental task or conflict will be more significant than any other. Please reflect upon your own life in terms of the Erikson’s 8 stages of Psychosocial Development and write about what was your experience like handling each of the eight developmental tasks/conflicts (where applicable). Erikson’s Psycho-Social Development Erik Erikson theory consists of 8 stagesRead MoreThe Effects Of Midlife Psychosocial Development On Cognitive And Emotional Health1331 Words   |  6 Pagesconsequences of midlife psychosocial development in relation to late-life cognitive and emotional health. It is relevant in my age group particularly in my husband’s case who is in his mid-thirties. Although I have been aware of the implications of certain psychosocial factors in someone’s well-being, I wanted to know the other aspects of midlife psychosocial development and its effect as the person ages. 2. Summary of related literature or studies Erikson’s psychosocial development theory became theRead MoreI Find This Journal Article Interesting As It Discussed1335 Words   |  6 Pagesconsequences of midlife psychosocial development in relation to late-life cognitive and emotional health. It is relevant in my age group, particularly in my husband’s case who is in his mid-thirties. Although I have been aware of the implications of certain psychosocial factors in someone’s well-being, I wanted to know the other aspects of midlife psychosocial development and its effect as the person ages. 2. A summary of related literature or studies Erikson’s psychosocial development theory became theRead MoreErikson s Theory For Psychosocial Development1000 Words   |  4 PagesErikson was a theorist who focused on his theory for psychosocial development. The article Psychosocial Identity Development Theories, highlights the keys points and idea of Erikson’s psychosocial theory. Erikson was very focused on the idea of ego identity and obtaining full potential. His theory or â€Å"model† stats that, â€Å"identity formation is based on overcoming conflicts that individuals encounter during adolescent and early childhood.†(Karkouti, 2014, p.257) He believed that all people must endureRead MoreTeaching Young Children Self Regulation Through Children s Books By Patricia Cooper Essay1299 Words   |  6 Pageschildren’s psychosocial development. The article argues that teachers need to understand how certain pieces of literature affects a child’s psychosocial development and how teachers s hould go about choosing books that most positively affect psychosocial development. According to Cooper (2007), the article uses a combination of Dewey’s impetus for learning and Vygotsky’s theory that learning precedes development through scaï ¬â‚¬olded social interaction, Erikson’s theory of psychosocial development, and Rosenblatt’sRead MoreErik Erikson s Theory Of Psychosocial Development884 Words   |  4 Pagesfamous theory of psychosocial development and the concept of the identity crisis. His theories marked an important shift in thinking on personality; instead of focusing simply on early childhood event, his psychosocial theory looked at how social influences contribute to personality throughout the entire lifespan. Erik Erikson died May 12, 1994 due to prostate cancer. (Erik Erikson, 2015). Stages of Psychosocial Development Comprehension of Erikson’s eight stages of psychosocial development requires anRead MoreErikson s Psychosocial Theory : Development Of Ego Identity1293 Words   |  6 PagesZoi Arvanitidis 05/16/17 ECEE-310 Dr.Alkins Studying Erikson’s Psychosocial theory Erik Erikson was a student of another theorist, Sigmund Freud. Erikson expanded on Freud’s psychosexual theory. Erikson later developed the psychosocial theory. This theory described the effect of one’s social experiences throughout one’s whole lifespan. One of the main elements of Erikson’s psychosocial theory is the development of ego identity. Ego identity is the conscious sense of self that we developRead MoreThe Boys Building A Racetrack1207 Words   |  5 Pagesencounters the situation where he tries to explain to all of the other boys around him to join and help him. Bob begins explaining this idea that he believes is brilliant. 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Erikson suggested that everyone experiences a series of psychosocial stages insteadRead MoreEarly Childhood Psychosocial Development Essay1307 Words   |  6 Pages The development starts from infant until old age. Childhood is a time of tremendous change, but people also continue to grow slowly and develop during adulthood. It is a continuous process with a predictable sequence. These developmental changes may be influenced by genetic factor, environment factor and maturation factor. There are three types of human development changes: physical development, cognitive development and psychosocial development. Our group member’s choice is psychosocial development

Supplier Relationship Management SRM

Question: Describe about the Supplier Relationship Management? Answer: SRM (Supplier Relationship Management) highlights towards the protocol and the practice, which are commonly found to be associated with suppliers. It can be analyzed that most of the suppliers highlight SRM as an organized approach to define the need and demand for the providers. It further focuses on establishing and thereby managing the concept of company-to-company linkage. This is obtained to fulfill the needs of the sector. When there is no conscious procurement-supplier linkage, the practices along with the protocol in play are termed to be informal. However, formal or not, the academic along with the consulting researchers tend to organize approaches for the supplies. The protocol highlights towards the development of positive sourcing results. The protocol of SRM highlights towards the relation numbers 3 through 6. The primary emphasis of the concept lies in the identification of the performance attributes that are attained from the suppliers. Managing these aspects based on the relationship highlights towards the consequences. The Opportunity sourcing (i.e. number 7) focuses towards the practices associated with the current need of sources. This is considered to be true discovery, which is an initiative to identify and thereby determining the usefulness of the protocol. This is frequent in both the high-tech industries along with High Margin Consumer Product industries. It is often encountered that the supply professionals tend to have innovative product revenues as a part of the performance metrics. It can be assumed that every relationship tends to require dynamic management along with the practical leadership attributes that develop benefits for an organization. As one shift from length price relationship towards the development of a joint venture, the business linkages become closer and well defined. The benefits calculated are much deeper and broader. The internal relationship is considered equally important as the external ones. The SRM domain tends to link the standard operations such as accounting, logistics, and engineering. The Intrinsic factors found to work against the concerted efforts of the suppliers. It can also create high consistency of the various purposes associated with an organization. It can be stated that there are two types of measurements, i.e. targets and means. The objectives tend to the end goals, which are being sought. This includes the cost, price, quality, logistic details, marketing timing, etc. The means of measurement are considered the sub-component activities, which adds for accomplishing the targets. A common fault that is associated with the context is the over requiring means of measurements. The simpler approach is to perform several ended goal targets. The primary motto of involving stakeholders, understanding the final market, creating aligned measures are all associated with this context. Whether a defined target is used, it has been encountered that the stakeholders have their impact on the performance of the group. The concept of SRM is commonly found to be associated with strategic rollout sourcing. Thereby it can be analyzed that the management and the leadership of working with the strategic suppliers are preferred by pure transactional attributes. Every SRM is associated with determination and communication needs, which further focuses in expectation of the suppliers, performance measurement, and involvement of action for compliance. The interactions are involved in providing the suppliers with expectations of communication along with the flow of the products and services. Moreover, SRM categorizes the supply along with the markets of the goods and services, which interacts with the selected suppliers to meet the measurable performance goals. SEM highlights towards the development of suppliers to acquire the benefit of buying a company or an organization. SRM focuses on identifying and thereby measuring the suppliers through measurement, oversight, and management. The closer collaborative supplier relationships are of two types. This involves the suppliers possessing capabilities for buying the company, which does not have enough strategy needs and demands. The basic goal of SRM highlights towards the development of communication with the suppliers. They tend to share a methodology, business term and the information to improve familiarity with one another. SRM intends in ensuring the providers and thereby familiarize better core business of the enterprise. The SRM solution editors define the protocol based on four stages: a) Cooperative Design: It consists of the integration of the supply problems associated with designing of the products. This involves suppliers through cooperative design tools. This ensures minimum costing at every level. b) Identification of suppliers: This highlights towards the purpose of identifying potential suppliers. Preparation of scorecard is attained by qualifying them according to their cost and production capacity, delivery deadline and the quality guarantees. Finally, the best suppliers are invited to submit their bids. c) Selection of Suppliers: The suppliers are selected by Reverse Auction Mechanism. The role of the buyer and the seller are reversed in this context. The SRM tools have bidden interface that makes it possible to undergo three types of requests (known as RFx). These are as follows: i) RFQ (Request for Quotation): Simple application towards the quoted price. The supplier submitting the lowest bid is selected. ii) RFP (Request for Proposal): Request demanding to present the commercial proposal, specifying the price and information of the company. The properties of production capacities stock and delivery deadlines are counteracted with this protocol. The selected supplier evaluates the proposal based on different criteria. iii) RFI (Request for Information): This consists of issuing a simple request for information based on the products and services offered by the supplier. This is not necessarily implied on bidding. iv) Negotiation: This formalizes the contract between the providers (selected) and enterprise, which includes specific clauses regarding logistics, service quality, payment terms and other duties. It is often encountered that the challenges of supplier relationship management are the increasing reliance on them and exposing the risk factors. The protocol and role of the transaction are ill defined, which inhibit further performance improvement. This limit the value forms of the supplier relationship and thereby it makes the performance more efficient. Even though there are various suppliers who are tracked and thus reported, the performance, issues may seem to persist, and the organization may not have the ability to recoup with the resulting cost. It has been estimated that most of the organization identifies the suppliers, which are strategic and thereby can be managed efficiently. In the absence of the clear set of supplier management protocol, the role of the providers in the organization tends to set the agenda and the canvas for the building organization. The initial aggressive sourcing for most of the companies yields dramatic savings and other benefits, which sustains the benefits of attaining higher reductions. This would have been difficult without an effective SRM system. The formal program for the supplier development does not exist in limiting the organizations ability to form a win-win value with the supply base. Their inefficiency introduces towards many employees for spending time on the unnecessary reluctant interactions with the suppliers. The procurement functioning plays a leadership role in sourcing and ongoing activities. As the sourcing matures in an organization, the objectives along with value proposition of purchase need to be evolved simultaneously. Most of the organizations lack the system capabilities, which are required to be regularly supported by the supplier management across the supplier lifecycle. References Burnson, P. (9 June 2014). New Focus on Supplier Relationship Management. Retrieved from https://www.scmr.com/article/new_focus_on_supplier_relationship_management.Engel, B. (2011). 10 Best Practices You Should Be Doing Now. Retrieved from https://supplychainquarterly.com/Guest Contributor. (3 December 2013).North Rizza, M. (17 February 2015). The Five Secrets of Supplier Relationship Management. Retrieved from https://www.supplymanagement.com/

