english4us

Brave New World Chapter 1

2009-06-07T03:40:00.000-07:00

Read the beginning of the novel:

Chapter One

A SQUAT grey building of only thirty-four stories. Over the main entrance the words, CENTRAL LONDON HATCHERY AND CONDITIONING CENTRE, and, in a shield, the World State's motto, COMMUNITY, IDENTITY, STABILITY.

The enormous room on the ground floor faced towards the north. Cold for all the summer beyond the panes, for all the tropical heat of the room itself, a harsh thin light glared through the windows, hungrily seeking some draped lay figure, some pallid shape of academic goose-flesh, but finding only the glass and nickel and bleakly shining porcelain of a laboratory. Wintriness responded to wintriness. The overalls of the workers were white, their hands gloved with a pale corpse-coloured rubber. The light was frozen, dead, a ghost. Only from the yellow barrels of the microscopes did it borrow a certain rich and living substance, lying along the polished tubes like butter, streak after luscious streak in long recession down the work tables.

"And this," said the Director opening the door, "is the Fertilizing Room."

Bent over their instruments, three hundred Fertilizers were plunged, as the Director of Hatcheries and Conditioning entered the room, in the scarcely breathing silence, the absent-minded, soliloquizing hum or whistle, of absorbed concentration. A troop of newly arrived students, very young, pink and callow, followed nervously, rather abjectly, at the Director's heels. Each of them carried a notebook, in which, whenever the great man spoke, he desperately scribbled. Straight from the horse's mouth. It was a rare privilege. The D. H. C. for Central London always made a point of personally conducting his new students round the various departments.

"Just to give you a general idea," he would explain to them. For of course some sort of general idea they must have, if they were to do their work intelligently–though as little of one, if they were to be good and happy members of society, as possible. For particulars, as every one knows, make for virtue and happiness; generalities are intellectually necessary evils. Not philosophers but fret-sawyers and stamp collectors compose the backbone of society.

"To-morrow," he would add, smiling at them with a slightly menacing geniality, "you'll be settling down to serious work. You won't have time for generalities. Meanwhile …"

Meanwhile, it was a privilege. Straight from the horse's mouth into the notebook. The boys scribbled like mad.

Tall and rather thin but upright, the Director advanced into the room. He had a long chin and big rather prominent teeth, just covered, when he was not talking, by his full, floridly curved lips. Old, young? Thirty? Fifty? Fifty-five? It was hard to say. And anyhow the question didn't arise; in this year of stability, A. F. 632, it didn't occur to you to ask it.

"I shall begin at the beginning," said the D.H.C. and the more zealous students recorded his intention in their notebooks: Begin at the beginning. "These," he waved his hand, "are the incubators." And opening an insulated door he showed them racks upon racks of numbered test-tubes. "The week's supply of ova. Kept," he explained, "at blood heat; whereas the male gametes," and here he opened another door, "they have to be kept at thirty-five instead of thirty-seven. Full blood heat sterilizes." Rams wrapped in theremogene beget no lambs.

Still leaning against the incubators he gave them, while the pencils scurried illegibly across the pages, a brief description of the modern fertilizing process; spoke first, of course, of its surgical introduction–"the operation undergone voluntarily for the good of Society, not to mention the fact that it carries a bonus amounting to six months' salary"; continued with some account of the technique for preserving the excised ovary alive and actively developing; passed on to a consideration of optimum temperature, salinity, viscosity; referred to the liquor in which the detached and ripened eggs were kept; and, leading his charges to the work tables, actually showed them how this liquor was drawn off from the test-tubes; how it was let out drop by drop onto the specially warmed slides of the microscopes; how the eggs which it contained were inspected for abnormalities, counted and transferred to a porous receptacle; how (and he now took them to watch the operation) this receptacle was immersed in a warm bouillon containing free-swimming spermatozoa–at a minimum concentration of one hundred thousand per cubic centimetre, he insisted; and how, after ten minutes, the container was lifted out of the liquor and its contents re-examined; how, if any of the eggs remained unfertilized, it was again immersed, and, if necessary, yet again; how the fertilized ova went back to the incubators; where the Alphas and Betas remained until definitely bottled; while the Gammas, Deltas and Epsilons were brought out again, after only thirty-six hours, to undergo Bokanovsky's Process.

