American Literature Essay Example for Free

American Literature Essay On learning that his gay lover â€Å"Prior Walter† was infected with AIDS, Louis Ironson being unable to cope quits the relationship. Joe is offered a good promotion by fellow homosexual and lawyer â€Å"Roy Cohn†, unknowing to Joe, Roy has AIDS, which he contacted from Prior. Angels and ghosts visited Prior and told him he was a prophet, Joe struggles to reconcile his religion with his sexuality; Louis blames himself for leaving Prior and begins a relationship with Joe. Harper who was mentally derailed due to her addiction to taking pills regularly and had her problems worsened as she realizes that her husband ‘Joe’ is gay. She is very sensitive and weak, but loves her husband and wants to keep her home. Joe’s mother, Hannah moves to New York to attempt to take care of Harper and meets Prior. Harper separates from Joe and Roy is hospitalized. Tony Kushner shows some heavy Biblical references and references to American society, as well as some fantastical scenes including voyages to Antarctica and Heaven, as well as key events happening in San Francisco and at Bethesda Fountain in Central Park. I think Kushner wants to show how unhappy people could be and have lots of secret and can’t trust themselves in the modern life.

Multiculturalism In Canada :: Immigration, Ethnic Diversity

Multiculturalism In Canada Canada has long been called "The Mosaic", due to the fact that it is made up of a varied mix of races, cultures and ethnicities. As more and more immigrants come to Canada searching for a better life, the population naturally becomes more diverse. This has, in turn, spun a great debate over multiculturalism. Some of the issues under fire are the political state's policies concerning multiculturalism, the attitudes of Canadians around these policies, immigration, the global market, and a central point is the education and how to present the material in a way so as to offend the least amount of people. There are many variations on these themes as will be discussed in this paper. In the 1930's several educators called for programs of cultural diversity that encouraged ethnic and minority students to study their respective heritages. This is not a simple feat due to the fact that there is much diversity within individual cultures. A look at the 1991 Canadian census shows that the population has changed more noticeable in the last ten years than in any other time in the twentieth century, with one out of four Canadians identifying themselves as black, Hispanic, Asian, Pacific Islander, Metis or Native. (Gould 1995: 198)Most people, from educators to philosophers, agree that an important first step in successfully joining multiple cultures is to develop an understanding of each others background. However, the similarities stip there. One problem is defining the tem "multiculturalism". When it is looked at simply as meaning the existence of a culturally integrated society, many people have no problems. However, when you go beyond that and try to suggest a different way of arriving at theat culturally integrated society, everyone seems to have a different opinion on what will work. Since education is at the root of the problem, it might be appropriate to use an example in that context. In 1980, the American school, Stanford University came up with a program - later known as the "Stanford-style multicultural curriculum" which aimed to familiarize students with traditions, philosophy, literature and history of the West. The program consisted of fifteen required books by writers such as Plato, Aristotle, Homer, Aquinas, Marx and Freud. By 1987, a group called the Rainbow Coalition argued the fact that the books were all written by DWEM's or Dead White European Males. They felt that this type of teaching denied student s the knowledge of contributions by people of colour, women, and other oppressed groups.

National Health Care Spending Paper

Sloan Miller [email  protected] com Home 614-377-0096 Objective Seek to work in an environment that will challenge me further; while allowing me to contribute to the continued growth and success of the organization. Obtain a position that will provide me the ability to apply my work experience to a growing industry. Look forward to working with a company that promotes quality products and services; and provides me with the opportunity to meet and exceed assigned daily goals. First Choice Security April 2010 to presentDuties: As a security guard where my position require me to be alert, quick responding and fasting thinking on duty. I was responsible of guarding, patrolling and monitoring premises to avoid theft, violence and the infraction of rules. And to safe guard the assets and people within the premises of a company. Teach and Learn: May 2012 to July 2012 Duties: to provide care, education and nurturing for children of a variety of ages. As a daycare provider I provided genuin e passion for caring for children and the ability to relate to a diverse group of kids.My communication skills and the ability to positively interact with children, parents and other daycare staff members is something that I performed on a daily basis. Wackenhut Security: Duties: To provide security for different types of organizations which my company had taken on the responsibility to prevent violence and negligence from occurring at the different locations I had to safe guard. Education: South High School 1998 to 2001 Job Corp: Business clerical trade 2004

