Sunday, January 26, 2020

Domestication of Maize in Mesoamerica

Domestication of Maize in Mesoamerica One of the most basic needs of a human being is that of food. We most eat and drink to survive. Subsistence is a natural thought which consumes every modern humans day. What will I eat for breakfast? What will I take for lunch or will I eat out? Should I take something out for dinner or pick something up on the way home? All of these questions seem at times quite complicated, however are without a doubt, much simpler than what may have crossed the minds of prehistoric humans. Just as it is today subsistence was the center of each cultures world. Whether you were nomadic or sedentary each group of hunter-gatherers had to eat. It is the survival of these societies which allows us as archaeologists a peak into the past. The process of gathering enough food in which to obtain a sufficient amount of calories was first and foremost in everyday life. The process of domestication of certain plants eventually led to more nucleated settlements. Let us keep in mind Morgans theory of culture, if this is correct, that cultural progression is lineal; than it is safe to assume that the only natural progression for prehistoric humans was to transition from the hunter gather stage of obtaining subsistence to a more agricultural life style. One cultigen in particular was maize, now referred to as corn. In this paper an attempt will made to properly explain what maize is, how maize became a major staple in prehistoric peoples diet, and lastly how has maize been detected in Mesoamerica through evidence in the archaeological record. What is maize? It is a large species of American grass of the genus Zea (Z. Mays) widely cultivated as a forage and food plant; known as Indian corn (http://archaeology.about.com). Maize is a cultigen; this is a crop that cannot propagate in the wild without human intervention. Plant domestication can be defined as the human creation of a new form of plant, dependent on human intervention, harvesting and planting for survival. Maize has a distinct planting season, growing season, and harvesting season. There is a worldwide importance placed on corn. In the Western Hemisphere it is by far the most important human food crop (Beadle, 615). It is still the most important crop in all of Latin America. On a worldwide basis it is the third most important human food crop, with an annual production of some two hundred metric tons (Beadle, 615). When Columbus arrived from the Old World and stumbled upon this strange crop on the island of Cuba, essentially all major races of maize-some two to three hundred- were already in cultivation and had been disseminated from its place of origin, probably southern Mexico (which will be explained further in the paper), to mid-Chile in the south and to the mouth of the St. Lawrence River in the north. The passage below from a science magazine will further help explain the definition of maize. Corn, also known as maize (from the Spanish maiz) was first domesticated nearly 10,000 years ago from teosinte, a wild grass that looked quite different from our modern crop. Teosinte grew in Mexico and Central America as a bushy plant with many spikes, the precursor to our familiar ear of corn. The small teosinte spikes had only two rows of nearly inedible kernels, or seeds, each enclosed by a hard covering. These seeds separated individually at maturity and were dispersed widely. In probably less than a thousand years, the tiny spikes of ancestral teosinte transformed into larger ears with edible kernels that remained on the cob for easy harvest. How these dramatic changes occurred has been a puzzle for over a century. Geneticists are now convinced that humans living in the Balsas River region of Mexico were foraging teosinte seeds when they noticed rare aberrations-likely caused by random mutations-that increased spike size dramatically. Seeds were propagated from these bigger spi kes, and thus the remarkable events of domestication began. By studying the maize genome, researchers have now confirmed that mutations in single genes, such as Teosinte glume architectural (Tgal). Alter kernel and plant structure and that changes in many genes influence complex developmental traits, such as the time to flowering. As human populations migrated throughout the Americas, new varieties of maize were selected to grow in local environments. Some varieties were maintained as so-called landraces, each growing in ecological niches in Mexico and South America. Now, these varieties and landraces hold a wealth of genetic diversity, which is being tapped for both basic research and as traits for crop breeding(http://www.sciencemag.org/products/posters/maize_poster) How did maize become a major staple in prehistoric peoples diet? Where there other uses or maize other than subsistence? New research shows that there is unequivocally four major independent centers of plant domestication; the Near East, China, Eastern North America and Mesoamerica. (Smith 