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thefederalistfreestyle · 7 years

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Hamilton: how Lin-Manuel Miranda’s musical rewrote the story of America (New Statesman):

[. . .] Because of the success of Hamilton – it has been sold out on Broadway since August 2015, won 11 Tony Awards and the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for Drama, and is on tour in Chicago and Los Angeles – there is now an industry devoted to uncovering and explaining its references. Yet the sheer ebullience of the soundscape is not enough to explain why it became a hit. To understand that, we need to understand the scope of its ambition, which is nothing less than giving America a new origin story. “Every generation rewrites the founders in their own image,” says Nancy Isenberg, a professor of history at Louisiana State University and the author of a biography of Aaron Burr. “He [Miranda] rewrote the founders in the image of Obama, for the age of Obama.”

In doing so, Miranda created a fan base that mirrors the “Obama coalition” of Democrat voters: college-educated coastal liberals and mid-to-low-income minorities. (When the musical first hit Broadway in 2015, some tickets went for thousands of dollars; others were sold cheaply in a daily street lottery or given away to local schoolchildren.) He also gave his audiences another gift. Just as Obama did in his 2008 campaign, Hamilton’s post-racial view of history offers Americans absolution from the original sin of their country’s birth – slavery. It rescues the idea of the US from its tainted origins.

[. . .]

There is, of course, a great theatrical tradition of “patriotic myth-making”, and it explains another adjective that is frequently applied to Hamilton: Shakespearean. England’s national playwright was instrumental in smearing Richard III as a hunchbacked child-killer, portraying the French as our natural enemies and turning the villainous Banquo of Holinshed’s Chronicles into the noble figure claimed as an ancestor by the Stuarts, and therefore Shakespeare’s patron James VI and I.

James Shapiro, a professor of English literature at Columbia University, New York, and the author of several books on Shakespeare, first saw the musical during its early off-Broadway run. “It was the closest I’ve ever felt to experiencing what I imagine it must have been like to have attended an early performance of, say, Richard III, on the Elizabethan stage,” he tells me. “But this time, it was my own nation’s troubled history that I was witnessing.”

Shapiro says that Shakespeare’s first set of history plays deals with the recent past, ending with Richard III; he then went back further to create an English origin story through Richard II and Henry V. “Lin-Manuel Miranda was trying to grasp the fundamental problems underlying contemporary American culture,” he adds. “He might, like Shakespeare, have gone back a century and explored the civil war. But I suspect that he saw that to get at the deeper roots of what united and divided Americans meant going back even further, to the revolution. No American playwright has ever managed to explain the present by reimagining so inventively that distant past.” And where Shakespeare had Holinshed’s Chronicles, Miranda had Ron Chernow.

There are Shakespearean references throughout his play. In “Take a Break”, Hamilton writes to his sister-in-law, Angelica:

They think me Macbeth and ambition is my folly. I’m a polymath, a pain in the ass, a massive pain. Madison is Banquo, Jefferson’s Macduff And Birnam Wood is Congress on its way to Dunsinane.

Shapiro says that these “casual echoes of famous lines” are less important than the lessons that Miranda has taken about how to write history. “Another way of putting it is that anyone can quote Shakespeare; very few can illuminate so brilliantly a nation’s past and, through that, its present.”

[. . .]

I love Hamilton – I think the level of my nerdery about it so far has probably made that clear – but I find it fascinating that its overtly political agenda has been so little discussed, beyond noting the radicalism of casting black actors as white founders. Surely this is the “Obama play”, in the way that David Hare’s Stuff Happens became the “Bush play” or The Crucible became the theatre’s response to McCarthyism. It’s just unusual, in that its response to the contemporary mood is a positive one, rather than sceptical or scathing. (And it has an extra resonance now that a white nationalist is in the White House. One of the first acts of dissent against the Trump regime was when his vice-president, Mike Pence, attended the musical in November 2016 and received a polite post-curtain speech from the cast about tolerance. “The cast and producers of Hamilton, which I hear is highly overrated, should immediately apologise to Mike Pence for their terrible behaviour,” tweeted Trump, inevitably.)

Hamilton tries to make its audience feel OK about patriotism and the idealism of early America. It has, as the British theatre director Robert Icke put it to me this summer, “a kind of moral evangelism” that is hard for British audiences to swallow. In order to achieve this, we are allowed to see Hamilton’s personal moral shortcomings, but the uglier aspects of the early days of America still have to be tidied away.

There’s a brief mention, for instance, of Jefferson’s relationship with his slave Sally Hemings – whom he systematically raped over many years. But the casting of black and Hispanic actors makes it hard for the musical to deal directly with slavery, and so the issue only drips into the narrative rather than being confronted. There’s a moment after the battle of Yorktown when “black and white soldiers wonder alike if this really means freedom – not yet”. Another sour note is struck in one of the cabinet rap battles between Hamilton and Jefferson, in which the former notes acidly, “Your debts are paid cos you don’t pay for labour.”

In early workshops, there was a third cabinet battle over slavery – and the song is available on The Hamilton Mixtape, a series of reworkings and offcuts from the musical. When a proposal is brought before Washington to abolish slavery, Hamilton tells the cabinet:

This is the stain on our soul and democracy A land of the free? No, it’s not. It’s hypocrisy To subjugate, dehumanise a race, call ’em property And say that we are powerless to stop it. Can you not foresee?

Ultimately, though, the song was cut. “No one knew what to do about it, and [the founding fathers] all kicked it down the field,” Miranda explained to Billboard in July 2015. “And while, yeah, Hamilton was anti-slavery and never owned slaves, between choosing his financial plan and going all in on opposition to slavery, he chose his financial plan. So it was tough to justify keeping that rap battle in the show, because none of them did enough.”

***

In March 2016, Lin-Manuel Miranda returned to the White House. This time, one of the numbers he performed was a duet from the musical called “One Last Time”, sung with the original cast member Christopher Jackson playing George Washington. After Alexander Hamilton tells the first US president that two of his cabinet have resigned to run against him, Washington announces that he will step down to leave the field open.

It is the political heart of the play’s myth-making, comparable to Nelson Mandela leaving Robben Island. The decorated Virginian veteran was the only man who could unite the fractious revolutionaries after they defeated the British. Washington could have become dictator for life; instead, he chose to create a true democracy. “If I say goodbye, the nation learns to move on./It outlives me when I’m gone.”

For a nation just beginning to think that Trump could really, actually become its president, seeing the incumbent acknowledge that his time was nearly over was a powerful moment. For Obama watching it in the audience, it must have felt like his narrative had come full circle.

Towards the end of the song, Hamilton begins to read out the words of the farewell address he has written, and Washington joins in, singing over the top of them. It was a technique cribbed from Will.i.am’s 2008 Obama campaign video, in which musicians and actors sing and speak along to the candidate’s “Yes, we can” speech.

In his memoir, Dreams from My Father, Obama had written, “I learnt to slip back and forth between my black and white worlds, understanding that each possessed its own language and customs and structures of meaning, convinced that with a bit of translation on my part the two worlds would eventually cohere.”

This was the promise of his presidency: that there was not a black America or a white America, a liberal America or a conservative America, but, as he said in his breakthrough speech at the 2004 Democratic convention, “a United States of America”. The man who followed him clearly thinks no such thing, but nonetheless the nation must learn to move on.

In his farewell address in January 2017, Obama returned to the “Yes, we can” speech, using its words as the final statement on his presidency:

I am asking you to hold fast to that faith written into our founding documents; that idea whispered by slaves and abolitionists; that spirit sung by immigrants and homesteaders and those who marched for justice; that creed reaffirmed by those who planted flags from foreign battlefields to the surface of the moon; a creed at the core of every American whose story is not yet written: yes, we can. Yes, we did.

For the playwright JT Rogers, this is the true triumph of Hamilton – giving today’s multiracial America a founding myth in which minorities have as much right to be there as Wasps. It is political “in the sense of reclaiming the polis” – the body of citizens who make up a country. “The little village we live in outside the city, everyone in the middle school knows the score verbatim,” Rogers adds. “They recite it endlessly and at length, like Homer.”

the full long-read here!

#hamilton #meta #u.s. politics #obama #new statesman #history #shakespeare

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overthinkingfeathers · 7 years

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So I finished the main questline of Pillars of Eternity semi-accidentally. By which I mean I finished it 100% on purpose but assumed the game would continue on afterwards, and I could finish DLC and a few outstanding quests. Given that that is not the case, I have reset to a few hours before the end and am finishing up all those other things. But since I did the end, I’m going to talk about it.

To be totally honest, I didn’t entirely understand the primary religious conflict at the end. I’m hoping the second journey through will clear that up. Because from what I understand, it’s this: -Lots of people have lots of different religions, wars over this. -Highly advanced civilization decides they will find the real gods to end all these wars. -They find there are no gods, decide to literally create some, spread that religion as the one true one. -Others find out they’re made up, lose that war... and as far as I can tell, everyone in modern times has been successfully converted to that one religion.

I get why the Watcher is involved in all this. Betraying your lover (in my gamestate, anyway) in a former life is going to weigh on you. (Also, I don’t really know why I didn’t think I’d end up betraying her. I sat at the ‘why did you do it’ screen for the longest time. That was terrible.) I get why the revelation that the gods were created by people are a big deal. I don’t get the insistence that this means they’re not real. Because they didn’t create the world as its known, but they still seem to have the powers of a god. They’re still far beyond the capabilities of mortal people. At this point, they are real. Unless they gain power through worship - and I saw nothing indicating that - suddenly deciding they’re not actually gods doesn’t seem like it’s going to accomplish anything other than pissing them off.

Which isn’t to say I agree with creating them at all or with spreading that religion (especially given the terrible way they did so), just that I don’t see what good saying they aren’t gods now accomplishes. Spread their true origins, fine, but they’re still super power beings that can bestow boons or kill a shit ton of people, so nothing’s really changed there. Morally it’s a complicated situation, but practically, it... doesn’t really seem like it is? I don’t know. Maybe my brain is just not getting it or I missed something important.

Assorted other ramblings about my ending:

I sent the souls back to the Hollowborn, as requested by Hylea and also as I intended to do even before that.

Gilded Vale is lawless but alive, which is apparently the best ending it can have, sooo...

Defiance Bay turned out well, with the Crucible Knights reestablishing order, returning to their old ways, Heritage Hill being repopulated (without zombies), and animancy being acquitted.

Caed Nua is a bastion and beacon of I built everything. This is only getting a point because the wiki lists one of the ending options as, “Caed Nua is kinda rubbish,” and that is my favorite end title description ever.

Pallegina was banished and joined the Kind Wayfarers. All of her endings seem kinda shitty, tbh. Either she gets banished, she lives in personal disappointment for doing what she believed was wrong, or a war happens. I guess this one was what I’d consider best, but it’s not really happy.

Hiravais was content. Apparently I pushed him along the route of Wael. I have no real recollection of this, but this is a better ending than ‘fights his way back into his clan then leaves to wander anyway.’

Edér became the mayor of Dyrford. Yay Edér. At least one person got a unilaterally happy ending.

I supported Aloth’s whole ‘maybe the evil organization is evil’ revelation and thus he dedicated his life to destroying it. Which is a worthy goal and all, and I’m proud of him, but two out of three of his endings include the line “long and lonely task,” and the other involves him literally killing himself, and Jesus Christ, let my snarky elf friend be happy.

Kana sucked as an academic but did great as a foreign influence back home, so good for you, Kana. I’m glad I didn’t accidentally crush your spirit or get you killed, because apparently everyone needs a shitty ending possibility.

The Grieving Mother sat in an abandoned village, peacefully awaiting births that never happened, and uh, that’s awful. I’m hoping my reset is far enough back that I can be like no, I’m sorry, your life will only be fulfilling later if I doom you to terrible memories, so sorry.

Durance committed suicide. What the fuck. My reset is definitely far enough back to fix that, though the sole alternative is ‘wanders broke and angry, seeking revenge against his goddess,’ so it’s not like he’s going to end up happy.

Who hurt you, Pillars writers?

Sagani spent 20 more years before fulfilling her quest, because I suck and completely just missed the Pearlwood Bluffs. Like, I just didn’t scroll down on the map. Sorry, Sagani. At least you didn’t die! That was an option too!

I already fixed that. I went with family rather than community building, since that seemed to be the way she was personally leaning.

Apparently the game actually takes into account whether you picked up that baby or not. I had not, but you better believe I have now. Mind you, this is a moderately grey zone, given that I had already poisoned the person trying to kill her, but I’m going to rationalize it as I don’t know how long the poison took, I was just going to take the baby somewhere safe so he couldn’t hurt her, and the only person I could give the baby to forced a fight, so now I have a baby.

By moderately grey I mean I have to jump through a lot of hoops to pretend this isn’t just a flat out bad thing, but whatever. Apparently Pillars 2 imports your potential baby into your new world state, and I am having a goddamn baby adventuring with me.

Also, I’m not far into the White March, but I would like to note that this game features both accidental baby acquisition and being canonly stuck in a blizzard for 3 days. These are fanfic trope scenarios, and they’re canon. Amazing.

#Pillars of Eternity liveblogging #Pillars of Eternity

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angelofberlin2000 · 8 years

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Photograph: Jake Chessum

Adam Driver and Andrew Garfield on Martin Scorsese’s new film Silence

Silence stars Adam Driver and Andrew Garfield talk about the cathartic experience of shooting Martin Scorsese’s epic

By Joshua Rothkopf

Posted: Tuesday December 20 2016

“ ‘What’s that bird?’ ” It’s maddeningly early for a Sunday morning, but Adam Driver, gleeful with his coffee and smoked salmon in the near-empty Brooklyn Heights café that’s his local favorite, is setting a scene. “We were shooting in the hills of Taiwan, and Marty kept hearing a certain kind of bird, asking everyone around, ‘What’s that bird sound I’m hearing? What’s that bird?’ It was really important for him to get it. And I don’t remember that bird! It was a detail I wasn’t absorbing. But Marty was so open, in the midst of everything, to be aware of how the space was affecting the story.”

