...Defining the Humanities University of Phoenix Tara Brigham HUM/100 Introduction to the Humanities Professor Marilyn Olander June 27, 2011 Humanities can be defined as human characteristics or different branches of learning. Humanities have affected every culture. One cultural event that I have experienced and I have seen how humanities have changed it over the years is music. Music that is made and played has evolved as humans have evolved over the years. The first music was made during the Middle Ages. The first two types or styles of music were monophonic and polyphonic. The Renaissance period came next and changed the way music was created and perceived. The Baroque period came after the Renaissance period. During the Baroque period composers experimented with different styles and instruments. Classical music came from the Baroque period. Classical music allowed the composer to tell a story or express his or her feelings through the music. The Romantic period was next. Composers experimented with different instruments including wind instruments. The music was more dramatic than any other time period. After the Romantic period came the 20th century. Music in the 20th century allowed the composer and artist to use technology to enhance the compositions. And now in the we have different styles and types of music because of the humanistic of music. We have country, rap, rhythm & blues, soul, gospel just to name a few...
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...Defining and Experiencing the Humanities Tim Williams HUM/100 July 22, 2014 Dierdre Finnegan Defining and Experiencing the Humanities I define Humanities as simply how we as humans live, think, love, communicate, and why we do it the way we do it. We can trace our cultural history for insight about whom and why we are, and why we intertwine the humanities within our modern lives. In this paper, I will provide a first-hand account of my experience attending the Zulu Ball in New Orleans on February 2, 2014. It was a lackluster experience that left me and my guests less than impressed. Nonetheless, the evening was clearly a lesson in our humanities. Please read on as I attempt to convey why I think this is so. First thing…Traffic! The very thought of traffic makes me cringe. I was aware of our destination and its proximity to downtown New Orleans. I was also aware that there would be at least a moderate delay when attempting to access the major arteries that connect the east side of this great city to the west side. In anticipation, my guests and I departed my residence in what we thought was ample time to compensate for possible traffic issues. Unfortunately, this was not the case. We arrived at our destination after almost three hours of bumper to bumper, snail’s pace commuting. Needless to say, the evening was already off to a bad start. Upon arrival, things continued to decline. Mind you, this was a black tie catered affair. However, when we arrived...
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...Defining Humanities: The humanities are the stories, the ideas, and the words that help us make sense of our lives and our world. The humanities introduce us to people we have never met, places we have never visited, and ideas that may have never crossed our minds. By showing how others have lived and thought about life, the humanities help us decide what is important in our own lives and what we can do to make them better. By connecting us with other people, they point the way to answers about what is right or wrong, or what is true to our heritage and our history. The humanities help us address the challenges we face together in our families, our communities, and as a nation. Academically, we refer to the humanities as the study of arts – the visual arts such as architecture, painting and sculpture; music; dance; the theater or drama; and literature. They are the branches of learning concerned with the human thought, feelings and relations. The study of arts is the study of mankind. Humanities, being the study of arts, have always been concern with the importance of human being, his feelings, and how he expresses those feelings. However, it should be stressed that the humanities emphasize analysis and exchange of ideas rather than the creative expression of the arts or the quantitative explanation of the sciences. Significance of the Humanities Art is very important in our lives. It constitutes one of the oldest form and most important means of expression developed...
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...I chose the video “Paul McCartney’s Live Kiss.” Paul and The Beatles have always been some of my favorite musicians. I grew up listening to The Beatles and when they broke up, I continued listening to Paul McCartney and Wings after that. In my opinion, Paul McCartney and Wings is probably the best of all of the Pop Rock bands of all time. In this particular video he is in the studio, the Capitol Records studio in Hollywood, California, recording his new album. The Capitol Records Studio building was the first round building ever built and it is an icon of the music industry. It is also one of the best built studios in the world. They start out giving some history of the Capitol Records Studio, telling about some of the musicians that have recorded there over the years. The Beatles actually recorded their first few albums there, before they started Apple Records, so he probably felt right at home in that studio. He is recording a different style of music than he normally records for this album. He normally does Rock and Roll but for this album he is doing Blues and Jazz music. He wanted to record some of his favorite music from when he was growing up. Since he is doing just the vocals for the album, he chose some of the best and brightest jazz musicians in the industry to play the instruments for him. He listened to Fats Waller a lot when he was a kid so he did a couple of his tunes and one of Frank Sinatra’s as well. He also does a tune from “Guys and Dolls” that is only performed...