Maroons and Marronage Escaping Slavery

Maroon  refers to an African or Afro-American person who escaped slavery in the Americas and lived in hidden towns outside of the plantations. American slaves used several forms of resistance  to fight their imprisonment, everything from work slowdowns and tool damage to full-fledged revolt and flight.  Some runaways established permanent or semi-permanent towns for themselves in hidden places not far from the plantations, a process known as marronage (sometimes also spelled  maronnage or maroonage). Key Takeaways: Maroon Maroon is a word which refers to African or African-American people who escaped slavery and lived in communities outside of plantations.  The phenomenon is known globally wherever slavery occurs.  Several long-term American communities were created in Florida, Jamaica, Brazil, the Dominican Republic, and Suriname.  Palmares in Brazil was a maroon community of people originally from Angola that lasted for nearly a century, essentially an African state.   The runaways in North America were predominantly young and male, who had often been sold many times. Before the 1820s, some headed west or to Florida while it was  owned by the Spanish. After Florida became a U.S. territory in 1819, most headed to the North. The intermediate step for many of the escapees was marronage, where runaways hid relatively locally to their plantation but without the intention of returning to slavery.   The Process of Marronage Plantations in the Americas were organized such that the big house where the European owners lived was near the center of a large clearing. The slave cabins were located far from the plantation house, at the edges of the clearing and often immediately next to a forest or swamp. Enslaved men supplemented their own food supply by hunting and foraging in those woods, at the same time exploring and learning the terrain. Plantation workforces were made up mostly of male slaves, and if there were women and children, the men were the ones who were best able to leave. As a result, new Maroon communities were little more than camps with skewed demographics, mostly made up of  men and a small number of women and very rarely children. Even after they were set up, the embryonic Maroon towns had limited opportunities for building families. The new communities maintained difficult relationships with the slaves left behind on the plantations. Although the Maroons did help others to escape, kept in touch with family members, and traded with the plantation slaves, the Maroons sometimes resorted to raiding the plantation slave cabins for food and supplies. On occasion, the plantation slaves (voluntarily or not) actively assisted the whites to recapture runaways. Some of the male-only settlements were reportedly violent and dangerous. But some of those settlements eventually gained a balanced population, and flourished and grew.   Maroon Communities in the Americas The word Maroon typically refers to North American runaway slaves and it likely comes from the Spanish word cimarron or cimarroon, meaning wild. But marronage flared up wherever slaves were held, and whenever the whites were too busy to be vigilant. In Cuba, villages made up of escaped slaves were known as palenques or mambises; and in Brazil, they were known as quilombo, magote, or mocambo. Long-term marronage communities were established in Brazil (Palmares, Ambrosio), Dominican Republic (Jose Leta), Florida (Pilaklikaha and Fort Mose), Jamaica (Bannytown, Accompong, and Seamans Valley), and Suriname (Kumako). By the late 1500s, there were already Maroon villages in Panama and Brazil, and  Kumako in Suriname was established at least as early as the 1680s.   In the colonies which would become the United States, Maroon communities were most abundant in South Carolina, but they were also established in Virginia, North Carolina, and Alabama. The largest known Maroon communities in what would become the U.S. were formed in the Great Dismal Swamp on the Savannah River, on the border between Virginia and North Carolina. In 1763, George Washington,  the man who would become the first president of the United States, conducted a survey of the Great Dismal Swamp, intending to drain it and make it suitable for farming. The Washington Ditch, a canal built after the survey and opening up the swamp to traffic, was both an opportunity for Maroon communities to establish themselves in the swamp but at the same time dangerous in that white slave hunters could also find them living there. Great Dismal Swamp communities may have begun as early as 1765, but they had become numerous by 1786, after the end of the American revolution when the slaveholders could pay attention to the problem.   Structure The size of Maroon communities varied widely. Most were small, with between five and 100 people, but some became very large: Nannytown, Accompong, and Culpepper Island had populations in the hundreds. Estimates for Palmares in Brazil range between 5,000 and 20,000. Most were short-lived, in fact, 70 percent of the largest quilombos in Brazil were destroyed within two years. However, Palmares lasted a century, and Black Seminole towns — towns built by Maroons who were allied with the Seminole tribe in Florida — lasted several decades. Some of the Jamaican and Suriname Maroon communities founded in the 18th century are still occupied by their descendants today. Most Maroon communities were formed in inaccessible or marginal areas, partly because those areas were unpopulated, and partly because they were difficult to get to. The Black Seminoles in Florida found refuge in central Florida swamps; the Saramaka Maroons of Suriname settled on riverbanks in deeply forested areas. In Brazil, Cuba, and Jamaica, people escaped into the mountains and made their homes in densely vegetated hills. Maroon towns nearly always