Marty is, of course, Martin Scorsese, the high priest of American cinema, maker of Mean Streets, Goodfellas and, occasionally, something that challenges and floors even his most ardent fans. That movie this time around is Silence, the director’s long-cherished passion project come to fruition after nearly 30 years of development. Based on Shusaku Endo’s controversial 1966 novel about faith under fire, the film follows the plight of 17th-century Jesuit missionaries who travel from Portugal to Japan, which was at the time a mystery to the West.

In Scorsese’s execution, Silence is more than just an Oscar contender, more than a masterpiece, even. It’s simply the kind of thing that doesn’t get made anymore. It explores a spiritual agony last probed by Sweden’s mighty director Ingmar Bergman while being swaddled in a smoky fable-like texture that even Akira Kurosawa would have envied. And if you’re wondering if Marty ever found his bird, rest easy: The film’s opening seconds in the darkness build to a deafening roar of chirps, the shriek of a land that won’t be tamed.

“There’s a short list of directors that, if they call—no matter what they’re asking for—you do it,” says Andrew Garfield, leaning in as if confiding a secret, the most obvious one in the world. “And Scorsese is at the top of that list. I had just finished my stint as Spider-Man. I wasn’t aware that it was over yet, but I kind of had that feeling. I was doing a lot of reflecting. That was a really difficult learning process and a wonderful one as well.”

Garfield and Driver make up the emotional core of Silence as a pair of young novitiates who, Heart of Darkness–style, head into the wilderness searching for their missing mentor, who hasn’t been heard from in years. Along the way, they are tested by a brutal regime that doesn’t want their foreign beliefs spread, even as converted Japanese Christians harbor the holy men as fugitives.

But there’s another story here: that of two actors, both 33 years old (Jesus would smile at that), both at a crossroads of success and personal satisfaction. Silence has been their crucible, and they’ve emerged from it hardened and recommitted to chasing their art to a degree that’s noticeable.

Driver, the soulful ex-boyfriend of Lena Dunham’s character on Girls and a brilliant portrayer of millennial squirminess in Noah Baumbach's While We’re Young, now chafes at his popular status as a Bushwickian sex symbol. “I’m kind of mystified by it,” he says, “because a lot of times, I feel disconnected from my generation.” An ex-Marine who arrived at New York’s Juilliard School in 2005 with a strict sense of discipline and a fierce work ethic, Driver has never known what he terms the “shitty-apartment part” of young strugglers (he loves his “gravely quiet” hipster-free neighborhood). Shaking his head, Driver won’t say a word about next year’s Star Wars: Episode VIII, in which his villainous Kylo Ren from The Force Awakens reappears. Instead, he pivots our conversation back to his passion for personal expression, even in a galaxy far, far away: “Because J.J. Abrams and Rian Johnson directed those [Star Wars] movies, they still feel like independent films to me. They don’t sacrifice story for spectacle.” (Before the year is out, Driver will also be seen in Jim Jarmusch’s bus-driver haiku, Paterson—as small and lovely as it gets.)

Garfield, for his part, lashes out at his years toiling in the Marvel megamachine. “There has to be something urgent about the stories we’re telling,” he says, “otherwise we’re a part of the numbing of the culture. I think that was hard, doing the Spider-Man stuff. Because even though I felt an opportunity to do something for young people—adolescents who were going through the confusion of ‘What’s my gift? Who am I in the world?’—it ultimately became about shareholders and McDonald’s. It ended up flattened and made to appeal to everybody. That’s a heartbreaking thing.”

After that heartbreak, Garfield took some time off. He prepared a full year for Silence, training under the tutelage of Father James Martin, a Jesuit friend of Scorsese’s who worked as the film’s consultant. “He became my spiritual director for a year,” says Garfield. “He took me in as if I was training for the priesthood.” That, combined with Scorsese’s own homework assignments (“the most obscure movies, like black-market films that only three people had seen”) and even a 30-day silent retreat with Driver, coaxed a new actor to emerge, one who could take on Mel Gibson’s ferocious war picture Hacksaw Ridge—itself about a deeply religious man challenged by the realities of WWII soldiering—with confidence.

“I think there’s always been a longing in me,” Garfield adds when I ask if he thinks of himself as a spiritual person. “There’s a big hole that needs filling all the time. I mostly search for it in all the wrong places, like we all do: work, success, food, drugs, alcohol, validation. You name it. One of the things I understood in the process of making Silence is that we’re always worshipping something. We’re always devoting ourselves to something, even if we’re not conscious of it. So better to be conscious of it and choose what we’re devoting ourselves to.”

As for the director who inspired his two leads to lose a combined 85 pounds to better portray both literal and religious hunger (Driver looks painfully emaciated in the film), Scorsese himself sounds like the upstart 33-year-old who helmed Taxi Driver during a sweltering New York City summer in 1975. “I guess I’m looking for it for myself,” he tells me on the phone from Los Angeles, of his quest for something higher, a core element of even his most violent and hedonistic films. “I’ve always been very close to religion. I figured if I could pull myself through this picture, I might get a little closer to it, you know? The problem is, how do you act it out?”

Scorsese, Driver and Garfield all describe the birthing of Silence as difficult. Above and beyond the years of looking for funding—Scorsese was first turned on to Endo’s book in 1988 during the controversies over The Last Temptation of Christ—there was the matter of shaping the material into a script, a multidecade task undertaken by frequent Scorsese collaborator Jay Cocks (The Age of Innocence). And then, even with the green light, the Taiwan shoot had its share of miseries.

“It was actually pretty painful,” Scorsese says of one particular scene: a moment when Garfield’s priest, captured by the Japanese and ranting in a haze of religious doubt, comes close to snapping. With its echoes of Raging Bull, specifically when Robert De Niro smashes up a Miami jail cell, the scene is arguably the summit the 74-year-old director has been working up to his entire career.

“The key there was Andrew, because I put two cameras on him and created this atmosphere in which he could just take off—in one take, by the way,” says Scorsese. “And it was—how can I put it?—excruciating. A lot of the stuff in this film was. Excruciating to the point where you feel pain in your back and your stomach and your head. It may have been cathartic, but I gotta say, none of this stuff was enjoyable.”

Driver agrees, saying he fed off the parallels between religion and the leap of faith needed to take on any role seriously. “Acting, a marriage, any relationship where you make a commitment to something—it’s filled with doubt,” he says. “But that’s actually a virtue of Scorsese. He sets an environment for people to take ownership of their parts. He actually hires you for your opinions. He wants you to rebel, to do something unexpected. He’s been thinking about this stuff for 28 years, and still he doesn’t have a ‘right’ way of going about it, which I think is amazing.”

Silence now arrives in a moment of global uncertainty, making it extra timely. A private meeting between Pope Francis and Scorsese’s family led to blessings and a message of hope for the days and months ahead. “He said, ‘Pray for me—I could use it,’ ” recalls the director. But in no small way, Silence already signals a mighty resurrection, even under the guise of a historical epic about religious repression. It’s a long-won triumph for Scorsese and an arrival for its two stars, poised to possibly join the company of cinema’s great tortured souls—the Brandos and the Pacinos. “I want my work to be as deep as it can possibly be,” admits Garfield. “I’m more aware than ever of human potentiality. And I think I need it all.”

#silence #martin scorsese #andrew garfield #adam driver

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networkingdefinition · 5 years

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America Quotes

Official Website: America Quotes

(adsbygoogle = window.adsbygoogle || []).push(); • A citizen of America will cross the ocean to fight for democracy, but won’t cross the street to vote in a national election. – Bill Vaughan • A general dissolution of principles and manners will more surely overthrow the liberties of America than the whole force of the common enemy. While the people are virtuous they cannot be subdued; but when once they lose their virtue then will be ready to surrender their liberties to the first external or internal invader. – Samuel Adams • A lawyer’s either a social engineer or … a parasite on society … A social engineer [is] a highly skilled, perceptive, sensitive lawyer who [understands] the Constitution of the United States and [knows] how to explore its uses in the solving of problems of local communities and in bettering conditions of the underprivileged citizens. – Charles Hamilton Houston • A man of abilities and character, of any sect whatever, may be admitted to any office of public trust under the United States. – Edmund Randolph • After the period of sex-attraction has passed, women have no power in America. – Elizabeth Bisland • Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, brain and spinal cord disorders, diabetes, cancer, at least 58 diseases could potentially be cured through stem cell research, diseases that touch every family in America and in the world. – Rosa DeLauro • Am I emotional? Yes, my first born was murdered. Am I angry? Yes, he was killed for lies and for a PNAC [Project for the New American Century] Neo-Con agenda to benefit Israel. My son joined the Army to protect America, not Israel. Am I stupid? No, I know full well that my son, my family, this nation, and this world were betrayed by George [W.] Bush who was influenced by the neo-con PNAC agenda after 9/11. – Cindy Sheehan • America – it is a fabulous country, the only fabulous country; it is the only place where miracles not only happen, but where they happen all the time. – Thomas Wolfe • America and Islam are not exclusive and need not be in competition. Instead, they overlap, and share common principles of justice and progress, tolerance and the dignity of all human beings. – Barack Obama • America does not go abroad in search of monsters to destroy. – John Quincy Adams • America does to me what I knew it would do: it just bumps me. The people charge at you like trucks coming down on you — no awareness. But one tries to dodge aside in time. Bump! bump! go the trucks. And that is human contact. – D. H. Lawrence • America doesn’t reward people of my age, either in day-to-day life or for their performances. – Meryl Streep • America had often been discovered before Columbus, but it had always been hushed up. – Oscar Wilde • America has never been an empire. We may be the only great power in history that had the chance, and refused – preferring greatness to power and justice to glory. – George W. Bush • America has never been united by blood or birth or soil. We are bound by ideals that move us beyond our backgrounds, lift us above our interests and teach us what it means to be citizens. – George W. Bush • America is a great country, but you can’t live in it for nothing. – Will Rogers • America is a large country and its people have so far not shown much interest in great international problems, among which the problem of disarmament occupies first place today. This must be changed, if only in America’s own interest. The last war has shown that there are no longer any barriers between the continents and that the destinies of all countries are closely interwoven. The people of this country must realize that they have a great responsibility in the sphere of international politics. The part of passive spectator is unworthy of this country and is bound in the end to lead to disaster all round. – Albert Einstein • America is a large friendly dog in a small room. Every time it wags its tail it knocks over a chair. – Arnold J. Toynbee • America is a mistake, a giant mistake. – Sigmund Freud • America is a Nation with a mission – and that mission comes from our most basic beliefs. We have no desire to dominate, no ambitions of empire. Our aim is a democratic peace – a peace founded upon the dignity and rights of every man and woman. – George W. Bush • America is a nation with many flaws, but hopes so vast that only the cowardly would refuse to acknowledge them. – James A. Michener • America is a passionate idea or it is nothing. America is a human brotherhood or it is chaos. – Max Lerner • America is a tune. It must be sung together. – Gerald Stanley Lee • America is a young country with an old mentality. – George Santayana • America is another name for opportunity. – Ralph Waldo Emerson • America is becoming so educated that ignorance will be a novelty. I will belong to a select few. – Will Rogers • America is false to the past, false to the present, and solemnly binds herself to be false to the future. – Frederick Douglass • America is God’s Crucible, the great Melting-Pot where all the races of Europe are melting and re-forming! – Israel Zangwill • America is great, because America is free. – Dan Quayle • America is just downright mean. – Michelle Obama • America is my country and Paris is my hometown. – Gertrude Stein • America is the country where you can buy a lifetime supply of aspirin For one dollar and use it up in two weeks. – John Barrymore • America is the most grandiose experiment the world has seen, but, I am afraid, it is not going to be a success. – Sigmund Freud • America is the only country ever founded on the printed word. – Marshall McLuhan • America is the only idealistic nation in the world. – Woodrow Wilson • America is the only nation in history which miraculously has gone directly from barbarism to degeneration without the usual interval of civilization. – Georges Clemenceau • America is the sum of all our journeys as we search for our national community and our national culture. – Paul Tsongas • America is therefore the land of the future, where, in the ages that lie before us, the burden of the World’s History shall reveal itself. – Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel • America is too great for small dreams. – Ronald Reagan • America makes prodigious mistakes, America has colossal faults, but one thing cannot be denied: America is always on the move. She may be going to Hell, of course, but at least she isn’t standing still. – e. e. cummings • America must not ignore the threat gathering against us. Facing clear evidence of peril, we cannot wait for the final proof, the smoking gun that could come in the form of a mushroom cloud. – George W. Bush • America was not built on fear. America was built on courage, on imagination and an unbeatable determination to do the job at hand. – Harry S. Truman • America will never be destroyed from the outside. If we falter and lose our freedoms, it will be because we destroyed ourselves. – Abraham Lincoln • America will never run… And we will always be grateful that liberty has found such brave defenders. – George W. Bush • America will never seek a permission slip to defend the security of our people. – George W. Bush • America would be a better place if leaders would do more long-term thinking. – Wilma Mankiller • America! America! God shed His grace on thee. – Katharine Lee Bates • America, how can I write a holy litany in your silly mood? – Allen Ginsberg • America, I don’t think you can change history.” All the same, his expression looked hopeful. “Sure we can. Besides, who’d ever know about it but you and me? – Kiera Cass • America, thou half-brother of the world; with something good and bad of every land. – Philip James Bailey • America, we are better than these last eight years. We are a better country than this. – Barack Obama • America… just a nation of two hundred million used car salesmen with all the money we need to buy guns and no qualms about killing anybody else in the world who tries to make us uncomfortable. – Hunter S. Thompson • America’s one of the finest countries anyone ever stole. – Bobcat Goldthwait • American consumers have no problem with carcinogens, but they will not purchase any product, including floor wax, that has fat in it. – Dave Barry • American Education has a long history of infatuation with fads and ill-considered ideas. The current obsession with making our schools work like a business may be the worst of them, for it threatens to destroy public education. Who will Stand up to the tycoons and politicians and tell them so? – Diane Ravitch • American soldiers in battle don’t fight for what some president says on T.V., they don’t fight for mom, apple pie, the American flag…they fight for one another. – Hal Moore • American style is about confidence, independence, diversity and free expression. – Tommy Hilfiger • Americans need to understand that they have lost their country. The rest of the world needs to recognize that Washington is not merely the most complete police state since Stalinism, but also a threat to the entire world. The hubris and arrogance of Washington, combined with Washington’s huge supply of weapons of mass destruction, make Washington the greatest threat that has ever existed to all life on the planet. Washington is the enemy of all humanity. – Paul Craig Roberts • Americans never quit. – Douglas MacArthur • Americans usually believe that nothing is impossible. – Lawrence Eagleburger • Americans will put up with anything provided it doesn’t block traffic. – Dan Rather • Americans, unhappily, have the most remarkable ability to alchemize all bitter truths into an innocuous but piquant confection and to transform their moral contradictions, or public discussion of such contradictions, into a proud decoration, such as are given for heroism on the field of battle. – James A. Baldwin • America’s abundance was created not by public sacrifices to the common good, but by the productive genius of free men who pursued their own personal interests and the making of their own private fortunes. They did not starve the people to pay for America’s industrialization. They gave the people better jobs, higher wages, and cheaper goods with every new machine they invented, with every scientific discovery or technological advance- and thus the whole country was moving forward and profiting, not suffering, every step of the way. – Ayn Rand • An asylum for the sane would be empty in America. – George Bernard Shaw • Anti-Americanism from abroad would not be such a problem if Americans were united in standing up for their own country. – Dinesh D’Souza • Any politician who can be elected only by turning Americans against other Americans is too dangerous to be elected. – Thomas Sowell • Any unarmed people are slaves, or are subject to slavery at any given moment. If the guns are taken out of the hands of the people and only the pigs have guns, then it’s off to the concentration camps, the gas chambers, or whatever the fascists in America come up with. One of the democratic rights of the United States, the Second Amendment to the Constitution, gives the people the right to bear arms. However, there is a greater right; the right of human dignity that gives all men the right to defend themselves. – Huey Newton • As Mankind becomes more liberal, they will be more apt to allow that all those who conduct themselves as worthy members of the community are equally entitled to the protections of civil government. I hope ever to see America among the foremost nations of justice and liberality. – George Washington