"Bokanovsky's Process," repeated the Director, and the students underlined the words in their little notebooks.

One egg, one embryo, one adult-normality. But a bokanovskified egg will bud, will proliferate, will divide. From eight to ninety-six buds, and every bud will grow into a perfectly formed embryo, and every embryo into a full-sized adult. Making ninety-six human beings grow where only one grew before. Progress.

"Essentially," the D.H.C. concluded, "bokanovskification consists of a series of arrests of development. We check the normal growth and, paradoxically enough, the egg responds by budding."

Responds by budding. The pencils were busy.

He pointed. On a very slowly moving band a rack-full of test-tubes was entering a large metal box, another, rack-full was emerging. Machinery faintly purred. It took eight minutes for the tubes to go through, he told them. Eight minutes of hard X-rays being about as much as an egg can stand. A few died; of the rest, the least susceptible divided into two; most put out four buds; some eight; all were returned to the incubators, where the buds began to develop; then, after two days, were suddenly chilled, chilled and checked. Two, four, eight, the buds in their turn budded; and having budded were dosed almost to death with alcohol; consequently burgeoned again and having budded–bud out of bud out of bud–were thereafter–further arrest being generally fatal–left to develop in peace. By which time the original egg was in a fair way to becoming anything from eight to ninety-six embryos– a prodigious improvement, you will agree, on nature. Identical twins–but not in piddling twos and threes as in the old viviparous days, when an egg would sometimes accidentally divide; actually by dozens, by scores at a time.

"Scores," the Director repeated and flung out his arms, as though he were distributing largesse. "Scores."

But one of the students was fool enough to ask where the advantage lay.

"My good boy!" The Director wheeled sharply round on him. "Can't you see? Can't you see?" He raised a hand; his expression was solemn. "Bokanovsky's Process is one of the major instruments of social stability!"

Major instruments of social stability.

Standard men and women; in uniform batches. The whole of a small factory staffed with the products of a single bokanovskified egg.

"Ninety-six identical twins working ninety-six identical machines!" The voice was almost tremulous with enthusiasm. "You really know where you are. For the first time in history." He quoted the planetary motto. "Community, Identity, Stability." Grand words. "If we could bokanovskify indefinitely the whole problem would be solved."

Solved by standard Gammas, unvarying Deltas, uniform Epsilons. Millions of identical twins. The principle of mass production at last applied to biology.

"But, alas," the Director shook his head, "we can't bokanovskify indefinitely."

Ninety-six seemed to be the limit; seventy-two a good average. From the same ovary and with gametes of the same male to manufacture as many batches of identical twins as possible–that was the best (sadly a second best) that they could do. And even that was difficult.

"For in nature it takes thirty years for two hundred eggs to reach maturity. But our business is to stabilize the population at this moment, here and now. Dribbling out twins over a quarter of a century–what would be the use of that?"

Obviously, no use at all. But Podsnap's Technique had immensely accelerated the process of ripening. They could make sure of at least a hundred and fifty mature eggs within two years. Fertilize and bokanovskify–in other words, multiply by seventy-two–and you get an average of nearly eleven thousand brothers and sisters in a hundred and fifty batches of identical twins, all within two years of the same age.

"And in exceptional cases we can make one ovary yield us over fifteen thousand adult individuals."

Beckoning to a fair-haired, ruddy young man who happened to be passing at the moment. "Mr. Foster," he called. The ruddy young man approached. "Can you tell us the record for a single ovary, Mr. Foster?"

"Sixteen thousand and twelve in this Centre," Mr. Foster replied without hesitation. He spoke very quickly, had a vivacious blue eye, and took an evident pleasure in quoting figures. "Sixteen thousand and twelve; in one hundred and eighty-nine batches of identicals. But of course they've done much better," he rattled on, "in some of the tropical Centres. Singapore has often produced over sixteen thousand five hundred; and Mombasa has actually touched the seventeen thousand mark. But then they have unfair advantages. You should see the way a negro ovary responds to pituitary! It's quite astonishing, when you're used to working with European material. Still," he added, with a laugh (but the light of combat was in his eyes and the lift of his chin was challenging), "still, we mean to beat them if we can. I'm working on a wonderful Delta-Minus ovary at this moment. Only just eighteen months old. Over twelve thousand seven hundred children already, either decanted or in embryo. And still going strong. We'll beat them yet."

