... Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nature The West captivates people. The West both as a direction of navigation and as an idea occupies a magical realm where boundaries become blurred and what is light becomes twilight and dark. Just as the East represents the arrival of sun with its light and rationality—of darkness dispelled— so too does the West embody the loss of that sun’s light and logic and the commencement of night. However, there are more boundaries between East and West than merely the presence or absence of light. After the time of Columbus, the people who looked toward the West, and particularly the North American continent, saw more than just land. The West was a sacred place where magic, hallowed, and even treacherous experiences were possible. This idea that possibilities existed in the West that did not exist elsewhere motivated millions to leave the Old World for the new and redefine themselves in a Western landscape of unlimited possibilities. What is the West? These early settlers, religionists, and explorers to the West came to the shores of the Atlantic seaboard unsure of what to expect from the new landscape they encountered. By leaving their homes and coming to a new land to make a new life, these immigrants breached a frontier. Frontiers are not solidified lines of demarcation; instead, they are indistinct and shifting perceptions that divide what is “us” from what is not yet “us.” As immigrants traveled west they increased the distance from their old...
Words: 4300 - Pages: 18
...Medal of Science. He is also the author of The Third Chimpanzee. SUMMARY The book asks and attempts to answer the question, once humankind spread throughout the world, why did different populations in different locations have such different histories? The modern world has been shaped by conquest, epidemics, and genocide, the ingredients of which arose first in Eurasia. The book’s premise is that those ingredients required the development of agriculture. Agriculture also arose first in Eurasia, not because Eurasians were superior in any way to people of other continents, but because of a unique combination of naturally occurring advantages, including more and more suitable wild crops and animals to domesticate, a larger land mass with fewer barriers to the spread of people, crops, and technology, and an east-west axis which meant that climate was similar across the region. The book is well written and contains not only information about the history of cultures around the world, but excellent descriptions of the scientific methodologies used to study them, from how archeologists study the origin of agriculture to how writing evolved to how linguistics can trace the movements of peoples across huge geographic areas. There are useful examples, maps and charts throughout, which make principles discussed in the body easy to visualize and compare. The appendix includes a chapter by chapter list of further readings on topics discussed. By the time of the beginning of Europe’s worldwide...
Words: 18440 - Pages: 74
...The Arab-Muslim control of spices to the east left Europe in economic starvation. The 'Islamic Curtain' shut out all trade of spices to the west. On the rare occasions that spice was available, only the extremely wealthy could afford to purchase it. It was not until the tenth century that sea-port city states like Venice and Genoa became alluring trading hubs. Spices and wealth trickled into their markets via ports from Arab traders. The Muslim hold on the markets were finally beginning to loosen. By the eleventh century CE, political regions were being established and the Roman Catholic Church had substantially grown in size and power. Christianity was spreading like wild fire across Northern Europe. Warrior civilizations such as the Vikings, Slavs and Magyars added thousands of soldiers to the church's battalion. The church aimed to recapture the Holy Land, with its key city, Jerusalem, that was occupied by Islam (Czarra). The Turks and the Byzantine empire were engaging in war and Alexius I called upon Pope Urban II for help from the Christians. In 1099 CE, the Crusaders marched into Jerusalem and in just eight days, slaughtered the population. The knights...
Words: 1474 - Pages: 6
...From Predator to Protector: The Paradigm Shift in America’s Werewolf Supernatural entities have been the topic of fiction since the dawn of literature. These entities brazenly manipulate the societal, environmental, and physical norms which dictate much of the living world. Perhaps one of the most renowned literary characters of supernatural fiction is the werewolf. Historically, this literary concept of a wolf-human hybrid is rooted in evil. They are graphically described as “bestial, blood-drinking, human-flesh-eating creatures, endowed with more than human agility and strength” (Rudin 115). Werewolves served as popular antagonists throughout media, including television and cinema; yet, in recent years, the media’s perception of werewolves has taken a noticeable shift in the opposite direction. Stephenie Meyer, the critically acclaimed author of the Young Adult series The Twilight Saga, embodies this shift to the “new” werewolf. Meyer made a drastic change to the very nature of what was once a ferocious beast by characterizing werewolves as more gentle and protective. People wonder, though, what caused this sudden switch of characteristics? Through texts such as Rick Bass’ The Ninemile Wolf, Barry Holstun Lopez’s Of Wolves and Men, Valerie Fogleman’s piece “American Attitudes Towards Wolves: a History of Misperception,” Stephenie Meyer’s The Twilight Saga, and more, this paper will argue that the “original” werewolf belief was founded on America’s misperception of wolves...
