Wednesday, January 29, 2020

1950s America Speech Essay Example for Free

1950s America Speech Essay 1950s America Speech The 1950s were a remarkable time in the history of the United States of America. Many of the events that occurred during this time inspired and molded the future of an entire generation. The economy was booming, bringing millions of Americans into the middle class. Government, Business, and Unions worked together to keep the economy going, but I believed the biggest force in the economy in the 1950s decade is the consumers. â€Å"Consumer Culture† is a culture where consuming goods become a marker of social states and a way of creating meaning in the people’s lives. The demand of the consumers created many jobs for people. As a result there were millions of things the United States produced, and abundance of things to buy. America had the newest, coolest, popular car out like the Chevrolet Corvette and the Ford Thunderbird. America also produced the wristwatch, TVs, and the famous, girly toy in the world-the Barbie Doll. The best part was credit cards were invented around this time allowing consumers to buy now, and pay off later. Now with the economy going so great, there was a high cost in demand allowing jobs to be formed. Blue Color Jobs were people who are plumbers, bus-drivers, cab-drivers, warehouse workers and construction workers. White Color Jobs were people who are accountants, sales representatives and mid-management positions. In the 1950s women were the housewife and mostly stayed at home. However, in the late 50s women started to have jobs mostly like being teachers, nurses, stewardess, and secretaries. In 1950 the gross national product (also known as GNP) had $284. 6 billion dollars; the US was by far the largest economy in the world! By the end of the decade the GNP stood at $482. 7 billion dollars. The 1950s played a huge role in segregation. â€Å"Separate but equal† was a famous quote to allow segregation seem okay. In truth, African Americans were always separate but never equal. However, in 1948 armed services were officially desegregation. Schools weren’t desegregated yet. An African-American girl had to walk 2 miles get to a black school when a white school was only 6 blocks away. On May 17, 1954 with its Brown v. Board of Education decision, the U. S. Supreme Court ends segregation in public schools. This is the beginning of the Civil Rights Movement. Just like today, Americans were sports crazy in the 1950s. Basketball, football, boxing were all typical sports that Americans loved, but one sport stood out of all of them. You guessed it; baseball. All these sports expanded in popularity due by technology and mass media such as television, magazines, and radio. Integration was spreading to sports allowing the famous, â€Å"Rookie of the Year†- Jackie Robinson to play baseball. Baseball remained the most popular of American sports mainly because the New York Yankees winning 7 out of 9 World Series. LEGOs building bricks were the most popular activity to do. It required imagination allowing the creator to build anything she/he wants to build. These LEGOs building bricks were for mainly children around 7 to 12 years of age. Skateboarding was a very popular activity for teenager during the 1950s. Fashion changes all the time. What’s interesting about the 1950s fashion is that it’s still acceptable nowadays. The teenage boys would were blue jeans, a white t-shirt, and a black leather jacket. To form a â€Å"cool† look. The hair style has longer than usual hair allowing longer sideburns for guys. This fashion was mainly influenced by Elvis Plessey. Grown up men would wear suits, a tie, and a hat to top it off. Most of the men would carry a suitcase. This fashion is known as the business man. Fashion for teenage girls is more sophisticated. What was in† during the 1950s were the tight sweater for a top, poodle skirt (a long, full skirt with the image of a poodle on it), bobby socks (ankle-high socks) and saddle shoes (sturdy shoes with a contrasting band of color). Teenage girls wore their hair up in a ponytail and wore a lot of Make-up. The only difference in clothes between teen age girls and women is women didn’t wear the poodle skirt. Most women would wear a full-length dress and carry a purse. Music is everywhere; it’s only annoying when it’s stuck in your head and you hear it repeat over and over through-out the whole day. But something special happen in the 1950s; this was the decade Rock n’ Roll was introduced by â€Å"The King†-Elvis Plessey. Some of his famous songs include: Thats All Right Mama, Heartbreak Hotel, Viva Las Vegas and the one I have stuck in my head right now, You Ain’t Nothing but a Hound Dog. Not only does Elvis introduce a new type of music, but also Influence teens such as appearance in fashion, and behavior. He also influenced future musicians such as the Beatles. Elvis Plessey is one of the most famous musician/ actor in the 1950s. Let the Rock n’ Roll rule forever. Booooom! The baby boom started in 1946 and stop in 1964. A baby boom is when any period marked by a greatly increased birth rate. The term baby boom most often refers to the dramatic post–World War II baby boom (1946–1964). There are an estimated 78. 3 million Americans who were born during this demographic boom in births. Reasons why people started to have babies all around the same time because: WW2 ended, people started to marry at a young, around the age of 20 was average and were ready to start a family. Science began to take off. In the 1950s Francis Crick and James Watson discover the double-helix structure of DNA. An immunization vaccine is produced for polio. The first successful ultrasound test of the heart activity was in the 1950s. The CERN is established. (European Organization for Nuclear Research) The worlds first nuclear power plant is opened in Obninsk near Moscow. NASA is organized. (Later on we have a â€Å"Space Race† with the Soviet). President Harry S. Truman inaugurated transcontinental television service on September 4, 1951 when he made a speech to the nation. ATT carried his address from San Francisco and it was viewed from the west coast to the east coast at the same time. One of the most popular cars in the 1950s was a Cadillac. If you owned one you would symbolize wealth, power, and success. Elvis Pressley owned a Cadillac and so did captains of their own, individual industry. Even Hollywood big-shots and the common worker who saved enough owned a Cadillac. For most people, the name Cadillac evokes images of the finned, chromed, and gadget-laden â€Å"Fabulous Fifties† models. These Cadillacs proved that America was emerging unscathed from the war and to the contrary, demonstrated a new-found prosperity which found expression in cars. For four decades starting from 1950, Cadillac had no series competition in the US market. The 1950s were â€Å"The Golden Age of Television†. Television was introduced to Americana in 1939 and began to gain a foothold after WW2. In the 1950s TV were and still are American’s source of entertainment. In the year of 1950, 5 million TVs were sold! In 1950, just fewer than 20% of American homes contained a TV set. Ten years later, nearly 90% of homes contained a TV-and some even had color TVs. The three major networks: NBC, CBS, ABC. Some of the top favorite TV shows: The Texaco Star Theater, Arthur Godfrey’s Talent Scouts, I Love Lucy, The $64,000 Question, and Gunsmoke. Gradually, by the mid-fifties, there came electronic color television, which was followed by launching of remote control and transistorized television sets towards 1959. Thus, we can conclude that television in the 1950s brought an element of reality, news and fun for the people and also helped create a sense of awareness against all the social ills. The availability of movies and movie-related shows, reality shows, daily soaps and of course the news programs have made it the prime media of entertainment in every household. The 1950s truly were the decade of the TV. TVs allowed families to bond in the newly created suburbs. TVs also allowed advertisement. So in a way you’re communicating and discovering new products and news about what’s going on in the world. A women’s best friend is TV because around the 1950s women usually stayed at home and watched TV shows. The 1950s really had events and importance; also it isn’t much different from our lives today. Many of the events that occurred during this time inspired and molded the future of an entire generation.