"That's the spirit I like!" cried the Director, and clapped Mr. Foster on the shoulder. "Come along with us, and give these boys the benefit of your expert knowledge."

Mr. Foster smiled modestly. "With pleasure." They went.

In the Bottling Room all was harmonious bustle and ordered activity. Flaps of fresh sow's peritoneum ready cut to the proper size came shooting up in little lifts from the Organ Store in the sub-basement. Whizz and then, click! the lift-hatches hew open; the bottle-liner had only to reach out a hand, take the flap, insert, smooth-down, and before the lined bottle had had time to travel out of reach along the endless band, whizz, click! another flap of peritoneum had shot up from the depths, ready to be slipped into yet another bottle, the next of that slow interminable procession on the band. [...]

Aldous Huxley's video

2009-06-07T03:33:00.000-07:00

Aldous Huxley

2009-06-07T03:23:00.000-07:00

Aldous Huxley (1894-1963) is the author of Brave New World (1932) typical anti-utopian novel as Orwell's 1984.

Set in the London of AD 2540 (632 A.F. in the book), the novel anticipates developments in reproductive technology and sllep-learning that combine to change society. The future society is an embodiment of the ideals that form the basis of futurism.

The book starts off with the director of hatcheries describing a hatchery to a bunch of Alpha students. He explains the fertilizing, decanting, and conditioning process of people which is, when you come down to it, pure brainwashing.
The book then introduces a man named Bernard. Bernard is an alpha, but he’s queer. He’s shorter and less handsome than the other alphas. Bernard likes a girls named Lenina. Lenina, however, is having a guy named Henry, and has been having him for several months. Fanny one of Lenina’s friends tries to encourage Lenina to move on and to try other men. Lenina goes out with Bernard and that date ends with soma and sex even though Bernard said that they shouldn’t have sex on the first night.
This society is organized for the pleasure of the people. Their God is Ford. They have sex often with different people, and their taught in infancy certain prejudices. For example, the babies are taught to be satisfied with their own caste of which there are five: alphas at the top, then betas, gammas, deltas, and epsilons at the bottom. They’re taught to hate the country but like country sports. Every teaching has a specific purpose.
Bernard gets together with eleven other people and they worship Ford. They sing hymns (for example “Orgy Porgy”) to Ford and they experience Ford. They howl and shout to his name. Bernard, however, feels nothing. He shouts because the others are shouting and he leaves with an emptiness deeper than the one he came with.
Bernard suggests to Lenina that they go for a vacation to the savage reservation. Lenina agrees to go. Before they go, Bernard needs to get permission from the Director of Hatcheries named Thomas. Thomas tells him that he once went to the savage reservation and lost a girl he liked named Linda. Then he tells Bernard that if he continues with his behavior, Thomas will send him to Iceland.
Bernard and Lenina go to the savage reservation and they witness and “human sacrifice” where one Indian is whipped in reminder of Christ. Then they meet a woman that is fat and ugly but used to belong to the civilized world. Bernard figures out that she was the Linda that Thomas lost long ago. Linda had a son named John on the reservation of whom Thomas was the father. Having a child in this society was about as much a sin as being an adulteress in the Puritan society of The Scarlet Letter. John fell in love with Lenina.
Bernard had an idea. He decided that it would be good to have an experiment to see what would happen if a savage came to the civilized world. He wanted to bring John and Linda back into civilization. He pulled a few strings and was allowed to go on with his experiment. Linda was immediately rejected by society and by Thomas for being fat, and for being a mother. Thomas, quit his job as the director of hatcheries because he was humiliated at being a father. John, on the other hand, was an instant hit. The people loved him and brought Bernard instant fame. Bernard was able to get any girl he wanted, something he was not able to before. Bernard would host parties where John would be the guest of honor. One night, though, John didn’t want to show up. He rejected society and society rejected Bernard. Society went back to its old thoughts about Bernard. They thought he was a queer again. Bernard and John had a friend named Helmholtz who taught emotional engineering by the use of rhymes. John happened to have a copy of Shakespeare which he found at the reservation which he read to Helmholtz. Helmholtz was amazed at how well Shakespeare was at emotional engineering.
Lenina fell in love with John and John loved Lenina, but he was afraid of his feeling and felt unworthy for Lenina. One night, Lenina tried to seduce him but John ran from her, then attacked her calling her a whore.
All this while, Linda had taking one long soma holiday, and it was killing her. John got a call that Linda was at the hospital and dying so he rushed there to see her. Linda didn’t recognize him. She was having a soma induced dream about Pope, a guy she had at the reservation. Linda died and John wept for her while a bunch of little kids was led to the death hospital for their death conditioning. John was devastated. After leaving the hospital he saw soma being handed out to a group of workers. John runs there and throws the soma out the windows with the help of Helmholtz. This caused a riot among the workers and Bernard went to get help from the police. The police stopped the riot and supplied the workers with their share of soma. Bernard, Helmholtz and John are taken to Mustapha Mond, the ruler of this section of the world. He explains to them the necessity of stability and the reason he keeps them from Shakespeare, the Bible, and other old works of art. Bernard and Helmholtz are sent to separate island but John is allowed to continue living as he did to continue with Bernard’s experiment. John doesn’t want to stay so he seeks out a place where he can cleanse himself and live in solitude and finds a lighthouse. As part of his cleansing, he makes a whip and whips himself repeatedly with it. A few workers happened to see him doing so and the next day, John is swarmed with reporters. The next day more reporters come but this time Lenina is among them. She tried to seduce him but John whips her. That night, John commits suicide by hanging himself in the lighthouse and is discovered by a reporter the next morning.

