Kate OFlaherty Chopins Biography Essay -- essays research papers fc

Kate O'Flaherty Chopin was born 8 February 1851 into a prominent family in St.Louis, Missouri. Her father, Thomas O'Flaherty, an Irish immigrant, was a successful St. Louis merchant who was killed in a railroad accident when Kate was only five years old. Kate's mother, Eliza was left a wealthy widow and raised Kate in a household "run by vigorous widows: her mother, grandmother, and great-grandmother . . . a community of women who stressed learning, curiosity, and financial independence" (Toth, 187). Kate was formally educated at the Academy of the Sacred Heart in St. Louis where she kept a commonplace book "in which the thoughtful adolescent recorded themes that appear in her later fiction, among them women's roles and the conflict between desire and duty" (Toth, 187). On 9 June 1870, two years after graduating from the Academy, Kate married Oscar Chopin, the son of a planter from Natchitoches Parish, Louisiana. They were married for twelve and a half years, spending nine in New Orleans and three in Cloutierville, Natchitoches Parish. During this time, Kate gave birth to five boys and one girl. "Devoting herself to her family and household, she still managed to reconcile the needs of her own being with the expectations of her conventional milieu. She dressed unconventionally and smoked cigarettes long before smoking was an approved practice among women in her class" (Inge, 91). When Oscar died of malaria in 1882, he left Kate twelve thousand ...