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...Defining the Humanities According to textbook, The Creative Impulse, humanities is defined as “aspects of culture that look into the human spirit.” Humanities traditionally include the study of the arts, music, theater, dance, language, literature, and history. Many humanists like to dig deeper within the topic of history to look at technology and “early scientific thought.” The main focus of the study of humanities is to better understand what it means to think, feel, be motivated, take action, and to simply be human. We live in a very technologically advanced world today and sometimes we take the things we own for granted. We have computers and microscopic technology that run our lives on a daily basis from our alarm clocks in the morning, to communication throughout our day on our smart phones. If you take a second to look back in the past and see all of the accomplishments past civilizations made without the advanced gadgets that we have today, it should make you wonder and really open your eyes. The study of humanities is designed for people to use their minds and to draw connections to things they never knew before. As a child, my parents forced me to attend Thai school during the summer, Monday through Friday from 8 a.m. all the way until 5 p.m. They signed me up for two courses, Thai language classes until 2 p.m. and Thai dancing that last three hours for a total of two months. At first, I was very mad because I never got a summer break like the rest of my friends...
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...Joan Didion: What is Home? In Joan Didion’s essay “On Going Home” she writes about leading a double life. She feels like one person when she’s with her husband and daughter in Los Angeles, and a completely different person when back “home” surrounded by her childhood family in the Central Valley of California. During this particular trip, she begins to reflect on her life in Los Angeles. Didion contemplates the fact that she often feels uneasy around her husband, just like he feels uneasy being around her family. At a crossroad, she must decide not only who she is, and the life she wants, but also the kind of life she wants for her daughter. Her life in Los Angeles has cleansed her from her youth—one that was dusty and full of useless trinkets. She ponders the time her husband wrote the word “D-U-S-T” on those useless trinkets and she remembers her feelings of sadness and indignation. She says, “We live in dusty houses…filled with mementos quite without value to him” (139-40). The dust-covered trinkets signify what is important to her, or what needs to be addressed in her marriage. Yet, these objects just lay there waiting for someone to see them—for someone to dust them off and care for them—not unlike how Didion wishes her husband would see her and nurture her in their marriage. Didion wonders which of her two homes is normal or if they are both flawed. When she and her husband are with her family, he becomes apprehensive about her behavior, “…because once there I fall...
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...Dilemma of Philosophy Debates in Research Philosophy and research approach debates are timeworn and even in the present era, present a great deal of difficulty for the doctoral researcher. Students are often overwhelmed by research philosophy. The classifications of old are duplicated, expanded, and evolving interchangeably (Mkansi & Acheampong, 2012). In many cases the students of today cannot make a correlation with a particular method in order to make the method relative to the subject matter in which they are researching (Mkansi & Acheampong, 2012). The following philosophical classifications: quantitative, qualitative, epistemology, and ontology all have variances but do contain several interconnected qualities. Many in higher education perpetuate these philosophies. Could researchers and students benefit from a standardized and more structured template for conducting research? Should there be a different standard for the social sciences and another for natural sciences. According to a study conducted with PhD students in North West Universities in the UK, not only did students not completely comprehend philosophy and classifications, they did not find them necessary in finding their approach to their research method (Mkansi & Acheampong, 2012). Most found they were not partial to one philosophy or another based on personal beliefs but were influenced more by typical methods for their field of study and the opinions of their superiors (Mkansi & Acheampong...