The Principles of Newspeak

2009-05-10T09:42:00.001-07:00

Excerpt from
"The Principles of Newspeak"
An appendix to 1984
Written by : George Orwell in 1948

Newspeak was the official language of Oceania, and had been devised to meet the ideological needs of Ingsoc, or English Socialism. In the year 1984 there was not as yet anyone who used Newspeak as his sole means of communication, either in speech or writing. The leading articles of the Times were written in it, but this was a tour de force which could only be carried out by a specialist, It was expected that Newspeak would have finally superseded Oldspeak (or standard English, as we should call it) by about the year 2050. Meanwhile, it gained ground steadily, all party members tending to use Newspeak words and grammatical constructions more and more in their everyday speech. The version in 1984, and embodied in the Ninth and Tenth Editions of Newspeak dictionary, was a provisional one, and contained many superfluous words and archaic formations which were due to be suppressed later. It is with the final, perfected version, as embodied in the Eleventh Edition of the dictionary, that we are concerned here.

The purpose of Newspeak was not only to provide a medium of expression for the world-view and mental habits proper to the devotees of IngSoc, but to make all other modes of thought impossible. It was intended that when Newspeak had been adopted once and for all and Oldspeak forgotten, a heretical thought -- that is, a thought diverging from the principles of IngSoc -- should be literally unthinkable, at least so far as thought is dependent on words. Its vocabulary was so constructed as to give exact and often very subtle expression to every meaning that a Party member could properly wish to express, while excluding all other meaning and also the possibility of arriving at them by indirect methods. This was done partly by the invention of new words, but chiefly by eliminating undesirable words and stripping such words as remained of unorthodox meanings, and so far as possible of all secondary meaning whatever.

To give a single example - The word free still existed in Newspeak, but could only be used in such statements as "The dog is free from lice" or "This field is free from weeds." It could not be used in its old sense of "politically free" or "intellectually free," since political and intellectual freedom no longer existed even as concepts, and were therefore of necessity nameless. Quite apart from the suppression of definitely heretical words, reduction of vocabulary was regarded as an end in itself, and no word that could be dispenses with was allowed to survive. Newspeak was designed not to extend but to diminish the range of thought, and this purpose was indirectly assisted by cutting the choice of words down to a minimum. Newspeak was founded on the English language as we now know it, though many Newspeak sentences, even when not containing newly created words, would be barely intelligible to an English-speaker of our own day. Newspeak words were divided into three distinct classes, known as the A vocabulary, the B vocabulary, and the C vocabulary. It would be simpler to discuss each class separately, but the grammatical peculiarities of the language can be dealt with in the section devoted to the A vocabulary, since the same rules held good for all three categories.