Monday, January 20, 2020

Voice, Imagery, Symbols and Theme in Snows of Kilimanjaro Essay

Voice, Imagery, Symbols and Theme in Snows of Killamanjaro The Snows of Kilimanjaro, a short story by Ernest Hemingway, is a brilliant study of a man's final hours precluding death.   The story centers around Harry and his wife, waiting for a plane to come and take him to a doctor or hospital.   Thus begins a stream of passages that takes the reader along with Harry while he drifts in and out of consciousness, moving from one life to the next.   The obvious theme is death and dying, but the home theme is Harry's return to his past, and his journey to the present.   Hemingway uses animal imagery in the story to reflect the dying theme, and to show two distinct sides of Harry, and his passing from life to death .   The story opens with Harry discussing his dying leg and the smell that the infection or gangrene creates. He reflects on the three big birds (vultures) waiting in the horizon   "Look at them," he said.   "now is it sight or is it scent that brings them like that?"   His use of adjectives to describe the birds and their waiting for him to die projects a feeling of death, and sets the tone for the story, using words such as "obscene" and "shadow"   and "sail" to correlate the emergence of the birds with the ascent of death.  Ã‚   "...as he looked out past the shade onto the glare of the plane there were three of the big birds squatted obscenely, while in the sky a dozen more sailed, making quick moving shadows as they passed."  Ã‚   His introduction of various animals that are typically associated with death and dying into the story at intervals replicate the passing phases of the death process.   "They've been there since the looked out past the shade onto the glare of the plane there were three of the big birds squatted obs... ...y were out.."   The Snows of Kilimanjaro is a powerful story, beautifully written, chronicling one mans journey from life to death.   It's a step by step process, with each step brilliantly depicted in a small passing of time.   "It moved up closer to him still and now he could not speak to it, and when it saw he could not speak it came a little closer, and now he tried to send it away without speaking, but it moved in on him so its weight was all upon his chest, and while it crouched there he could not move, or speak.."   At the end of the story the animal emerges again, this time serving as the call to Harry's death.   "Just then the hyena stopped whimpering in the night and started to make a strange, human, almost crying sound. The woman heard it and stirred uneasily."  Ã‚   Works Cited: Hemingway, Ernest. "The Snows of Kilimanjaro." Baym, et al. 2: 1687-1704.