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jQuery(document).ready(function($) var data = action: 'polyxgo_products_search', type: 'Product', keywords: 'USA', orderby: 'rand', order: 'DESC', template: '1', limit: '20', columns: '4', viewall:'Shop All', ; jQuery.post(spyr_params.ajaxurl,data, function(response) var obj = jQuery.parseJSON(response); jQuery('#thelovesof_usa').html(obj); jQuery('#thelovesof_usa img.swiper-lazy:not(.swiper-lazy-loaded)' ).each(function () var img = jQuery(this); img.attr("src",img.data('src')); img.addClass( 'swiper-lazy-loaded' ); img.removeAttr('data-src'); ); ); );

jQuery(document).ready(function($) var data = action: 'polyxgo_products_search', type: 'Product', keywords: 'United+States', orderby: 'rand', order: 'DESC', template: '1', limit: '20', columns: '4', viewall:'Shop All', ; jQuery.post(spyr_params.ajaxurl,data, function(response) var obj = jQuery.parseJSON(response); jQuery('#thelovesof_united-states').html(obj); jQuery('#thelovesof_united-states img.swiper-lazy:not(.swiper-lazy-loaded)' ).each(function () var img = jQuery(this); img.attr("src",img.data('src')); img.addClass( 'swiper-lazy-loaded' ); img.removeAttr('data-src'); ); ); ); • Be proud to be a decent American rather than a wanker whipping up fear. – Michael D. Higgins • By heritage and by choice, the United States of America will make that stand. – George W. Bush • Christopher Columbus, as everyone knows, is honored by posterity because he was the last to discover America. – James Joyce • Democracy — rule by the people — sounds like a fine thing; we should try it sometime in America. – Edward Abbey • England and America are two countries separated by the same language. – George Bernard Shaw • Everyday, day & night, we hear the lies that September 11th is the worst tragedy, worst accident, and worst crime to ever been committed on American soil. We bear witness that the worst crime, the worst tragedy, that has ever taken place on American soil is not September 11th. It’s not the twin towers. It’s the holocaust that black folks been dealing with for 400 years. – Malik Zulu Shabazz • Everyone should be proud of who they are and where they come from because America is a big melting pot of diverse ethnicities. It’s great to be part of this wonderful country. – Rima Fakih • Fascism will come to America wrapped in a flag. – Sinclair Lewis • From where many of us in the U.K. sit, American politics is hopelessly polarized. All kinds of issues get bundled up into two great heaps. The rest of the world, today and across the centuries, simply doesn’t see things in this horribly oversimplified way. – N. T. Wright • God created war so that Americans would learn geography. – Mark Twain • Happily for America, happily, we trust, for the whole human race, they pursued a new and more noble course. They accomplished a revolution which has no parallel in the annals of human society. – James Madison • I always like to go to Washington D.C. It gives me a chance to visit my money. – Bob Hope • I believe in America. I’m one of those silly flag wavers. – Paul Prudhomme • I believe the most solemn duty of the American president is to protect the American people. If America shows uncertainty and weakness in this decade, the world will drift toward tragedy. This will not happen on my watch. – George W. Bush • I have never been able to look upon America as young and vital but rather as prematurely old, as a fruit which rotted before it had a chance to ripen. – Henry Miller • I have no further use for America. I wouldn’t go back there if Jesus Christ was President. – Charlie Chaplin • I know my own deficiencies, one of which is that I had lived away from America for such a long time. It’s called expatriate – James Hillman • I like America, just as everybody else does. I love America, I gotta say that. But America will be judged. – Bob Dylan • I love America more than any other country in the world, and, exactly for this reason, I insist on the right to criticize her perpetually. – James A. Baldwin • I never thought I’d live to see the day that an American administration would denounce the state of Israel for rebuilding Jerusalem. – Mike Pence • I read in the newspapers they are going to have 30 minutes of intellectual stuff on television every Monday from 7:30 to 8. to educate America. They couldn’t educate America if they started at 6:30. – Groucho Marx • I really want Congress to do its job, the constitutional power that they have, to halt an imperial presidency, to halt this fundamental transformation of America that is making us an unrecognizable mess of a nation at this time. – Sarah Palin • I see America spreading disaster. I see America as a black curse upon the world. I see a long night settling in and that mushroom which has poisoned the world withering at the roots. – Henry Miller • I see America, not in the setting sun of a black night of despair ahead of us, I see America in the crimson light of a rising sun fresh from the burning, creative hand of God. I see great days ahead, great days possible to men and women of will and vision. – Carl Sandburg • I think that Richard Nixon will go down in history as a true folk hero, who struck a vital blow to the whole diseased concept of the revered image and gave the American virtue of irreverence and skepticism back to the people. – William S. Burroughs • I will make such a wonderful India that all Americans will stand in line to get a visa for India – Narendra Modi • I will never relent in defending America – whatever it takes. – George W. Bush • I will speak until I can no longer speak. I will speak as long as it takes, until the alarm is sounded from coast to coast that our Constitution is important, that your rights to trial by jury are precious, that no American should be killed by a drone on American soil without first being charged with a crime, without first being found to be guilty by a court. – Rand Paul • I would rather have a nod from an American, than a snuff- box from an emperor. – Lord Byron • If America ever passes out as a great nation, we ought to put on our tombstone: America died from a delusion she had Moral Leadership. – Will Rogers • If America is to be run by the people, it is the people who must think. And we do not need to put on sackcloth and ashes to think. Nor should our minds work like a sundial which records only sunshine. Our thinking must square against some lessons of history, some principles of government and morals, if we would preserve the rights and dignity of men to which this nation is dedicated. – Herbert Hoover • If we ever forget that we are One Nation Under God, then we will be a nation gone under. – Ronald Reagan • If you say ‘Good Morning’ in America and it’s five past twelve you end up with a lawsuit. – Bernie Ecclestone • If you take advantage of everything that America has to offer, there’s nothing you can’t accomplish. – Geraldine Ferraro • I’m convinced that today the majority of Americans want what those first Americans wanted: A better life for themselves and their children; a minimum of government authority. – Ronald Reagan • Imagine a political system so radical as to promise to move more of the poorest 20% of the population into the richest 20% than remain in the poorest bracket within the decade? You don’t need to imagine it. It’s called the United States of America. – Thomas Sowell • In all their wars against the French they [the Americans] never showed such conduct, attention and perseverance as they do now. – Thomas Gage • In America all too few blows are struck into flesh. We kill the spirit here, we are experts at that. We use psychic bullets and kill each other cell by cell. – Norman Mailer • In America the President reigns for four years, and Journalism governs forever and ever. – Oscar Wilde • In America, sex is an obsession, in other parts of the world it’s a fact. – Marlene Dietrich • In America, through pressure of conformity, there is freedom of choice, but nothing to choose from. – Peter Ustinov • In the past week it has become clear that the vote on the final healthcare bill will be very close. I take this vote with the utmost seriousness. I am quite aware of the historic fight that has lasted the better part of the last century to bring America in line with other modern democracies in providing single payer health care. – Dennis Kucinich • In this springtime of hope, some lights seem eternal; America’s is. – Ronald Reagan • Individualism, the love of enterprise, and the pride in personal freedom, have been deemed by Americans not only as their choicest, but their peculiar and exclusive possessions. – James Bryce • Intellectually I know that America is no better than any other country; emotionally I know she is better than every other country. – Sinclair Lewis • It is impossible for a stranger traveling through the United States to tell from the appearance of the people or the country whether he is in Toledo, Ohio, or Portland, Oregon. Ninety million Americans cut their hair in the same way, eat each morning exactly the same breakfast, tie up the small girls curls with precisely the same kind of ribbon fashioned into bows exactly alike; and in every way all try to look and act as much like all the others as they can. – Alfred Harmsworth, 1st Viscount Northcliffe • It remains an astonishing, disturbing fact that in America – a nation where nearly every new drug is subjected to rigorous scrutiny as a potential carcinogen, and even the bare hint of a substance’s link to cancer ignites a firestorm of public hysteria and media anxiety – one of the most potent and common carcinogens known to humans can be freely bought and sold at every corner store for a few dollars. – Siddhartha Mukherjee • It was wonderful to find America, but it would have been more wonderful to miss it. – Mark Twain • It’s just the way it is. The sky is blue, the sun is bright, and Aspen endlessly loves America. It’s how the world was designed to be. – Kiera Cass • It’s like, how did Columbus discover America when the Indians were already here? What kind of s– is that, but white people’s s–? – Miles Davis • It’s the movies that have really been running things in America ever since they were invented. They show you what to do, how to do it, when to do it, how to feel about it, and how to look how you feel about it. – Andy Warhol • Let’s withdraw from Afghanistan and have the army invade America – that’s the only way we’ll get new schools and roads. – Andy Borowitz • Likewise, I see no shame in writing Captain America or Wolverine. – Mark Millar • Make no mistake about it. These are not ‘kookie’ birds. Right now the greatest player, the big tent on the political scene in America, is called the Tea Party movement. – Dick Armey • May we think of freedom, not as the right to do as we please, but as the opportunity to do what is right. – Peter Marshall • My dream is of a place and a time where America will once again be seen as the last best hope of earth. – Abraham Lincoln • My fellow Americans, ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country. – John F. Kennedy • My understanding is that espionage means giving secret or classified information to the enemy. Since Snowden shared information with the American people, his indictment for espionage could reveal (or confirm) that the US Government views you and me as the enemy. – Ron Paul • No white American ever thinks that any other race is wholly civilized until he wears the white man’s clothes, eats the white man’s food, speaks the white man’s language, and professes the white man’s religion. – Booker T. Washington • Now we Democrats believe that America is still the country of fair play, that we can come out of a small town or a poor neighborhood and have the same chance as anyone else, and it doesn’t matter whether we are black or Hispanic, or disabled or women. – Ann Richards • October is a fine and dangerous season in America. a wonderful time to begin anything at all. You go to college, and every course in the catalogue looks wonderful. – Thomas Merton • Oh Beautiful for smoggy skies, insecticided grain, For strip-mined mountain’s majesty above the asphalt plain. America, America, man sheds his waste on thee, And hides the pines with billboard signs, from sea to oily sea. – George Carlin • On that terrible day, a nation became a neighborhood. All Americans became New Yorkers. – George Pataki • Only Americans can hurt America. – Dwight D. Eisenhower • Our country, the United States of America, may be the worlds largest economy and the worlds only superpower, but we stretch ourselves dangerously thin by taking on commitments like Iraq with only a motley band