The A vocabulary. The A vocabulary consisted of words needed for the business of everyday life --- For such things as eating, drinking, working, putting on one's clothes, going up and down stairs, riding in vehicles, gardening, cooking, and the like. It was composed almost entirely of words that we already possess -- words like hit, run, dog, tree, sugar, house, field -- but in comparison with the present-day English vocabulary, their number was extremely small, while their meanings were far more rigidly defined. All ambiguities and shades of meaning had been purged out of them. So far as it could be achieved, a Newspeak word of this class was simply a staccato sound expressing one clearly understood concept. It would have been quite impossible to use the A vocabulary for literary purposes or for political or philosophical discussion. It was intended only to express simple, purposive thoughts, usually involving concrete objects or physical actions.

The grammar of Newspeak has two outstanding peculiarities. The first of these was an almost complete interchangeability between different parts of speech. Any word in the language (in principle this applied even to very abstract words such as if or when) could be used either as verb, noun, adjective, or adverb. Between the verb and noun form, when of the same root, there was never any variation, this rule of itself involving the destruction of many archaic forms. The word thought, for example, did not exist in Newspeak. Its place was taken by think, which did duty for both noun and verb. No etymological principle was involved here; in some cases it was the original noun that was chosen for retention, in other cases the verb. Even where a noun and a verb of kindred meanings were not etymologically connected, one or other of them was frequently suppressed. There was, for example, no such word as cut, its meaning being sufficiently covered by the noun-verb knife. Adjectives were formed by adding the suffix -ful to the noun verb, and adverbs by adding -wise. Thus, for example, speedful meant "rapid" and speedwise meant "quickly." Certain of our present-day adjectives, such as good, strong, big, black, soft, were retained, but their total number was very small. There was little need for them, since almost any adjectival meaning could be arrived at by adding -ful to a noun-verb. None of the now-existing adverbs was retained, except for a few already ending in -wise; the -wise termination was invariable. the word well, for example, was replaced by goodwise.

In addition, any word -- this again applied in principle to every word in the language -- could be negative by adding the affix un-, or could be strengthened by the affix plus-, or, for still greater emphasis doubleplus-. Thus, for example, uncold meant "warm" while pluscold and doublepluscold meant, respectively, "very cold" and "superlatively cold". It was also possible, as in present-day English, to modify the meaning of almost any word by prepositional affixes such as ante-, post-, up-, down-, etc. By such methods it was possible to bring about an enormous diminution of vocabulary. Given, for instance, the word good, there was no need for such a word as bad, since the required meaning was equally well --indeed better-- expressed by ungood. All that was necessary, in any case where two words formed a natural pair of opposites, was to decide which of them to suppress. Dark, for example, could be replaced by Unlight, or light by undark, according to preference.

The second distinguishing mark of Newspeak grammar was its regularity. Subject to a few exceptions which are mentioned below, all inflections followed the same rules. Thus in all verbs the preterite and the past participle were the same and ended in -ed. The preterite of steal was stealed, the preterite of think was thinked, and so on throughout the language, all such forms as swam, gave, brought, spoke, taken, etc., being abolished. All plurals were made by adding -s or -es as the case might be. The plurals of man, ox, life, were mans, oxes, lifes. Comparison of adjectives was invariably made by adding -er, -est (good, gooder, goodest), irregular forms and the more, most formation being suppressed.

The only classes of words that were still allowed to inflect irregularly were the pronouns, the relatives, the demonstrative adjectives, and the auxiliary verbs. All of these followed their ancient usage, except that whom had been scrapped as unnecessary, and the shall, should tenses had been dropped, all their uses being covered by will and would. There were also certain irregularities in word-formation arising out of the need for rapid and easy speech. A word which was difficult to utter, or was liable to be incorrectly heard, was held to be ipso facto a bad word: occasionally therefore, for the sake of euphony, extra letters were inserted into a word or an archaic formation was retained. But this need made itself felt chiefly in connexion with the B vocabulary. Why so great an importance was attached to ease of pronunciation will be made clear later in this essay.