1989: 1566) The Americas is believed to provide the clearest record there is of agriculture origins anywhere in the world, providing new understanding of the process involved in this key transformation in human history. However, the process is believed to have started in Mesoamerica. Maize has many uses; food, feed for live stock and energy for industries. As a food, the whole grain, either mature or immature, may be used; or the maize may be processed by dry milling techniques to give a relatively large number of intermediary products, such as maize grits of different particle size, maize meal, maize flour and flaking grits. (http://fao.org) These materials have a significant number of applications in a large variety of foods. Maize grown in subsistence agriculture continues to be used as a basic food crop. In developed countries more than 60 percent of the production is used in compounded feeds for poultry, pigs and ruminant animals. In recent years, even in developing countries in which maize is a staple food, more of it has been used as an animal feed ingredient. High moisture maize has been paid much attention recently as an animal feed because of its lower cost and its capacity to improve efficiency in feed conversion. The by-products of dry milling include the germ and the seed-coat. The former is used as a source of edible oil of high quality. The seed-coat or pericarp is used mainly as a feed, although in recent years interest has developed in it as a source of dietary fiber (Earl et al., 1988; Burge and Duensing, 1989). Wet milling is a process applicable mainly in the industrial use of maize, although the alkaline cooking process used in manufacturing tortillas (the thin, flat bread of Mexico and other Central American countries) is also a wet milling operation that removes only the pericarp (Bressani, 1972). Wet milling yields maize starch and by-products such as maize gluten, used as a feed ingredient. It is this flat bread or tortilla that is speculated to have been used in pre-historic times. This is not the tortilla that we think of today, however, the basic concept is rudimentary and could have been used even 10,000 years ago. George W. Beadles research shows that the probability of maize being similarly used as what we refer to as popcorn is high. This high probability points to the use of teosinte, which has been argued among scholars as an un-usable product, therefore not an ancestor of maize. Beadles research has proven that even the triangular kernel of teosinte could have been heated on heated sand, hot rock or fire and would have popped. There is speculation that in prehistoric time, maize had a religious and ceremonial purpose. It is written that in the height of the Incan empire maize was used in ritual and ceremonial gatherings in the form of beer. (Fernandez-Arnesto; 243) There isnt anything to indicate any different anywhere else that maize has turned up within the archaeological record. With a better understanding of maize and its possible functions, lets address where maize originated. Blake, Clark, Chisholm, and Mudar consider the transition to agriculture in the Formative period of coastal Mesoamerica (from approximately 1500 B.C. to the birth of Christ), specifically along the Pacific coast of Chiapas, Mexico. These scholars review the evidence from this area in terms of two competing hypotheses: the competitive feasting model of Hayden (1990) and the interaction of plants and humans as described by Rindos (1984) and Flannery (1986). MacNeishs work in the Tehuacan Valley has shown that the origins of maize and its integration into a system of agricultural production that included a variety of plants began as early as 7000 B.C. The earliest people to use and domesticate these plants were not sedentary, instead, they were nomadic foragers who incorporated these domesticates into a complex seasonal pattern of hunting and collecting (MacNeish 1967, 1972; Flannery 1968; Flannery 1986). It has been believed that from Formative times forward that maize is typically seen as the main staple crop in Mesoamerican prehistory. Agricultural advancement has long been thought of as the cornerstone of early sedentary village life and one of necessary conditions for the development of complex society (MacNeish 1972). Maize yields a high amount of caloric intake which is necessary in the process of sustaining the level of activity that prehistoric people in Mesoamerica needed to survive. A recent re-analysis by Farnsworth et al (1985) of archaeological data from the Tehuacan Valley, including a stable carbon and nitrogen analysis of the human skeletal remains, suggests that a heavy dependence on grains, including maize began as early as the Coxcatlan phase (ca. 5000-3000 B.C.). In Oaxaca, excavated macrobotanical remains show that domesticates, including maize, beans, squash, and avocados, were in use and consumed both before and after the appearance of the first sedentary villages (Flannery 1976, 1986). Kirkbys (1973) study of agricultural