The Story of the Star Spangler Banner By Ryan Jacobson Essay Example for Free

The Story of the Star Spangler Banner By Ryan Jacobson Essay This book is about the history of our National Anthem that was written amidst the war between the people of Maryland who were attacked by a British Fleet. This happened between 1812 and 1814 at the Fort Mc Henry where the faith of the country rested in the waiving of the flag. For 24 hours, the American flag stood still despite constant attacks by the enemies. Both parties decided that a flag truce will determine the winner of the war; in short, the last flag standing will be the victor. The climax of the story happened a little over midnight when the firing stopped and there was silence.   The soldier named Francis Scott Key which is also the main character of the story together with a friend soldier of his was held captive by the British Fleet. When dawn came they looked at Fort McHenry to see which flag is waving in the air and to be called the victor. Just as the first ray of light hit the flag they saw that it was still stars and stripes and not that of the British Fleet. In joy Mr. Key took from his pocket a pen and paper and there in the oddest place a soldier could be during a war, a boat beside the British Fleet, he wrote the poem â€Å"The Star-Spangled Banner† with all the pride and joy he have at that very moment.The British Fleet lost the battle and Mr. Key went back to the shore and gave the copy of the poem to his uncle who printed it. The soldiers sang the poem in the tune of â€Å"To Anacreon in Heaven† and since then many loved to sing the song.   Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚   The book tells us a lot about the events that led to the making of our national anthem which is The Star Spangled Banner. This is good since most of the children’s books that are written about the song just tell us about the meaning of the lyrics of the song word for word. The book by  Ã‚   Ryan Jacobson says a lot about the detail and event that let Mr. Key into writing the song which years later, in 1938, was officially declared our national Anthem. I take pride and honor when hearing the song and watching our flag wave as a symbol of victory and freedom since it reminds me of how Mr. Key and the rest of our ancestors fought for our land. Source:   Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚   Jacobson, R. 2006   The Story of the Star-Spangled Banner, USA