Slaughterhouse Five Themes and Symbolism Essay Example

Slaughterhouse Five: Themes and Symbolism Paper Slaughterhouse-Fives durability as a satiric masterwork is explained by two factors. First, the 1960s appear increasingly as a definitive era as we move further away from them. This is true for the reason that in that decade, with the help of television, domestic violence and martial violence merged for the first time in the cultural imagination. The Cuban Missile Crisis, Vietnam, student riots, racial battles, political assassinations, as well as our usual glut of homicides, rapes, and assaults turned out to be the design of the national fabric. Second, Vonneguts satire is the best from the era and the sharpest commentary on the era. By way of layered points of view, we are forced outside Slaughterhouse-Five to get the frightful picture of the civilians killed at Dresden, a massacre that Ira C. Eaker and Sir Robert Saundby so staunchly defend (166). â€Å"In Vonneguts text we hear about the corpse factory to which Dresden is reduced and know that it reeks of mustard gas and roses, but we are not eyewitnesses or participants†. (Peter J. Reed, pp 88-101)The factual source of great innovation in Slaughterhouse Five is how Vonnegut transforms the war model into an excremental vision that efficiently captures the instinctual and definitive violence of the human animal. Vonneguts precise term is excrement festival. While he develops the notion all through the narrative, the specific metaphorical identifier takes place in one of the defining episodes of the narrative, when the English prisoners see the diarrheic Americans fouling their tidy latrine:â€Å"Billy looked inside the latrine. The wailing was coming from in there. The place was crammed with Americans who had taken their pants down. The welcome feast had made them as sick as volcanoes. The buckets were full or had been kicked over. . . . Billy reeled away from his vision of Hell. He passed three Englishmen who were watching the excrement festival from a distance. They were catatonic with disgust†. (113-114)Vonnegut makes use of excrement festival as rhetorical shorthand for a basic horror that lies beyond the capabilities of conventional language. The deductive plan for which excrementfestival is substituted might be stated consequently: War is the most gigantic expression of human violence. Modern warfare has turned out to be so terrible that rhetoric fails to describe it. What, therefore, is the merely further fundamental and universal human action that might replace war and serve as a literary allegory for violence? Vonneguts answer, as seen in the excrement festival description, is bodily functions. They are, ironically the great democratic constant. Festival and the joy the term means show that Vonnegut is not taking himself or the process very seriously. Like Walt Whitman, he celebrates the bodily functions; however he does so with an absurd humor that the nineteenth-century romantic would hardly appreciate, or recognize. (Patrick Hruby, pp 88-101)For Vonnegut excre ment means all the waste matter discharged from the body, including semen. Perhaps orificial vision would be a more appropriate designation for Vonneguts satire, since the term covers all the bodily apertures through which Vonnegut sees waste oozing or exploding. However, excrement festival is Vonneguts own term, used with fall awareness of its Swiftian and Freudian connotations. It is thus the more appropriate phrase to use in discussing Vonneguts motif.Vonneguts recognizing these fundamental associations among war, excrement, and the ideas by which America identifies itself is at once simple and ingenious. Using various techniques, Vonnegut artfully correlates the associations. The simplest narrative device he uses to correlate the three elements is the conventional rhetorical connectors that unite excrement, war, and American values. For example, Roland Weary, the rabid defender of democracy, threatens to beat the living shit out of Pilgrim. Valencia Merble and the callous girl a t the Chicago City News Bureau both eat Three Musketeers bars, thereby connecting themselves to Wearys idiotic identification with Dumass fabulous martial quartet. Such connectors effectively anticipate the more subtle digestion motif identified as the excrement festival.With the digestion motif, Vonnegut unifies all other significant elements of the text regarding war and waste production. â€Å"Lest we forget, digestion is the process of enzymes relentlessly attacking food inside the body. This essential life process in turn produces feces, urine, sweat, phlegm, and other waste materials that make up Vonneguts excrement festival. Therefore, the human body is both a very efficient waste producer and a macrocosmic battle ground of unrelenting violence†. (Peter J. Reed, 1997)Like the collective human body called society, the individual human body is in a constant duty dance with death. The body will ultimately dance its last and become waste that in turn becomes food for other microbes that carry on the same eternal battle. So it goes. Others have used the war-biology metaphor before, as Hemingway does in A Farewell to Arms, where he develops the biological trap concept. Only Vonnegut, however, develops this attack-and destroys cycle of the digestive processes into the linchpin association between war and excrement. Once developed, it works on levels ranging from the absolutely ridiculous and juvenile to the totally tragic and extra-linguistic. (Wayne D. McGinnis, pp 200-233)In Slaughterhouse-Five, the rhetoric of violence is the seemingly endless obscenities used to describe the excrement festival. Vonneguts references to filth are so abundant that wardens of the national virtue have often tried to ban Slaughterhouse-Five. Vonnegut himself refers in Palm Sunday to his battles with book-burners in North Dakota; and the Christian Science Monitor reports that a circuit court judge in Oakland County, Michigan ordered that Slaughterhouse-Five be removed from the schools. It is, the judge declared, a degradation of the person of Christ and full of repetitious obscenity and immorality' (681). To enumerate all the references to bodily functions that make up this repetitious obscenity would require that we separate the implied or metaphorical allusions from the overt. The simple fact is that excremental allusions ranging from basic Anglo-Saxon profanities to sophomoric double entendres to complex metaphors dominate the text of Slaughterhouse Five. From the mass, there are four substantive examples to illustrate the development of Vonneguts themes and symbolism: the description of the Tralfamadorian, the prison boxcar scene, the backward move, and the photograph of the girl and pony. (Is this the thesis? YES)Billy Pilgrims description of his alien kidnapers is the indispensable summary passage in the narrative design. It pictorializes the creatures who form the core of Vonneguts satire and who determine Pilgrims peculiar philosophy. (Kathry n Hume, pp 155-178)The initial point to make about the Tralfamadorians is that because they have no concept of death they also have no concept of pain or suffering. Thus they personify pure violence. With a shrug, and dismissing the act with their usual So it goes, they blow the universe to bits without qualms or regrets. Also, these are second generation or second stage Tralfamadorians. In The Sirens of Titan the Tralfamadorians are not peculiarlyshaped and emotionless machines. They are very much like humans. Feeling superior, they invent a machine to do all their low purpose tasks. When the machine reports to them that they have no purpose at all, they therefore start killing each other because they hate things that have no purpose. This irrational, violent demise foreshadows the fate that awaits Earthlings.The two features most striking about the Tralfamadorian are: (1) its likeness to the common household gadget used to unclog toilets, and (2) its exaggerated optic capacity. Th ese are the two characteristics that Vonnegut uses to establish the connection between everyday, ordinary domestic life and imminent violence. Despite this spastic world view, Pilgrim is the typical American. He is a harmless drudge from a dysfunctional family who does his military duty, goes to school, marries the ugly daughter of a wealthy man, fills a respectable job and dreams of escape from the Capitalist rut. When in psychological crisis, therefore, it is fitting that Pilgrim turns not to the crucified Christ whose picture hangs above his bed but to the American values that have caused his crisis. He envisions his savior in the image of an ordinary household device used for loosening excrement and accumulated filth from sewage pipes.Symbolically, this is the same function that the Tralfamadorians perform for Pilgrim: they cleanse the pipes of his perception, unclog his vision by disabusing him of historical, sociological fixations. The parallax view of this function is that Pi lgrim himself is also excrement. He cannot willfully inflict pain upon another human being. Consequently, no matter how benevolent his intentions or how financially successful he becomes; he remains a scrap of human waste sticking in the cultural pipes. Pilgrim cannot alter the social predicament, but thanks to a brain trauma and the Tralfamadorians, he transfers his dilemma to a second dimension. He comes unstuck in time (26), thereby unclogging his own perceptions so that he realizes the negligibility of death, and the true nature of time (169). To realize the true nature of time simply means to quit trying to understand time. That is, by complying in his own status as waste, he frees himself from spatio-temporal reality. He lets go of all intellectual pretense and philosophical biases and drifts into a psychic state where he is untethered to any moral or political codes. He is freed from cultural gravity.In the context of this historical reality, poetic vision is nonsensical. Von negut makes no claim to it and has no faith in it. His narrator self observes ironically that Among the things Billy could not change were the past, the present, and the future (58). Though Pilgrim is truly a seer, unlike the idealistic poets, he fails to convince the populace that he is anything other than a madman.This sight metaphor carries over to the second summary passage: Vonneguts description of the American prisoners in the German boxcars:â€Å"To the guards who walked up and down outside, each car became a single organism which ate and drank and excreted through its ventilators. It talked or sometimes yelled through its ventilators, too. In went water and loaves of blackbread and sausage and cheese, and out came shit and piss and language†. (66-678)The boxcar scene shows how our pipes get so clogged. Everything entering the human body or mindfood, language, historyemerges as waste. The shit and piss and language are the ultimate product of all human endeavors. In th e microcosmic confines of the prison car, the men are reduced to their basic biological form: they are consumers and excreters, a collective singular waste-producing organism. They see the world only through occasional cracks in the boxcar door or through the ventilators, a condition paralleling the human tunnel vision that the Tralfamadorians later ridicule. Moreover, the boxcar further shows how human vision is impaired by human waste. The prisoners view the universe through the same apertures that have just been fouled by their own excrement. (Sanford Pinsker, pp 42-66).The direct connection between the boxcar and the beautiful, doomed city is that the sausage eaten by the American prisoners probably comes from the Dresden slaughterhouse. The black bread too later shows up in the kitchen of Schlachthoffà ¼nf, cooked for the Americans by an impatient German war widow (142). In this way the Dresden slaughterhouse produces the excrement that comes out through the boxcar apertures. Dresden epitomizes urban civilization. There the genius of man produced a viable monument to architecture, music, and art, as described by Mary Endell in 1908 (21). That same genius produces the prison trains and the