production suggests that the main staple, maize, was cultivated and relied upon from the Early Formative Tierras Largas phase (1400-1150 B.C.) onwards. She suggests, however, that maize did not reach a threshold of productivity, until about 100B.C. when larger varieties allowed greater yields per cultivated hectares of land. The assumption is that as maize cob size grew, and the plant became more productive, then early villagers c ame increasingly to rely on it as a subsistence staple. Both the Tehuacan and the Oaxaca data suggest that after agricultural products, particularly maize, became important in the subsistence system by the Late Archaic period, the trend towards increasing reliance on these plants continued through time. The movement of a relatively small amount of maize from established agro-ecology over long distances into a new environment is equivalent to an evolutionary bottleneck or a founder event (King, 1987; Mayr, 1963). Because only a small portion of the population is represented after one of these events, sampling error will result in, among other things, changed gene frequencies, breakdown of co-adapted gene complexes, and sometimes increased additive genetic variability (Cheverud and Routman, 1996). The above mentioned on page 2 and 3 of this paper attempted to explain the process of genetics when involved in the process of advancement of a plant. We can refer to this as agricultural evolution. Farming in modern day seems to be, from an outsider looking in; hard work, dirty work, and monotonous work. If with modern equipment farming is difficult what would it have been like in prehistoric Mesoamerica? Why farm at all? We look at hunting game now in present day society as romantic and sportsman like. There is a challenge to the game. There is fancy equipment purchased and well kept. Hunters tell stories that are passed on from generation to generation, hunting stories in prehistory had to be just as exciting and the stuff of which myths were made. So, again why farm at all? Many scholars have argued that without agriculture societies would not have existed. Only agriculture, with its pattern of population growth, urbanization, and economic surpluses has produced civilizations (Reed, 5). Thus helping to explain why agriculture led to complex societies. Varying conditions such as altitude, rainfall, soil, and seasonal temperature rand and latitudinal differences in the length of day during growing seasons led to the eventual diffusion of maize northward into North America, however for the sake of this paper the focus will remain on Mesoamerica. The research indicates that the evidence in the archaeological record states that the coastal areas show maize before any other area. Coe and Flannery until the 1980s were the only two researchers to report domesticates at Early Formative cities along the Pacific Coast of either Chiapas or Guatemala. Other than these few incidences relatively few sites have produced macrobotanical evidence of cultigens among their subsistence remains. Richard Scotty MacNeish conducts what he called the great corn hunt in 1958. MacNeish believed by tracking pre-ceramic caves in the southern part of Mesoamerica, namely, in the caves of Copan and the Comeagua Valley of Honduras he would have a better chance of tracking the corn (MacNeish 1962). His search extended to Zacapa Valley of Guatemala in 1959, as well having brief visits in Oaxaca and the Rio Balsas Valley of Guerrero. In 1961 MacNeish and his team started the Tehuacan project which yielded to be a great unbelievable success. Among many question with this project MacNeish and his colleagues were able to solve the problem of the origins of corn and were able to attack the how and the why of many other domesticated plants in highland Mesoamerica. According to MacNeish the amount of artifacts (50,000 lithics, more than 100,000 plant remains, over 10,000 bones and some 250 human feces) found in the 454 sites gave the team a time span that roughly stretched from 20,000 to 2000 B. C. Since MacNieshs research and excavations there have been over 1000 sites found and more archaeological evidence to support his original findings. In conclusion, the topic of maize is one that has intrigued and puzzled archaeologists for many years. The domestication and evolution of maize in and of itself causes much debate. It is because of great archaeologists like MacNeish and his unwavering curiosity of the great corn hunt as to why we have the information that we have today. The mere evidence of 454 sites becoming 1000 in a matter of years speaks for itself. The fact remains that there are 4 major independent centers of plant domestication, the Near East, China, North America, and Mesoamerica. It is the intent of this paper to have clearly introduced even the novice of persons to what exactly is the definition of maize, how maize became a major staple in prehistoric peoples diet, and how maize has been detected in Mesoamerica through evidence in the archaeological record.