Gender Inequality In Family

Gender Inequality In Family In this essay I would like to demonstrate that achieving a greater equality in terms of reconciliation of professional and family life requires policies that not only introduce changes in labour market patterns, but also within the private sphere of family. This is to say, the reconceptualisation of womens and mens roles cannot be achieved without the political will descending from above and common social agreement emanating from below. Further along the essay, I am going to complement the theoretical arguments with some practical examples from the European context in order to discuss to what extent family policies enhance or diminish equality between men and women. Demographic changes towards new family patterns One of numerous attributes of the post-industrial era could be defined in terms of feminist claims for gender equality. Indeed, women demands have been part of policy arena in most post-industrial countries. As individuals, women firstly demanded the detachment from their traditional roles of housewives. Later on, due to demographic changes such as low fertility, womens issues became one of the top priorities on political agenda. This time, however, women reclaimed their rights not only as workers, but also as mothers. This political turn shouldnt be regarded as nostalgia for the male bread-winner model. In effect, tough conditions of labour market and economic hardship put women under pressure in terms of making a trade-off between having a family and pursuing a professional career. Subsequently, since a large proportion of women opted for stability employment rather than precariousness providing free care, the fertility rate has started dropping rapidly. Since the societys reprod uction buttresses future states economy, it remains highly questionable if national policies, originally purported to tackle gender inequality, are not more likely to be driven by political preoccupation of deleterious consequences of low fertility on productivity, profitability and competitivity of a country. The fact that until today most of the political effort to eradicate gender equality concentrated on labour market adjustments rather than finding real answers in the core of the problem in family patterns confirms the hypothesis of governments hypocrisy. From the theoretical perspective Although welfare regimes have been more or less successful in equalizing men and women in the labour market, the fact that women still perform the bulk of domestic work gives evidence about the ineffectiveness of these policies in terms of gender equity. In the theoretical field, scholars positions towards the relationship between family and gender have been rather convergent. According to Daly and Lewis (2000) the relationship between family and state has used to be defined in terms of level of contribution of individual to the labour market. Taking this criterion as a universal measure of human ´s contribution, the non-remunerated care giving activities would be therefore omitted since their social value would be considered as negligible. Although this definition would probably more likely correspond to the definition traditional society of industrial era, residues do persist in Western countries persist in form of assigning women to the private sphere of family, while stressing the duties of men as the bread-winners and therefore, the only actors in the public sphere. In tandem with the disproportional relationship between men and women, Lewis (2002:332), for instance, highlights the unequal relationship between women and labour market. She contends that women are only taken into account when working, whereas women that stay at home and care for child ren have not being recognized as legitimate enough to the contribution to the society. This is to say that despite the fact that female participation on the labour market increased steadily during the last twenty years, no considerable change has been achieved at the household level, where the majority of domestic tasks, including cleaning and child rearing activities, continues to be performed by women (Lewis, 2002). On a similar note, Fraser(1994) tries to define the post-industrial welfare regimes through two models. The universal caregiver model (1994:593) assumes men and women as autonomous individuals and aims to attain the gender equity through the guarantee of equal opportunities and equal treatment in the labour market. The other one Caregiver parity model (1994:593) aims to reach gender equity through the support of informal care and generous caregiver allowances. However, because both models are in some aspect discriminating, they fail to alter the gendered conditions of employment and reproduction and therefore, to respond to womens demands. Fraser thus deems that gender equity can only be achieved through the dismantlement of gender opposition between breadwinning and caregiving (Fraser, 1994:611). In other words, the key to achieving gender equity in a postindustrial welfare state is to make womens current patterns the norm (Ibid.). Frasers universal caregiver approach considers ch ildcare responsibilities as the alpha omega of persistent gender inequalities of current welfare systems. Peter McDonald (2002) suggests that in societies where women are treated as autonomous individuals in education and labour market, but as inferior beings in other social male dominated institutions, they are more likely to opt to not to have children. This argument would reinforce his hypothesis that low fertility rate in industrialized countries is most probably due to a persistent gender inequalities since the women willingness to have children didnt change. Surveys such as those conducted my McDonald and Fraser place the issues of childcare at the centre of recent policy making interest. For the reasons discussed above, challenges Western societies are facing since the last two decades specifically the low birth rate, longevity risk and ageing population problem have become more pronounced and have force the policy- making authorities to introduce changes not only in the public sphere, but also in the private sphere. In the second part of my essay, I am going to provide some empirical support from Netherlands and Sweden which tried to tackle the low fertility with gender neutral policies premised on reconciliation of family and work lives. Reconciliation policies in EU In 1997, the Dutch government launched the Combination Scenario programme aimed to promote equal sharing of time between paid and unpaid work among men and women. Since the Dutch culture is based on strong attachment to private and informal care (Platenga et al., 1999), the policy goal was to be achieved through widening employment patterns rather than providing extensive childcare services. Long male and short female working hours were supposed to be equalized through policies such as shorter working week. Nonetheless, whereas public opinion hailed new measures, outcomes of the latter remained far from the initial goal. Part-time contract did not diminish mens working hours, but moreover, it even pronounced the inequality of labour market since women (and not men) continued to opt for part-time contracts in order to care for their children. Platenga et al. therefore conclude: an increase in the amount of time spent in the market without any corresponding change in the organization of unpaid work will not only slow down any progress made