Plow and Cyrus Essay

John Deere’s Steel-Tipped Plow and Cyrus McCormicks’s Mechanical Reaper – Deere invented a steel-tipped plow that halved the labor to clear acres to till. Timber for housing and fencing was available in nearby woods, and settlements spread rapidly. McCormick developed the mechanical reaper which harvested grain seven times faster than traditional methods with half the work force and guaranteed that wheat would dominate the Midwestern prairies. American System of Manufacturing, or Interchangeable Parts – Europeans had started to refer to manufacture by interchangeable parts as the â€Å"American System of Manufacturing. The system had many advantages. Traditionally, damage to any part of something ruined the whole thing and no new part would fit. With interchangeable parts, however, replacement parts could be obtained and mass production also occurred. Samuel F. B. Morse – Morse was an American inventor. He contributed to the invention of a single-wire telegraph system bases on European telegraphs. He was also co-inventor of the Morse code, and also an accomplished painter. Catharine Beecher, A Treatise on Domestic Economy – In her widely popular Treatise on Domestic Economy, Beecher told women that technological advances made it their duty to make every house a â€Å"glorious temple† by utilizing space more efficiently. Contagion Theory versus Miasma Theory – The inability of physicians to explain the diseases led to these theories. No one understood that bacteria cause cholera and yellow fever. The contagion theory was that epidemic diseases were spread by touch, whereas the miasmas theory was it resulted from air carried gases from rotten vegetation or dead animals. But neither theory worked. Crawford Long and William T. G. Morton – Long employed sulfuric ether during a surgical operation. Long failed to follow up on his discovery, but four years later, Morton, a dentist, successfully employed sulfuric ether during an operation at MA General Hospital in Boston. Within a few years, ether came into wide use in American surgery. Hydropathy – Hydropathy was known as the â€Å"water cure,† which filtered into the United States from Europe. By the mid-1850s the United States had twenty-seven hydropathic sanatoriums, which used cold baths and wet packs. It helped relieve the pain associated with childbirth and menstruation. Sylvester Graham – Graham propounded a health system that anyone could adopt. Alarmed by the cholera epidemic, Graham counseled changes in dies and regimen as well as total abstinence from alcohol. Soon, he added sexual â€Å"excess† to his list of forbidden indulgences. Phrenology – The belief that each person was master of his or her own destiny underlay not only evangelical religion and popular health movements but also the most popular of the antebellum scientific fads: phrenology. It rested on the idea that the human mind comprised thirty-seven distinct organs, each located in the different part of the brain. James Gordon Bennett, the New York Herald, and the Penny Press – Bennett applied new technology to introduce the penny press. Newspapers could now rely on vast circulations rather than on political subsidies to turn a profit. The New York Sun became America’s first penny newspaper, and Bennett’s New York Herald followed in 1835. Horace Greeley and the New York Tribune – Greeley’s New York Tribune pioneered modern financial and political reporting. The relentless snooping of the Tribune’s Washington reporters outrages politicians. In 1848, Tribune correspondents were temporarily barred from the House floor for reporting about Representative Sawyer of Ohio. Astor Place Riot – In 1849, a long-running feud between the leading American actor, Edwin Forrest, and popular British actor William Macready ended with the Astor Place riot in New York City, which left twenty-two people dead. This riot demonstrated the broad popularity of the theater. Minstrel Shows – These shows arose in northern cities when white men in blackface took to the stage to present and evening of songs, dances, and humorous sketches. Minstrelsy borrowed some authentic elements of African-American culture, especially dances. P. T. Barnum and the American Museum – Barnum purchased a run-down museum in NYC, rechristened it the American Museum, and opened a new chapter in the history of popular entertainment. The founders of earlier museums had educational purposes. Barnum, in contrast, made pricking public curiosity the main goal. Washington Irving – When British questioned â€Å"Who ever reads an American book? ,† Americans responded by pointing to Irving, whose Sketch Book contained two famous stories, â€Å"Rip Van Winkle† and â€Å"The Legend of Sleepy Hollow. † Naming hotels and steamboats after Irving, Americans soaked him in applause, but they had to concede that Irving had done much of his best writing while living in England. James Fenimore Cooper – Cooper was the first important figure in this literary upsurge. His most significant innovation was to introduce a distinctively American fictional character, the frontiersman Natty Bumppo. Edgar Allan Poe – Poe wrote both fictional and poetry and was a major contributor to the American Renaissance. He set several of his short stories in Europe; as one critic has noted, â€Å"His art could have been produced as easily had he been born in Europe. † American Renaissance – The Renaissance was a flowering of literature. In 1800, American authors accounted for a negligible proportion of the output of American publishers. By 1830, 40 percent of the books published in the United States were written by Americans; by 1850 this had increased to 75 percent. Not only were Americans writing more books; increasingly, they sought to depict the features of their nation in literature and art. Henry David Thoreau – Thoreau was representative of the younger Emersonians. He was more of a doer and was adventurous in action. At one point, he went to jail rather than to pay his poll tax. This revenue, he knew, would support the war in Mexico, which he viewed as part of a southern conspiracy to extend slavery. The experience led Thoreau to write â€Å"Civil Disobedience† in which he defended a citizen’s right to disobey unjust laws. Ralph Waldo Emerson and â€Å"The American Scholar† – Emerson emerged in the late 1830s as the most influential spokesman for American literary nationalism. He announced his address â€Å"The American Scholar. † The time had come for Americans to trust themselves. Let â€Å"the single man plant himself indomitably on his instincts and there abide,† he proclaimed. Transcendentalism – It’s a philosophical movement that developed in the 1830s and 1840s in the Eastern region of the United States as a protest to the general state of culture and society. Among their core beliefs was the inherent goodness of both man and nature. They believed that society and its institutions ultimately corrupted the purity of the individual. Margaret Fuller – Her status as an intellectual woman distanced her from conventional society. Disappointed that his first child was not a boy, her Harvard educated father determined to give Margaret the sort of education young men would have acquired at Harvard. Fuller turned transcendentalism into an occupation of sorts. Nathaniel Hawthorne – Hawthorne was a major contributor to the American Renaissance. He wrote the famous novel, The Scarlett Letter along with The House of the Seven Gables and The Marble Faun in Rome. He ignored Emerson’s call to write about everyday experiences of their fellow Americans. Ironically, their conviction that the lives of ordinary Americans provided inadequate materials for fiction led them to create a uniquely American fiction marked less by the description of the complex social relationships of ordinary life than by the analysis or moral dilemmas and psychological states. Walt Whitman – Self-taught and in love with virtually everything about America except slavery, Whitman left school at eleven and became a printer’s apprentice and later a journalist and editor for various newspapers in Brooklyn, Manhattan, and New Orleans. A familiar figure at Democratic Party functions, he marched in party parades and put his pen to the service of its antislavery wing. Herman Melville – Melville was another key contributor to the American Renaissance who primarily wrote fiction. He did draw materials and themes from his own experiences as a sailor and from the lore of the New England whaling industry, but for his novels, be picked the exotic setting of islands in the South Seas. He wrote the famous Moby-Dick. Thomas Cole, Asher Durand, Frederic Church, and the Hudson River School – The Hudson River School flourished from the 1820s to the 1870s. Cole, Durand, and Church best represented more than fifty painters. They painted scenes of the region around the Hudson River, a waterway that Americans compared in majesty to the Rhine. Lyceums – This is a category of educational institution defined within the education system of many countries, mainly in Europe. The definition varies between countries; usually it is a type of secondary school. Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux – In 1858, New York City chose a plan drawn by Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux for its proposed Central Park. Olmstead eventually became the park’s chief architect. They both wanted the park to look as much like the countryside as possible, showing nothing of the surrounding city.