Sunday, January 12, 2020

The Renaissance: the Invention of the Printing Press

At the height of the Hussite crisis in the early 1400's, when the authorities ordered 200 manuscripts of heretical writings burned, people on both sides realized quite well the significance of that act. Two hundred handwritten manuscripts would be hard to replace. Not only would it be a time consuming job, but also trained scribes would be hard to find. After all, most of them worked for the Church, and it seemed unlikely that the Church would loan out its scribes to copy the works of heretics.Although the Hussites more than held their own against the Church, their movement remained confined mainly to the borders of their homeland of Bohemia. One main reason for this was that there was no mass media, such as the printing press to spread the word. A century later, all that had changed. Like any other invention, the printing press came along and had an impact when the right conditions existed at the right time and place. In this case, that was Europe in the mid 1400's.Like many or most inventions, the printing press was not the result of just one man's ingenious insight into all the problems involved in creating the printing press. Rather, printing was a combination of several different inventions and innovations: block printing, rag paper, oil based ink, interchangeable metal type, and the squeeze press. If one process started the chain reaction of events that led to the invention of the printing press, it was the rise of towns in Western Europe that sparked trade with the outside world all the way to China.That trade exposed Europeans to three things important for the invention of the printing press: rag paper, block printing, and, oddly enough, the Black Death. For centuries the Chinese had been making rag paper, which was made from a pulp of water and discarded rags that was then pressed into sheets of paper. When the Arabs met the Chinese at the battle of the Talas River in 751 A. D. , they carried off several prisoners skilled in making such paper. The tech nology spread gradually across the Muslim world, up through Spain and into Western Europe by the late 1200's.The squeeze press used in pressing the pulp into sheets of paper would also lend itself to pressing print evenly onto paper. The Black Death, which itself spread to Western Europe thanks to expanded trade routes, also greatly catalyzed the invention of the printing press in three ways, two of which combined with the invention of rag paper to provide Europe with plentiful paper. First of all, the survivors of the Black Death inherited the property of those who did not survive, so that even peasants found themselves a good deal richer.Since the textile industry was the most developed industry in Western Europe at that time, it should come as no surprise that people spent their money largely on new clothes. However, clothes wear out, leaving rags. As a result, fourteenth century Europe had plenty of rags to make into rag paper, which was much cheaper than the parchment (sheepski n) and vellum (calfskin) used to make books until then. Even by 1300, paper was only one-sixth the cost of parchment, and its relative cost continued to fall. Considering it took 170 calfskins or 300 sheepskins to make one copy of the Bible, we can see what a bargain paper was.But the Black Death had also killed off many of the monks who copied the books, since the crowded conditions in the monasteries had contributed to an unusually high mortality rate. One result of this was that the cost of copying books rose drastically while the cost of paper was dropping. Many people considered this unacceptable and looked for a better way to copy books. Thus the Black Death rag paper combined to create both lots of cheap paper plus an incentive for the invention of the printing press.The Black Death also helped lead to the decline of the Church, the rise of a money economy, and subsequently the Italian Renaissance with its secular ideas and emphasis on painting. It was the Renaissance artists who, in their search for a more durable paint, came up with oil-based paints. Adapting these to an oil-based ink that would adhere to metal type was fairly simple. Block printing, carved on porcelain, had existed for centuries before making its way to Europe. Some experiments with interchangeable copper type had been carried on in Korea.However, Chinese printing did not advance beyond that, possibly because the Chinese writing system used thousands of characters and was too unmanageable. For centuries after its introduction into Europe, block printing still found little use, since wooden printing blocks wore out quickly when compared to the time it took to carve them. As a result of the time and expense involved in making block prints, a few playing cards and pages of books were printed this way, but little else. What people needed was a movable type made of metal.And here again, the revival of towns and trade played a major role, since it stimulated a mining boom, especially in Ge rmany, along with better techniques for working metals, including soft metals such as gold and copper. It was a goldsmith from Mainz, Germany, Johannes Gutenberg, who created a durable and interchangeable metal type that allowed him to print many different pages, using the same letters over and over again in different combinations. It was also Gutenberg who combined all these disparate elements of movable type, rag paper, the squeeze press, and oil based inks to invent the first printing press in 1451.The first printed books were religious in nature, as were most medieval books. They also imitated (handwritten) manuscript form so that people would accept this new revolutionary way of copying books. The printing press soon changed the forms and uses of books quite radically. Books stopped imitating manuscript forms such as lined paper to help the copiers and abbreviations to save time in copying. They also covered an increasingly wider variety of non-religious topics (such as grammar s, etiquette, and geology books) that appealed especially to the professional members of the middle class.By 1482, there were about 100 printing presses in Western Europe: 50 in Italy, 30 in Germany, 9 in France, 8 each in Spain and Holland, and 4 in England. A Venetian printer, Aldus Manutius, realized that the real market was not for big heavy volumes of the Bible, but for smaller, cheaper, and easier to handle â€Å"pocket books†. Manutius further revolutionized book copying by his focusing on these smaller editions that more people could afford. He printed translations of the Greek classics and thus helped spread knowledge in general, and the Renaissance in particular, across Europe.By 1500, there were some 40,000 different editions with over 6,000,000 copies in print. The printing press had dramatic effects on European civilization. Its immediate effect was that it spread information quickly and accurately. This helped create a wider literate reading public. However, its importance lay not just in how it spread information and opinions, but also in what sorts of information and opinions it was spreading. There were two main directions printing took, both of which were probably totally unforeseen by its creators.First of all, more and more books of a secular nature were printed, with especially profound results in science. Scientists working on the same problem in different parts of Europe especially benefited, since they could print the results of their work and share it accurately with a large number of other scientists. They in turn could take that accurate, not miscopied, information, work with it and advance knowledge and understanding further. Of course, they could accurately share their information with many others and the process would continue.By the 1600's, this process would lead to the Scientific Revolution of the Enlightenment, which would radically alter how Europeans viewed the world and universe. The printing press also created its s hare of trouble as far as some people were concerned. It took book copying out of the hands of the Church and made it much harder for the Church to control or censor what was being written. It was hard enough to control what Wycliffe and Hus wrote with just a few hundred copies of their works in circulation.Imagine the problems the Church had when literally thousands of such works could be produced at a fraction of the cost. Each new printing press was just another hole in the dyke to be plugged up, and the Church had only so many fingers with which to do the job. It is no accident that the breakup of Europe's religious unity during the Protestant Reformation corresponded with the spread of printing. The difference between Martin Luther's successful Reformation and the Hussites' much more limited success was that Luther was armed with the printing press and knew how to use it with devastating effect.Some people go as far as to say that the printing press is the most important invent ion between the invention of writing itself and the computer. Although it is impossible to justify that statement to everyone's satisfaction, one can safely say that the printing press has been one of the most powerful inventions of the modern era. It has advanced and spread knowledge and molded public opinion in a way that nothing before the advent of television and radio in the twentieth century could rival. If it were not able to, then freedom of the press would not be such a jealously guarded liberty as it is today.