towards gender equality, but will also have detrimental effects on the quality of our lives. (1999:109) Here again, the failure of Dutch initiative could be a consequence of putting too much emphasis into the promotion of changes in employment patterns rather than in equal distribution of care time. Some authors suggest that such working-time regimes can either promote or diminish gender equality (Rubery et al, 1998 in Platenga et al, 1999). This would depend on to what extent the institutions and political environment are favourable toward these changes. In the Dutch case, despite the public willingness of change, part-time work continued to be considered as a deviation from full-time norm as well as the care work persisted to be understood as womens responsibility and was therefore, undervalued (Platenga et al., 1999) Unlike other EU countries, Sweden, for instance, has a long history of active women participation in public sphere. Since 1970 women represented up to 50% of elected representatives at all levels of governance (Hantrais, 2000). The women -friendliness of Nordic welfare systems is supposed to be premised on this active female participation in politics. The Nordic model, also called the dual-breadwinner model is women-friendly in the sense of allowing women to participate in public life and on the same time, allowing the reconciliation of motherhood and paid work. Moreover, in 1974 the maternity leave had been replaced by gender neutral parental leave that hitherto enabled men to actively participate in child rearing (Ibid). Although the generosity of Nordic child subventions cant be disputed, Scandinavian welfare system can be also discriminating for some women. Shalev (2008) claims that mother friendly state interventions can have detrimental effects for the labour market attainments of high class women by relegating their type of employment to the public sector and subsequently, limiting their access to high managerial positions. Premised on the idea that childhood determines peoples lifecourse, the post-industrial societies should consider the investment in children as a sine qua non for sustainable development of knowledge economy (Esping-Andersen, 2002). However, due to the cultural differences, the debate about whether support for childcare should be provided through childcare allowances (Netherlands) or whether families should rather benefit from childcare facilities (Sweden) dominates the European agenda. Lewis (2006) contends that increasing attention to children in the political agenda is a result of their future role as adult citizens rather than their role as child qua child (Lewis, 2006:43). As a counter-argument , Esping-Andersen concludes that there is no empirical evidence that mothers work could have detrimental impact on childrens development (Esping-Andersen, 2002). Other authors, however, suggest that key success of equal gender treatment consists in concentrating in private sphere instead o f putting too much effort into the public sphere (Lewis 2006, McDonald 2002). In opposition to the Nordic model, where parents benefit from extensive childcare facilities, some authors deem that care provided by parents themselves cannot be substituted by any public service no matter how good it is (Folbre and Nelson, 2000). In addition to this, Etzioni (1993) deems that the transmission of informal values and norms is more likely to happen in private sphere of family. Subsequently, children socialized in childcare facilities would suffer from lack of so-called parental deficit (Ibid). From the theoretical debate it is difficult and inappropriate to make generalizations about what kind of care is more suitable for children. On the other hand, Lewis argues convincingly that evidence shows a shift in parents opinion about time spent with children from being assumed as a duty to as an important part of self-fulfilment (Lewis, 2006). This is also to say that more fathers have begun to consider their involvement in rearing activities. In Sweden, the fathers month, designed to convince more fathers to take up the parental insurance benefit, was backed up by important political support of so-called fathers group that campaigned for men to perform their role as fathers in taking the parental leave (Hantrais, 2000: 170-1). Successful strategies to tackle gender equality and reconcile work and family life, need to include combined strategies (Esping-Andersen, 2002:66) that would guarantee security through income assurance for those who want to take parental leave and also, measures to provide a stable support for mothers employment, since unemployed and single mothers face the highest poverty risk (European Commission, 2007). Monoparental families at the edge of poverty Despite measures intended to secure access to women into the labour market, solo mothers and lone-parent households continue to be the most vulnerable cohort in term of facing the risk of poverty and unemployment. By the same means, exclusion and poverty in lone-parents household is more likely to become a long-term phenomenon, since childrens development depends on parental and social investment and is very likely to be reproduced (Esping-Andersen, 2002). Following the Report enacted by European Commission, women constitute almost totality of lone parents with an exception of United Kingdom, Denmark, Poland and Germany, where the percentage of young fathers under age 35 varies from 17% (United Kingdom ) up to 25% (in Denmark) (EC, 2007:3). The singleness of lone mothers makes their position in society extremely vulnerable: unlike other forms of family, solo mothers face the double pressure to combine child care and breadwinner responsibilities on the same time. Although some critique could be raised towards Scandinavian welfare systems, Nordic countries occupy the top positions of international rankings and this is unconditionally of the type of conducted survey. However, the application of this model to the rest of European countries would require deep structural changes, especially in terms of more generous budget. Ergo, in the European continental context of scarce budget resources, lone mothers that opt for childcare benefits instead of paid employment, condemn themselves to be more vulnerable to poverty. The key issue to avoid this scenario stems from securing enough flexibility of labour market, so that lone mothers can combine the pleasure of motherhood with a decent employment. Conclusion In this essay I tried to demonstrate that increased individualization which considers men and women as autonomous individuals freed from their family and gender responsibilities does not suffice to guarantee equal conditions for every individual. Subsequently, women become more vulnerable and risk either exclusion from welfare either pressure from labour market. From the theoretical perspective, most of the authors agree that assuring reliable security net requires adjustments of social and working structures to the family, and not to the market. For example, one of the positive outcomes of the Netherlands Combination Scenario had been the application of legal minimum wage to all employees regardless of the amount of working hours (Platenga et al., 1999). This is to say that in order to avoid mens and womens occupational segregation, policy-making authorities should guarantee sufficient adjustment of child care allowances and employment policies so both, men and women can equally con tribute to paid and unpaid work.