had several security measures. Primarily, the towns were hidden away, accessible only after following obscure paths which required long treks across difficult terrain. In addition, some communities built defensive ditches and forts and maintained well-armed, highly drilled and disciplined troops and sentries. Subsistence Many Maroon communities started out as nomadic, moving base often for safetys sake, but as their populations grew, they settled into fortified villages. Such groups often raided colonial settlements and plantations for commodities and new recruits. But they also traded crops and forest products with pirates and European traders for weapons and tools; many even signed treaties with different sides of competing colonies. Some Maroon communities were full-fledged farmers: in Brazil, Palmares settlers grew manioc, tobacco, cotton, bananas, maize, pineapples, and sweet potatoes; and Cuban settlements depended on honeybees and game. Many communities blended ethnopharmacological knowledge from their homes in Africa with the locally available and indigenous plants. In Panama, as early as the 16th century, palenqueros threw in with pirates such as the English privateer Francis Drake. A Maroon named Diego and his men raided both overland and maritime traffic with Drake, and together they sacked the city of Santo Domingo on Hispaniola island in 1586. They exchanged vital knowledge about when the Spanish would be moving looted American gold and silver and traded that for enslaved females and other items. South Carolina Maroons By 1708, enslaved Africans formed a majority of the population in South Carolina: the largest concentrations of African people at that time were at rice plantations on the coasts where up to 80 percent of the total population — white and black — was made up of slaves. There was a constant influx of new slaves during the 18th century, and during the 1780s, fully one-third of the 100,000 slaves in South Carolina had been born in Africa. Total Maroon populations are unknown, but between 1732 and 1801, slaveholders advertised for more than 2,000 fugitive slaves in South Carolina newspapers. Most returned voluntarily, hungry and cold, back to friends and family, or were hunted down by parties of overseers and dogs. Although the word Maroon was not used in the paperwork, the South Carolina slave laws defined them clearly enough. Short-term fugitives would be returned to their owners for punishment, but long-term fugitives from slavery — those who had been away for 12 months or longer — could be lawfully killed by any white. In the 18th century, a small Maroon settlement in South Carolina included four houses in a square measuring 17x14 feet. A larger one measured 700x120 yards and included 21 houses and cropland, accommodating up to 200 people. This towns people grew domesticated rice and potatoes and raised cows, pigs,  turkeys, and ducks. Houses were located on the highest elevations; pens were built, fences maintained, and wells dug. An African State in Brazil The most successful Maroon settlement was Palmares in Brazil, established about 1605. It became larger than any of the North American communities,  including over 200 houses, a church, four smithies, a six-foot-wide main street, a large meeting house, cultivated fields, and kingly residences. Palmares is thought to have been made up of a core of people from Angola, and they essentially created an African state in the Brazilian hinterland. An African-style system of status, birthrights, slavery, and royalty was developed at Palmares and adapted traditional African ceremonial rites were performed. A range of elites included a king, a military commander, and an elected council of quilombo chiefs. Palmares was a constant thorn in the side of the Portuguese and Dutch colonials in Brazil, who waged war with the community for most of the 17th century. Palmares was finally conquered and destroyed in 1694.  Ã‚   Significance Maroon societies were a significant form of African and African American resistance to slavery. In some regions and for some periods, the communities held treaties with other colonists and were recognized as legitimate, independent, and autonomous bodies with rights to their lands.   Legally sanctioned or not, the communities were ubiquitous wherever slavery was practiced. As the American anthropologist and historian Richard Price has written, the persistence of Maroon communities for decades or centuries stands out as a heroic challenge to white authority, and the living proof of the existence of a slave consciousness that refused to be limited by the dominant white culture. Sources de Santana, Bruna Farias, Robert A. Voeks, and Ligia Silveira Funch. Ethnomedicinal Survey of a Maroon Community in Brazils Atlantic Tropical Forest. Journal of Ethnopharmacology 181 (2016): 37-49. Print.Fortes-Lima, Cesar, et al. Genome-Wide Ancestry and Demographic History of African-Descendant Maroon Communities from French Guiana and Suriname. The American Journal of Human Genetics 101.5 (2017): 725-36. Print.Lockley, Tim, and David Doddington. Maroon and Slave Communities in South Carolina before 1865. The South Carolina Historical Magazine 113.2 (2012): 125-45. Print.Okoshi, Akane, and Alex de Voogt. Mancala in Surinamese Maroon Communities: The Expedition of Melville J. Herskovits. Board Game Studies Journal  12.1 (2018): 57. Print.Price, Richard. Scrapping Maroon History: Brazils Promise, Surinames Shame. NWIG: New West Indian Guide / Nieuwe West-Indische Gids 72.3/4 (1998): 233-55. Print.van’t Klooster, Charlotte, Tinde van Andel, and Ria Reis. Patterns in Medicinal Plant Knowledge and Use in a Maroon Village in Suriname. Journal of Ethnopharmacology 189 (2016): 319-30. Print.White, Cheryl. Kumako. Antiquity 84.324 (2015): 467-79. Print.: A Place of Convergence for Maroons and Amerindians in Suriname, SA