Words: 3939 - Pages: 16
...William Penn was born in a foreign country but would help shape The United States of America into the resolute country it is known as today. Not only did he help form the United States by his ideas and treaties but he also founded the State of Independence formally known as Pennsylvania. William was born on the fourteenth of October in the year of 1644. His father, Sir William Penn was a commendable landowner and his mother Margaret Jasper Vanderschuren was a merchant’s daughter. Not much is known about Penn’s childhood besides the fact that he was enthusiastic about religion from a young age. When William was only thirteen his love for the Quakers began after hearing a speech from a popular Quaker leader Thomas Loe. Years later before starting college Penn served in the parliamentary navy during the Puritan Revolution. After a successful time in the war he was rewarded by an english statesman Oliver Cromwell. Unfortunately William’s award of land in Ireland he had earned during the war didn’t last very long. This was due to the fact the he soon fell out of Cromwell’s favor after taking part in the restoration of King Charles the...
Words: 1063 - Pages: 5
...gold, and sail back to Europe a rich man. Columbus first sailed south to the Canary Islands. Then he turned west across the unknown waters of the mid-Atlantic Ocean. Ten weeks after leaving Spain, on the morning of October 12, he stepped ashore on the beach of a low sandy island. He named the island San Salvador – Holy Savior. Columbus believed that he had landed in the Indies, a group of islands close to the mainland of India. For this reason he called the friendly, brown-skinned people who greeted him ‘los Indios’ – Indians. In fact, Columbus was not near India. It was not the edge of Asia that he had reached, but islands off the shores of a new continent. Europeans would soon name the continent America, but for many years they went on calling its inhabitants Indians. Only recently have these first Americans been described more accurately as ‘native Americans’ or Amerindians. There were many different groups of Amerindians. Those north of Mexico, in what is now the USA and Canada, were scattered across the grasslands and forests in separate groups called ‘tribes’. These tribes followed very different ways of life. Some were hunters, some were farmers. Some were peaceful, others warlike. They spoke over three hundred separate languages, some of which were as different from one another as English is from Chinese. Europeans called America ‘the New World’. But it was not new to the Amerindians. Their ancestors had already been living there for maybe 50...
Words: 5271 - Pages: 22
...across the tops of cities contemplating jazz, who bared their brains to Heaven under the El and saw Mohammedan angels staggering on tene- ment roofs illuminated, who passed through universities with radiant cool eyes hallucinating Arkansas and Blake-light tragedy among the scholars of war, who were expelled from the academies for crazy & publishing obscene odes on the windows of the skull, who cowered in unshaven rooms in underwear, burn- ing their money in wastebaskets and listening to the Terror through the wall, who got busted in their pubic beards returning through Laredo with a belt of marijuana for New York, who ate fire in paint hotels or drank turpentine in Paradise Alley, death, or purgatoried their torsos night after night with dreams, with drugs, with waking nightmares, al- cohol and cock and endless balls, incomparable blind; streets of shuddering cloud and lightning in the mind leaping toward poles of Canada & Paterson, illuminating all the mo-...
Words: 2989 - Pages: 12
...“Sea Venture” In 1609 the Virginia Company had a decision to make. Continue business as usual and allow the settlers in Jamestown to slowly perish, and not recoup any money for its investors, or drum up more investors and send the single largest group of settlers the New World had seen. The decision that Thomas Smythe and the Virginia Company made would lead to the settlement of a new land, and save Jamestown. In February 1609, the Virginia Company acquired a new charter for Jamestown, the Second Charter of Virginia, from King James. The new charter not only restructured the Colony in the new world, but completely restructured the Virginia Company and gave them “full and absolute power and authority, to correct, punish, pardon, govern, and rule.” The new charter granted them this power in all of Virginia, as well as the on the seas to and from the new world. The charter prohibited breaking any English law in the colony, but otherwise “they, in their good discretion, shall think to be fittest for the good of the adventurers and inhabitants there” The restructuring of Virginia was also in the new charter, it expanded the colony from 10,000 square miles to over one million square miles. The first decision made by the Virginia Company was to send Sir Thomas Gates to Virginia as Governor. Admiral George Sommers was chosen to command the fleet, and England’s most renowned Captain, Christopher Newport, would sail the lead vessel. The Virginia Company rounded up investors and...
