...of discovery lasted from about 1418 to 1620. During this time, European explorers made many daring voyages that changed world history. A major reason for these voyages was the desire to find sea routes to east Asia, which Europeans called the Indies. When Christopher Columbus sailed west across the Atlantic Ocean, he was looking for such a route. Instead, he landed in the Americas. Columbus thought he had reached the Indies. In time, Europeans would realize that he had found what they called the ”New World.” European nations soon rushed to claim lands in the Americas for themselves. Early explorers often suffered terrible hardships. In 1520, Ferdinand Magellan set out with three ships to cross the Pacific Ocean from South America. He had guessed, correctly, that the Indies lay on the other side of the Pacific. But Magellan had no idea how vast the ocean really was. He thought his crew would be sailing for a few weeks at most. Instead, the crossing took three months. While the ships were still at sea, the crew ran out of food. One sailor wrote about this terrible time. “We ate biscuit… swarming with worms…. We drank yellow water that had been putrid [rotten] for days... and often we ate sawdust from boards.” Why did explorers brave such dangers? In this reading, you will discover some of the reasons for the Age of Exploration. Then you will learn about the voyages of explorers from Portugal, Spain, and other European countries. You will also learn about the impact of their discoveries...
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...Renaissance Comparison Essay Candyce Kettler Hum/205 Jill Hunt August 29, 2010 We top Italian society's rebirth from the medieval period with the changes that occurred during the Italian Renaissance. Civilization was changing and what we consider the modern world was about to begin. The renaissance doings that happened in Europe outside of Italy is called the Northern European Renaissance. Italy's humanist ideas and values moved out of Italy and throughout Europe, which spurred on the Northern European Renaissance. The Renaissance period began in the early 14th Century and lasted until the late 16th Century. “Renaissance” comes from the French word that means “rebirth.” This time period is named and studied because of its unique art, literature, and music. It is also known as society's modern age. Early in the 14th Century, Italian scholars started to study the ancient cultures that preceded them, like those of Greece and the Roman Empire. This scholarly interest would lead to the Italian Renaissance. Italy and Europe was ready for change after the harrowing destruction of the Black Plague in the Middle Ages. Florence, Italy, was the home of the start of the Renaissance. After the collapse of the Roman Empire, culture, politics, and the arts had only been in decline. Petrarch advocated learning about Italy's Latin and Roman history. The Pope and the royalty liked this idea, so other scholars begun to study in the same vein. These scholars valued the accomplishments...
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...much so that this period is called the Age of Discovery. The European sailors and ships left the coastal waters of the lands they knew to embark upon adventures in the unknown “green sea of darkness”. It began with the Portuguese and was soon followed by British, French, and Dutch ships who eventually set out to explore what became known as the “New World”. There were many reasons that motivated these cultures to set out into the unknown but the most compelling reasons included gold, religion and the drive to explore and expand territory. The first motive was wealth. Although Genghis Khan was best known for his bloody legacy, he had done wonders to improve the trade across Eurasia. He provided the security for travelers to cross what is now known as the Silk Road. This trade route extended over 5000 miles on land and sea with interconnected trade routes that connected with Asia Minor and the Mediterranean. The world had developed a taste for the spices and silks that had been brought back by the crusaders, and now men saw this as an opportunity to make their fortune. They traveled the Silk Road to bring back to the items that were in great demand and brought a large profit (Rossabi, n.d.). However, the Mongol empire eventually fell. China became Buddhist and a rising Islamic threat shut down travel on the Silk Road. Trade was restricted to the sea. Finally, in 1452, Constantinople, the last refuge for European trading in the East, was conquered by the Muslims. Europe fell...
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...Native-Europeans Interactions The era of Imperialism was an era of discovery and conquests. It began in the early 16th Century. Imperialism is the extension of one country by forcefully taking over another area of land for economic growth. One country that had become the victim of imperialism was Africa. European countries discovered that they could easily take over the tribes, and they had an enviroment good for agriculture. Natives of the land became enslaved towards the more powerful Europeans. The leader of the countries had a hunger to be the more powerful, superior country in the Europe, and having the most land was one of the key factors. When The Americas were discovered it be the first type of imperialism. They not only almost take over the entire west coast of the world, they nearly wiped the entire population of the natives.(Britt) People like Hernan Cortes, Christopher Columbus, Amerigo Vespucci, and Cosme de Torres each arrived in a foreign country to try to expand their own beliefs to their country’s belief. Cosme de Torres went to Japan to try to convert the natives to Christianity, but while he was there he was heavily influenced by the Japanese. Hernan Cortes was a Spanish Conquistador who sought to take over the lands of Mexico. The author of the excerpt is an Aztec descendant, Miguel Leon-Portilla. He is an anthropologist who studied his ancestors very closely. He was successful with 4 of his novels, all having to do with the Aztec people. He was heavily...