Robert Crandall :: essays research papers fc

Leadership in Aviation American Airlines was under Robert Crandall's leadership from 1980, when he was named president and later chairman, until he retired in 1998. He possesses characteristics like intelligence, character, ability, and desire, all of which is needed to get things accomplished through people. American Airlines was transformed from a small, domestic carrier to one of the world's leading airlines with the largest jet fleet worldwide. American led the airline industry in the 1990's in revenues and operating income, and its parent company, AMR Corporation, was one of the top Fortune 500 companies under Crandall’s reign. Raised in Rhode Island, Robert Lloyd Crandall graduated from his state’s university and the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton Business School. He worked as a regional credit supervisor for Eastman Kodak and later, headed the computer programming division at Hallmark Cards. In 1966, he joined TWA (TransWorld Airlines) as assistant treasurer. He briefly left the airline industry in 1972 to become senior financial officer at Bloomingdale's Department Stores, but returned the next year when American made him its senior Vice President of Finance (Robert L. Crandall: Official Biography). From there, Mr. Crandall advanced to president. During his 18-year tenure as head of American Airlines, Robert Crandall and his self-empowered team formulated many of the innovations that helped to revolutionize the airline industry after deregulation, when many competitors went bankrupt. American was the first to recognize the value of filling empty seats with discounted tickets now known as "Super Saver Fares." These tickets offered deep discounts for advance-purchase tickets and outsold cheap charter competition. He was also quick to see the importance of restructuring and building a route system around central hub airports to which many airlines still use today. To keep American Airlines on top of the industry, one of Crandall's visions was to accelerate the company's efforts into the rich overseas markets. By tapping into voids created by Pan Am, Eastern Air, Braniff Int’l and TWA, Mr. Crandall’s ambition acquired promising overseas routes to Asia and Europe, and Latin America. Perhaps Robert Crandall's greatest contribution to the success of American Airlines was his vision in propelling the SABRE Group from an internal division of the company to one of the world's largest, privately owned computer networks. Conceived in 1959, the Semi-Automatic Business Research Environment served as an internal link between American's offices and ticket counters to help track reservations. When talks aimed at developing an industry-wide reservation system, broken down between travel agents and major carriers in the mid-1970’s, Crandall successfully marketed his airline's computer system throughout the world.

Writing and Descriptive Essay

†¢ Write down in any order about things that strike you. †¢ Put it down in black and white. †¢ Depending on the train of thought and association which the essay forms itself. †¢ Use vivid language that brings out the principle features. †¢ Comparing with some other thing will allow the senses of reader act. †¢ Effective time should be used to show change or evolution.†¢ Free play of emotions and feelings adds essence to the essay. †¢ Use adverbs and verbs to show the writer’s state of mind on the topic. †¢ Evoke images and allow the readers feel intensity. †¢ Understand the purpose of the essay and the readers who are being targeted. †¢ Outline is must. †¢ Rewrite as many times you can. †¢ Use concrete ideas and mix with abstract to make the essay alive and vital. †¢ Be natural and refreshing.Descriptive essay about a personWell, common this is, perhaps, the most popular type of descriptive essay. Students a re asked to write about their parents, friends, teachers and professors, as well as prominent people who are living now or lived in past. A descriptive essay about a person should tell as much as possible about features of character, virtues and drawback etc. You can also tell readers how this person influences your life or why you think this person is better than the others. Usually, students are given freedom in choice of a topic, so they are asked to write about the most prominent figure in the US history or the person they respect most. This is a very creative and interesting task.Descriptive essay about event celebrationIf you are a college or high school student you might be asked to write a descriptive essay about event celebration. This may be your graduation party, meeting with classmates, your sister’s wedding or your best friend’s  fancy B-day party. As a rule you are free to choose any topic you like. The key task here is to share the atmosphere of the ev ent and find the right words to describe it. Readers should feel as if they have been to this part as well.Descriptive wordsDescription essay and other write-ups of this nature must be revised and edited. These activities will sometimes be difficult if you had failed to make precise descriptions and use the right descriptive words as you began writing. You may get out that there are places that you withheld describing enough and important details. You will need to go back and make appropriate corrections. This is the more reason why it is always advised that you write using an outline. Including fresh materials or excluding irrelevant materials will be easy.Edit to make sure that you have used simple but still strong descriptive words. You have a duty to make your readers understand your descriptions clearly. Make sure that you have used enough verifications to make your description convincing and make sure that these verifications are precise and can be verified through objective m eans.Looking for an exceptional company to do some custom writing for you? Look no further than ProfEssays.com! You simply place an order with the writing instructions you have been given, and before you know it, your essay or term paper, completely finished and unique, will be completed and sent back to you. At ProfEssays.com, we have over 500 highly educated, professional writers standing by waiting to help you with any writing needs you may have! We understand students have plenty on their plates, which is why we love to help them out. Let us do the work for you, so you have time to do what you want to do!