of allies to share the burden. – John Spratt • Our society distributes itself into Barbarians, Philistines and Populace; and America is just ourselves with the Barbarians quite left out, and the Populace nearly. – Matthew Arnold • Sad will be the day when the American people forget their traditions and their history, and so longer remember that the country they love, the institutions they cherish, and the freedom they hope to preserve, were born from the throes of armed resistance to tyranny, and nursed in the rugged arms of fearless men. – Roger Sherman • She behaves as if she was beautiful. Most American women do. It is the secret of their charm. – Oscar Wilde • Since the conception of our country, America has held that parents, not schools, teachers, and certainly not courts, hold the primary responsibility of educating their children. – John Doolittle • Sitting at the table doesn’t make you a diner, unless you eat some of what’s on that plate. Being here in America doesn’t make you an American. Being born here in America doesn’t make you an American. – Malcolm X • Social media has taken over in America to such an extreme that to get my own kids to look back a week in their history is a miracle, let alone 100 years. – Steven Spielberg • Some Americans need hyphens in their names, because only part of them has come over; but when the whole man has come over, heart and thought and all, the hyphen drops of its own weight out of his name. – Woodrow Wilson • Sometimes people call me an idealist. Well, that is the way I know I am an American. America is the only idealistic nation in the world. – Woodrow Wilson • Terrorist attacks can shake the foundations of our biggest buildings, but they cannot touch the foundation of America. These acts shatter steel, but they cannot dent the steel of American resolve. – George W. Bush • That is the American story. People, just like you, following their passions, determined to meet the times on their own terms. They weren’t doing it for the money. Their titles weren’t fancy. But they changed the course of history and so can you. – Barack Obama • The American fascists are most easily recognized by their deliberate perversion of truth and fact. – Henry A. Wallace • The American Republic will endure until the day Congress discovers that it can bribe the public with the public’s money. – Alexis de Tocqueville • The Americans are violently oral. That’s why in America the mother is all-important and the father has no position at all — isn’t respected in the least. Even the American passion for laxatives can be explained as an oral manifestation. They want to get rid of any unpleasantness taken in through the mouth. – W. H. Auden • The average American may not know who his grandfather was. But the American was, however, one degree better off than the average Frenchman who, as a rule, was in considerable doubt as to who his father was. – Mark Twain • The best kept secret in America today is that people would rather work hard for something they believe in than live a life of aimless diversion. – John W. Gardner • The best way to improve the American workforce in the 21st century is to invest in early childhood education, to ensure that even the most disadvantaged children have the opportunity to succeed along side their more advantaged peers – James Heckman • The business of America is business. – Calvin Coolidge • The chief contribution made by white men of the Americas to the folk songs of the world ——- the cowboy songs of Texas and the West ——- are rhythmed to the walk, the trot, and the gallop of horses. – J. Frank Dobie • The Civil War was fought in 10,000 places, from Valverde, New Mexico, and Tullahoma, Tennessee, to St. Albans, Vermont, and Fernandina on the Florida coast. More than 3 million Americans fought in it, and over 600,000 men, 2 percent of the population, died in it. – Bruce Catton • The evils we experience flow from the excess of democracy. The people do not want virtue, but are the dupes of pretended patriots. – Elbridge Gerry • The great social adventure of America is no longer the conquest of the wilderness but the absorption of fifty different peoples. – Walter Lippmann • The greatness of America lies not in being more enlightened than any other nation, but rather in her ability to repair her faults. – Alexis de Tocqueville • The interesting and inspiring thing about America is that she asks nothing for herself except what she has a right to ask for humanity itself. – Woodrow Wilson • The Jews might have had Uganda, Madagascar, and other places for the establishment of a Jewish Fatherland, but they wanted absolutely nothing except Palestine, not because the Dead Sea water by evaporation can produce five trillion dollars of metaloids and powdered metals; not because the sub-soil of Palestine contains twenty times more petroleum than all the combined reserves of the two Americas; but because Palestine is the crossroads of Europe, Asia, and Africa, because Palestine constitutes the veritable center of world political power, the strategic center for world control. – Nahum Goldmann • The men who have guided the destiny of the United States have found the strength for their tasks by going to their knees. This private unity of public men and their God is an enduring source of reassurance for the people of America. – Lyndon B. Johnson • The only foes that threaten America are the enemies at home, and these are ignorance, superstition and incompetence. – Elbert Hubbard • The rivalry is huge between South Carolina and Clemson. It’s major bragging rights; one of the most intense things I’ve been a part of. – William Perry • The things that have made America great are being subverted for the things that make Americans rich. – Louise Erickson • The United States of America does not have friends; it has interests. – John Foster Dulles • The voice of America has no undertones or overtones in it. It repeats its optimistic catchwords in a tireless monologue that has the slightly metallic sound of a gramophone. – Vance Palmer • The war is coming to the streets of America and if you are not keeping and bearing and practicing with your arms then you will be helpless and you will be the victim of evil. – Ted Nugent • Then join hand in hand, brave Americans all! By uniting we stand, by dividing we fall. – John Dickinson • There is a Providence that protects idiots, drunkards, children and the United States of America. – Otto von Bismarck • There is not a liberal America and a conservative America – there is the United States of America. There is not a black America and a white America and latino America and asian America – there’s the United States of America. – Barack Obama • There is nothing the matter with Americans except their ideals. The real American is all right; it is the ideal American who is all wrong. – Gilbert K. Chesterton • There is nothing wrong with America that cannot be cured with what is right in America. – William J. Clinton • There is nothing wrong with America that faith, love of freedom, intelligence, and energy of her citizens cannot cure. – Dwight D. Eisenhower • There will be over 3,500 killed in USA today from abortion. No flags lowered, no presidents crying. No media hyperventilating. Normal day. – Matt Drudge • Those of us who shout the loudest about Americanism, are all too frequently those who . . . ignore some of the basic principles of Americanism-the right to criticize, the right to hold unpopular beliefs, the right to protest, the right of independent thought. – Margaret Chase Smith • To maintain the ascendancy of the Constitution over the lawmaking majority is the great and essential point on which the success of the [American] system must depend; unless that ascendancy can be preserved, the necessary consequence must be that the laws will supersede the Constitution; and, finally, the will of the Executive, by influence of its patronage, will supersede the laws . . . – John C. Calhoun • Two things in America are astonishing: the changeableness of most human behavior and the strange stability of certain principles. Men are constantly on the move, but the spirit of humanity seems almost unmoved. – Alexis de Tocqueville • Unemployment is down, confidence is up, DOW 5,000 above Bush – or as Republicans put it, let’s talk about gay people and abortion! – Bill Maher • We can dream of an America, and a world, in which love and not money are civilization’s bottom line. – Martin Luther King, Jr. • We don’t want an America that is closed to the world. What we want is a world that is open to America. – George H. W. Bush • We have no desire to be the world’s policeman. But America does want to be the world’s peacemaker. – Jimmy Carter • We need an America with the wisdom of experience. But we must not let America grow old in spirit. – Hubert H. Humphrey • We will send ships and Marines as soon as possible for the protection of American life and property. – Theodore Roosevelt • Well, the way things are going, aside from wheat and auto parts, America’s biggest export is now the Oscar. – Billy Crystal • Were the Soviet Union to sink tomorrow under the waters of the ocean, the American military-industrial establishment would have to go on, substantially unchanged, until some other adversary could be invented. Anything else would be an unacceptable shock to the American economy. – George F. Kennan • What is the essence of America? The essence of America is finding and maintaining that perfect, delicate balance between freedom “to” and freedom “from.” – Marilyn vos Savant • What the people want is very simple – they want an America as good as its promise. – Barbara Jordan • What we need are critical lovers of America – patriots who express their faith in their country by working to improve it. – Hubert H. Humphrey • What you have to do is enter the fiction of America, enter America as fiction. It is, indeed, on this fictive basis that it dominates the world. – Jean Baudrillard • What, then, is this new man, the American? They are a mixture of English, Scotch, Irish, French, Dutch, Germans, and Swedes. From this promiscuous breed, that race, now called Americans, have arisen. – J. Hector St. John de Crevecoeur • Whatever America hopes to bring to pass in the world must first come to pass in the heart of America. – Dwight D. Eisenhower • What’s great about this country is that America started the tradition where the richest consumers buy essentially the same things as the poorest. – Andy Warhol • What’s right about America is that although we have a mess of problems, we have great capacity – intellect and resources – to do some thing about them. – Henry Ford • When fascism comes to the United States it will be wrapped in the American flag and will claim the name of 100-percent Americanism – Sinclair Lewis • When politicians start talking about large groups of their fellow Americans as ‘enemies,’ it’s time for a quiet stir of alertness. Polarizing people is a good way to win an election, and also a good way to wreck a country. – Molly Ivins • When did it become something of shame or ridicule to be a self-made man in America? – Glenn Beck • With few exceptions, democracy has not brought good government to new developing countries. What Asians value may not necessarily be what Americans or Europeans value. Westerners value the freedoms and liberties of the individual. As an Asian of Chinese cultural backround, my values are for a government which is honest, effective and efficient. – Lee Kuan Yew • Workers come to America to fill jobs unwanted by Americans, but they are staying and they are not going home. – Christopher Bond • Yesterday, December 7, 1941 a date which will live in infamy the United States of America was suddenly and deliberately attacked by naval and air forces of the Empire of Japan… We will gain the inevitable triumph so help us God. – Franklin D. Roosevelt • Yet America is a poem in our eyes; its ample geography dazzles the imagination, and it will not wait long for metres. – Ralph Waldo Emerson • You know there are very few Marxists left in the world… they’re all in American universities. – Milton Friedman • You may be sure that the Americans will commit all the stupidities they can think of, plus some that are beyond imagination. – Charles de Gaulle • You, the Spirit of the Settlement! … Not understand that America is God’s crucible, the great melting-pot where all the races of Europe are melting and re-forming! Here, you stand, good folk, think I, when I see them at Ellis Island, here you stand in your fifty groups, with your fifty languages and histories, and your fifty blood hatreds and rivalries. – Israel Zangwill