bombs that destroy Dresden. That incineration reduces Dresdens inhabitants to tons of human bone meal (7), a metaphor that returns us to the waste producing example from which we began. The narrative cycle encompassing Dresden and the prison boxcar symbolizes the conflict between the human instinct to violence and the conscious awareness that such violence must be controlled lest the species disappear. It is a lesson, obviously, that humans have not learned.The boxcar scene also symbolizes Slaughterhouse-Five per se. The book itself is part of Vonneguts excrement festival. Vonnegut has consumed hunks and fragments of history, the most indigestible being his experiences in Dresden. He says that he thought it would be easy for me to write about the destruction of Dresden (8), but discovers that he suffers from a creative constipation that remains unrelieved for twenty-three years. In trying to purge Dresden from his memory he recalls a limerick that concludes: And now you wont pee you old fool (8). By tragicomically associating his own inability to write with the inability to urinate, and by expressing his frustration in a bawdy limerick, Vonnegut shows that his novel is the ultimate example of the excremental motif that sustains it. Slaughterhouse Five is, in short, the waste product of Vonneguts illustration of the imagination. Language, whether written or oral, is merely part of the excrement that passes through the mental ventilators. (Thomas Reed Whissen, pp 321-329)The third summary passage exemplifies the war technology implied in the boxcar episode. The scene in which Pilgrim imagines viewing a war movie backward, perhaps more overtly than any other in the novel, shows how closely violence is linked with every trait of the human animal. Vonn egut was not the first to exploit the similarity of bomber. Vonnegut, however, greatly extends the suitable Freudian metaphor. To the bombers defecation he adds the fighter planes spewing bullets in steel ejaculation. Like Freud, whom he satirizes, Vonnegut associates defecation and ejaculation with destructiveness: war, in one way or another, is the collective human response to sexuality and poor toilet training. (William E. K. Meyer Jr, pp 78)In Pilgrims idealistic dream world, however, evil and brutality are removed from the excremental-sexual processes. Pilgrim imagines that the indefinite reversal of the biological functions will terminate in the re-perfection of Adam and Eve, the original apple-eaters, sinners, and waste producers. Appropriately, Pilgrim sees Eves modern counterparts as the ones who eliminate the dangerous contents from the cylinders that suggests both the phallic and the fecal. Pilgrim characteristically misses the point that Eve is the typical mother of evil and that the modern women who now disarm the bombs also produced the soldiers and bombardiers who use the weapons to kill the sons and daughters of other mothers. In Pilgrims defense, however, we have to remember that when he envisions the comforting reversal depicted in the backward movie, he has not yet been re-educated by the Tralfamadorians. The spacemen soon come to flush such romantic sentimentalism (shit, Vonnegut would say) from his mind. They eliminate the myths, old wives tales, and historical-psychological sewage from his thinking. Conventional wisdom judges him insane, but the psychic flushing is nonetheless what frees Pilgrim from his mother, his wife Valencia, his intrusive daughter Barbara, and other daughters of Eve. Once freed, he replaces them with his ideal Eve: Montana Wildhack, a porn queen whore. (Jerome Klinkowitz, pp 77-102)The fourth summary passage is not so much a scene as a recurring emblem. Vonnegut, like Swift with his maps and charts, has a penchant f or graphics. Therefore this fourth instance is another graphic, though one that does not appear literally in the novel but only in the readers interesting imagination. It is the dirty picture of a woman attempting sexual intercourse with a Shetland pony (40). This is the first pornographic photograph in history, having been made in 1841 by Andrà © Le Fà ¨ve, an assistant to Louis Daguerre. Like a bawdy cue card, the photo pops up throughout history and Vonneguts narrative. Le Fà ¨ve defends it as representing mythological couplings. Despite this artistic effort, he is condemned as a pornographer and dies in prison. Roland Weary, in World War II, carries a copy as part of his survival kit. The Germans who capture him steal it. Pilgrim stumbles across another copy in 1968 while investigating a New York porn shop that is appropriately adorned with fly shit on the windows (177).Not only is the photograph a graphic example of absurd and a mocking reminder of what Eves sin has led her daughters to, but it is another link in Vonneguts thematic satire of artistic creation. John Keats urn, for instance, is an unravished bride of quietness and a Sylvan historian that also depicts a scene of seduction from Greek myth. Like the doomed original photographer of the woman-and-pony tableau, Keats ode claims to make a statement about truth and beauty. Vonneguts reoccurring photograph of a willing whore about to be ravished by a horse, however, is a reminder that throughout history love has been the accelerating converter in a waste producing machine. One of the cruelest aspects of the joke implied by the photograph is about poets such as Keats who attempt to understand and transcribe the foolishness of humankind. Love, art, and the general human dilemma are not expressed in pretty sonnets, but in profane poetry such as that sung by the barbershop quartet for Pilgrims father. (Sanford Pinsker, pp 42-66)The ultimate irony underlying the excremental vision is that humans have developed some truly beautiful, inspiring myths and ideas (the Garden of Eden, Heaven, Nirvana, Love, Art). The powerful instinct to violence, however, with all its resultant horrors, has distorted such visions beyond recognition. Little in Vonnegut argues for optimism, but deep in the black mass of his absurdist talent flickers a minute candle of possibility. Slaughterhouse Five Themes and Symbolism Essay Example Slaughterhouse Five: Themes and Symbolism Paper Slaughterhouse-Fives durability as a satiric masterwork is explained by two factors. First, the 1960s appear increasingly as a definitive era as we move further away from them. This is true for the reason that in that decade, with the help of television, domestic violence and martial violence merged for the first time in the cultural imagination. The Cuban Missile Crisis, Vietnam, student riots, racial battles, political assassinations, as well as our usual glut of homicides, rapes, and assaults turned out to be the design of the national fabric. Second, Vonneguts satire is the best from the era and the sharpest commentary on the era. By way of layered points of view, we are forced outside Slaughterhouse-Five to get the frightful picture of the civilians killed at Dresden, a massacre that Ira C. Eaker and Sir Robert Saundby so staunchly defend (166). â€Å"In Vonneguts text we hear about the corpse factory to which Dresden is reduced and know that it reeks of mustard gas and roses, but we are not eyewitnesses or participants†. (Peter J. Reed, pp 88-101)The factual source of great innovation in Slaughterhouse Five is how Vonnegut transforms the war model into an excremental vision that efficiently captures the instinctual and definitive violence of the human animal. Vonneguts precise term is excrement festival. While he develops the notion all through the narrative, the specific metaphorical identifier takes place in one of the defining episodes of the narrative, when the English prisoners see the diarrheic Americans fouling their tidy latrine:â€Å"Billy looked inside the latrine. The wailing was coming from in there. The place was crammed with Americans who had taken their pants down. The welcome feast had made them as sick as volcanoes. The buckets were full or had been kicked over. . . . Billy reeled away from his vision of Hell. He passed three Englishmen who were watching the excrement festival from a distance. They were catatonic with disgust†. (113-114)Vonnegut makes use of excrement festival as rhetorical shorthand for a basic horror that lies beyond the capabilities of conventional language. The deductive plan for which excrementfestival is substituted might be stated consequently: War is the most gigantic expression of human violence. Modern warfare has turned out to be so terrible that rhetoric fails to describe it. What, therefore, is the merely further fundamental and universal human action that might replace war and serve as a literary allegory for violence? Vonneguts answer, as seen in the excrement festival description, is bodily functions. They are, ironically the great democratic constant. Festival and the joy the term means show that Vonnegut is not taking himself or the process very seriously. Like Walt Whitman, he celebrates the bodily functions; however he does so with an absurd humor that the nineteenth-century romantic would hardly appreciate, or recognize. (Patrick Hruby, pp 88-101)For Vonnegut excre ment means all the waste matter discharged from the body, including semen. Perhaps orificial vision would be a more appropriate designation for Vonneguts satire, since the term covers all the bodily apertures through which Vonnegut sees waste oozing or exploding. However, excrement festival is Vonneguts own term, used with fall awareness of its Swiftian and Freudian connotations. It is thus the more appropriate phrase to use in discussing Vonneguts motif.Vonneguts recognizing these fundamental associations among war, excrement, and the ideas by which America identifies itself is at once simple and ingenious. Using various techniques, Vonnegut artfully correlates the associations. The simplest narrative device he uses to correlate the three elements is the conventional rhetorical connectors that unite excrement, war, and American values. For example, Roland Weary, the rabid defender of democracy, threatens to beat the living shit out of Pilgrim. Valencia Merble and the callous girl a t the Chicago City News Bureau both eat Three Musketeers bars, thereby connecting themselves to Wearys idiotic identification with Dumass fabulous martial quartet. Such connectors effectively anticipate the more subtle digestion motif identified as the excrement festival.With the digestion motif, Vonnegut unifies all other significant elements of the text regarding war and waste production. â€Å"Lest we forget, digestion is the process of enzymes relentlessly attacking food inside the body. This essential life process in turn produces feces, urine, sweat, phlegm, and other waste materials that make up Vonneguts excrement festival. Therefore, the human body is both a very efficient waste producer and a macrocosmic battle ground of unrelenting violence†. (Peter J. Reed, 1997)Like the collective human body called society, the individual human body is in a constant duty dance with death. The body will ultimately dance its last and become waste that in turn becomes food for other microbes that carry on the same eternal battle. So it goes. Others have used the war-biology metaphor before, as Hemingway does in A Farewell to Arms, where he develops the biological trap concept. Only Vonnegut, however, develops this attack-and destroys cycle of the digestive processes into the linchpin association between war and excrement. Once developed, it works on levels ranging from the absolutely ridiculous and juvenile to the totally tragic and extra-linguistic. (Wayne D. McGinnis, pp 200-233)In Slaughterhouse-Five, the rhetoric of violence is the seemingly endless obscenities used to describe the excrement festival. Vonneguts references to filth are so abundant that wardens of the national virtue have often tried to ban Slaughterhouse-Five. Vonnegut himself refers in Palm Sunday to his battles with book-burners in North Dakota; and the Christian Science Monitor reports that a circuit court judge in Oakland County, Michigan ordered that Slaughterhouse-Five be removed from the schools. It is, the judge declared, a degradation of the person