John Cheever and His Seemingly Average Americans Essay Example

John Cheever and His Seemingly Average Americans Essay Example John Cheever and His Seemingly Average Americans Essay John Cheever and His Seemingly Average Americans Essay Average Americans Since 1935 middle class Americans have been able to sit in their suburban home or their urban apartment, open up a copy of the New Yorker, and read about themselves. Not literally, but rather a perfect reflection of themselves, or their next door neighbor, or their friend down the street. Of John Achievers nearly two hundred short stories, one hundred and twenty one were published in the New Yorker. He wrote primarily about the seemingly average American He takes that stereotype and creates narratives that delve so deeply into he psyches of each of his characters that their ordinary lives become immediately enthralling. He draws universal connections that make his stories instantly relate- able no matter the setting. Achievers work is generally sorted into four categories based on their location and while he manages to paint distinct pictures of the types of people in each environment we see an overarching theme throughout his writing the theme of the duality of man. Each story presents us with a main character, usually an upper-middle class American, battling between the facade they have rated for the outside world and their innermost thoughts and desires a feeling we have all dealt with at one time or another. These characters typically live tranquil lives that become momentarily uprooted which sends each into a state of turmoil, and though we can usually rely on Achiever to return them to normalcy, there is the occasional exception. Each character is treated with such care that even at their times of normalcy we find each one somehow captivating. Achiever creates a dialogue among his vast audience and bridges the gap of social differences by offering moon human conditions manifested within his characters. At the time of Achievers greatest success as a writer suburbia was still a fairly new addition to the American scenery, albeit a significant one, with the majority of Americans leaving the cities for the picturesque notion of quiet suburban living. This is the setting for some of Achievers most successful stories most notably The Housebreaker of Shady Hill and The Country Husband. Achiever has been widely referred to as the chronicler of suburban life, and though his entire body of work does not focus on suburbia, a large oration, and most certainly some of his best does. On this Achiever has said Theres been too much criticism of the middle-class way of life. Life can be as good and rich there as anyplace else. I am not out to be a social critic, however, nor a defender of suburbia. It goes without saying that the people in my stories and the things that happen to them could take place anywhere.. Many of Achievers stories are set in suburbia because it is a setting that lends itself perfectly to the concept of a characters internal struggle vs.. Their external appearance, but we also see this theme manifested elsewhere in other stories such as The Enormous Radio which takes place in a New York apartment building. In The Housebreaker of Shady Hill we meet Johnny Hake. Right away we are given every detail of his life age, height, weight, where he was born, where he grew up, where he was confirmed, etc. Simply put Johnny Hake is your average middle-aged suburban American male, that is until he becomes tired of his work environment and leaves his Job. Johnny rents a cubicle and tries to make a living for himself, but he soon finds that he can not support his family on the amount of money he is able to make. He finds himself desperate when it came time to borrow money he had nowhere to turn.. Having been taught by his mother never to speak about money, he could not bring himself to burden his wife with their financial difficulties. One night Johnny and his wife attend a dinner party at their friends, the Warburton, house. It is there that he learns about the large amount of cash the Carl Warburton tends to carry. That night he feels the desire for money as a premonition of death and explains he had never longed for anyone the way he yearned that night for money. He sneaks away in the middle of the night and enters he Warburton house stealing Carla wallet and returning home. As soon as he is safe in his own house, the weight of what he has Just done bares down on him. Oh, I never knew that a man could be so miserable and that the mind could open up so many chambers and fill them with self-reproach. His misery is unrelenting he makes note of every tiny theft he witnesses or reads about and his eyes twitch when he hears the word steal. He begins to see everyone around him as a thief and searches for someone he can blame. He begins acting unlike himself he is distracted in church and yells at his wife and children. At one point he even describes the types of people he hates and is pained to realize that he is one of them. Despite all of this, it does not stop him from choosing his next victims. However, on his way to steal from the Pewters