Words: 2020 - Pages: 9
...Red Feather Journal 73 “Be Sure You're Right, Then Go Ahead”: The Davy Crockett Gun Craze by Sarah Nilsen In April 2005, sixty thousand members of the National Rifle Association gathered in Houston, Texas for their 134th Annual Meeting. The keynote speaker for the event was embattled U.S. House Majority Leader, Representative Tom De Lay. After his speech, De Lay was joined on stage by Lee Hamel dressed as Davy Crockett in full buckskin attire and a coonskin hat. Hamel presented De Lay with a handcrafted flintlock rifle that he had made for the event with his mentor, Cecil Brooks. The presentation of the reproduction rifle to De Lay is part of a long NRA tradition that began in 1955 when Walt Disney‟s Davy Crockett series first appeared on television. When Charlton Heston received his handcrafted flintlock rifle in 1989, he uttered his famous words, “From my cold dead hands.” President Ronald Reagan and Vice President Dick Cheney also joined the list of those who received facsimile Davy Crockett flintlock rifles from a man dressed in Crockett buckskin attire. This tradition is part of the NRA‟s efforts to represent the gun as a key instrument in the founding of the United States. It secured this ideological representation in part by appropriating the mythology of early American heroes like Davy Crockett. Davy Crockett became emblematic of the gun mythology of early American life. This mythology was synergized by the NRA and popularized through children‟s television...
Words: 8084 - Pages: 33
...S Denmark ATLANT C A T L A N T II C OCEAN OCEAN St Kilda St Kilda Reykjavik Reykjavik GREENLAND GREENLAND Isafjordur Isafjordur ICELAND ICELAND Oban Oban Faroe Faroe Islands Islands ouu SSo b byy ss ree or So Scc nd nd 90° 90° 60° 60° 30° 30° Edinburgh Edinburgh UK UK Norweg an N o r w e g iia n Shetland Islands Shetland Islands G een and G rre e n lla n d Sea Sea Spitsbergen Spitsbergen Longyearbyen Longyearbyen 0° 0° North North Sea Sea NORWAY NORWAY Sea Sea North North Pole Pole 30° 30° 60° 60° 90° 90° Franz Josef Franz Josef Land Land Novaya Novaya Zemlya Zemlya 2012 EXPEDITION PROGRAM CRUISE DATES VOYAGE * Kayaking Option # Diving Option WILD SCOTLAND & EUROPEAN ARCTIC 11-24 June 14 days WILD SCOTLAND AND THE FAROE ISLANDS*# SPITSBERGEN ODYSSEY* SPITSBERGEN ODYSSEY*# JEWELS OF THE ARCTIC *# JEWELS OF THE ARCTIC * RUSSIAN COAST TIC IC ARC T ARC E CL E L CIR C CIR B aren ts B aren ts Murmansk Murmansk Sea Sea a lya mly em Ze aaZ yy vaa oov N N Kara Kara Sea Sea PAGE 8 R R 19-29 July 11 days 29 July-8 Aug 11 days 8-21 Aug 14 days 21 Aug-3 Sept 14 days 10 10 12 12 25 June-7 July 13 days 7-19 July 13 days 19-31 July 13 days 31 July-13 Aug 14 days 13 Aug-7 Sept 26 days 8-21 Sept 14 days RING OF FIRE* BERING SEA EXPLORER* TREASURES OF THE RUSSIAN FAR EAST* ARCTIC OCEAN DISCOVERER* ACROSS THE NORTH EAST PASSAGE* VOYAGE TO THE END OF THE EARTH* 16 18 20 24 26 28 2 (Alaska) ...
Words: 19097 - Pages: 77
...Drug abuse in Africa Sections ABSTRACT Introduction Historical background Current drug abuse situation in Africa Effects of drug abuse in Africa Control mechanisms Future trends Details Author: T. ASUNI , A. O PELA Pages: 55 to 64 Creation Date: 1986/01/01 Drug abuse in Africa T. ASUNI Department of Psychiatry, College of Medicine, University of Lagos, Lagos, Nigeria A. O PELA Clinical Pharmacy Unit, Faculty of Pharmacy, University of Benin, Benin, Nigeria ABSTRACT Apart from cannabis abuse in northern and southern Africa and khat chewing in north-eastern Africa, the history of drug abuse in Africa is relatively short. The abuse of drugs in Africa is nevertheless escalating rapidly from cannabis abuse to the more dangerous drugs and from limited groups of drug users to a wider range of people abusing drugs. The most common and available drug of abuse is still cannabis, which is known to be a contributing factor to the occurrence of a schizophrenic-like psychosis. The trafficking in and abuse of cocaine and heroin are the most recent developments in some African countries that had had no previous experience with these drugs. Efforts should be made to design and implement drug abuse assessment programmes to determine the real magnitude and characteristics of the problem and to monitor its trends. A lack of funds and a shortage of adequately trained personnel have made it difficult to implement drug abuse control programmes...