Core Concepts of the Four Traditions of Geography

Geographer William D. Pattison introduced his four traditions of geography at the annual convention of the National Council for Geographic Education in 1963. With these precepts, Pattison sought to define the discipline by establishing a common vocabulary in the geographic community at large. His goal was to create a lexicon of basic geographical concepts so that the work of academics could be easily interpreted by laymen. The four traditions are the Spatial or Locational Tradition, the Area Studies or Regional Tradition, the Man-Land Tradition, and the Earth Science Tradition. Each of these traditions is interrelated, and they are often used in conjunction with one another, rather than alone. Spatial or Locational Tradition The core concept behind the Spatial Tradition of geography relates to the in-depth analysis of the particulars of a place—such as the distribution of one aspect over an area—using quantitative techniques and tools that might include such things as computerized mapping and geographic information systems, spatial analysis and patterns, aerial distribution, densities, movement, and transportation. The Locational Tradition attempts to explain the course of human settlements in terms of location, growth, and in relation to other locales. Area Studies or Regional Tradition Unlike the Spatial Tradition, the Area Studies Tradition determines as much as it is possible to glean about a particular place in order to define,  describe, and differentiate it from other regions or areas. World regional geography, along with international trends and relationships are at its center. Man-Land Tradition The focus of the Man-Land Tradition is the study of the relationship between human beings and the land they live on. Man-Land looks not only at the impact people impose on their local environment but conversely, at how natural hazards can influence human life. Along with addition population geography, the tradition also takes into account the ramifications that cultural and political practices have on the given area of study as well. Earth Science Tradition The Earth Science Tradition is the study of planet Earth as the home to humans and its systems. Along with the physical geography of the planet, focuses of study include such things as how the planets location in the solar system affects its seasons (this is also known as Earth-sun interaction) and how changes in the lithosphere, hydrosphere, atmosphere, and biosphere impact human life on the planet. Offshoots of the Earth Science Tradition of geography are geology, mineralogy, paleontology, glaciology, geomorphology, and meteorology. What Did Pattison Leave Out? In response to the four traditions, in the mid-1970s, researcher J. Lewis Robinson noted that Pattisons model left out several important aspects of geography, such as the factor of time as it relates to historical geography and  cartography (mapmaking). Robinson wrote that by dividing geography into these categories—while admitting consistent themes do run through all four—Pattisons precepts lacked a unifying focus. Robinson did, however, concede that Pattison had done a good job of creating a framework for the discussion of the philosophical tenets of geography.   As a result, while its not the be all and end all, most geographic studies are likely to at least begin with Pattisons traditions. While not perfect, they have nonetheless become essential to the study of geography since first being adopted. Many of the more recent specialized areas of geographic study are, in essence, new and improved versions—reinvented and using better tools—of Pattisons original ideas.