Saturday, January 4, 2020

Minimum Wage Is Necessary For A Basic Quality Of Life

Minimum wage is defined as the lowest possible income that an employer can legally pay an employee. These provisions are contained in the Fair Labor Standards Act. The purpose of minimum wage is to ensure that all workers are fairly paid and not exploited by companies or businesses. However this is not always the case instead this policy ends up hurting low-end workers and the economy in terms of lower job opportunities. Sustainability, in this case, is defined as the ability to maintain a certain amount of physical property. Considering this definition of sustainability, minimum wage is not a feasible salary to survive with a basic quality of life. Standard minimum wage presently is a base pay of $7.25 an hour. The current amount of minimum wage fails to keep pace with inflation and the rising cost of living (Biegler, 2014). Living standards in the United States have risen over time just as overall consumption levels have increased. The outdated measurement of poverty underestimates the amount of income families need to sustain a comfortable living. The original poverty thresholds were set in the early 1960s. Since then, there have been significant changes in family spending patterns that the poverty threshold fails to capture. For example, families are demanding and paying for more health care and child care because of changes in health insurance coverage, rising health care costs, and women’s increased labor force participation (Chasanov, 2004).This only means thatShow MoreRelatedA Brief Note On The Myanmar Garment Industry Essay1693 Words   |  7 PagesThe Myanmar garment industry is still extremely small and it tends to specialists in higher quality by comparing with other countries in the region. 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