Words: 3841 - Pages: 16
...Josh Smith Dr. Tom Jones English 101 December 5, 2006 The Big Bad Wolf • Three little pigs dance in a circle singing "Who's afraid of the big, bad wolf?" • Little Red Riding Hood barely escapes the cunning advances of the ravenous wolf disguised as her grandmother. • Movie audiences shriek as a gentle young man is transformed before their eyes into a blood-thirsty werewolf, a symbol for centuries of the essence of evil. Such myths and legends have portrayed the wolf as a threat to human existence. Feared as cold-blooded killers, they were hated and persecuted. Wolves were not merely shot and killed; they were tortured as well. In what was believed to be a battle between good and evil, wolves were poisoned, drawn and quartered, doused with gasoline and set on fire, and, in some cases, left with their mouths wired shut to starve (Begley 53). Convinced that they were a problem to be solved, U.S. citizens gradually eradicated gray wolves from the lower 48 states over a period of 25 years. Today many people are convinced that the elimination of the gray wolf was not only an error, but also a detriment to the quality of life in this country. There has been a public outcry to rectify the situation created by the ignorance of our ancestors. However, in seeking to address a situation created by the human compulsion to control nature, it is crucial to discern how much human interference is necessary. Human control must be tempered by respect and restraint...
Words: 2667 - Pages: 11
...INTERPRETATIONS OF THE CIVIL WAR IN EARLY FILM One Film To Rule Them All In 1915, the blockbuster film, The Birth of a Nation swept the nation. In a pivotal scene, the attractive daughter of a former slave owner, whose cotton business had been ruined by the war, is stalked by a menacing looking black soldier, named Gus. He is shown with his shirt wide open and bare-chested. Flora, the stereotypical southern belle, notices the voyeur and is visibly shaken. Flora tries to hide from Gus, but Gus corners her and tells her that he wants her and that he is not married. Since the end of the Civil War, Flora has noticed several black soldiers in the area in the past few months harassing her family and other upstanding families. Gus forces Flora closer and tries to kiss her. In a panic, Flora slaps him and pushes him away. Flora flees into the woods. The ensuing pursuit shows Gus as a sex-crazed maniacal troll chasing down the seemingly innocent virginal fairy. Gus follows her absorbedly intent on raping her. Flora winds up on a cliff overlooking a series of jagged rocks. She stares at Gus and motions for him to leave her alone. In a silent ultimatum, she gesticulates that if he doesn’t leave then she’ll leap from the cliff to the rocks below. Gus is exposed as a beast, sweating and pulsating lustful desires. He moves closer to Flora to stop her from leaping. Unwilling to give herself to a black man and death being the only alternative, Flora jumps from the...
Words: 5187 - Pages: 21
...A Brief History of "Outlaw" Motorcycle Clubs Little scholarly research exists which addresses outlaw motorcycle clubs. These works attempt to explore warring factions of outlaw clubs, provide club members’ perspectives about media portrayal, expose myths, and elucidate motorcycle club culture.*1 The literature reveals gaps which leave many unanswered questions: Where do outlaw motorcycle clubs come from? How did they start? How or why did they evolve into alleged international crime organizations? The few histories of outlaw motorcycle organizations date the origins of such clubs to around 1947 and tend to oversimplify the issues of why these clubs formed and who actually joined them. Histories such as these are built on foundations of weak evidence, rendering inconsequential the origins of the subculture and relegating members of early organizations to the marginal status of “malcontents on the edge of society, and other antisocial types who just wanted to raise hell” (Valentine 147). This article extends current research by reaching back nearly half a century before 1947 to link the dawn of motorcycle organizations with the present reality of outlaw motorcycle clubs. The overarching goal of the article is to offer a more comprehensive history, an evolutionary history that may allow for a better understanding of contemporary motorcycle subculture. What follows is a taxonomy of social and historical factors affecting group formation of motorcycle clubs according to the...
Words: 8033 - Pages: 33
...HERBS & SPICES HERBS & SPICES WHAT ARE HERBS? * Leaves of plants that lack woody stems. * Typically, the green, leafy part of the plant is used in cooking. * The plants are grown for their flavor and medicinal value. * Some define herbs as plants with healing properties. Herbs: Leaves, stems, and flowers of aromatic plants * Fresh: More aromatic; cleaner flavor * Dried: Stronger, but often harsher flavor; less expensive; crumbling lightly before use will release oils USING HERBS Fresh herbs *Ready to eat foods-add as early as possible to allow the flavor to be released *Cooked foods-add toward the end to prevent bitter flavors and burnt looking herbs Dried Herbs *Ready to eat foods-early in the cooking process *Cooked foods-early in the cooking process *If the recipe calls for fresh and you are using dried you need to ½ the amount. HISTORY As far back as 5000 BCE, Sumerians used herbs in medicine. Ancient Egyptians used fennel, coriander and thyme around 1555 BCE. In ancient Greece, in 162 CE, a physician by the name of Galen was known for concocting complicated herbal remedies that contained up to 100 ingredients. CULINARY HERBS Culinary herbs are distinguished from vegetables in that, like spices, they are used in small amounts and provide flavor rather than substance to food. Culinary herbs can come in two different forms. They can be in their natural state which is straight from the garden or bought in...
Words: 6433 - Pages: 26