Saturday, January 18, 2020

Rainer Maria Rilke Essay

Rainer Maria Rilke was born in Prague in 1875, a city with a German-speaking element. He attended the University of Prague and Linz, and soon set out on his unsettled life of wandering among friends and countries. In 1899 and 1900 he went to Russia with Lou Andreas-Salome and her professor husband, where he met tolstory and the painter Pasternak (father of the poet Boris). He was fascinated by Russian Orthodox mysticism and the solitary life of the monks. Russia was the foundation of his ways of absorbing the world; he was to say at the end of his life. He took trips to North Africa, Sweden, and Denmark, and in 1901 married to Clara Westhoff, a German, and had a daughter Ruth by her. After a year he left them, though he and Clara remained close friends. In 1902 Rilke went to Paris, where he lived off and on for the next twelve years, part of which time he was the sculptor Rodin’s private secretary. The first of his Duino Elegies were written in 1912 at Duino, Italy, in a castle which looked onto the Adriatic. Then, following a period of creative frustration, in 1921 he settled in Chateau de Muzot, in Switzerland, a small, uncomfortable, thirteenth-century stone house, with a bedroom and one tall room, where he remained the rest of his life. There, in the month of February 1922, he completed the Duino Elegies, the fifty-five poems in Sonnets to Orpheus, and a miscellany of other poems. After 1924 he was sick and by November 1926 he was at the Valmont Sanatorium. That month he published Vergers, a collection of his French poems. After pricking his finger on a rose thorn and suffering pain from severe blood poisoning, he died of leukemia at Valmont on December 29, 1926. By the time he wrote Sonnets to Orpheus, Rainer Maria Rilke was at once the most classically informed and innovatively modern writer of his generation (Rilke 1972). Unembarrassed by precursors, using them to his advantage, he stood apart from his immediate experimental contemporaries and created a modernism at once unique, cyclical, and enduring. Rilke’s Sonnets to Orpheus, prompted by the death of a young woman, Vera Oukama Koop, is an occasion of perfectly crafted poems, which Rilke shaped and misshaped in every possible way to suit the few days of their compelling creation. The blind angel entered him and spoke his message, and Rilke completed the first book in about three days. He returned to the Duino Elegies, and then turned back to the sonnets and completed the second book, also in a few days. So this most interior, metaphysical, secular-religious poet of the century yielded. In the poems he moves away from what might be an ordinary life of friends, lovers, and artists to one of remembrances: a dog’s imploring face, a free-flying kite, a young childhood cousin who will die, a teenage Dutch dancer, Vera Ouckama Koop, who dies in her eighteenth year and to whom his volume is dedicated. He also contemplates the indifferent modern machine that threatens the soul, contrasted with a virgin and her white unicorn that he discovers on a medieval textile in the Musee de Cluny in Paris. Finally, he addresses the silent friend of many distances, who may be Koop or Rilke himself. In this last sonnet, affirming the risk of life and art that may lead to jubilance, Rilke tells the friend, lost in darkness, to let he go and ring out. In the sonnets, Rilke exchanges his outer and inner worlds with agility. While he may find an angel or two or Orpheus’s resounding tunes inhabiting his realms, no salvific god shows up to comfort or make promises. The poet resides in loneliness, homelessness, silence, and change, his conditions for touching the sky and the fields and hearing all that is elsewhere and around him. Rilke had many friends, but he was always a guest, an uprooted monk of art, and his most accomplished work was completed in a month of 1922 in that tiny dingy castle where he sentenced himself to solitary confinement. Orpheus is a calendar of search, remembrance, and acceptance of Orpheus, the art-god of descent and resurrection, who is everywhere. Rilke succeeds in turning grief into pathos and ultimately into an ecstasy of absence and presence. Following a familiar pattern of his relations with women, Rilke moves from desire, to its frustration and negation, to the transformation into art. It is not different, emotionally and artistically from the pattern of the mystical poets as in St. John of the Cross, where the speaker moves from the burning senses, to the dark night of their negation, and to light and union which in the instance of both Rilke and the Spanish mystic is the evidence of the poem. Rilke’s Interpretation of the Greek Myth Orpheus There are three moments of