of Christ and full of repetitious obscenity and immorality' (681). To enumerate all the references to bodily functions that make up this repetitious obscenity would require that we separate the implied or metaphorical allusions from the overt. The simple fact is that excremental allusions ranging from basic Anglo-Saxon profanities to sophomoric double entendres to complex metaphors dominate the text of Slaughterhouse Five. From the mass, there are four substantive examples to illustrate the development of Vonneguts themes and symbolism: the description of the Tralfamadorian, the prison boxcar scene, the backward move, and the photograph of the girl and pony. (Is this the thesis? YES)Billy Pilgrims description of his alien kidnapers is the indispensable summary passage in the narrative design. It pictorializes the creatures who form the core of Vonneguts satire and who determine Pilgrims peculiar philosophy. (Kathry n Hume, pp 155-178)The initial point to make about the Tralfamadorians is that because they have no concept of death they also have no concept of pain or suffering. Thus they personify pure violence. With a shrug, and dismissing the act with their usual So it goes, they blow the universe to bits without qualms or regrets. Also, these are second generation or second stage Tralfamadorians. In The Sirens of Titan the Tralfamadorians are not peculiarlyshaped and emotionless machines. They are very much like humans. Feeling superior, they invent a machine to do all their low purpose tasks. When the machine reports to them that they have no purpose at all, they therefore start killing each other because they hate things that have no purpose. This irrational, violent demise foreshadows the fate that awaits Earthlings.The two features most striking about the Tralfamadorian are: (1) its likeness to the common household gadget used to unclog toilets, and (2) its exaggerated optic capacity. Th ese are the two characteristics that Vonnegut uses to establish the connection between everyday, ordinary domestic life and imminent violence. Despite this spastic world view, Pilgrim is the typical American. He is a harmless drudge from a dysfunctional family who does his military duty, goes to school, marries the ugly daughter of a wealthy man, fills a respectable job and dreams of escape from the Capitalist rut. When in psychological crisis, therefore, it is fitting that Pilgrim turns not to the crucified Christ whose picture hangs above his bed but to the American values that have caused his crisis. He envisions his savior in the image of an ordinary household device used for loosening excrement and accumulated filth from sewage pipes.Symbolically, this is the same function that the Tralfamadorians perform for Pilgrim: they cleanse the pipes of his perception, unclog his vision by disabusing him of historical, sociological fixations. The parallax view of this function is that Pi lgrim himself is also excrement. He cannot willfully inflict pain upon another human being. Consequently, no matter how benevolent his intentions or how financially successful he becomes; he remains a scrap of human waste sticking in the cultural pipes. Pilgrim cannot alter the social predicament, but thanks to a brain trauma and the Tralfamadorians, he transfers his dilemma to a second dimension. He comes unstuck in time (26), thereby unclogging his own perceptions so that he realizes the negligibility of death, and the true nature of time (169). To realize the true nature of time simply means to quit trying to understand time. That is, by complying in his own status as waste, he frees himself from spatio-temporal reality. He lets go of all intellectual pretense and philosophical biases and drifts into a psychic state where he is untethered to any moral or political codes. He is freed from cultural gravity.In the context of this historical reality, poetic vision is nonsensical. Von negut makes no claim to it and has no faith in it. His narrator self observes ironically that Among the things Billy could not change were the past, the present, and the future (58). Though Pilgrim is truly a seer, unlike the idealistic poets, he fails to convince the populace that he is anything other than a madman.This sight metaphor carries over to the second summary passage: Vonneguts description of the American prisoners in the German boxcars:â€Å"To the guards who walked up and down outside, each car became a single organism which ate and drank and excreted through its ventilators. It talked or sometimes yelled through its ventilators, too. In went water and loaves of blackbread and sausage and cheese, and out came shit and piss and language†. (66-678)The boxcar scene shows how our pipes get so clogged. Everything entering the human body or mindfood, language, historyemerges as waste. The shit and piss and language are the ultimate product of all human endeavors. In th e microcosmic confines of the prison car, the men are reduced to their basic biological form: they are consumers and excreters, a collective singular waste-producing organism. They see the world only through occasional cracks in the boxcar door or through the ventilators, a condition paralleling the human tunnel vision that the Tralfamadorians later ridicule. Moreover, the boxcar further shows how human vision is impaired by human waste. The prisoners view the universe through the same apertures that have just been fouled by their own excrement. (Sanford Pinsker, pp 42-66).The direct connection between the boxcar and the beautiful, doomed city is that the sausage eaten by the American prisoners probably comes from the Dresden slaughterhouse. The black bread too later shows up in the kitchen of Schlachthoffà ¼nf, cooked for the Americans by an impatient German war widow (142). In this way the Dresden slaughterhouse produces the excrement that comes out through the boxcar apertures. Dresden epitomizes urban civilization. There the genius of man produced a viable monument to architecture, music, and art, as described by Mary Endell in 1908 (21). That same genius produces the prison trains and the bombs that destroy Dresden. That incineration reduces Dresdens inhabitants to tons of human bone meal (7), a metaphor that returns us to the waste producing example from which we began. The narrative cycle encompassing Dresden and the prison boxcar symbolizes the conflict between the human instinct to violence and the conscious awareness that such violence must be controlled lest the species disappear. It is a lesson, obviously, that humans have not learned.The boxcar scene also symbolizes Slaughterhouse-Five per se. The book itself is part of Vonneguts excrement festival. Vonnegut has consumed hunks and fragments of history, the most indigestible being his experiences in Dresden. He says that he thought it would be easy for me to write about the destruction of Dresden (8), but discovers that he suffers from a creative constipation that remains unrelieved for twenty-three years. In trying to purge Dresden from his memory he recalls a limerick that concludes: And now you wont pee you old fool (8). By tragicomically associating his own inability to write with the inability to urinate, and by expressing his frustration in a bawdy limerick, Vonnegut shows that his novel is the ultimate example of the excremental motif that sustains it. Slaughterhouse Five is, in short, the waste product of Vonneguts illustration of the imagination. Language, whether written or oral, is merely part of the excrement that passes through the mental ventilators. (Thomas Reed Whissen, pp 321-329)The third summary passage exemplifies the war technology implied in the boxcar episode. The scene in which Pilgrim imagines viewing a war movie backward, perhaps more overtly than any other in the novel, shows how closely violence is linked with every trait of the human animal. Vonn egut was not the first to exploit the similarity of bomber. Vonnegut, however, greatly extends the suitable Freudian metaphor. To the bombers defecation he adds the fighter planes spewing bullets in steel ejaculation. Like Freud, whom he satirizes, Vonnegut associates defecation and ejaculation with destructiveness: war, in one way or another, is the collective human response to sexuality and poor toilet training. (William E. K. Meyer Jr, pp 78)In Pilgrims idealistic dream world, however, evil and brutality are removed from the excremental-sexual processes. Pilgrim imagines that the indefinite reversal of the biological functions will terminate in the re-perfection of Adam and Eve, the original apple-eaters, sinners, and waste producers. Appropriately, Pilgrim sees Eves modern counterparts as the ones who eliminate the dangerous contents from the cylinders that suggests both the phallic and the fecal. Pilgrim characteristically misses the point that Eve is the typical mother of evil and that the modern women who now disarm the bombs also produced the soldiers and bombardiers who use the weapons to kill the sons and daughters of other mothers. In Pilgrims defense, however, we have to remember that when he envisions the comforting reversal depicted in the backward movie, he has not yet been re-educated by the Tralfamadorians. The spacemen soon come to flush such romantic sentimentalism (shit, Vonnegut would say) from his mind. They eliminate the myths, old wives tales, and historical-psychological sewage from his thinking. Conventional wisdom judges him insane, but the psychic flushing is nonetheless what frees Pilgrim from his mother, his wife Valencia, his intrusive daughter Barbara, and other daughters of Eve. Once freed, he replaces them with his ideal Eve: Montana Wildhack, a porn queen whore. (Jerome Klinkowitz, pp 77-102)The fourth summary passage is not so much a scene as a recurring emblem. Vonnegut, like Swift with his maps and charts, has a penchant f or graphics. Therefore this fourth instance is another graphic, though one that does not appear literally in the novel but only in the readers interesting imagination. It is the dirty picture of a woman attempting sexual intercourse with a Shetland pony (40). This is the first pornographic photograph in history, having been made in 1841 by Andrà © Le Fà ¨ve, an assistant to Louis Daguerre. Like a bawdy cue card, the photo pops up throughout history and Vonneguts narrative. Le Fà ¨ve defends it as representing mythological couplings. Despite this artistic effort, he is condemned as a pornographer and dies in prison. Roland Weary, in World War II, carries a copy as part of his survival kit. The Germans who capture him steal it. Pilgrim stumbles across another copy in 1968 while investigating a New York porn shop that is appropriately adorned with fly shit on the windows (177).Not only is the photograph a graphic example of absurd and a mocking reminder of what Eves sin has led her daughters to, but it is another link in Vonneguts thematic satire of artistic creation. John Keats urn, for instance, is an unravished bride of quietness and a Sylvan historian that also depicts a scene of seduction from Greek myth. Like the doomed original photographer of the woman-and-pony tableau, Keats ode claims to make a statement about truth and beauty. Vonneguts reoccurring photograph of a willing whore about to be ravished by a horse, however, is a reminder that throughout history love has been the accelerating converter in a waste producing machine. One of the cruelest aspects of the joke implied by the photograph is about poets such as Keats who attempt to understand and transcribe the foolishness of humankind. Love, art, and the general human dilemma are not expressed in pretty sonnets, but in profane poetry such as that sung by the barbershop quartet for Pilgrims father. (Sanford Pinsker, pp 42-66)The ultimate irony underlying the excremental vision is that humans have developed some truly beautiful, inspiring myths and ideas (the Garden of Eden, Heaven, Nirvana, Love, Art). The powerful instinct to violence, however, with all its resultant horrors, has distorted such visions beyond recognition. Little in Vonnegut argues for optimism, but deep in the black mass of his absurdist talent flickers a minute candle of possibility.