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equitiesstocks · 5 years

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America Quotes

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reviewape-blog · 6 years

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RMAX Primal Stress

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(function ($) { var $self = $('.adace-loader-5c350fb7e1146'); var $wrapper = $self.closest('.adace-slot-wrapper'); "use strict"; var adace_load_5c350fb7e1146 = function(){ var viewport = $(window).width(); var tabletStart = 601; var landscapeStart = 801; var tabletEnd = 961; var content = ''; var unpack = true; if(viewport=tabletStart && viewport=landscapeStart && viewport=tabletStart && viewport=tabletEnd){ if ($wrapper.hasClass('.adace-hide-on-desktop')){ $wrapper.remove(); } } if(unpack) { $self.replaceWith(decodeURIComponent(content)); } } if($wrapper.css('visibility') === 'visible' ) { adace_load_5c350fb7e1146(); } else { //fire when visible. var refreshIntervalId = setInterval(function(){ if($wrapper.css('visibility') === 'visible' ) { adace_load_5c350fb7e1146(); clearInterval(refreshIntervalId); } }, 999); } })(jQuery); Description: “Scott Sonnon’s revolutionary new work Primal Stress clearly and comprehensively explains the impact of stress on the body, and how not only to offset but to optimize it in order to build the best possible life that you can. If you suffer any symptoms due to excessive stress from your job or your lifestyle (and who doesn’t?) you need this book. Even if you don’t think that you suffer due to inordinate stress, you need this book. Basically, if you have a body, you need this book. What you learn from it can change everything. Working in film and TV production comes with a unique set of challenges – punishingly long hours, often unpredictable conditions, and a lot of heavy lifting, both physical and mental – it’s the worst and best job in the world. Nearly 20 years in the business had taken it’s toll on my body – chronic pain from recurring injuries, adrenal exhaustion, and a host of other miseries – and I was sadly considering another way of life, which felt like the end of the world to me. Then I found Scott Sonnon. Using principles I learned through his programs Intu-Flow, Prasara and TACFIT, now crystallized in his groundbreaking book Primal Stress, I’ve been able to regain the inner and outer strength and resilience I need, in order to keep doing the job that I love. I truly can’t thank Scott enough, and I can’t think of any better way of paying my gratitude forward than to recommend his book to everyone I can, so that they may reap the life-changing benefits that I have.” ~ Tanya Lemke, Tooshea Media “Primal Stress is hands-down, the single-best bodyweight training program available today, and I’ve tried almost all of them!” ~ John Sifferman, Professional Online Fitness Reviewer “This is Scott Sonnon’s Magnus Opus! It is his life! Fantastic Coach, fascinating read. Incredible to see all your work weave together like a huge tapestry.” “This is now my #1 recommendation. Condensed joint mobility, power core workout, metabolic waving protocols in bodyweight, and compensatory yoga that flows. It is the TOTAL PACKAGE! The massive knowledge base on stress response and psychological performance = Magnum opus!” “Primal Stress may well be the most complete and intelligent body-weight exercise program ever created. Emphasizing health but taking fitness to an edge FAR beyond the casual needs of any normal citizen, by the time you’ve outgrown and absorbed this you will understand your body and mind at a level absurdly beyond the human norm in a modern society.” ~ Steven Barnes, Best-Selling Author, Screenwriter and Speaker “I truly appreciate your generosity to divulge such useful information to help anyone caring enough and willing enough to thrive in life, regardless of circumstances. Consistently elevating one’s quality of life, you are helping many to be successful as well. This is a GREAT GIFT!” “Primal Stress will take care of ALL of my REHAB as well as STRENGTH GAINS! Highly recommended!” “When I saw the amount of material you’ve been working on I thought I could never afford it even with a discount because it is thousands of dollars of worth of value! So when I saw the price, I couldn’t believe it! You’re still giving it away!!! OMG! Thank you from the bottom of my heart!” “I am in awe of the Work Coach Sonnon has put together. The Revive and the Thrive videos are for EVERYONE, excellent, excellent resource for decreasig tension in the body, even if you never get into the workouts, which are extensive and multi-layered. I STRONGLY recommend you get this program, NOW! It is superb!” ~ Peter Ryan As a practicing Doctor of Chiropractic, a Husband and Father “I finally got done reading the manual. WOW. The workouts are always changing. This is much more refined and very different from your earlier work Scott. I am glad I bought it.Great job on this Scott!” “Inward calm cannot be maintained unless physical strength is constantly and intelligently replenished”, advised Prince Siddhartha. Our physical movement cannot guarantee that we can attain “inward calm” but throughout our history as a species, ancient movement disciplines and modern bodywork have offered a bodily path to develop the inner state of grace. • Why do we not live in a continual state of flow? • What interrupts our natural condition of relaxed readiness and energized vigor? I’ve invested my life asking this question, due to early violent experiences. When my father returned from the Korean War, my family began to disintegrate. My social conflict accelerated as childhood learning disabilities and obesity conflated my already volatile environment. Like many of us, I couldn’t comprehend the “rusting armor” I had adorned. I only felt weighed down more and more with each advancing year. The British novelist Anne Brontë wrote: “All of our talents increase with usage; and every faculty, both good and bad, strengthen by exercise.” Thankfully, persistence is indiscriminate. Whatever we repeat most often, we become. We can harbor regrets of where blind nature of adaptation has unwittingly carried us, or we can revel in the opportunity to deliberately carve our own path. It’s never too late to plot a new course, for, as Napoleon Hill explained: “Patience, persistence and perspiration make an unbeatable combination for success.” Yet, as Brontë alludes, if we will not choose change, change will choose us. If we repeatedly hold trauma, anxiety, desperation, fear, frustration and pain, then, like anything else, we will adapt and strengthen it. It becomes “rusted armor” that only moving differently can heal. The most dramatic influence in our lives, stress, primarily determines our health and fitness, not anything we do. Insufficient sleep, poor nutrition, inadequate hydration, and most relevant to this message, lack of mobility, are not individually the problem, but merely contributors. They are each stressors, which accumulate. Like a tsunami, once stress crests over a particular threshold, it floods devastation throughout our lives. This flood metaphor held great insight for me. Unlike others in the birthing field of stress physiology, I didn’t ask how to build higher levees to protect against the swollen waters. I asked, how we recover when our levees break and are overrun. Where others sought to become tougher (able to resist higher floods), I sought to become more resilient (able to recover when the levees broke no matter how high or strongly we build them). And this became my research filter for one simple reason… Unless we know how to recover from failure, we cannot resist it. We cannot become tougher, until we become more resilient. Like a tree, the depth of our resilient roots determines the strength of our tough trunk and limbs. To stay with the flood metaphor, if we do not know our emergency plan for recovering from our levees breaking and devastating the town, then we cannot effectively build levees to properly protect us. “Fall down seven times. Get up eight.” Martial art gave me a unique opportunity to observe high stress within a controlled and timed crucible. Unlike the chaos of emotional and psychological violence where you may inadvertently become stronger from the experience, martial arts intentionally aim to develop the virtues of resilience and toughness. You learn how to bounce back when you make errors, when you get surprised, or when you do not succeed immediately. Errors, surprise and failure are guarantees, so when they happened, I was given an opportunity to observe a predictable pattern arise. As a national coach and international competitor, I noticed that whenever a fighter would reach their threshold, the stress they were experiencing throughout their lives caused them to be over-whelmed. This event would elicit very specific behaviors: common denominators which coalesced into a method I observed throughout my career. Teaching tactical fitness for the federal government, I noticed the phenomenon from the opposite end of the spectrum: even these veteran trainers were not able to “enter” drills due to common aches, pains and injuries. The pattern emerged: these impediments to their health and performance were adaptations from the stresses of their job. They had become “stress-shaped.”The #1 killer in their world was neither bullets nor knives, but stress-related heart disease. Excessive stress cannibalizes our bodies, erodes our minds, and literally breaks our hearts. Providing these agents with solutions to their occupational stress was not merely changing lives. It was potentially saving them. For the past twenty years, I’ve kept my head down working with government agencies, military outfits, air and marine offices, fire rescue departments, and of course my own discipline of martial arts. The revelations they provided galvanized me to look at the health statistics outside of the tactical community. You can imagine my shock when I learned that the #1 killer in the world outside of the high-stress world of tactical response was also stress-related heart disease. So, looking back through my archives, and studying new subjects, I observed the same set of predictable behavioral patterns when beset by excessive stress: the same common aches, pains and injuries (as well as the same set of stress-induced attitudes.) Implementing my discoveries with the general public, across a broad demographic sample, I found identical relief and empowered physical potential in each of them.Stress affects us all in the same unless we become aware of: 1. the genetically encoded mechanisms to Revive our relaxed readiness from the reflexes stress induces, 2. the powerful biomechanics that give us our optimal strength and condition to Survive stress, and 3. the unique neurological elegance that causes us to Thrive under positive stress, like no other creature on the planet. Primal Stress represents the culmination of the above lifetime of experiences, study, research and development.” Scott Sonnon, World Champion, Master of Sport, USA National Team Coach, Fitness Consultant for Federal Government Agencies www.rmaxinternational.comwww.flowcoach.tv * The above is a symbolic depiction of the product’s content. For illustration purposes only. The complete product’s content comes in a digital/downloadable format. ** iPhone and Audio player are not included. *** PLEASE NOTE *** >>> YOUR BROWSER COOKIES MUST BE ENABLED >> YOUR BROWSER COOKIES MUST BE ENABLED

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ultralifehackerguru-blog · 6 years

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New Post has been published on http://www.lifehacker.guru/this-winters-best-nonfiction-reads/

This Winter’s Best Nonfiction Reads

New books from Jill Abramson, Kathleen Collins, and Hanif Abdurraqib offer fresh takes on today’s issues.

Reading List

This Winter’s Best Nonfiction Reads

1/8

From Simon and Schuster.

Merchants of Truth: The Business of News and the Fight for Facts by Jill Abramson

In her former post as New York Times executive editor, Jill Abramson made history as the first woman to hold the title in the Times’s 160-year history. Fittingly: as a journalist and author, Abramson’s own work has often been concerned with issues of sex and gender, including her 1986 book, Where They Are Now, which describes the experiences of the 70 women in Harvard’s class of ‘74—Harvard is Abramson’s alma mater—and considers whether they went on to enjoy the same opportunities and success as their male classmates, and Strange Justice: The Selling of Clarence Thomas, co-written with Jane Mayer in 1994. Now, in Merchants of Truth (Simon & Schuster), Abramson sets her eyes on an industry she knows well: the news media—specifically, The New York Times, The Washington Post, Vice Media, and BuzzFeed. She examines how the companies regained their urgency and mission in the face of recent political upheavals and the increased presence of Facebook and Google, asking the end-all question of whether an informed press can stand its ground. (Amazon)

2/8

From Harper Collins.

Notes from a Black Woman’s Diary by Kathleen Collins

“To be this good and yet to be ignored is shameful, but her rediscovery is a great piece of luck for us,” says Zadie Smith of the late Kathleen Collins, whose literary work, like Lucia Berlin’s, went under-appreciated throughout her lifetime. In 2016, nearly 30 years after her death, Collins burst onto the literary scene with the posthumous publication of her story collection, Whatever Happened to Interracial Love? Now, a new collection of the author’s work—diary entries, screenplays, scripts, and fiction—published by Ecco and edited by Collins’s daughter, Nina Lorez Collins, displays the author’s unique, evocative style: “In the crucible of our family my sister burned like molten steel. Once I saw her arms outspread her legs hanging limp and useless wet saliva dripping from her tongue. I screamed they surrounded her lifted her onto the sheets where she convulsed for hours . . . ” begins the very first story in the collection, titled “Scapegoat Child.” The book sheds light on Collins, a pioneer black playwright, civil-rights activist, educator, and filmmaker—Collins’s film, Losing Ground, a portrayal of a black female intellectual, is one of the first features by a black woman in America—and includes her keen, thoughtful insights into marriage, motherhood, race, and the African-American experience. (Amazon)

3/8

From Riverhead.

The Heartbeat of Wounded Knee: Native America from 1890 to the Present by David Treuer

At the 2018 Global Climate Action Summit in San Francisco this past September, former U.S. Vice President Al Gore said, in an interview with Bloomberg Businessweekeditor Joel Weber, “Some people go straight from denial to despair without pausing on the intermediate step of actually addressing and solving the problem.” He was, of course, referring to climate change, but author David Treuer strikes a similar note in his new book, The Heartbeat of Wounded Knee (Riverhead)—a sweeping history of Native American life from the Wounded Knee massacre to the present—disputing the commonly held belief that the infamous 1890 massacre destroyed the Native American population and spirit. Treuer, whose mother is an Ojibwe Indian and who grew up on the reservation before leaving to attend Princeton, presents a more nuanced and hopeful vision of the past and future of Native Americans: “I cannot shake the belief that the ways in which we tell the story of our reality shapes that reality. . . . And I worry that if we tell the story of the past as a tragedy we consign ourselves to a tragic future,” Treuer writes, echoing Gore. “As much as our past was shaped by the whims and violence of an evolving America, America, in turn, has been shaped by us.” (Amazon)

4/8

From Flatiron.

The Pope: Francis, Benedict, and the Decision that Shook the World by Anthony McCarten

The Pope (Flatiron) follows Pope Benedict XVI’s largely unprecedented 2013 decision to resign (the last resignation was about 700 years ago) and the Church’s decision—in many ways equally shocking—to fill the post with Argentina’s moderate Cardinal Jorge Bergoglio. For the first time since 1415, the world now had two living popes, notes author Anthony McCarten, the Academy Award-nominated screenwriter of The Theory of Everything and Darkest Hour (The Pope, too, is soon to be a motion picture, starring Anthony Hopkins and Jonathan Pryce). The book explores Benedict and Francis’s experiences growing up in war-torn Germany and Argentina, respectively, as well as the ongoing sexual abuse scandal rocking the Church, and provides a compelling look at life and politics in the Vatican today. (Amazon)

5/8

From Henry Holt.

The Empire and the Five Kings: America’s Abdication and the Fate of the World by Bernard-Henri Lévy

The acclaimed French philosopher is the author of several books including War, Evil, and the End of History (2004) and Public Enemies: Dueling Writers Take on Each Other and the World (2011), which he co-wrote with French author, filmmaker, and poet Michel Houellebecq. (Tangentially: Houellebecq’s novel Submission—describing a futuristic France where a Muslim party rules the country according to Islamic law—was published on January 7, 2015, the date of the Charlie Hebdo shooting in Paris; on that same date, a cartoon of Houellebecq ominously appeared on the cover page of Charlie Hebdo with the caption “The Predictions of Wizard Houellebecq.”) In his new book, The Empire and the Five Kings (Henry Holt), Bernard-Henri Lévy turns his lens on America, looking at the U.S.’s withdrawal from world leadership and exploring the rising powers—Russia, China, Turkey, Iran, and Sunni radical Islamism—who seek to fill the vacuum left behind. (Amazon)

6/8

From Harper.

Parkland: Birth of a Movement by Dave Cullen

In 2009, Dave Cullen’s book Columbine, 10 years in the making and detailing the 1999 school shooting, was published. Not even a decade later, and Parkland (Harper), an extension of an article on the Parkland school shooting which Cullen wrote for the October 2018 issue of Vanity Fair, is dedicated to the 17 people who were killed during the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School shooting and to the March for Our Lives kids. The book is a result of nearly 10 months spent shadowing the Marjory Stoneman Douglas students who gave birth to the Never Again movement. “They were relentless,” Cullen writes in the prologue to his book, “frequently racing around the country in opposite directions. That was their secret weapon: waging this battle on so many fronts with a host of different voices, perspectives, and talents—healing each other as they fought.” Cullen has also spent the last 19 years following two gay soldiers for a book about their lives, a project interrupted on Valentine’s Day of 2018 for the Vanity Fairarticle and, now, a book on the Parkland kids’ amazing achievements. (Amazon)

7/8

From University of Texas Press.

Go Ahead in the Rain: Notes to A Tribe Called Quest by Hanif Abdurraqib

“This is the third book by Hanif Abdurraqib,” reads the cover of Go Ahead in the Rain(University of Texas Press). “It is a love letter to a group, a sound, and an era.” Go Ahead in the Rain is more than just an homage to A Tribe Called Quest, though; it’s more like a reckoning. The result is a critical examination of the group—their message and history—as well as a musical memoir of sorts, and an exploration of the lasting impact music can have on the soul. “In the beginning, from somewhere south of anywhere I come from, lips pressed the edge of a horn, and a horn was blown,” writes Abdurraqib in his opening chapter, “The Paths of Rhythm,” tracing musical influence to his roots: “In the beginning before the beginning, there were drums, and hymns, and a people carried here from another here, and a language stripped and a new one learned, with the songs to go with it.” (Amazon)

8/8

From David Zwirner Books.

David Zwirner: 25 Years with contributions by Richard Shiff, Robert Storr, and David Zwirner

Offering archival imagery from the New York City art gallery’s early days, through its expansion to the Chelsea and Upper East Side neighborhoods and eventually to London, David Zwirner—published on the gallery’s 25-year anniversary—chronicles its growth and development through the lens of the artists who have shaped it (Yayoi Kusama,Jeff Koons, and Lisa Yuskavage, to name only a few). The book features contributions from the art historian Richard Shiff, the renowned curator and academic Robert Storr,and founder David Zwirner himself, and offers insights into the gallery’s substantial growth, attributable to its long-term commitment to artists. The book is published by David Zwirner Books, a further testament to the gallery’s expansion; in 2014, Zwirner founded the stand-alone publishing house, which has since released catalogues, monographs, historical surveys, and books on various artists and their work. (Amazon) | (David Zwirner Books)

(C)

#Book #Lifestyle #reading list

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deadpresidents · 2 years

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Any books you'd particularly recommend outside of US/Presidential history?

I always will take opportunities like this question to recommend Charles Emmerson's 2019 book, Crucible: The Long End of the Great War and the Birth of a New World, 1917-1924 (BOOK | KINDLE). I know it'll sound like hyperbole, but I am not exaggerating: it's one of the best books I've ever read, if not the best. It has stayed with me ever since I finished it, largely because of how absolutely riveting Emmerson's writing style is. I don't know if I've ever read a single book that has told so many incredible stories about so many remarkable people and so many fascinating places. And it does so without ever losing its overall focus or confusing the reader. I love this book and every time I see it on one of my bookshelves I get jealous that I can't read it for the first time over-and-over again.