the myth of Orpheus as related and commented by Rilke, first, the creation of a world through language, second, the turn which Orpheus makes at the threshold of Hades, and third, the death of Orpheus. In Rilke’s Sonnets to Orpheus, the poet-figure Orpheus, whom we know from Greek legend and Medieval Latin folklore, is the symbol for a poetical synthesis that joins all things in harmony and joins what appears and what by its very nature does not, Orpheus is thought to keep open what Rilke will call a dual realm between the actual and the potential that lies beyond it. The poet-figure to whom Rilke’s sonnets are addressed, of course, is the Greek poet Orpheus, who according to legend, sang so divinely that all of nature hearkened to his call, Orpheus was thus able to charm the god Hades and bring back his dead wife, Eurydice, from the underworld, holding open what Rilke calls the pure relation between the here and the beyond. And so the Sonnets to Orpheus series is about the access of poetic language to appearance and to what transcends it. Rilke’s language itself, through its elusive but also vertiginously concrete references, realizes a world that encompasses the actual and the unseen, the special transcendence (1972:189-192) of potentiality. This is why Rilke’s poetry emphasizes the other side of even ordinary things and other side not exhausted by the actuality that foreshadows it. The inspiration for Rilke’s Sonnets is twofold. First of all, it is grateful to the Orpheus legend an illustration of which hung in the Chateau de Muzot, where Rilke was staying in February 1922 when the series was written. Equally importantly, it was occasioned by the untimely death in youth of Vera Duckama Knoop( a daughter of a friend of Rilke’s), to whom the sonnests are dedicated. (1958: 185). One can infer then that Rilke takes the task upon himself, as Orpheus did for Eurydice, of establishing a relation to the mysteriousness of the other side, which Rilke claims, in a letter about the Sonnets, the dead girl symbolizes. In a commentary Rilke writes that the Sonnets are placed under the name and protection of the dead girl whose incompletion and innocence holds open the door of the grave, so that she, gone from us, belongs to those powers who keep the half of life fresh and open towards the other wound-open half(1972: 136). Rilke is fascinated by the legendary poet, who is said to have sung so beautifully that all beings, even gods, were enchanted by his song, but it is primarily the invisible potential horizon of things that Rilke’s own poetry, by invoking Orpheus, aims to bring into poetical intimacy. Through this horizontality, Rilke finds an access to what he often refers to as the essence of things. The girl is a symbol of that horizonality, a symbol of incompleteness itself: as a young girl, she was half yet to be. Her death transports her to the other side of life which illuminates life’s own incompleteness. In the Duino Elegies,(1994: 154 ),the second part of which was finished during the same profile month of February 1922, the figure of the angel which Rilke takes pains to distinguish from the Christian symbolism of the same serve unification of distinct realms. The Orpheus myth for both Rilke and his predecessor Ovid concerns the relation between this known side of life and the mysterious beyond. Orpheus is the one who has lifted the lyre among shadows, who has entered the underworld, and so the one to whom is allowed the infinite praise of poeticizing. It is because the figure of Orpheus, like the dead girl, is characterized by transcendence that he serves Rilke well here. Rilke devices in his invocation of Orpheus, a decidedly modern poetical access to the transcendent by presenting in condensed and abbreviated form, a lyrical total without translating that total into logical or even associative statements. From the first sonnet of the series, Orpheus and his song are associated by Rilke with pure transcendence. Orpheus who sang so sublimely that he was said to have become a god, transcended the ordinary relation that language gives us to things, a relation which Rilke conceives as relying upon opposites, the cleavage between being and non-being. Rilke’s reference to Orpheus is marked by a repetition of German verbs that indicate a crossing of such boundaries. His word transcends( ubertrifft) the being-here ( das Hiersein), because it overstep ontological boundaries even as he obeys them and so Orpheus enters into relation with the mystery of things and their transience. Their transience renders them intimate with our own and so we must according to Rilke resist the will to run down and degrade everything earthly, just because of its temporariness which it shares with us. Things too