The B vocabulary.

The B vocabulary consisted of words which had been deliberately constructed for political purposes: words, that is to say, which not only had in every case a political implication, but were intended to impose a desirable mental attitude upon the person using them. Without a full understanding of the principles of Ingsoc it was difficult to use these words correctly. In some cases they could be translated into Oldspeak, or even into words taken from the A vocabulary, but this usually demanded a long paraphrase and always involved the loss of certain overtones. The B words were a sort of verbal shorthand, often packing whole ranges of ideas into a few syllables, and at the same time more accurate and forcible than ordinary language.

The B words were in all cases compound words.

They consisted of two or more words, or portions of words, welded together in an easily pronounceable form. The resulting amalgam was always a noun-verb, and inflected according to the ordinary rules. To take a single example: the word goodthink, meaning, very roughly, 'orthodoxy', or, if one chose to regard it as a verb, 'to think in an orthodox manner'. This inflected as follows: noun-verb, goodthink; past tense and past participle, goodthinked; present participle, goodthinking; adjective, goodthinkful; adverb, goodthinkwise; verbal noun, goodthinker.

The B words were not constructed on any etymological plan. The words of which they were made up could be any parts of speech, and could be placed in any order and mutilated in any way which made them easy to pronounce while indicating their derivation. In the word crimethink (thoughtcrime), for instance, the think came second, whereas in thinkpol (Thought Police) it came first, and in the latter word police had lost its second syllable. Because of the great difficulty in securing euphony, irregular formations were commoner in the B vocabulary than in the A vocabulary. For example, the adjective forms of Minitrue, Minipax, and Miniluv were, respectively, Minitruthful, Minipeaceful, and Minilovely, simply because -trueful,-paxful, and -loveful were slightly awkward to pronounce. In principle, however, all B words could inflect, and all inflected in exactly the same way.

Some of the B words had highly subtilized meanings, barely intelligible to anyone who had not mastered the language as a whole. Consider, for example, such a typical sentence from a Times leading article as Oldthinkers unbellyfeel Ingsoc. The shortest rendering that one could make of this in Oldspeak would be: 'Those whose ideas were formed before the Revolution cannot have a full emotional understanding of the principles of English Socialism.' But this is not an adequate translation. To begin with, in order to grasp the full meaning of the Newspeak sentence quoted above, one would have to have a clear idea of what is meant by Ingsoc. And in addition, only a person thoroughly grounded in Ingsoc could appreciate the full force of the word bellyfeel, which implied a blind, enthusiastic acceptance difficult to imagine today; or of the word oldthink, which was inextricably mixed up with the idea of wickedness and decadence. But the special function of certain Newspeak words, of which oldthink was one, was not so much to express meanings as to destroy them. These words, necessarily few in number, had had their meanings extended until they contained within themselves whole batteries of words which, as they were sufficiently covered by a single comprehensive term, could now be scrapped and forgotten. The greatest difficulty facing the compilers of the Newspeak Dictionary was not to invent new words, but, having invented them, to make sure what they meant: to make sure, that is to say, what ranges of words they cancelled by their existence.

* Compound words such as speakwrite, were of course to be found in the A vocabulary, but these were merely convenient abbreviations and had no special ideological colour.