Great Term Paper

Great Term Paper Great Term Paper Great Term Paper: Learn How to Write It It is impossible to give a certain definition in order to describe the notion of a great term paper. You see how many professors there are; so many opinions at the subject of great term paper exist. Some of the professors consider non-standard and creative term paper to be great term paper. Some of the professors think that only such term paper can be defined as great term paper, which is written according to all the requirements an existing rules for term papers writing, some of the professors believe that great term paper is nothing else than a term paper which is free of mistakes and all the other slips of the tongue. Consult Your Professor or Contact Us! That is why if you really want to write great term paper the only way for you to study how to write it is to consult with your professor and to ask him about his or her own criteria of great term paper. After you have received all the recommendations from that very person, who is going to check your term paper it is a high time for you to continue your research at the subject of great term paper defining. Textbooks are very helpful for you if you want to learn how to write great term paper. You can find a lot of useful information while reading issues devoted to the rules and demands from academic writing. Use The Internet To Get Ideas for Great Term Paper! Internet is another one way for you to learn writing great term paper. You see you can find thousand of articles with tips and advices devoted to the matter of great term paper writing. Almost each of these articles contains some of the useful secrets of great term paper writing, of course, it is impossible to read all of them, however, several articles will be enough for you in order to attain the proper knowledge. It is also very useful to read ready-made term papers written by the professionals, which you can find within the servicing of custom writing companies. Enter any site of any custom writing comp any and you will be offered with hundreds of ready-made term papers, which can be defined as great term paper. Read them and learn how to arrange your own term paper in order it to become great term paper. Our Advices Are As Helpful As Paid Services! We hope that our advices at the subject of where to find information about how to write great term paper will help you a lot and teach you how to write great term paper. We wish you good luck with your research and your great term paper writing.

Admiral Jesse B. Oldendorf in World War II

Admiral Jesse B. Oldendorf in World War II Jesse Oldendorf - Early Life Career: Born February 16, 1887, Jesse B. Oldendorf spent his early childhood in Riverside, CA.   After receiving his primary education, he sought to pursue a naval career and succeeded in obtaining an appointment to the US Naval Academy in 1905.   A middling student while at Annapolis, Oley as he was nicknamed, graduated four years later ranked 141st in a class of 174.   As the policy of the time required, Oldendorf commenced two years of sea time prior to receiving his ensigns commission in 1911.   Early assignments included postings to the armored cruiser USS California (ACR-6) and the destroyer USS Preble.   In the years prior to the United States entrance into World War I, he also served aboard USS Denver, USS Whipple, and later returned to California which had been renamed USS San Diego.    Jesse Oldendorf - World War I: Completing an assignment aboard the hydrological survey ship USS Hannibal near the Panama Canal, Oldendorf returned north and later prepared for duty in the North Atlantic following the American declaration of war.   Initially conducting recruiting activities in Philadelphia, he then was assigned to lead a naval armed guard detachment aboard the transport USAT Saratoga.   That summer, after Saratoga was damaged in a collision off New York, Oldendorf transferred to the transport USS Abraham Lincoln where he served as gunnery officer.   He remained aboard until May 31, 1918 when the ship was hit by three torpedoes fired by U-90.   Sinking off the Irish coast, those aboard were rescued and taken to France.   Recovering from the ordeal, Oldendorf was posted to USS Seattle that August as an engineering officer.   He continued in this role until March 1919. Jesse Oldendorf - Interwar Years: Briefly serving as executive officer of USS Patricia that summer, Oldendorf then came ashore and moved through recruiting and engineering assignments in Pittsburgh and Baltimore respectively.   Returning to sea in 1920, he did a short stint aboard USS Niagara before transferring to the light cruiser USS Birmingham.   While aboard, he served as flag secretary to a series of commanding officers of the Special Service Squadron.   In 1922, Oldendorf moved to California to serve as aide to Rear Admiral Josiah McKean, the commandant at Mare Island Navy Yard.   Completing this duty in 1925, he assumed command of the destroyer USS Decatur.   Aboard for two years, Oldendorf then spent 1927-1928 as an aide to the commandant of the Philadelphia Navy Yard. Having attained the rank of commander, Oldendorf received an appointment to the Naval War College in Newport, RI in 1928.   Completing the course a year later, he immediately began studies at the US Army War College.   Graduating in 1930, Oldendorf joined USS New York (BB-34) to serve as the battleships navigator.   Aboard for two years, he then returned to Annapolis for an assignment teaching navigation.   In 1935, Oldendorf moved to the West Coast to serve as executive officer of the battleship USS West Virginia (BB-48).   Continuing a pattern of two-year postings, he moved to the Bureau of Navigation in 1937 to oversee recruiting duties before assuming command of the heavy cruiser USS Houston in 1939. Jesse Oldendorf - World War II: Posted to the Naval War College as a navigation instructor in September 1941, Oldendorf was in this assignment when the United States entered World War II after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.   Leaving Newport in February 1942, he received a promotion to rear admiral the following month and an assignment to lead the Aruba-Curaà §ao sector of the Caribbean Sea Frontier.   Helping to protect Allied commerce, Oldendorf moved to Trinidad in August where he took an active role in anti-submarine warfare.   Continuing to fight the Battle of the Atlantic, he shifted north in May 1943 to lead Task Force 24.   Based at Naval Station Argentia in Newfoundland, Oldendorf oversaw all convoy escorts in the Western Atlantic.   Remaining in this post until December, he then received orders for the Pacific. Hoisting his flag aboard the heavy cruiser USS Louisville, Oldendorf assumed command of Cruiser Division 4.   Tasked with providing naval gunfire support for Admiral Chester Nimitzs island-hopping campaign across the Central Pacific, his ships went into action in late January as Allied forces landed at Kwajalein.   After aiding in the capture of Eniwetok in February, Oldendorfs cruisers struck targets in the Palaus before conducting bombardment missions to aid troops ashore during the Marianas Campaign that summer.   Transferring his flag to the battleship USS Pennsylvania (BB-38), he directed the pre-invasion bombardment of Peleliu that September.   In the course of operations, Oldendorf courted controversy when he ended the attack a day early and omitted shelling an obvious Japanese strong point.    Jesse Oldendorf - Surigao Strait: The following month, Oldendorf led the Bombardment and Fire Support Group, part of Vice Admiral Thomas C. Kinkaids Central Philippine Attack Force, against Leyte in the Philippines. Reaching its fire support station on October 18 and his battleships began covering General Douglas MacArthurs troops as they went ashore two days later. With the Battle of Leyte Gulf underway, Oldendorfs battleships moved south on October 24 and blocked the mouth of the Surigao Strait.   Arraying his ships in a line across the strait, he was attacked that night by Vice Admiral Shoji Nishimuras Southern Force.   Having crossed the enemys T, Oldendorfs battleships, many of which were Pearl Harbor veterans, inflicted a decisive defeat on the Japanese and sunk the battleships Yamashiro and Fuso.   In recognition of the victory and the preventing the enemy from reaching the Leyte beachhead, Oldendorf received the Navy Cross. Jesse Oldendorf - Final Campaigns: Promoted to vice admiral on December 1, Oldendorf assumed command of Battleship Squadron 1.   In this new role he commanded the fire support forces during the landings at Lingayen Gulf, Luzon in January 1945.   Two months later, Oldendorf was put out of action with a broken collar bone after his barge hit a buoy at Ulithi.   Temporarily replaced by  Rear Admiral Morton Deyo, he returned to his post in early May.   Operating off Okinawa, Oldendorf was again injured on August 12 when Pennsylvania was hit by a Japanese torpedo.   Remaining in command, he transferred his flag to USS Tennessee (BB-43).   With the Japanese surrender on September 2, Oldendorf traveled to Japan where he directed the occupation of Wakayama.   Returning to the United States in November, he assumed command of the 11th Naval District in San Diego. Oldendorf remained in San Diego until 1947 when he moved to the post of Commander, Western Sea Frontier.   Based in San Francisco, he held this position until his retirement in September 1948.   Promoted to admiral as he left the service, Oldendorf later died on April 27, 1974.   His remains were interred at Arlington National Cemetery.     Ã‚        Ã‚   Selected Sources World War II Database: Jesse OldendorfU-boat: Jesse OldendorfFind A Grave: Jesse Oldendorf