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...Why Should Unhealthy Foods Be Taxed Around The World? An Exploratory Essay Nicholas Jackson Goldey - Beacom College Why Should Unhealthy Foods Be Taxed Around The World? An Exploratory Essay I normally eat French toast sticks with bacon or waffles with bacon for breakfast in the morning because it is the most convenient for me - it comes in a pre-cooked package that I could throw in the microwave and be ready in the minutes – and it tastes good to me. Even though it may taste good to me and will settle for a breakfast meal for my stomach, I know it isn’t good for my body in the long run. However, after reading some of the writings of food activist Gary Sacks, I began to think more about what I should be eating healthy foods because there will begin to be taxes on unhealthy foods that are made. A prime example is in his article, “Traffic-Light' Nutrition Labeling and 'Junk-Food' Tax: a Modeled Comparison of Cost-Effectiveness for Obesity Prevention,” published in Nature Publishing Group, Sacks states junk-food' tax, price elasticity’s were used to estimate a change in energy intake in response to a 10% price increase in seven food categories. Sacks advice about the junk foods, my breakfast foods, starting to get taxed 10% makes me start thinking about what I should be eating. The waffles/French toast sticks with bacon have been pre-cooked and made so that the packaging can be heated up in a microwave oven, but on the same note, the food items look to be similar to...
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...that involves many different aspects of organisations, all of which may be important. This makes it difficult to record and analyse. *And it's a subject that lacks a widely agreed body of accepted knowledge. Different strategists have different opinions on what is important and how strategy should be developed. All these factors make it quite tough. Certainly, some strategists argue that there is a place for strategic analytical frameworks like Professor Michael Porter's Five Forces. But the same strategists also point out the most successful strategies need to be more experimental and creative. For example, they argue that the successful strategy of Dell Personal Computers - selling directly to customers, cutting out the distributor - owed much more to innovation than to traditional strategic analysis. In more general terms and arguably to oversimplify strategy theory, strategic processes need to be both prescriptive and emergent. We'll explore the models of these two approaches to corporate strategy later in this exercise. The case we're going to look at is an important strategic battle between two of the world's largest food companies. On one side, we have the Swiss company Nestle, which was exploring how to enter the market for prepared breakfast cereals in recent years. On the other side, we have...
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...Name: __________________________ World History Unit Two: Global Inequality [pic] An Overview of Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs, and Steel Why do some nations have so much material wealth while so many others have so little? This was the question Jared Diamond posed in his book Guns, Germs, and Steel. After identifying a point in time when all societies were roughly equal (over 13,000 years ago), Diamond identified the key variables that allowed some societies to develop highly complex, material-rich societies, while others developed at much slower rates. Guns, Germs, and Steel uncovers how Europeans came to dominate every other group on the planet by virtue of their access to what Diamond terms the “Agents of Conquest”: Guns, Germs, and Steel. Jared Diamond’s journey of discovery began on the island of Papua, New Guinea. There, in 1974, a local named Yali asked Diamond a deceptively simple question: "Why is it that you white people developed so much cargo (material goods), but we black people had little cargo (material goods) of our own?" Diamond realized that Yali's question penetrated the heart of a great mystery of human history -- the roots of global inequality. Why were Europeans the ones with all the cargo? Why had they taken over so much of the world, instead of the native people of New Guinea? How did Europeans end up with what Diamond terms the Agents of Conquest: Guns, Germs and Steel...
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...from the relatively safe market of innovative, premium-priced computers into the highly competitive markets of consumer electronics. This case explores this profitable but risky strategy. Note that this case explores in 2008 before Nokia had major problems with smartphones – see Case 9.2 and Case 15.1 for this later situation. Early beginnings To understand any company’s strategy, it is helpful to begin by looking back at its roots. Founded in 1976, Apple built its early reputation on innovative personal computers that were par-ticularly easy for customers to use and as a result were priced higher than those of competitors. The inspiration for this strategy came from a visit by the founders of the company – Steven Jobs and Steven Wozniack – to the Palo Alto research laboratories of the Xerox company in 1979. They observed that Xerox had developed an early version of a computer interface screen with the drop-down menus that are widely used today on all personal computers. Most computers in the late 1970s still used complicated technical interfaces for even simple tasks like typing – still called ‘word-processing’ at the time. Jobs and Wozniack took the concept back to Apple and developed their own computer – the Apple Macintosh (Mac) – that used this consumer-friendly interface. The Macintosh was launched in 1984. However, Apple did not sell to, or share the software with, rival companies. Over the next few years, this non-co-operation strategy turned out to be a major weakness...
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...Much of the credit for the European military success in the new world can be handed to the superiority of their weapons, their literary heritage, even the fact they had unique load-bearing mammals, like horses. These factors combined, gave the conquistadors a massive advantage over the sophisticated civilizations of both the Aztec and Incan empires. But weapons alone cannot account for the breathtaking speed with which the indigenous population of the new world were completely wiped...