As we have already seen in the case of the word free, words which had once borne a heretical meaning were sometimes retained for the sake of convenience, but only with the undesirable meanings purged out of them. Countless other words such as honour, justice, morality, internationalism, democracy, science, and religion had simply ceased to exist. A few blanket words covered them, and, in covering them, abolished them. All words grouping themselves round the concepts of liberty and equality, for instance, were contained in the single word crimethink, while all words grouping themselves round the concepts of objectivity and rationalism were contained in the single word oldthink. Greater precision would have been dangerous. What was required in a Party member was an outlook similar to that of the ancient Hebrew who knew, without knowing much else, that all nations other than his own worshipped 'false gods'. He did not need to know that these gods were called Baal, Osiris, Moloch, Ashtaroth, and the like: probably the less he knew about them the better for his orthodoxy. He knew Jehovah and the commandments of Jehovah: he knew, therefore, that all gods with other names or other attributes were false gods. In somewhat the same way, the party member knew what constituted right conduct, and in exceedingly vague, generalized terms he knew what kinds of departure from it were possible. His sexual life, for example, was entirely regulated by the two Newspeak words sexcrime (sexual immorality) and goodsex (chastity). Sexcrime covered all sexual misdeeds whatever. It covered fornication, adultery, homosexuality, and other perversions, and, in addition, normal intercourse practised for its own sake. There was no need to enumerate them separately, since they were all equally culpable, and, in principle, all punishable by death. In the C vocabulary, which consisted of scientific and technical words, it might be necessary to give specialized names to certain sexual aberrations, but the ordinary citizen had no need of them. He knew what was meant by goodsex -- that is to say, normal intercourse between man and wife, for the sole purpose of begetting children, and without physical pleasure on the part of the woman: all else was sexcrime. In Newspeak it was seldom possible to follow a heretical thought further than the perception that it was heretical: beyond that point the necessary words were nonexistent.

No word in the B vocabulary was ideologically neutral. A great many were euphemisms. Such words, for instance, as joycamp (forced-labour camp) or Minipax (Ministry of Peace, i. e. Ministry of War) meant almost the exact opposite of what they appeared to mean. Some words, on the other hand, displayed a frank and contemptuous understanding of the real nature of Oceanic society. An example was prolefeed, meaning the rubbishy entertainment and spurious news which the Party handed out to the masses. Other words, again, were ambivalent, having the connotation 'good' when applied to the Party and 'bad' when applied to its enemies. But in addition there were great numbers of words which at first sight appeared to be mere abbreviations and which derived their ideological colour not from their meaning, but from their structure.

So far as it could be contrived, everything that had or might have political significance of any kind was fitted into the B vocabulary. The name of every organization, or body of people, or doctrine, or country, or institution, or public building, was invariably cut down into the familiar shape; that is, a single easily pronounced word with the smallest number of syllables that would preserve the original derivation. In the Ministry of Truth, for example, the Records Department, in which Winston Smith worked, was called Recdep, the Fiction Department was called Ficdep, the Teleprogrammes Department was called Teledep, and so on. This was not done solely with the object of saving time. Even in the early decades of the twentieth century, telescoped words and phrases had been one of the characteristic features of political language; and it had been noticed that the tendency to use abbreviations of this kind was most marked in totalitarian countries and totalitarian organizations. Examples were such words as Nazi, Gestapo, Comintern, Inprecorr, Agitprop. In the beginning the practice had been adopted as it were instinctively, but in Newspeak it was used with a conscious purpose. It was perceived that in thus abbreviating a name one narrowed and subtly altered its meaning, by cutting out most of the associations that would otherwise cling to it.

The words Communist International, for instance, call up a composite picture of universal human brotherhood, red flags, barricades, Karl Marx, and the Paris Commune. The word Comintern, on the other hand, suggests merely a tightly-knit organization and a well-defined body of doctrine. It refers to something almost as easily recognized, and as limited in purpose, as a chair or a table. Comintern is a word that can be uttered almost without taking thought, whereas Communist International is a phrase over which one is obliged to linger at least momentarily. In the same way, the associations called up by a word like Minitrue are fewer and more controllable than those called up by Ministry of Truth. This accounted not only for the habit of abbreviating whenever possible, but also for the almost exaggerated care that was taken to make every word easily pronounceable.

In Newspeak, euphony outweighed every consideration other than exactitude of meaning. Regularity of grammar was always sacrificed to it when it seemed necessary. And rightly so, since what was required, above all for political purposes, was short clipped words of unmistakable meaning which could be uttered rapidly and which roused the minimum of echoes in the speaker's mind. The words of the B vocabulary even gained in force from the fact that nearly all of them were very much alike. Almost invariably these words -- goodthink, Minipax, prolefeed, sexcrime, joycamp, Ingsoc, bellyfeel, thinkpol, and countless others -- were words of two or three syllables, with the stress distributed equally between the first syllable and the last. The use of them encouraged a gabbling style of speech, at once staccato and monotonous. And this was exactly what was aimed at. The intention was to make speech, and especially speech on any subject not ideologically neutral, as nearly as possible independent of consciousness.