it begins to rain, and it is this, of all things, that finally sobers him. It is as if is mind had been washed clear. There were ways out of my trouble if I cared to make use of them. I was not trapped. I was here on earth because I chose to be. And it was no skin off my elbow how I had been given the gifts of life so long as I possessed them, and I possessed them then. He the goes home and goes back to sleep. The next day he gets a call asking him to come back to work and that night he goes back to the Warburton and leaves the 900 he had taken. Johnny Hake returns to his normal life, his brief brush with his malevolent destiny soon to be no more than a nightmare. The Country Husband offers us a look inside the life of Francis Weed. At the beginning of the story Francis is on a plane traveling home. Soon there are technical difficulties and after a moment of terror and the mental image of the spreading wings of the Angel of Death the plane needs to make an emergency landing. All Francis wants is to share his experience with his family, but the house is in a state of chaos, and though he tries to tell his tale the children are fighting and his wife is too preoccupied to listen. At this point in the story we can understand Francis strife through the observations he makes of his life around him. Such as the outpouring of tearful petulance, lonesomeness, and self-pity he hears when listening to the neighbors piano playing or how the energetic golden retriever Jupiter is an anomaly and how his high spirits were out of place in Shady Hill.. Soon we see Francis spirits aka a turn for the better when he becomes suddenly infatuated with the beautiful, young, babysitter, Anne Morison. When these new passionate feelings take a hold of him he begins to see life in a new way, observing the beauty around him instead of the drabness. Birds were congressionally and the last of the robins. The sky shone like enamel. Even the smell of ink from his morning paper honed his appetite for life, and the world that was spread out around him was plainly a paradise. Francis, elated, buys his new love a bracelet and he even ends up kissing her, but problems arise when he meets the man that she is engaged to. After a heated argument with his wife, Francis finds himself in a hopeless state. He resolves himself to go see a psychiatrist and his life is returned to normalcy. The story ends on an anticlimactic note with a scene of a typical night in Shady Hill, everything is exactly as it should be. In this way Francis weeds exemplifies the typical Achiever character He is an ordinary middle-class suburban husband and father who experiences a sudden and fierce turn in his emotional state. Instead of changing his life for good he is instead trampled by his social restraints and returns to his average life, his momentary suasion replaced by apathy. Though not set in Shady Hill as the other stories are, The Enormous Radio fits perfectly into the pattern that John Achievers suburban tales follow. This story is instead set in an apartment building and creates the image of dozens of nearly identical rooms and families within, lending a similar feel to the suburbia of the other narrations. Our main characters in this story are Jim and Irene Westport who differed from their friends, their classmates, and their neighbors only in an interest they shared in serious music. Unfortunately, their radio breaks and Jim f forced to buy a new one. However, this new radio is revealed to not play music, but instead the sounds and conversations from the other apartments in the building. Soon listening to the private lives of her neighbors becomes an obsession for Irene. She begins listening to the radio every opportunity she gets, she can not reign in her curiosity and she begins to see her neighbors differently, wondering every time she sees someone who it was who said what. This begins to take a toll on her, she becomes upset over the things she hears but she still can not stop listening, she soon tarts to question her own happiness which before she had taken as absolute truth. She turns to her husband for reassurance Life is too terrible, too sordid and awful. But weve never been like that, have we, darling Have we I mean, weve always been good and decent and loving to one another, havent we And we have two children, two beautiful children. Our lives arent sordid, are they, darling Are they She flung her arms around his neck and drew his face down to hers. Were happy, arent we, darling We are happy, arent we. As desperately as she tries to confirm their perfect allegations the illusion is shattered when, towards the end of the story, Jim begins yelling at her, laying out all of her past wrongdoings. The story ends with Irene listening to the radio and hearing only the days news. The radio caused the upheaval of the average life of the Westport and exposed them to the evil of the world around them, an evil that they were before ignorant of and now they realize resides within their own family. These stories perfectly reflect Achievers tendency to portray characters in conflict with their inner desires and the reality of their external world.