belong to the dual realm to which Rilke’s sonnet series repeatedly refers. This is suggested in these lines from Rilke’s Sonnet on the relationship of poetic song and the nature. Conclusion While Rainer Maria Rilke’s relation to empiricist psychology is marginal at best, his relatively unreflecting use of its imagery allows us to estimate with some accuracy the extent to which the movement had entered the general consciousness of an entire period from the 1890s on. For many readers and writers, the dispersed and fragmented subject was doubtless little more than a fashion, just as many saw impressionist painting more as a technique than as the outgrowth of a philosophy. Rilke seems to have used empiricist vocabulary and turns of thought somewhat eclectically throughout his career, he was an excellent indicator of what was generally in the air and had an exceptionally creative way of integrating it into his own original and powerfully imagined poetic universe. Influence studies of the conventional type cannot do justice to the kind of problem he poses. Throughout his life, as an almost daily custom, Rilke wrote letters of such exceptional grace and expressive force that they have come to represent a significant part of his artistic legacy. He also preserved conscientiously letters written to him by others. Family members, friends, and more incidental acquaintances collected his letters as precious gifts, in keeping with old European traditions. After his return from Paris to Muzot, Rilke set down his last will and testament in which he authorized his heirs to publish his correspondence. He realized how much of his creative energies had flowed into the letters. He had spent days and weeks just answering the growing number of questions on his work and way of life and thinking about concerns with which others had approached him. In its totality, Rilke’s work reflects his personal life and disposition, as well as, and perhaps even more so, the curiously pessimistic historical climate that became obvious at the turn of the century. He felt and recorded the insidious doubt in the strength or adequacy of a modern rationalistic society. He was extraordinarily sensitive to the deeply disturbing signs of this cultural unrest and without any sustained interest in theoretical discourse, learned to draw conclusions from the work of contemporary artists. Rainer Maria Rilke is a master at lining, and his use of contemporary meters, rhythm, and diction makes his translations more readable to a contemporary audience without losing the mysticism and lyrical quality of Rilke’s poems.

Friday, January 10, 2020

Correlative Conjunctions

Correlative Conjunctions They are defined as mechanisms that link only two balanced words, phrases, and clauses. The linked elements should be parallel or equal in terms of length and grammatical similarity. Verb agreement When two subjects are connected with a correlative conjunction, the second must agree with the following verb. Every single evening either the horned owl or the squabbling cats wake Sam with their racket.Every single evening either the squabbling cats or the horned owl wakes Sam with their racket. Pronoun agreement In the case of pronouns, the second antecedent must agree with the following pronoun. Neither Yolanda nor the cousins expressed their disappointment when blind Aunt Sophie set down the plate of burnt hamburgers. Neither the cousins nor Yolanda expressed her disappointment when blind Aunt Sophie set down the plate of burnt hamburgers. Primary correlative conjunctions in English: both . . . nd â€Å"It is difficult to produce a television documentary that is both incisive and probing when every twelve minutes one is interrupted by twelve dancing rabbits singing about toilet paper. † (Rod Serling) either . . . or Either John or George must have done this mischief. neither . . . nor â€Å"In nature there are neither rewards nor punishments; there are only consequences. † (Robert G. Ingersoll) not . . . but â€Å"In the end, we will remember not the words of our enemies but the silence of our friends. (Martin Luther King, Jr. ) not only . . . but also The Great Wall of China is not only up to 30 feet high and 32 feet thick, but also 1,400 miles long. Other pairs which can be used: as . . . as If you are as intelligent as your father, it will not be difficult for you to run your family business. just as . . . so Just as the holiday's basis changed from a historical to a mythological one, so too is it now changing to become more political than anything else. the more . . . the lessThe more he eats, the less he puts on weigh t. the more . . . the more The more the building shook, the more we held on. no sooner . . . than No sooner had I finished the meal than I started feeling hungry again. so . . . as The movie is not so interesting as the book. whether . . . or â€Å"I couldn't distinguish whether I was smelling the clutching sound of misery or hearing the cloying odor of death. † (Maya Angelou, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, 1970) http://www. towson. edu/ows/exerciseparal4. htm