Statistical analysis of data Statistics Project Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 500 words

Statistical analysis of data - Statistics Project Example In this dataset we can find out the average emission of the pollutants over the years for different activities and can report which activity has the most notorious impact on the environment. As we have analysed Constructions and construction works for civil engineering has the highest average emission of greenhouse gases, heavy metals and acid rain precursors compared to others while specialised construction works has the highest average emission of other pollutants. For the year 2009 and for other years also we can find out which construction activity has created the maximum and minimum pollution and thus which is sustainable and which is not. Since 2005 to 2009 we can see that a specialised construction service has created the maximum pollution and thus is less sustainable while the Buildings and building construction works has created the minimum pollution over the years and thus is more sustainable than others. From 2000 to 2004 activity of constructions and construction works fo r civil engineering has created the maximum pollution. Time series forecasting of overall emission for three activities can be given for the next 5 or 10 years using minitab or other statistical tools like R or SAS. In excel we can do moving average and trend analysis like linear trend, quadratic trend etc for the data. In the given data, it has been noticed that the data for year 2000 and 2001 is exactly same across all categories. Data on other manufacturing sectors and industries like automobile industry, chemical industry, fertilizer industry etc and their emissions of pollutants like greenhouse gases can also be collected for time period say 2000 to 2013 so as to compare it with the construction activity emissions of the same. Time series analysis can be done in tools like minitab to forecast each sector emission of greenhouse gases for next five years. Time series forecast like moving average, blended moving average, trend analysis can be done in excel

Tomkins PLC Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1250 words

Tomkins PLC - Essay Example The declaration of dividend is often almost solely dependent on the internal condition of a company. Accordingly, a company is only able to declare a cash dividend if its operation in the fiscal year had been profitable and if it has enough cash. Capital gains on the other hand, are determined by various factors internal and external to the company. Operating performance, investor financial ratios, revenues and profits are often determines the price level of stocks. Other external factors such as interest rates, competitors, and other company issues are irrefutably integrated in the investors' perception of the intrinsic value of a stock. Thus, the creation of wealth for shareholders is often reflected at the dividend pay-outs and the appreciation of its stock price. This report will look at the shareholder value creation of Tomkins PLC for the past ten years. The next section will give a brief background on the company. The paper will then present how the company maximized shareholder value through dividends and capital gains. Relevant investor ratios will also be examined. Lastly, the report will conclude on how the company can further develop its wealth creation record. Tomkins PLC is player in the international engineering industry listed in both London (LSE) and New York Stock Exchanges (NYSE). Generally, the company is subdivided into two business segments namely, industrial and automotive, and building products. The company expressed that "Our primary business objective is to achieve a long term sustainable growth in the economic value of Tomkins through strategic development of our businesses." Tomkins PLC was recognized by the Euromonitor as one of the top companies in the world in terms of Ownership Transparency and Rights, Financial Transparency & Process, Board Structure, Stakeholder Relations and Alignment of Managerial Interest. The company garnered a high score as it ranked number two in developing countries and the best of four British companies in the top ten (Tomkins top for Corporate Governance 2003). This just reflects the company's commitment in enhancing transparency for investors on the real value of their stocks. Tomkins Chairman David Newlands expressed, "We are very pleased with this accolade from Euromoney, which acknowledges the enormous amount of work that we have put into Corporate Governance. At Tomkins we have made corporate governance and delivering shareholder value our top priorities and this survey is recognition of how far we have come. We continue to concentrate on maintaining the highest standards of transparency and delivering value to our s hareholders." Dividends As stated above, dividend is an indicator of shareholder value creation. Through dividends, each stockholder is compensated for holding the company's stock. It is

Judicial term Essay Example for Free

Judicial term Essay Forum non convenience is a judicial term used for an inconvenient place of judicial trials for one of the parties involved in the case. In judicial trials if parties involved are not satisfied for the place where their case will be executed they can take a motion to dismiss the case on the basis of forum non conveniens. Any parties involved in the case can submit a proof that the current forum is not sufficient or suitable for them. Instead another place (forum) is more suitable for their case and the dismissal of the case in the current forum is more in favor of both the parties than carrying out in the same forum, and the alternative forum is suitable for both the parties. All the factors of the plaintiff’s and defendant’s interest involved in the decision of dismissal are considered. The balancing between the parties must be equal and favoring them. The facts involved in the forum non convenience grounds are weighed before the decision is taken. Also the convenience of court and the justice itself is considered. Whether it would be convenient to dismiss the case and carried out in another forum would be an appropriate step itself? If it satisfies the needs of both the parties and justice would be more balanced in an alternative forum then court has the right to dismiss the case on the forum non conveniens. This also involves that the new forum will not pose up new issues for any of the parties involved. The plaintiff and defendants must be satisfied with the new forum and will not make it an issue when the trial will be conducted.

Correlation Between Mental Illness and Violence and Crime Essay

Literature Analysis and Research Proposal of the Correlation between Mental Illness and Violence and Crime Over the past few decades, many researches have strived to test and explain the correlation between violence and crime and mental illness. Moore and Hiday (2006) assert that up 22% of inmates has a mental illness, sometimes containing more mental illness patients than many psychiatric units. Due to these statistics it is evident how important it is to understand the causes of the correlations between crime and violence and mental disorders. This proposal wishes to explain and understand the possible correlation and the reasons for such correlation between mental health illnesses and violence and crime. Further research to test these theories of crime and mental disorders will also be presented. Crime can be described combination between both behavior and mental factors. This will prove incredibly crucial in the definition of crime in relation to mental illness. Many of those that commit crimes are not convicted due to their illness so it is important to note, for the purpose of this analysis, that all illegal activity is considered crime, regardless of conviction (Monahan and Steadman 1983). It is evident that those with mental illnesses have an increased likelihood of committing crimes. It is important to note, however, that not all people with mental illnesses commit crimes or violent behavior so a cause is not evident. Substance abuse, a mental disorder, is also seen as a large risk in violent behavior (Silver 2006). Hiday (1995) asks the questions of the direction of this correlation. Does mental illness lead to violence or is it vice versa? THEORETICAL FRAMEWORKS Silver (2006) asserts the importance of using t... ...s.† Law and Human Behavior 30(6):659-674. Powell, Thomas A., John C. Holt and Karen M. Fondacaro. 1997. â€Å"The Prevalence of Mental Illness among Inmates in a Rural State.† Law and Human Behavior 21(4):427-438. Robbins, Pamela Clark, John Monahan and Eric Silver. 2003. â€Å"Mental Disorder, Violence, and Gender.† Law and Human Behavior 27(6):561-571. Silver, Eric. 2006. â€Å"Understanding the Relationship between Mental Disorder and Violence: The Need for a Criminological Perspective.† Law and Human Behavior 30(6):685-706. Silver, Eric and Brent Teasdale. 2005. â€Å"Mental Disorder and Violence: An Examination of Stressful Life Events and Impaired Social Support.† Social Problems 52(1):62-78. Walsh, Zach and David S. Kosson. 2007. â€Å"Psychopathy and Violent Crime: A Prospective Study of the Influence of Socioeconomic Status and Ethnicity.† Law and Human Behavior 31(2):209-229.