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...Julia Flynn Siler’s Lost Kingdom: Hawaii’s Last Queen, the Sugar Kings, and America’s First Imperial Adventure, published in 2012, explores past the life of Lili’uokalani and also focuses on the role that sugar production played in the rise of the white oligarchy that overthrew the monarchy. Siler begins her text discussing the role of Western influence with the Hawaiian Monarchy stating how Kamahameha I was able to unite the Hawaiian Islands under his rule with the aid of Western advisors and guns, foreshadowing the further involvement of American and European influence and power in Hawaii. Siler also discusses the individuals that make up the white oligarchy, rather than just as a general group of men. This is important because it was a...
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...and Reformed Monetary system | | | |WINNIE PAUL NDOSA (2011178102) | |12/24/2013 | Introduction The year 1252 marked the minting of the very first gold coin in Western Europe since Roman times. Since this landmark, the international monetary system has evolved and transformed itself into the modern system that we use today. The modern system has its roots beginning in the 19th century. In this thesis I explore three main ideas related to this history. First is the evolution of the international monetary system. Within this I will explore the different eras that make up this time. First is the classic gold standard, then the interwar period, and followed by Bretton Woods. This section concludes with a discussion...
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...Even though women have been creating art since the beginning of the Homo sapiens species it was not until the late 1960’s and 1970’s when female artists began to receive the recognition they deserved for their talent and art. Early women in the world of art have been faced with challenges due to gender biases, often being encountered with difficulties when it came to training, traveling, selling their art, as well as even receiving credit for their own work. However, even with so many obstacles facing early women artists, some managed to be an exception and become successful fine artists of their time. What did this handful of women do differently to become successful and break barriers for their time? Dating back to the prehistoric area up...
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...Professor Walker Anthropology December 13, 2014 Ecotourism and its Effect on the World Ecotourism is becoming a big reason why economies in certain countries rise. There is an abundance of beautiful and natural scenery that westerners are willing to go out to see. Both Robert Fletcher (Author of Romancing the Wild) and Martha Honey (Author of Ecotourism and Sustainable Development) give a definition about what ecotourism is and the impact it has on the places where it occurs. They also talk about which classes and groups are involved in these activities for leisure. Honey and Fletcher have different idea how ecotourism will be of different help towards the host of the country where this form of tourism is going on. So what is exactly ecotourism? Fletcher and Honey both have different definitions of what ecotourism is. Fletcher’s definition of ecotourism is: “just interaction with some type of natural resource, as opposed to seeking out the products of human creation, which has been the main form of tourism until now, in terms of mainstream tourism”. This entails leaving home and going to natures beautiful scenery. People are willing to do this to explore new places and find their inners self. It gives them inspirations for their endeavors. Fletcher compares these finding and activities as if people were exploring new worlds like they once did in the 15th/16th century. The benefit of ecotourism with Fletcher’s definition is the economic value that is brings...
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...Taylor Groenhout Ms. Schaner AP Language 22 May 2012 Two Different Worlds With the “BOORRRUUMMMM” of the big horn on our giant ship, the captain sounded the supposedly great news of our arrival. Although I love traveling, sitting in this musty old coat pocket is quite a bore and our destination on this business trip is less than desirable. “I’m back…” my master droned as he stepped onto the unsophisticated American soil. Whipping me out of his chamber of a coat pocket and handing me to the tall uniformed man, I was admired, scanned, and stamped. The man at the port had never seen such an accomplished one of my kind before. I have ventured between America and the always great Europe an impressive number of times and plan on being stamped at different country boundaries until my pages are worn to the core, and I am an inked mess. “Incredible, Sir this passport is quite weathered. I see you have been many the miles.” “Mr. Henry James is my name and thank you. I take great pride in my travels for they provide one with experience and insight.” With a hard stamp my pages were once again marked with the disgraceful American ink, but either way I was glad to add another traveler’s mark to my collection. As Henry continued to talk about his travels and writing, he waved me around like a trophy to behold. Although glad to be seen and treasured, I wished he would put me away and we could start exploring some more. Getting into the carriage, he slipped me into the breast pocket...
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...HISTORY 4C: WESTERN CIVILIZATION: 1715-PRESENT Description of the Course: This course surveys the history of Europe from the beginning of the 18th century until the end of the 20th century. We will study major political, economic, social and intellectual developments that affected European societies during that time period and changed lives of people throughout the world. Major themes of the course will include the French and Industrial Revolutions, emergence of ideologies such as liberalism, nationalism and socialism as well as their practical impact on politics and culture, the rise and fall of European global dominance, wars and revolution of the 20th century. Goals of the Course: I. Understanding Historical Heritage of our Civilization: The major purpose of this course is to familiarize you with heritage of the western civilization and help you understand significance of its impact on contemporary world. This class will aim to illustrate how the past impacts people’s lives in the present and how our actions, ideas, and self-image are shaped by historical developments. II. Acquiring Critical Thinking: History consists of more than just memorization of names, dates and narratives of historical events. Although knowledge of factual information is imperative, it is important to realize that history is interpretation of facts, trends and ideas. Therefore, neither professor nor Teaching Assistants will give you “right” or “wrong” answers. Instead, another major...
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