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...Discourse on the Method of Rightly Conducting one’s Reason and Seeking Truth in the Sciences “A Personal Analysis World Cultures – HUM 112 November 11, 2012 In analysis of the Discourse on the Method, I come to realize Descartes thought pattern was a simple yet complex one in the beginning. He basically took the thoughts of others and put them into a reality that coincided with his own so people would have a better understanding of the things and/or situations of this life. Descartes’s thoughts in my opinion are like a non-believer of God and His word at some point in life and then entering into the fullness and knowledge of the faith and seeking to live a Christian life after receiving knowledge of God and His redeeming power. He at the end starting to realize and offer the reader a gift and an answer to what living life is all about, “God.” I felt it was a bit hard to understand his point of view in the beginning of the passage because he was speaking of the existence of life on one’s own and not by God the creator of life. It was as though he was saying he created himself and there was no God to create creation or life; that the existence of life was natural and a part of an earthly way of life. For an unbeliever it is hard to understand what to believe at first because of the notion that people place on the table that God is good and he has, is, and will always do great things for His people, yet no one has seen him face to face. Descartes offers us reasons...
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...How are scholars able to find out how early people with no written records lived? Scholars use several techniques in order to establish and conclude a portrayal of early people’s lives, before any written records. They simply rely on findings that were left behind. Tools, bones, graveyards, hunting equipment, as well as weapons, art on pottery or cave walls, are some of the prehistoric finds, to name a few. These findings, when examined can tell scholars a lot about peoples lifestyle pre-written records. For example, by examining bones, a scholar would determine if people were malnourished, or whether they knew how to take care of broken bones or used any healing methods. What was prehistoric society like around the Amazon? Populations from North American and Europe did not find the prehistoric Amazon population interesting. The cultural differences were too vast, as opposed to societies around the Amazon. The Amazonian people believed in coexisting with their gods and relied heavily on their dangerous environment. I suppose the Amazon was a threat to societies around it, since they had not developed an acquired set of skills to survive. What ensured European domination in the New World? The Europeans were able to dominate the New World, by having armies that would take over natives ground, and have their own people settle. They also were in advantage knowing how to trade, how to build weapons, which were made of steel, as opposed to native culture who used leather, wood...
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...Raymond Williams on Culture From "What is Culture", at http://www.wsu.edu:8001/vcwsu/commons/topics/culture/culture-definitions/raymond-williams.html Culture is ordinary: that is the first fact. Every human society has its own shape, its own purposes, its own meanings. Every human society expresses these, in institutions, and in arts and learning. The making of a society is the finding of common meanings and directions, and its growth is an active debate and amendment under the pressures of experience, contact, and discovery, writing themselves into the land. The growing society is there, yet it is also made and remade in every individual mind. The making of a mind is, first, the slow learning of shapes, purposes, and meanings, so that work, observation and communication are possible. Then, second, but equal in importance, is the testing of these in experience, the making of new observations, comparisons, and meanings. A culture has two aspects: the known meanings and directions, which its members are trained to; the new observations and meanings, which are offered and tested. These are the ordinary processes of human societies and human minds, and we see through them the nature of a culture: that it is always both traditional and creative; that it is both the most ordinary common meanings and the finest individual meanings. We use the word culture in these two senses: to mean a whole way of life--the common meanings; to mean the arts and learning--the special processes...
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...Kaplan Online University HU300: Arts and Humanities: 20th Century and Beyond Professor Lisa Dimitriadis Mr. Karl Gibson April 15, 2011 When I think of music and how it influences my life I come up with many different types to consider, and at various times. Music I associate with my childhood are various songs heard during family picnics, family gatherings, and times or events of this nature. I grew up as a child in the 1960’s and listened to what my parents were listening to. Songs like Finger Popping Time by Hank Ballard and the Midnighter’s, I got a Woman, Ray Charles, The Great Pretender, Sam Cooke and Think by Aretha Franklin, who is said to be the Queen of Soul. These songs were of good times, happy times, they made me feel that everything was well in the world, despite the horrific turmoil in the U.S. caused by the Vietnam War. I still look back at those times as some of the best times in America and my musical experiences. I think the music then reflect my childhood experiences of sensibility, freedom, fun and laughter. My adolescence year’s music seemed to change a bit in America as well as for me and what we listened to in our home, as well as on my own. I was never much of a rebel so I guess music in my adolescence years was more of a way for me to fit in. Songs in the late 70’s were changing over Woodstock was over as well as the whole Love & Peace movement. We were bringing troops home from Korea and the long dreaded Vietnam War was...