Why Marine Life Is So Diverse in the Gulf of Maine

Why Marine Life Is So Diverse in the Gulf of Maine The Gulf of Maine is one of the most important marine habitats in the world and home to a wealth of marine life, from giant blue whales to microscopic plankton. Overview The Gulf of Maine is a semi-enclosed sea that covers 36,000 square miles of ocean and runs along 7,500 miles of coastline, from  Nova Scotia,  Canada,  to  Cape Cod,  Massachusetts. The Gulf is bordered by three New England states  (Massachusetts, New Hampshire, and Maine) and two Canadian provinces (New Brunswick and Nova Scotia). Water depths in the Gulf of Maine range from zero feet to several hundred feet. The deepest spot is 1,200 feet and is found in Georges Basin. The Gulf of Maine has many dramatic underwater features, which were carved out by glaciers  10,000 to 20,000 years ago. History The Gulf of Maine was once dry land covered by the Laurentide Ice Sheet, which advanced from Canada and covered much of New England and the Gulf of Maine about 20,000 years ago. At that time, the sea level was about 300 to 400 feet below its current level. The weight of the ice sheet depressed the Earths crust, and as the glacier retreated, the area that is now the Gulf of Maine filled in with seawater. Types of Habitat The Gulf of Maine is home to a variety of different habitats. They include: Sandy banks (such as Stellwagen Bank and Georges Bank)Rocky ledges (such as Jeffreys Ledge)Deep  channels (such as the Northeast Channel and Great South Channel)Deep basins with water depths over 600 feet (such as the Jordan, Wilkinson and Georges Basins)Coastal areas near the shore, whose bottoms are composed of rocks, boulders, gravel, and sand Tides The Gulf of Maine has some of the greatest tide ranges in the world. In the southern Gulf of Maine, including the area around Cape Cod, the range between high tide and low tide may be as low as four feet. But the Bay of Fundy, which borders the northern Gulf of Maine, has the highest tides in the world. Here, the range between low and high tide can be as great as 50 feet. Marine Life The Gulf of Maine supports over 3,000 species of marine life. They include: About 20 species of whales and dolphinsFish, including Atlantic cod, bluefin tuna, ocean sunfish, basking sharks, thresher sharks, mako sharks haddock, and flounderMarine invertebrates such as lobsters, crabs, sea stars, brittle stars, scallops, oysters, and musselsMarine algae, such as kelp, sea lettuce, wrack, and Irish mossPlankton, which provide food for many larger marine species that live in the Gulf of Maine Scientists believe the Gulf is probably home to many more unidentified species, including small worms and microscopic bacteria. Information about individual marine species is available from the states Department of Marine Resources. Human Activity The Gulf of Maine is an important area, both historically and today, for commercial and recreational fishing. It is also popular for recreational activities such as boating, wildlife watching (such as whale watching), and scuba diving (although the waters can be chilly). Threats to the Gulf of Maine include  overfishing, habitat loss, and coastal development.

Spanish Plan for Colonization essays

Spanish Plan for Colonization essays When the Spanish decided that they were going to colonize various parts of Texas they did not realize the task they had before them. The Spanishs main goal was to convert the Indians into Christians or Spaniards. They decided to build missions to teach the Indians their way of life and religious beliefs. Although their goal was estimated to take ten years for each colony, they were not prepared for the realities of this uneasy assignment. Some of the main problems with colonizing the northern frontier were the conflicts between the settlers and the missionaries, the aggressive Indians, and the distance between the missions. There were many conflicts between the settlers and the missionaries. The settlers from the Canary Islands had many complaints about their way of life. The settlers complained they didnt like the church they attended and wanted a new one built. They also believed there werent enough jobs for them to make a decent amount of money. They said that the only work for them was farming and the profits were to small to benefit from because the missionaries sold the corn for cheaper. Another major problem was that the settlers wanted the Indians to be able to work for them and this wasnt allowed. Father Benito, one of the missionaries, disputed all of these things saying that they were ordinary problems that everyone has. He believed that the settlers could work together to finish the church if they wanted to. He also said there were plenty of jobs besides farming. Many of the settlers were many other things such as bricklayers, merchants, carpenters, and soldiers. The reasons that the missionaries didnt want the Indians to be day laborers with the other settlers was because this would take the time away from teaching them to be Christians. One of the main problems that hurt many of the missions was some of the more aggressive Indian tribes att ...