Theme

Eddie Truong Prof. Gray English 28 11 March 2013 Finding The Theme Many stories around the world have a wide variety of theme and issues that are not easily identified. Throughout stories, authors like to describe the characterization of character rather than the plot. The reason authors don’t describe the plot of the story is because through the characterization of the characters, readers are able to distinguish the different issues the author has planted in the story. Alice Walker’s â€Å"Everyday Use† is a short story that explores the way some people tend to view their family heritage and culture.Even though the title of the story does not give a sense of genre, it is actually a drama story because it has conflicts between different people. This story begins when Mama and Maggie are waiting at their front yard for the arrival of their daughter/sister. When Dee, the sister arrives, she informs her family that she has thrown away her name for another name. When they all get into the house, Dee asks her mom for valuables that were left behind by their past relatives. At first Mama agrees to give it to her, but refuses later because Mama felt that Dee would not carry the important heritage of the family tradition.Dee, who is outraged at this point, runs out of the house and left saying that they do not understand the real importance of their culture essay writer dubai. In the story, â€Å"Everyday Use† uses direct and indirect characterization through Mama, Maggie, and Dee to elucidate the theme of personal belief some people have for their family heritage. One way the theme becomes clearer to the readers is through the indirect characterization of Mama. Indirect characterization is shown throughout the story to show the traits of the characters by what they say and what they do. The readers are able to have a sense of who the character is by indirect characterization.For example, â€Å"A yard like this is more comfortable then most people know. It is not just a yard. It is like an extended living room† (108). Through this quote the readers are able to realize that Mama is proud of what she has and the yard was not just a property to her, it is her culture. Another example given is when Mama â€Å"snatched the quilts out of miss Wangero’s hand and dumped them into Maggie’s lap† (115), and then at the end mama and Maggie sits outside enjoying their sister leave. This shows the readers that Mama believe that Maggie is more qualified to carry on the heritage and their belief of heritage is better than their sister.Another character that is characterized directly and indirectly to help clarify the theme is Maggie. Unlike indirect characterization, direct characterization is when the traits are actually given to us by the narrator rather than their actions and words. The way the author directly and indirectly characterize Maggie helps the reader see the belief she has in her family cultur e. For instance, When Maggie lets her sister have the quilt because she â€Å"can ‘member Grandma Dee without the quilts† (115) since she was taught how to make the quilt by their grandmother.Maggie does this because she had acquired the skill of quilting from her grandmother. This quote shows that Maggie is open minded and wanted to learn her family’s culture. The readers can have a sense that Maggie feels that the culture of making quilt is better than needing an item to actually remind you of your culture. Another example is when Maggie says that the dasher was whittled by â€Å"Aunt Dee’s first husband†(113) and that his name was â€Å"Henry, but they called him Stash†(113). Maggie says this quietly and outspoken because her sister Dee didn’t remember who in their family made that significant piece.The reader are shown that Maggie actually know more about their family valuables and their heritage than Dee. Maggie values the importa nce of the people who created this piece, while Dee just valued the material. The last character that helps elucidate the theme through indirect characterization is Dee. The indirect characterization of Dee helps show the reader the views of heritage she has compared to her mother and sister. A given example is when Dee comes back home and tell her family that she has thrown away her name, which has been in their family for years and chosen the name: â€Å"Wangero Leewanika Kemanjo† (112).This shows the readers that Dee has thrown her family’s name that has been passed down their culture because she wanted to be even closer to the roots of their African Americans culture. Another example that is given is when Dee yells at her mother that Maggie shouldn’t wear the quilts because she doesn’t â€Å"appreciate the quilts† that their ancestors has made. Dee believes that â€Å"they’re priceless†(114) and that they should be hung up. Even t hough the readers will find that Dee is being disrespectful to her mother, the readers are able to recognize that the quilt was made with materials from African American culture.Indirect and direct characterization is a key way to help readers wrestle their way through the different issues expressed by the author. The descriptions of the character’s traits and their words to their actions are important in every story. Many stories would be difficult to figure out the issues or theme without these key points. It could leave readers confused and mislead into many different directions. Through indirect and direct characterization, the readers are able to find the ideas given by the author.