Another book that immediately comes to mind is Lawrence Wright's Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood, and the Prison of Belief (BOOK | KINDLE), which I'm sure many others would back me up on. I'm a huge fan of all of Lawrence Wright's work, so you can't go wrong with any of his other books, particularly The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11 (BOOK | KINDLE) and The Terror Years: From Al-Qaeda to the Islamic State (BOOK | KINDLE), both of which are journalism at its very best. And I understand you asked about books that didn't have anything to do with the Presidency, but it would be criminal if I didn't also suggest Wright's excellent history of the 1978 Camp David Accords between Israel and Egypt, Thirteen Days in September: Carter, Begin, and Sadat at Camp David (BOOK | KINDLE). The difficult peace negotiations between President Carter, Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin, and Egyptian President Anwar Sadat are detailed so intimately that Wright originally began writing it as a play, and the storytelling remains just as vivid as if it were being performed on a stage.

By no means is that a complete list of suggestions, but those are the first books that came to mind when reading your question. But, seriously, don't hesitate to read Charles Emmerson's Crucible ASAP!!!

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swipestream · 6 years

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New Release Roundup, 2 June 2018: Fantasy and Adventure

The northern frontier of Britannia, a magical school, a conquered city, and Manly Wade Wellman’s Sgt. “Bible” Jaeger feature in this week’s roundup of the newest releases in fantasy and adventure.

Desperate Measures (The Valens Legacy #8) – Jan Stryvant

Things are starting to heat up for Sean and for some of his allies as well. The Sacramento Vestibulum council is starting to act in ways that no one had anticipated, and the Gradatim national council is by no means standing idly by either. When several of the councils decide to ban together in a move to eradicate Sean’s followers and remove him as well, Sean has no choice other than to try and teach them a painful lesson.

But those aren’t all the problems that Sean now has to deal with. More and more people are counting on him as the days go by and the burdens he must shoulder are quickly growing. Between the magical work he must do, the people he must lead, the battles he has to fight, and the money he needs to earn, Sean barely has time for his wives, much less himself these days.

And if dealing with the magic users isn’t enough, there are some very ‘mundane’ issues on the horizon that he may soon find himself dealing with as well.

Embers of Empire (Ava’s Crucible #2) – Mark Goodwin

America has fallen and Ava’s band of misfits is all that stands between freedom and absolute tyranny.

Political division in the United States has reached the boiling point and the Second American Civil War is well underway. Communist agitators have been successful in their efforts to intimidate voters from key states and steal the election. A far-left socialist candidate has seized the reins of power and his designs against the republic are absolute. With a sympathetic congress, he will sign in sweeping bans on firearms, criminalize free speech, and institute a new government agency to root out dissenters.

Ava’s group pledges to launch an insurgency campaign against the occupying force in Texas, but they’ll have to watch out for those who have been tasked with purging the patriots. Her team cannot fail in their mission to liberate Texas. If Texas falls, America’s demise is all but certain.

The Encircling Sea (Vindolanda #2) – Adrian Goldsworthy

Flavius Ferox, Briton turned Roman centurion, is charged with keeping Rome’s empire intact. But from his base at Vindolanda on the northern frontier of Britannia, he feels enemies closing in on him from all sides.

Ambitious leaders await the chance to carve out empires of their own. While men nearer at hand speak in whispers of war and the destruction of Rome.

And now new threats are reaching Ferox’s ears. Stories about the boat-dwelling men of the night, who have cursed the land and only come ashore to feast on men’s flesh.

These are just rumours for now. But Ferox knows that rumours stem from truth. And that no one on this isle is safe from the great, encircling sea…

The Family Shame (The Zero Enigma #4) – Christoper G. Nuttall

Isabella Rubén is a traitor – at twelve years old.

Disgraced, abandoned by her friends and shunned by her family, Isabella is sent into exile with scant hope of returning to her former home. Her destination, Kirkhaven Hall; a stone mansion miles from civilisation, inhabited only by a pair of older exiles. Existence as she knew it is over.

But as she tries to settle into Kirkhaven Hall, and a life far from the one she enjoyed before her fall from grace, she discovers that the hall has secrets. Intruders on the grounds, ghostly shadows moving at night …

… and a plot that may destroy everything she once held dear.

Hunted (The Oddyssey of Nath Dragon #4) – Craig Halloran

Nath, Darkken and Maefon’s relationships grow stronger and they become quite the formidable band of heroes. Still taken in by the deception, Nath journeys with his new companions across Nalzambor to the town of Old Hen. It is there that they begin a desperate search in a bizarre gargantuan crypt guarded by the undead. Within, they hope to find the secret of Dragon Steel, that can be turned into a weapon, that can kill anything.

Brenwar, Slivver and Master Elween pull their forces together in order to track Nath down. Can they find him before Lord Darkken’s deception takes a complete hold on Nath? Will they be able to reveal the insidious Lord of the Dark in the Day’s deception? Or will Nath set his sights on taking over Nalzambor with his brother?

Hunter’s Oath (Changeling Blood #2) – Glynn Stewart

Jason Kilkenny is a quarter-human Vassal of the Queen of the Fae and the neutral arbiter of supernatural affairs around the Fae Court in the Canadian city of Calgary. He has spent half a year building relationships with the existing power structure–but all of that is thrown into chaos when the Fae leadership dictates that Calgary’s Court split into Seelie and Unseelie factions. Backed by the highest authority, the new Lord Andrell is there to build an Unseelie Court from nothing, and he will brook no interference, no challenges.

Meanwhile, a rogue Fae launches a vicious slaughter at Calgary’s largest public event, and Jason is dragged into an investigation and pursuit of a monster far more powerful than he is. The rogue’s Unseelie heritage brings him into conflict with Lord Andrell, and the city’s peace is threatened.

One wrong step could unleash civil war between the new Courts and Jason’s own secrets could lead to lighting the embers of a civil war amongst all Fae–embers that have slumbered since before his birth.

If only he knew what those secrets were…

Magna Carta (The Border Knight #4) – Griff Hosker

The Earl of Cleveland has managed to put himself in King John’s good graces just at the time when other barons decide to rebel. They seek more land and power. The newly appointed Earl is caught in the middle. When the Scots begin to raid once more Sir Thomas is forced to rally the loyal knights of the north and repel them. Following the actual history which led to the Magna Carta and beyond this fast-moving novel moves from Scotland to Wales and Northampton and Lincoln. It culminates in the battle of Lincoln 1217 when the French army attempted to conquer England.

So long as the Earl and William Marshal stand shoulder to shoulder with the boy king, Henry III, then England will be safe!

Party of Assassins – Steven Maurer

The thing about war is that life still goes on.

As rival princes ravage across Aeterna, mustering armies to vie for the throne of the Nutearean Empire, Xanthe’s main concern is getting a date for the upcoming Festival of Favors. Hard for a poor scholar’s daughter, who sees nothing in her looks that would ever attract a suitable boy.

Yet even in the relative safety of northern Thule, the southern interregnum brings danger. Fanatics rise when rulers fall. The Curate preaches that ancient technologies weren’t lost due to apocalyptic battles, but seized as divine punishment for mortals usurping the authority to shape life. Some schismatic zealots go further. Against the law, they murder ‘witches’ – girls with mysterious talents engineered into their bloodlines – hoping to cleanse mankind of its sins.

And Xanthe has a secret…

A Sellsword’s Wrath (Seven Virtues #2) – Jacob Peppers

Aaron Envelar thought a sellsword’s life was as dangerous as any life could be. He was wrong.

Trapped in a conquered city with a reward on their heads, Aaron and his companions must find a way to elude the soldiers pursuing them while he struggles to understand his bond with Co, a magical creature of myth and the Virtue of Compassion. There is power within the bond, power that could help him protect his friends, if he’s lucky enough to master it before the darkness within the bond consumes him.

But luck, Aaron knows, is a blade reached for in the dark, the man who grasps it as likely to bleed for his trouble as find the handle.

Stalked by Belgarin’s soldiers, Aaron and his companions struggle to find allies before it’s too late. But Belgarin’s army is not the only danger they face, and even should they escape, even should Aaron master his bond with a legendary creature of magic, they may still fail. They may still die.

For there are other legends in the world, other magic. And not all legends are good ones. Not all magic is benign.

Tales of Anyar (Destiny’s Crucible #5) – Olan Thorensen

The Destiny’s Crucible series chronicles the incredible adventure of Joseph Colsco, a college student of no particular importance, who is thrust into an unimaginable fate by an accident that couldn’t happen—but did. Cast naked on the planet Anyar, he forges a new life for himself and rises to prominence and responsibilities he would otherwise never have imagined. However, much is left undone and uncertain. For readers who finished the first four books, many questions were left unanswered, and many stories left untold. This collection of short stories and novellas addresses some of the questions, expands previous books, and points to future directions. The anthology begins not on the planet Anyar but on Earth, with the aftermath of the improbable accident that starts Joseph Colsco on his new life.

Worse Things Waiting – Manly Wade Wellman

Available again for the first time in 45 years, Shadowridge Press is proud to present Manly Wade Wellman’s WORSE THINGS WAITING, one of the cornerstone short story collections in the fantasy and horror genres. Originally published by the legendary imprint Carcosa, Worse Things Waiting gathers 28 stories and two poems, selected from over 100 stories—the cream of nearly a half-century of fiction taken from the pages of Weird Tales, Unknown, Strange Stories and many other Golden Age pulps. Included are such classic tales as—

“The Undead Soldier”- featuring the original ending that Weird Tales considered too horrific to publish.

“The Devil Is Not Mocked” and “The Valley Was Still”- adapted for TV on Night Gallery and The Twilight Zone respectively.

“Coven” and “Fearful Rock”- Wellman’s two novelettes featuring Sgt. “Bible” Jaeger and his battles with diabolical evil in the Civil War south.

—and many more. The very best of Manly Wade Wellman, fully illustrated with over 30 ghoulish drawings by the legendary master of the macabre, Lee Brown Coye.

Cirsova #8 – edited by P. Alexander

For readers who want exciting tales of daring heroes up against impossible odds in exotic settings, the eight issue of Cirsova: Heroic Fantasy and Science Fiction is now hot off the press.

Featuring stories from Nathan Dabney, Jon Zaremba, J.D. Brink, Jim Breyfogle, Amy Power Jansen, Donald Jacob Uitvlugt, Jennifer Povey, Ken McGrath, and J. Manfred Weichsel.

New Release Roundup, 2 June 2018: Fantasy and Adventure published first on https://medium.com/@ReloadedPCGames