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...Corporate Culture, Environment, and Strategy The purpose of this article is to discuss the nature of a corporate culture in terms of the systems that are designed to support it. While it is true that cultures cannot be designed, the point we make is that the various control systems of the organization can work to shape through judicious reinforcement and feedback the desired attitudes and behaviors that are consistent with a particular strategic direction. The "culture" of the organization can therefore be defined as the emergent pattern of beliefs, behaviors, and interaction that uniquely characterize the organization as it operates within an industrial and a societal context. From a system perspective three levels can be distinguished from the start: (1) the societal level, (2) the industry level, and (3) the organizational level. Importance of culture in understanding behavior in different societies From this perspective, then, a "corporate culture" must necessarily be at least minimally consistent with the societal culture it is derived from. Societal exposure and heritage foster a labor force with a given value orientation, beliefs, and expectations about work and the work environment that are the "raw material" of corporate cultures. These points suggest that, in addition to societal culture, the specific industry a firm operates in is an important context for understanding corporate culture. While a complex array of internal dimensions affect...
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...Datoya Brown BIOL 703: Experimental Methods Biology January 29, 2014 “Preparing Graduate Students for Graduate-Level Study and Research” Summary The number of academically under prepared and at-risk college graduates completing graduate-level degrees is increasing. Many of the students are doomed to failure either because they are academically disqualified or because they lack the guidance to acquire new information necessary for involvement of their thesis and/or project. Ultimately the cost of losing students is worrisome to both university/college officials and program coordinators. One of the most common hindrances for graduate students is the completion of the thesis, which almost always involves complex reviews of subject area literature. This problem is often overlooked, since program coordinators, faculty advisors and other officials assume that students automatically have knowledge of procedures in obtaining previous data/research findings relevant to the thesis work. This could not be further from the truth. In lieu of reading this article for review Katherine O’Clair hypothesizes that providing graduate students with adequate resources and support, including the help from the library, is required for protecting and increasing return on investments for university graduate programs. Often, just simply involving a university/college librarian can help reduce graduate student attrition and improve degree completion rates. O’Clair had a simple question of, “does a course...
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...The collection of disciplines referred to as the Humanities are a broad set of academic principles essentially defined as “anything that isn’t an empirical science.” This includes the classics, languages, law, history, performing arts, literature, religion, philosophy, and visual arts. Some disciplines, such as anthropology and linguistics, are considered to be a part of both the humanities and the sciences (Anissimov, 2010). On September 29, 1965, the Senate and House of Representatives enacted the National Foundation on the Arts and Humanities Act of 1965 to promote progress and scholarship in the humanities and the arts in the United States as well as for other purposes (National Endowment for the Humanities, 2010). The purpose of this paper is to define the term humanities, distinguish the humanities from other modes of human inquiry and expression, and give an example of some of the humanities and explain why each example reflects current developments in politics, socioeconomics, and technology. In the Middle Ages, studies not centered on God were referred to as part of the humanities; therefore, early sciences and mathematics were part of the humanities. Today the sciences are completely separate and are divided into two main categories: Social sciences and natural sciences. Humanities differentiates itself from present-day sciences by following a non- scientific approach in that the scientific mode of inquiry, where the goal is to establish validated theories and scientific...
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...According to Fee and Stuart, “ Narratives are stories – purposeful stories retelling the historical events of the past that are intended to give meaning and direction for a given people in the present.”(P.90) The most common mistake made by readers is that they place themselves into the stories and expect to have the same meaning as those contained within the story. Another problem listed and referred to, as Decontextualizing is simply reading out of context. This is when readers don’t take into account the historical context to which the narrative was written. Allegorizing is being focused on the text itself but reading into and beyond the purposed meaning. Redefining a text to mean something else or making it apply to what one wants it to. Selectivity focus on phrases while ignoring others and miss the message entirely. Moralizing is believing that the answer to all is within the text. Fee and Stuarts point out that God is always the hero in all the narratives and that the narratives do not give all the details nor do they make clear if the ending of the story is a good or bad thing. The narratives are written to deal with very specific topic and issues (however they don’t just come out and say it). I have to say that I have over the course of my limited studies have fell victim to many of these problems. As for I’m sure many of us through our daily lives have been witnesses to those who have used the bible to explain themselves or to justify a cause. Which...
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