Indianization Term Essay

Question 1 What does the term `Indianization` or `sinicization` refer to when used to describe government administrations headed by invaders or foreign powers? Please give at least 2 examples.   Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚   These two terms refer to a general cultural assimilation of the foreign government.   Over time, occupying powers in China and India became familiar with the local culture and began to blend in, appearing more and more as locals than foreigners.   In the case of these two countries, this process led to locals being promoted to government positions that were initially reserved for the foreign or invading power.   The nation gradually looks less and less like a conquered state, as more of its own people are placed in positions of power and its populace regains greater self-determination.   Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚   In India, this process was introduced by the British in the 1920’s and was actually termed Indianisation.   The British appointed Indians to fill senior military ranks and government positions, and set up specific officers to handle this process in a deliberate manner.   Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚   The example is perhaps clearer in China, where Kublai Khan fell in love with Chinese culture in his youth.   In 1271, after being Khan for 20 years, Kublai created the Yuan dynasty which covered the area of China under Mongole rule.   The Yuan dynasty was initially a Mongol administration and was part of the Mongol empire, but with time, successive rulers saw themselves as Chinese emperors rather than Mongol lords.   The Yuan dynasty lost influence over Mongol lands outside of China, and became a true Chinese empire until conquered by the Ming dynasty in 1388 (Saunders, 2001). Question 2 What developments in Southern Song China resemble the Industrial Revolution of the West? Why were the emperors during the Song period so successful when their predecessors were not?   Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚   The Song period was one of great growth and development in China’s industry and infrastructure.   One of the largest factors of this was the introduction of paper money, leading to a normalized market economy.   This was also a time of development of cities, as opposed to the agrarian economy that had characterized earlier periods.   Cities became centers of trade and industry, leading to the development of a merchant class similar to the later Bourgeoise in Europe.   Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚   Chinese industry grew along with the merchant class during the Song period.   While finding exact numbers from the time period is difficult, Robert Hartwell notes that Chinese iron production lept sixfold from the early 800’s to 1078, where he notes that Chinese iron production reached 125,000 tons (Hartwell, 1962), far beyond that of the Western powers.   This abundance of iron allowed China to manufacture tools, machinery, and trade goods.   The result was that China’s economy grew dramatically, leading to China surpassing Western Europe in per capita income during the Song dynasty (Maddison, 2006).   Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚   Several factors contributed to the occurrence of this Chinese â€Å"Industrial Revolution† under the Song dynasty.   One was the establishment of a civil bureaucracy as opposed to rule by warlords.   This helped to encourage the development of trade and industry, as well as education, as commoners could achieve these posts via taking the imperial examination.   Another factor was technological innovation, marked by developments such as gunpowder and movable type.   Such social and technological innovation led to expanded opportunities for the peasant class and allowed many to migrate from farms to cities to pursue the newer career paths available to them. Question 3 What combination of Mongol attributes and Song weaknesses made the Mongol conquest successful? Please analyze it detail.   Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚   The single largest factor leading to the successful Mongol conquest of the Song dynasty was the attitudes of each culture towards war.   The Mongols were born and bred for it.   Their culture glorified battle and conquest.   The Mongol empire had been growing for centuries, winning victory after victory, which surely inspired fear and doubt in any army forced to stand against them.   The Song were not pacifists by any means, but they were not warriors in the same vein as the Mongols.   When they broke the Mongol alliance to recapture former lost cities, they were not prepared for the war they had unleashed.   Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚   One major Song weakness was that the initial battlefields of the war were not favorable positions to hold.   Kaifeng, Luoynag, and Chang’an were already ruined by war.   The Song strategy of defense also played into the Mongols’ hands, allowing the horsewarriors to choose the time and place of battles and ensure local superiority.   This led to the Song being driven back, finally retreating to Guangdong and losing their leader, Emperor Gong, in the process.   Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚   The Song dynasty was now left effectively leaderless.   The two heirs were mere children.   Without a decisive and strong leader, further efforts at resistance were to prove futile.   The final defeat of the Song at the Battle of Yamen in 1279 was almost a foregone conclusion, as the demoralized and cornered Song were beaten soundly by Kublai Khan’s naval forces, leading to the death of the final Song emperor and the assimilation of Song lands. Question 4 Why did Chinese culture become so popular and accepted in Japan? What are the major differences and similarities between the Chinese and Japanese culture.   Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚   Many aspects of Chinese culture passed to Japan in the earlier centuries AD, when China was a more advanced society and the Japanese eager to learn and advance themselves.   This hunger for learning and improvement of their culture was the primary factor that allowed Chinese cultural influence to infiltrate Japanese society.   When the two cultures first made contact Japan had no formal written language and adopted that of the Chinese, which would later be evolved to a similar but distinct written form.   Japan also modelled its imperial bureaucracy after that of China, and the courts of the two nations ended up being very similar in the ranks and titles used.   Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚   The largest form of cultural influence, though, was religion.   Both Confucianism and Buddhism made strong inroads in Japan, which at the time had a much less sophisticated form of religion.   Both of the Chinese religions imparted practical knowledge about how to run a society and live one’s daily life, and this proved attractive to the Japanese.   This influence led to the development of Zen Buddhism and the famous Japanese samurai culture.   Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚   With these similarities, differences between the two cultures remained.   One of the strongest was the samurai culture, the code of Bushido.   The Japanese samurai evolved to be a warrior caste, something which did not have a counterpart in China on nearly the same scale.   As a result of this, Japan evolved to a more feudal society, with peasant-serfs supporting the samurai nobility in a system of lesser warlords (daimyo) owing fealty to the imperial court (in reality, the Shogun).   Chinese culture, especially in the Ming period, treated the peasantry more as independent landowners rather than as the lowest tier in the feudal machine. Question 5 What impact did Buddhism have on the development of Japanese culture and lifestyles? Give examples in both art and literature where Buddhism was a major factor.   Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚   Japanese Zen Buddhism infiltrated and permeated every aspect of Japanese culture, influencing the way they thought, governed, created, even loved and made war.   The Japanese have long been famous for appearing reserved, for keeping emotion private.   This is a very Buddhist trait coming from the teachings of the Middle Path, the path of moderation.   Excess is frowned upon.   Discipline and focus are encouraged.   Those two words have formed the foundation of Japanese lifestyles for centuries.   The formalized ritual of the tea ceremony also demonstrates Buddhist influences over such a simple thing as the drinking of tea.   Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚   The samurai give excellent examples of how Buddhism affected Japanese culture.   The samurai were the ruling class, and as the elite, the commoners would seek to emulate them.   The samurai were known for their unshakeable dedication to their duty, that of serving their daimyo, or leige.   They paid particular emphasis to Samadhi, one of three branches of Buddhism’s Noble Eightfold Path.   The teachings of Samadhi emphasized right effort (continual self-improvement, via constant training at their disciplines), right mindfulness (awareness of one’s surroundings, seeing the world clearly), and right concentration (self-awareness, accomplished via meditation and self-reflection).   Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚   Buddhism’s influences also spread into the art and literature of the period.   The clearest example in art is in Japanese gardens and architecture.   Japanese homes were sparse and minimalist, rejecting luxury in favor of the simple necessities, in which the Japanese took joy.   Their gardens were designed and grown as places for tranquility, as places of meditation.   Buddhist influence over literature is seen in such writings as â€Å"An Account of My Hut† by Chomei, an argument for a life of peaceful meditation and tranquility. Question 6 How did a Japanese emperor differ from the Chinese emperor? Which would you consider more superior and why?   Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚   The primary difference was in the power they wielded.   Chinese emperors tended to wield far more power over their territory and ruling in a monarchial fashion.   While many Chinese emperors were overthrown in the end by court intrigue, regicide, or revolution; during their time on the throne a Chinese emperor was his nation’s absolute ruler.   Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚   In constrast the Japanese emperors were mostly figureheads.   Though viewed by the populace as a living god, in truth their power was very limited.   For most of the last 1,000 years the real power in Japan was held by the Shogun, the primary warlord who had gained dominance over the others.   Within that period were also many times of strife where Japan had no strong leader but was instead fragmented into many separate warring states, led by Daimyo.   The emperor still reigned during these periods but had no power to stop the warfare.   Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚   Chinese emperors fit more closely with the western idea of monarchy, whereas Japanese emperors were described by European explorers as being more akin to the Pope: a spiritual leader with little political clout, while the Shoguns were mentioned as being similar to the European monarchs (Howe, 1999).   Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚   In absolute terms, Chinese emperors seem to be superior to Japanese by virtue of the greater power they wield.   Argument could be made that monarchial institutions have the inherent weakness of relying too much on one man who may or may not be qualified to rule (just look at the damage some of the Roman emperors such as Nero and Caligula caused), that is beyond the scope of this work.   For the purposes of this discussion, I will argue that Chinese emperors were superior as the Japanese emperors were for the most part figureheads. Question 7 What characteristics of the nomadic peoples made them `barbaric` to the civilizations of India and China?   What characteristics of the nomadic peoples would you consider to be strengths?   Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚   China and India viewed their nomadic neighbors as barbarians due to what was seen as an overall lack of civilization.   Most of the nomadic cultures lacked such â€Å"civilizing† characteristics as a large and detailed government system, with most using a system that was very feudal in nature, chieftains owing fealty to greater warlords.   They also lacked what were seen as other civilizing characteristics, such as advanced agriculture with public works projects like canals to support it.   Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚   Another major factor was that of religion.   China and India had very sophisticated religious belief systems, as opposed to the less developed beliefs of the various nomadic groups around them.   As has been seen throughout history in all parts of the world, religion is commonly used as a barometer to judge the level of civilization of a culture, such as in Europe where Christians viewed non-Christians are barbarians. Based on this barometer, the Chinese and Indian cultures viewed others with simpler belief structures as not being as advanced spiritually and philosophically.   Finally, many of the neighboring nomadic cultures had not developed a fully-functional form of written language, often borrowing from Chinese writing.   Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚   And yet despite these â€Å"disadvantages†, nomadic cultures such as the Mongols would end up conquering the great civilized empires.   Their active tribal lifestyle bred them as warriors, not farmers.   Their lifestyle also led them to be superior horsemen, which proved yet another advantage in warfare.   Their people were hardy, used to living without luxury, and well-suited to conducting long campaigns. These cultures that were dismissed as â€Å"barbaric† would end up proving mightier than expected. Question 8 When did the Mughal dynasty rule India. What achievements occurred during this dynasty? What led to the decline of Mughal rule in India?   Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚   The Mughal dynasty began in 1504 when Babur of the Timurids conquered Kabul.   His force was a Muslim army of Mongols and other more local peoples (such as Afghans and Persians).   This and the following decades of consolidation of power with battles fought against smaller regional powers established the Mughal dynasty, and brought Islam to the front in the Indian subcontinent.   Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚   Of note, though, is that the Mughals exercised a religious tolerance rarely seen in the time period.   Though Islam was the primary religion throughout most of the dynasty, Hindus and other religions were rarely persecuted.   The reign of Akar from 1556-1605 brought about the most dramatic change of all, with a policy of direct attempts at reconciliation with Hindus, promoting them to high government office and abolishing the poll tax on non-Muslims.   Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚   Another major and lasting achievement of the Mughals was their architecture.   They were renowned for massive construction projects, including large fortress-palaces such as the monstrous Red Fort in Dehli.   There is also the Taj Mahal, perhaps the most famous lasting architectural sample, built in Agra and completed in 1648.   Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚   The decline of the Mughal empire was a long process.   The reign of the last of the strong Mughal emperors, Aurangzeb from 1658 to 1707, saw the empire hold together but the decay had begun and his policies, while temporarily effective, added to the long-term problems.   Wars demonstrated Mughal military might, but drained the treasury; and new anti-Hindu policies led to resentment and rebellion at home and class struggle (Habib, 2001).   This led the way to foreign invasion from the neighboring Marathas, Persians, and Afghans, eating away at the empire until the commonly accepted date of the empire’s final ruler Bahadur Shah Zafar   who was exiled in 1857. Question 9 Ironically, while Europeans later fought wars over control of the sea routes in the Asian region, China abandoned its dominant position. Why did the Ming court decide to end the maritime voyages of Zheng He just as China reached domination of the Asian seas? Was this a poor decision or one that strengthened China? Please explain.   Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚   There were multiple factors that seem to be present in the Ming’s decision to suspend Zheng He’s voyages.   Zheng He did most of his exploring during the time of the Yongle Emperor, and when he died in 1424 his successors seemed to view Zheng He’s growing influence at court as a threat.   Curbing his travels that made him famous would be a good way to reduce his influence.   Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚   Cost was also a major factor, as China became embroiled in conflict with its Mongolian neighbors to the north.   Having been once conquered by the Mongolians, the Ming court took this threat very seriously, and devoted every effort to protecting their borders and resisting the Mongols.   Zheng He’s expedition fleet was massive, and the cost of the journeys was thus immense, as he went as an emissary and explorer rather than a trader.   His journeys did not result in wealth pouring into Chinese coffers as did that of the European explorers from the colonies they founded and trade routes they started.   The Ming needed their resources to fight the Mongols, and thus cut back in other areas, such as these naval expeditions in order to meet the Mongol threat.   Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚   It is difficult to say whether this was a wise decision or not in retrospect.   The money saved on naval excursions surely assisted the Ming in their mostly successful efforts to resist the Mongols, culminating in the expansion of the Great Wall of China.   Perhaps if Zheng He’s costly voyages had continued, the resources would not have been available to hold off the Mongols.   And yet there was a cost, which is that when the European nations began arriving in force, the Chinese were not able to resist them.   Overall I would say the decision was wise, in facing the immediate threat rather than a potential and vague future threat that might never materialize. Question 10 Who founded the Ming Dynasty and what were main characteristics of rule during this period? What were the major achievements of the Ming Dynasty? What is meant by saying that the `sprouts of capitalism` can be found in the Ming Dynasty?   Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚   The Ming dynasty was founded in 1368 by Zhu Yuanzhang, a man of peasant birth and monastery education who was one of the leaders of a series of revolts that destroyed the Yuan dynasty.   Upon ascending to the position of emperor, he took the name Hongwu.   Some major traits of Ming rule were favor given to the poor, a strong military, a strong internal focus, and the replacement of the prime minister post with that of the Grand secretary.   Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚   The Ming period was a good one for the peasantry.   Hongwu seemed to favor the poor, and gave land to peasants to farm.   Peasants who moved to and farmed unused land could claim it as their own and be free from taxation on it.   This led to an agricultural class much like that to be found later in America, with free citizens owning and cultivating land rather than a feudal serf system.   Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚   The early Ming favored agriculture over trade, and would eventually forbid oceangoing trade ships from leaving China.   Despite this, trade flourished due to other factors, such as the introduction of silver to the economy which established currency and limited barter.   Another major achievement of the Ming dynasty was its refinement of the Chinese legal code.   The laws were designed to be fair and understandable, so that they could not be taken advantage of by the upper class.   Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚   Capitalism in China flourished during the Ming period.   The empire was stable politically, the lower class more prosperous than ever before.   Owning their own land meant that they received the benefits from their work rather than owing most of the fruits of their labor to a leige.   This was the beginning of a free market, and combined with increased trade, Chinese citizens were rewarded for their hard work and this encouraged them to do well. Bibliography Habib, I. (2001). The Agrarian System of Mughal India, 1526-1707. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hartwell, R. (1962). A Revolution in the Chinese Iron and Coal Industries During the Northern Sung, 960-1126 A.D. The Journal of Asian Studies , 21 (2), pp. 153-162. Howe, C. (1999). The Origins of Japanese Trade Supremacy. Development and Technology in Asia from 1540 to the Pacific War. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Maddison, A. (2006). The World Economy: Volume 1: A Millennial Perspective and Volume 2: Historical Statistics. Paris: Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development. Saunders, J. J. (2001). History of the Mongol Conquests. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.