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hardtostudy · 7 years

Text

American

THE PLANTATION - South in 1815: growing prosperity, and power.  - Cotton  - Slavery affected also values, customs, laws, class structure and the region’s relationship to the nation and the world  - Shape defined by plantation, cotton, and slaves   MASTER-SLAVE RELATIONSHIP  - Labor and profit was essential  - The labor relation was connected with violence - Slaves bodies, labor, and lives began to be defined as chattel  - Slaves struggled to survive but also to resist and limit the level of exploration  - Essential struggle - turning the system of absolute power and personal domination of the master to a design based on reciprocity — - Slaves had the means and human agency to resist (made their masters observe some limits to the exploitation of their labor  - Master-slave relationship was very asymmetrical   SLAVES  - Legally — chattel property — enslave people — mere extension of the master’s will  - J. H. Hammond:  The cardinal principle of slavery — that the motive is to be regarded as a thing — as an article of prosperity - a chattel personal - obtains as undoubted law in all these southern states.   The slave lives for his master service. His life, his labour, his comforts are all at his masters disposal. Slave is the most valuable property.   - Masters exercised exclusive power of slaves  - Slaves could be sold to pay off their ots, transferred, sold by executors to set states, seized by sheriffs, etc.  - Only 10% of wills did show some human concessions and made a human connection (arrangement to protect their family after their master’s death)  - As a property they were legally devoid of will  - Lives of slaves were full of violence (constant surveillance, sold or transferred, sexual abuse)  - Insistence on the recognition of their humanity, natural rights to family and or their owner’s recognition of these families and communities  - The debate about race was much more heated in the North (Northern institutions and universities looking for scientific proofs).  - Polygenesis — the idea that races were distinct and unequal in origin, Phrenology, etc.   - In South — slavery took the ideological work  - The defense of pro-slavery argument was largely biblical —fixed orders (hierarchy) were the basis of a proper Christian republic.   - J. D. Hammond:  What God ordains and Christ sanctifies should surely command a respect and toleration of Man   PRO-SLAVERY ARGUMENT  - The necessity of Democratic-Republican government (only on the foundations of slavery could true republican society flourish)  - Rejection of liberalism and principles of human equality - W. Harpor 1837:  …is it not palpably near the truth to say that no man was ever born free and no two men were born equal?   PRO-SLAVERY  — Slavery is like a marriage. A benevolent institution to protect the weak  ANTI-SLAVERY  — Slavery is like a marriage. A form of illegitimate authority formed to oppress.   - Analogy of slavery and marriage was an attempt to extent the public sense of immorality of slavery to other equally illegitimate forms of social domination  - Pro-slavery ideologues turned to gender analogies too — to justify as equally natural relation of masters and slaves.   SLAVE RESISTANCE  - The ability to convey the experience of slavery was highly constrained - Narratives with first-hand experience broke through to the public life outside the South  - Anti-slavery narratives (Solomon Northup, David Walker, Frederick Douglas, etc.) — their confessions were crucial in shaping American politics in the run up for the Civil War  - Nat Turner Rebellion - in 1831 in Virginia (70 whites were killed) - fear on both sides - whites constantly lived in the fear from these rebellions - Slave rebellions were not uncommon - with the Civil War messages in the South they were less covert   SLAVE FAMILY  - Family - a body to protect individuals  - Slave marriage had no legal standing in the South - chattel property had no rights  - Forcing owner’s recognition of Family was the greatest political achievement under slavery - to make AA define themselves as people   Marriage = A husband also owns his wife (possession of her body, her property and her children)  Slave marriage = Everything belonged to the master, not the man a slave woman married.   SLAVERY AND WOMEN  ‘’…slavery is terrible for men but it is far more terrible for women’’ H. Jacobs  - Intimate relationships were recognized in slave communities - Unwed mothers were not ashamed (virtue and virginity was necessarily different for slave women — they could not control the circumstances of their sexual life)   KINSHIP  - Kinship (fictive kin) - extended biological ties - practice that tied people to children and expand the group and people invested in the child’s wellbeing - The selling of slaves involved repeated cycles of social death and re-birth - the narrative of Ch. Ball.   THE END OF SLAVERY  - The Civil War meant the end of slavery as an institution and the beginning of life - family, religion, freedom  - When slaves were finally articulated, slaveholders had to acknowledge them as people   THE END OF PLANTATION  - 1865 the Confederacy was in ruins, slave regime was defeated - AA southerners had a long journey to gain their dignity  - It was also the fall of the planter’s class. The plantation ended.  THE HOME - ‘’America is God’s crucible, the great melting pot where all the races of Europe are melting and reforming!’’  - 1607 - The arrival of three ships in the Chesapeake Bay  - It was the newcomers who had the larger impact on the natives, rather than the other way around  - Up through the early 1800s, European immigrants streamed into the colonies and the US, primarily from the British Isles   FIRST WAVE OF IMMIGRATION  - Late 1700s, it was the Scotch-Irish (Scots who had briefly settled in Ireland).  - From about 1820 to 1880, it was the Irish and Germans.  - The Irish arrived poor, but the Germans often had a little money and a skill.  - The Irish took menial jobs, while the Germans went into printing, banking, painting, etc.  - Many Germans pushed on to the Midwest, set up farming communities, and maintained old-country traditions.   SECOND WAVE OF IMMIGRATION  - From 1880-1924 some 26mil immigrants arrived — the largest migration in world history.  - The earlier wave was primarily from western and northern Europe, the second wave was largely from eastern and southern Europe (large numbers of Italians, Jews fleeing persecution in Russia, Poland, and Hungary)  - Between 1900 and 1909, when the 2nd wave peaked, two-thirds of immigrants came from Italy, Austria-Hungary, and Russia.  - By 1910 arrivals from Mexico outnumbered arrivals from Ireland, and numerous Japanese had moved to the West Coast and Hawaii. Foreign-born blacks, mainly from the West Indies, also came.  - Many immigrants never intended to stay.  - For every hundred foreigners who entered the country, around thirty ultimately left.  - Most of the 26mil immigrants who arrived with this wave remained, and the great majority settled in cities.   MELTING POT  - A salad bowl with discrete units may be slightly better  - Suggests the nature of America at the time — a changing blend of cultures.  - Each group affects and is affected by the pre-existing culture, yet the result is more or less homogeneous society that speaks the same language and abides by the same laws.  - Immigration to the US was part of a world-wide movement  - Population pressures, land redistribution, and industrialization induced millions of peasants, small land-owners, and craftsmen to leave Europe and Asia for Canada, Australia, Brazil, Argentina, and the US.  - Technological advances in communications and transportation spread news of opportunities and made travel cheaper, quicker, and safer.  - Religious persecution — pogroms and military conscription that Jews suffered in eastern Europe, forced people to escape across the Atlantic.  - New arrivals received aid from relatives who had already immigrated   NON-WHITE CITIZENS  - African Americans, American Indians, Mexican Americans, and Asian Americans — their opportunities were scarce.  - Asians particularly encountered discrimination and isolated residential experience — they were blamed for unemployment in California in the late 1870s.  - ,,The Chinese must go’'  - To limit this latest influx, the government passed the Chinese Exclusion Act in 1882.   THE AMERICAN DREAM  - Non-manual jobs and the higher social status and income were attainable (white-collar jobs).  - From poverty to moderate success.  - Rates of upward occupational mobility were slow but steady between 1870 and 1920 (One in five manual workers rose to white-collar or owner’s positions within ten years)  - America was not a utopian dream, but it was generally better than what they had left behind. - In the 1920s intolerance pervaded American society  - Congress reversed previous policy and, In the Emergency Quota Act of 1921, set yearly immigration allocations for each nationality  - Preference for Anglo-Saxon Protestant immigrants reflected in annual immigration quotas for eastern European nationalities (could not exceed 3% of the number of immigrants from that nation residing in the United States in 1910).  - In 1924 Congress replaced it with the National Origins Act - law that limited annual immigration to 150 000 ppl and set quotas at 2% of each nationality residing in the US in 1890, except for Asians, who were banned completely.  - In 1950, 88% of Americans were of European ancestry; 10% of the population was African American; 2% was Hispanic; and Native Americans and Asian Americans each accounted for about one fifth of 1%.  - By 1960s only 5,7% of Americans were foreign-born (compared with approx 15% in 1910 and 12,4 in 2005)   - The immigration and Naturalization Act of 1952 ended the quota system that favored some nationalities over others.  - Between 1970 and 1990s the US absorbed more than 13 mil new arrivals, most from Latin America and Asia. Immigrants flooded in from South Korea, Thailand, India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Indonesia, Singapore, Laos, Cambodia, and Vietnam.  - In 1970 Latinos comprises 4,5% of the nation’s population; it jumped to 9% by 1990s, when one out of three Los Angelenos and Miamians were Hispanic.  - Hispanics created a new hybrid culture — ‘'We want to be here, but without losing our language and our culture. They are richness, a treasure that we don’t care to lose.'' - Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986 — ( discourage illegal immigration by imposing sanctions on employers who hired undocumented workers).  - In 2002 the foreign-born were 11,5% of the US population, a rising trend in recent decades, though still below the 14,5% of 1910…  WOMEN "a woman's place is in the home" Not mentioned in the Declaration of Independence, they were absent in the Constitution, they were invisible in the new political democracy. They were the women of early America – half the population that remained invisible – the very invisibility of women is a sign of their submerged status. Throughout most of history women generally have had fewer legal rights and career opportunities than men. Wifehood and motherhood were regarded as women's most significant professions. In the 20th century, however, women in most nations won the right to vote and increased their educational and job opportunities. Perhaps most important, they fought for and to a large degree accomplished a reevaluation of traditional views of their role in society. Maternity, the natural biological role of women, has traditionally been regarded as their major social role as well. The resulting stereotype that "a woman's place is in the home" has largely determined the ways in which women have expressed themselves. Biological predispositions positioned women as childbearers – whom men could use, exploit, who was at the same time servant, sex mate, companion, and bearer-teacher-warden of his children. Societies based on private property and competition in which monogamous families became practical units for work and socialiyation found it especially useful to establish this special status of women – something of a house slave in the mater of intimacy and oppression. The conditions under which white settlers came to America created various situations for women. Where the first settlements consisted almost entirely of men, women were imported as sex slaves, childbearers, companions. In 1619, the year that the first black slaves came to Virginia, ninety women arrived at Jamestown on one ship: „Agreeable persons, young and incorrupt... sold with their own consent to settlers as wives, the price to be the cost of their own transportation.“ Most women came as indentured servants – and did not live lives much different from slaves – they were to be obedient to masters and mistresses... The situation was much worse for black women – as slaves they were the property of their masters Even free white women not brought as servants or slaves, but as wives of the early settlers, faced special hardships.. Those who lived shared the life in the wildernss with their men and were often gien respect because they were so bady needed. And when men died, women often took up the men’s work as well. Women on the American frontier seemed close to equality with their men. But many were burdened with ideas from England influenced by Christian teachings. English law was summarized in a document of 1632 – „The lawes Resolutions of Womens Rights“ „In this consolidation which we call wedlock is a locking together. I tis true, that man and wife are one person, but understand in what manner. When a small brooke or little river incorporateth with Rhodanus, Humber, or the Thames, the poor rivulet looseth her name..... A woman as soon as she is married, is called covert... that is, „veiled“; as it were, clouded and overshadowed; she hath lost her streame. I may more truly, farre away, say to a married woman, her new self is her superior; her companion, her master…” Julia Spruill describes the woman’s legal situation in the colonial period: “The husband’s control over the wife’s person extended to the right of giving her chastisement…. But he was not entitled to inflict permanent injury or death on his wife…” As for property: “Besides absolute possession of his wife’s personal property and a life estate in her lands, the husband took any other income that might be hers. He collected wages earned by her labor…. Naturally it followed that the proceeds of the joint labor of husband wife belonged to the husband.” Puritan New England carried over the subjection of women – one woman dared to complain about the work a carpenter had done for her, the Reverend John Cotton said – “… that the husband should obey his wife, and not the wife the husband, that is a false principle. For God hath put another law upon women: wives, be subject to your husbands in all things.” In the 1700s – a best-selling “pocket-book” Advice to a Daughter: “You must first lay it down for a Foundation in general, that there is inequality in sexes, and that for the better Economy of the world; the men, who were to be the law-givers, had the larger share of reason bestowed upon them; by which means your sex is the better prepared for the xompliance that is necessary for the performance of those duties which seemed to be most properly assigned to it… your sex wanted our reason for your conduct, and our strength for your protection: ours wanted your gentleness to soften, and to entertain us… “ Yet women rebelled. Ann Hutchinson – a religious woman, mother of thirteen children – insisted that she, and other ordinary people, could interpret the Bible for themselves. She was a good speaker, held meetings and people gathered at her home in Boston to listen to her criticism of local ministers. John Winthrop described her as “a woman of a haughty and fierce carriage, of a nimble wit and active spirit, and a very voluble tongue, more bold than a man, though in understanding and judgement, inferior to many women.” She was put on trial for heresy and for challenging the authority of the government. She was made to leave Boston. 20years later, one person who had spoken up for her during Hutchinson’s trial was hanged for rebellion, sedition, and presumptuous obtruding themselves.” During the Revolution, the necessities of war brought women out into public affairs. Women formed patriotic groups, carried out anti-British actions, wrote articles for independence. They were active in the campaign against the British tea tax. They organized Daughters of Liberty groups, boycotting British goods, urging women to make their own clothes and buy only American-made things. Abigail Adams – even before the Declaration of Independence wrote to her husband: … in the new code of laws which I suppose it will be necessary for you to make, I desire you would remember the ladies, and be more generous to them than your ancestors. Do not put such unlimited power in the hands of husbands. Remember, all men would be tyrants if they could. If particular care and attention are not paid to the ladies, we are determined to foment a rebellion, and will not hold ourselves bound to obey the laws in which we have no voice of representation.” But Jefferson underscored his phrase “all men are created equal” by his statement that American women would be “too wise to wrinkle their foreheads with politics”.. And after the Revolution none of the new state constitutions granted women the right to vote. Between the American Revolution and the Civil War so many elements of American society were changing – the growth of population, the movement westward, the development of the factory system, expansion of political rights for white men, educational growth to match the new economic needs – that changes were bound to take place in the situation of women. In pre-industrial America, the practical need for women in a frontier society had produced some measure of equality – women worked at important jobs – publishing newspapers, managing tanneries, keeping taverns, engaging in skilled work. Women were being pulled out of the house and into industrial life, while at the same time there was pressure for women to stay home where they were more easily controlled. As the economy developed, men dominated as mechanics and tradesmen, and aggressiveness became more and more defined as a male trait. The outside world created fears and tensions in the dominant male world and brought forth ideological controls to replace the loosening family controls: the idea of “the woman’s place” promulgated by men, was accepted by many women. Cult of true womanhood – pious, religious, sexually pure, feminine, chaste, submissive.. The Young Lady’s Book of 1830 – “… in whatever situation of life a woman is placed from her cradle to her grave, a spirit of obedience and submission, pliability of temper, and humility of mind, are required from her.” “True feminine genius is ever timid, doubtful, and clingingly dependent; a perpetual childhood.” One book – rules for domestic happiness – “Do not expect too much” “How interesting and important are the duties devolved on females as wives… the counsellor and friend of the husband; who makes it her daily study to lighten his cares, to soothe his sorrows, and to augment his joys; who, like a guardian angel, watches over his interests, warns him against dangers, comforts him under trials; and by her pious, assiduous, and attractive deportment, constantly endeavors to render him more virtuous, more useful, more honorable, and more happy.” Republican mothers – patriotic women – women were urged to be patriotic since they had the job of educating children. The cult of domesticity – to pacify women with a doctrine – separate but equal – giving her work equally as important as the man’s, but separate and different. Inside that “equality” there was the fact that the woman did not choose her mate, and once her marriage took place, her life was determined. The new ideology worked – it helped to produce the stability needed by a growing economy. But the cult