Thursday, January 2, 2020

The Grapes Of Wrath And The Sun Also Rises - 1378 Words

The Rich and Poor in The Grapes of Wrath and the Sun Also Rises The Grapes of Wrath, written by John Steinbeck, follows the migration of people to California during the Dust Bowl, which took place in the 1930s. The lack of rainfall made it difficult for farmers to grow produce and ultimately put everyone out of work. The Joads are one of the many families that packed up as many belongings as they possibly could and headed West in the search of work. The Sun Also Rises, by Ernest Hemingway, takes place after World War 1 and focuses on the â€Å"Lost Generation†. The men, women, and veterans had a difficult time readjusting after the War. They were hopeless, faithless, and tried to filled the void with aimless activities including partying, drinking, and traveling. Many men and women became materialistic and spending money was their distraction from reality. The Grapes of Wrath and The Sun Also Rises demonstrates a huge gap between the rich and poor and how money affects their l ives. Both classes are being impacted by drastic events being, World War 1 and The Dust Bowl, two completely different events that resulted in different ways of dealing with them. Although the rich and poor have different ways of dealing with their problems, in the end it’s just a distraction for the both of them. The Joad family, from The Grapes of Wrath, hoped for a better life harvesting fruits in California. Reminiscing about the future and having faith kept them moving forward.Show MoreRelatedGrapes Of Wrath Gender Roles Essay1158 Words   |  5 PagesIn the 20th century, the average home life in rural Oklahoma was full of hard workers in the pursuit of the picture-perfect home surrounded by plentiful land. As the sun rises over the land in the morning with a red hue, it signals the commencement of the day ahead. The farmer has already been awake since before the sun broke the horizon, preparing his little equipment and his animals for his land’s work. 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This quote isRead MoreBrief Survey of American Literature3339 Words   |  14 PagesRichard Saunders Full of proverbs which teach people thrift, carefulness, and independence Poor Richard’s Almanac â€Å"lost time is never found again† â€Å"a penny saved is a penny earned† â€Å"God helps those that help themselves† â€Å"Early to bed, and early to rise, makes a man healthy, wealthy, and wise† The Autobiography First published in Paris in March of 1791 entitled â€Å"Memoires De La Vie Privee† The first English translation, The Private Life of the Late Benjamin Franklin. Originally Written By HimselfRead MoreExplore the Way the Writer Presents the Relationship Between George and Lennie in of Mice and Men3909 Words   |  16 PagesExplore the way the writer presents the relationship between George and Lennie in â€Å"Of Mice and Men† Of Mice and Men was written in the 1937 by John Steinbeck, he other well know books as the Grapes of Wrath and East of Eden, h also received a Nobel Prize for Literature in 1962. This book is set in the 1930s and set in California, his home region. During this time, the USA was suffering from a great depression, this meant that it was hard to find job because the economy was very weak, so to findRead MoreEssay Prompts4057 Words   |  17 PagesArtist as a Young Man A Gesture Life Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead Ghosts The Scarlet Letter Great Expectations Sister Carrie The Great Gatsby The Sound and Fury Gulliver’s Travels Sula Heart of Darkness The Sun Also Rises Invisible Man Their Eyes Were Watching God Joe Turner’s Come and Gone The Things They Carried King Lear The Turn of the Screw Major Barbara Who’s Afraid of Virginia Wolf 2004 (Form B): The most important themes in literatureRead MoreThe Orientation Packet to the Nation of Islam6353 Words   |  26 Pagesin your new role as a follower of Minister Farrakhan is that you are entering into a new course of study that actually involves the Supreme Wisdom (a term you will learn more about). A wise woman recognizes that she can never learn too much, but she also understands that a higher course of learning, starts from a basic foundation. It is the basic foundation that the following material and your further instructions in your orientation is design to teach you. No where in the world will you find a truer