of true womanhood could not erase what was visible as evidence of woman’s subordinate status – she could not vote, could not own property; when she did work, her wages were one-fourth to one-half what men earned in the same job. Women were excluded from professions of law and medicine, from colleges from the ministry. In 1789 in new England was introduced the first industrial spinning machinery and now there was a demand for young girls to work the spinning machinery in factories. All the operations needed to turn cotton fiber into cloth were under one roof. The new textile factories swiftly multiplied – most of the women working there were between 15-30. Some of the earliest industrial strikes took place in these textile mills in the 1830s – demanded shorter workday “I was awakened at five, by the bells calling to labor. The time allowed for dressing and breakfast was so short, as many told me, that both were performed hurriedly, and then the work at the mill was begun by lamplight, and prosecuted without remission will twelve, and chiefly in a standing position. Then half an hour only allowed for dinner, from which the time for going and returning was deducted. Then back to the mills to work till seven o’clock…. It must be remembered that all the hours of labor are spent in rooms where oil lapms, together with from 40 to 80 persons, are exhausting the healthful principle of the air… and where the air is loaded with particles of cotton thrown from thousands of cards, spindles, and looms.” Middle-class women barred from higher education, began to monopolize the profession of primary-school teaching. Literacy among women doubled between 1780 and 1840. Women became health reformers. They formed movements against double standards in sexual behavior. They joined in religious organizations. Some of the most powerful of them joined the antislavery movement. So, by the time a clear feminist movement emerged in the 1840s, women had become practiced organizers, agigatators, speakers. “Reason and religion teach us, that we too are primary existences… not the satellites of men.” Women, after becoming involved in other movements or reform – antislavery, temperance, dress style, prison conditions – turned, emboldened and experienced, to their own situation. Angelina Grimke, a southern white woman who became a fierce speaker and organizer against slavery, saw that movement leading further: “Let us all first wake up the nation to lift millions of slaves of both sexes from the dust, and turn them into men and then… it will be an easy matter to take millions of females from their knees and set them on their feet, or in other words transform them from babies into women.” Opposition – “Some have tried to become semi-men by putting on the Bloomer dress. Let me tell you in a word why it can never be done. Is is this: woman, robed and folded in her long dress, is beautiful. She walks gracefully…. If she attempts to run, the charm is gone…. Take off the robes, and put on pants, and show the limbs, and grace and mystery are all gone.” Sarah Grimke , Angelina’s sister, wrote: “During the early part of my life, my lot was cast among the butterflies of the fashionable world; and of this class of women, I am constrained to say, both from experience and observation, that their education is miserably deficient; that they are taught to regard marriage as the one thing needful, the only avenue to distinction…” Angelina was the first woman to address a committee of the Massachusetts state legislature on antislavery petitions.. Many other women began speaking on other issues and thus on the situation of women. Women put in enormous work in antislavery societies all over the country. In the course of this work, events were set in motion that carried the movement of women for their own equality racing alongside the movement against slavery. First Women’s Rights Convention in history – Seneca Falls, New York held by Elizabeth Cady Stanton = three hundred women and some men came. A Declaration of Principles was signed and signed by 68 womena dn 32 men. It made use of the language and rhythm of the Declaration of Independence. A series of women’s conventions in various parts of the country followed the one at Seneca Falls. Sojourner Truth – “Ain’t I a woman?” – That man over there says that woman needs to be helped into carriages and lifted over ditches…. Nobody ever helps me into carriages, or over mudpuddles or give me any best place. And an’t I a woman? ..” Women began to resist, in the 1830s and 40s and 50s, the attempt to keep them in their “woman’s sphere”. They were taking part in all sorts of movements, for prisoners, for the insane, for black slaves, and also for all women. In the 19th century, women began working outside their homes in large numbers, notably in textile mills and garment shops. In poorly ventilated, crowded rooms women (and children) worked for as long as 12 hours a day. Great Britain passed a ten-hour-day law for women and children in 1847, but in the United States it was not until the 1910s that the states began to pass legislation limiting working hours and improving working conditions of women and children. Eventually, however, some of these labor laws were seen as restricting the rights of working women. For instance, laws prohibiting women from working more than an eight-hour day or from working at night effectively prevented women from holding many jobs, particularly supervisory positions, that might require overtime work. Laws in some states prohibited women from lifting weights above a certain amount varying from as little as 15 pounds (7 kilograms) again barring women from many jobs. During the 1960s several federal laws improving the economic status of women were passed. The Equal Pay Act of 1963 required equal wages for men and women doing equal work. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 prohibited discrimination against women by any company with 25 or more employees. A Presidential Executive Order in 1967 prohibited bias against women in hiring by federal government contractors. But discrimination in other fields persisted. Many retail stores would not issue independent credit cards to married women. Divorced or single women often found it difficult to obtain credit to purchase a house or a car. Laws concerned with welfare, crime, prostitution, and abortion also displayed a bias against women. In possible violation of a woman's right to privacy, for example, a mother receiving government welfare payments was subject to frequent investigations in order to verify her welfare claim. Sex discrimination in the definition of crimes existed in some areas of the United States. A woman who shot and killed her husband would be accused of homicide, but the shooting of a wife by her husband could be termed a "passion shooting." Only in 1968, for another example, did the Pennsylvania courts void a state law which required that any woman convicted of a felony be sentenced to the maximum punishment prescribed by law. Often women prostitutes were prosecuted although their male customers were allowed to go free. In most states abortion was legal only if the mother's life was judged to be physically endangered. In 1973, however, the United States Supreme Court ruled that states could not restrict a woman's right to an abortion in her first three months of pregnancy. Until well into the 20th century, women in Western European countries lived under many of the same legal disabilities as women in the United States. For example, until 1935, married women in England did not have the full right to own property and to enter into contracts on a par with unmarried women. Only after 1920 was legislation passed to provide working women with employment opportunities and pay equal to men. Not until the early 1960s was a law passed that equalized pay scales for men and women in the British civil service. WOMEN AT WORK The medical profession is an example of changed attitudes in the 19th and 20th centuries about what was regarded as suitable work for women. Prior to the 1800s there were almost no medical schools, and virtually any enterprising person could practice medicine. Indeed, obstetrics was the domain of women. Beginning in the 19th century, the required educational preparation, particularly for the practice of medicine, increased. This tended to prevent many young women, who married early and bore many children, from entering professional careers. Although home nursing was considered a proper female occupation, nursing in hospitals was done almost exclusively by men. Specific discrimination against women also began to appear. For example, the American Medical Association, founded in 1846, barred women from membership. Barred also from attending "men's" medical colleges, women enrolled in their own for instance, the Female Medical College of Pennsylvania, which was established in 1850. By the 1910s, however, women were attending many leading medical schools, and in 1915 the American Medical Association began to admit women members. In 1890, women constituted about 5 percent of the total doctors in the United States. During the 1980s the proportion was about 17 percent. At the same time the percentage of women doctors was about 19 percent in West Germany and 20 percent in France. In Israel, however, about 32 percent of the total number of doctors and dentists were women. Women also had not greatly improved their status in other professions. In 1930 about 2 percent of all American lawyers and judges were women in 1989, about 22 percent. In 1930 there were almost no women engineers in the United States. In 1989 the proportion of women engineers was only 7.5 percent. In contrast, the teaching profession was a large field of employment for women. In the late 1980s more than twice as many women as men taught in elementary and high schools. In higher education, however, women held only about one third of the teaching positions, concentrated in such fields as education, social service, home economics, nursing, and library science. A small proportion of women college and university teachers were in the physical sciences, engineering, agriculture, and law. The great majority of women who work are still employed in clerical positions, factory work, retail sales, and service jobs. Secretaries, bookkeepers, and typists account for a large portion of women clerical workers. Women in factories often work as machine operators, assemblers, and inspectors. Many women in service jobs work as waitresses, cooks, hospital attendants, cleaning women, and hairdressers. During wartime women have served in the armed forces. In the United States during World War II almost 300,000 women served in the Army and Navy, performing such noncombatant jobs as secretaries, typists, and nurses. Many European women fought in the underground resistance movements during World War II. In Israel women are drafted into the armed forces along with men and receive combat training. Women constituted more than 45 percent of employed persons in the United States in 1989, but they had only a small share of the decision-making jobs. Although the number of women working as managers, officials, and other administrators has been increasing, in 1989 they were outnumbered about 1.5 to 1 by men. Despite the Equal Pay Act of 1963, women in 1970 were paid about 45 percent less than men for the same jobs; in 1988, about 32 percent less. Professional women did not get the important assignments and promotions given to their male colleagues. Many cases before the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission in 1970 were registered by women charging sex discrimination in jobs. Working women often faced discrimination on the mistaken belief that, because they were married or would most likely get married, they would not be permanent workers. But married women generally continued on their jobs for many years and were not a transient, temporary, or undependable work force. From 1960 to the early 1970s the influx of married women workers accounted for almost half of the increase in the total labor force, and working wives were staying on their jobs longer before starting families. The number of elderly working also increased markedly. Since 1960 more and more women with children have been in the work force. This change is especially dramatic for married women with children under age 6: 12 percent worked in 1950, 45 percent in 1980, and 57 percent in 1987. Just over half the mothers with children under age 3 were in the labor force in 1987. Black women with children are more likely to work than are white or Hispanic women who have children. Over half of all black families with children are maintained by the mother only, compared with 18 percent of white families with children. Despite their increased presence in the work force, most women still have primary responsibility for housework and family care. In the late 1970s men with an employed wife spent only about 1.4 hours a week more on household tasks than those whose wife was a full-time homemaker. A crucial issue for many women is maternity leave, or time off from their jobs after giving birth. By federal law a full-time worker is entitled to time off and a job when she returns, but few states by the early 1990s required that the leave be paid. Many countries, including Mexico, India, Germany, Brazil, and Australia require companies to grant 12-week maternity leaves at full pay. Traditionally a middle-class girl in Western culture tended to learn from her mother's example that cooking, cleaning, and caring for children was the behavior expected of her when she grew up. Tests made in the 1960s showed that the scholastic achievement of girls was higher in the early grades than in high school. The major reason given was that the girls' own expectations declined because neither their families nor their teachers expected them to prepare for a future other than that of marriage and motherhood. This trend has been changing in recent decades. Formal education for girls historically has been secondary to that for boys. In colonial America girls learned to read and write at dame schools. They could attend the master's schools for boys when there was room, usually during the summer when most of the boys were working. By the end of the 19th century, however, the number of women students had increased greatly. Higher education particularly was broadened by the rise of women's colleges and the admission of women to regular colleges and universities. In 1870 an estimated one fifth of resident college and university students were women. By 1900 the proportion had increased to more than one third. Women obtained 19 percent of all undergraduate college degrees around the beginning of the 20th century. By 1984 the figure had sharply increased to 49 percent. Women also increased their numbers in graduate study. By the mid-1980s women were earning 49 percent of all master's degrees and about 33 percent of all doctoral degrees. In 1985 about 53 percent of all college students were women, more than one quarter of whom were above age 29. WOMEN IN REFORM MOVEMENTS Women in the United States during the 19th century organized and participated in a great variety of reform movements to improve education, to initiate prison reform, to ban alcoholic drinks, and, during the pre-Civil War period, to free the slaves. At a time when it was not considered respectable for women to speak before mixed audiences of men and women, the abolitionist sisters Sarah and Angelina Grimke of South Carolina boldly spoke out against slavery at public meetings (see Grimke Sisters). Some male abolitionists including William Lloyd Garrison, Wendell Phillips, and Frederick Douglass supported the right of women to speak and participate equally with men in antislavery activities. In one instance, women delegates to the World's Anti-Slavery Convention held in London in 1840 were denied their places. Garrison thereupon refused his own seat and joined the women in the balcony as a spectator. Some women saw parallels between the position of women and that of the slaves. In their view, both were expected to be passive, cooperative, and obedient to their master-husbands. Women such as Stanton, Lucy Stone, Lucretia Mott, Harriet Tubman, and Sojourner Truth were feminists and abolitionists, believing in both the rights of women and the rights of blacks. (See also individual biographies.) Many women supported the temperance movement in the belief that drunken husbands pulled their families into poverty. In 1872 the Prohibition party became the first national political party to recognize the right of suffrage for women in its platform. Frances Willard helped found the Woman's Christian Temperance Union (see Willard, Frances). During the mid-1800s Dorothea Dix was a leader in the movements for prison reform and for providing mental-hospital care for the needy. The settlement-house movement was inspired by Jane Addams, who founded Hull House in Chicago in 1889, and by Lillian Wald, who founded the Henry Street Settlement House in New York City in 1895. Both women helped immigrants adjust to city life. (See also Addams; Dix.) Women were also active in movements for agrarian and labor reforms and for birth control. Mary Elizabeth Lease, a leading Populist spokeswoman in the 1880s and 1890s in Kansas, immortalized the cry, "What the farmers need to do is raise less corn and more hell." Margaret Robins led the National Women's Trade Union League in the early 1900s. In the 1910s Margaret Sanger crusaded to have birth-control information available for all women (see Sanger). FIGHTING FOR THE VOTE The first women's rights convention took place in Seneca Falls, N.Y., in July 1848. The declaration that emerged was modeled after the Declaration of Independence. Written by Elizabeth Cady Stanton, it claimed that "all men and women are created equal" and that "the history of mankind is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations on the part of man toward woman." Following a long list of grievances were resolutions for equitable laws, equal educational and job opportunities, and the right to vote. With the Union victory in the Civil War, women abolitionists hoped their hard work would result in suffrage for women as well as for blacks. But the 14th and 15th Amendments to the Constitution, adopted in 1868 and 1870 respectively, granted citizenship and suffrage to blacks but not to women. Disagreement over the next steps to take led to a split in the women's rights movement in 1869. Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony, a temperance and antislavery advocate, formed the National Woman Suffrage Association (NWSA) in New York. Lucy Stone organized the American Woman Suffrage Association (AWSA) in Boston. The NWSA agitated for a woman-suffrage amendment to the Federal Constitution, while the AWSA worked for suffrage amendments to each state constitution. Eventually, in 1890, the two groups united as the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA). Lucy Stone became chairman of the executive committee and Elizabeth Cady Stanton served as the first president. Susan B. Anthony, Carrie Chapman Catt, and Dr. Anna Howard Shaw served as later presidents. The struggle to win the vote was slow and frustrating. Wyoming Territory in 1869, Utah Territory in 1870, and the states of Colorado in 1893 and Idaho in 1896 granted women the vote but the Eastern states resisted. A woman-suffrage amendment to the Federal Constitution, presented to every Congress since 1878, repeatedly failed to pass. Pros of Immigration: • Will work at unwanted jobs. • Immigrants are a key part of Americas economic growth. • Increasing population. • We expand the American culture into other cultures and vice-versa. • Boost the economy. Cons of Immigration: • Immigrants take jobs away from Americans. • Illegal immigrants are decreasing wages for the poor and increasing taxes. • Immigrants are threating the American identity. • Some say that immigration is going to bring the economy down. • Cheap Labor. [it puts more Americans out of their jobs.]

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