For the purposes of everyday life it was no doubt necessary, or sometimes necessary, to reflect before speaking, but a Party member called upon to make a political or ethical judgment should be able to spray forth the correct opinions as automatically as a machine gun spraying forth bullets. His training fitted him to do this, the language gave him an almost foolproof instrument, and the texture of the words, with their harsh sound and a certain willful ugliness which was in accord with the spirit of Ingsoc, assisted the process still further.

So did the fact of having very few words to choose from. Relative to our own, the Newspeak vocabulary was tiny, and new ways of reducing it were constantly being devised. Newspeak, indeed, differed from most all other languages in that its vocabulary grew smaller instead of larger every year. Each reduction was a gain, since the smaller the area of choice, the smaller the temptation to take thought. Ultimately it was hoped to make articulate speech issue from the larynx without involving the higher brain centers at all. This aim was frankly admitted in the Newspeak word duckspeak, meaning ' to quack like a duck'. Like various other words in the B vocabulary, duckspeak was ambivalent in meaning. Provided that the opinions which were quacked out were orthodox ones, it implied nothing but praise, and when The Times referred to one of the orators of the Party as a doubleplusgood duckspeaker it was paying a warm and valued compliment.

The C vocabulary.

The C vocabulary was supplementary to the others and consisted entirely of scientific and technical terms. These resembled the scientific terms in use today, and were constructed from the same roots, but the usual care was taken to define them rigidly and strip them of undesirable meanings. They followed the same grammatical rules as the words in the other two vocabularies. Very few of the C words had any currency either in everyday speech or in political speech. Any scientific worker or technician could find all the words he needed in the list devoted to his own speciality, but he seldom had more than a smattering of the words occurring in the other lists. Only a very few words were common to all lists, and there was no vocabulary expressing the function of Science as a habit of mind, or a method of thought, irrespective of its particular branches. There was, indeed, no word for 'Science', any meaning that it could possibly bear being already sufficiently covered by the word Ingsoc.

From the foregoing account it will be seen that in Newspeak the expression of unorthodox opinions, above a very low level, was well-nigh impossible. It was of course possible to utter heresies of a very crude kind, a species of blasphemy.

It would have been possible, for example, to say Big Brother is ungood. But this statement, which to an orthodox ear merely conveyed a self-evident absurdity, could not have been sustained by reasoned argument, because the necessary words were not available. Ideas inimical to Ingsoc could only be entertained in a vague wordless form, and could only be named in very broad terms which lumped together and condemned whole groups of heresies without defining them in doing so. One could, in fact, only use Newspeak for unorthodox purposes by illegitimately translating some of the words back into Oldspeak. For example, All mans are equal was a possible Newspeak sentence, but only in the same sense in which All men are red-haired is a possible Oldspeak sentence.

It did not contain a grammatical error, but it expressed a palpable untruth-i.e. that all men are of equal size, weight, or strength. The concept of political equality no longer existed, and this secondary meaning had accordingly been purged out of the word equal. In 1984, when Oldspeak was still the normal means of communication, the danger theoretically existed that in using Newspeak words one might remember their original meanings. In practice it was not difficult for any person well grounded in doublethink to avoid doing this, but within a couple of generations even the possibility of such a lapse would have vanished. A person growing up with Newspeak as his sole language would no more know that equal had once had the secondary meaning of 'politically equal', or that free had once meant 'intellectually free', than for instance, a person who had never heard of chess would be aware of the secondary meanings attaching to queen and rook. There would be many crimes and errors which it would be beyond his power to commit, simply because they were nameless and therefore unimaginable. And it was to be foreseen that with the passage of time the distinguishing characteristics of Newspeak would become more and more pronounced -- its words growing fewer and fewer, their meanings more and more rigid, and the chance of putting them to improper uses always diminishing.

When Oldspeak had been once and for all superseded, the last link with the past would have been severed. History had already been rewritten, but fragments of the literature of the past survived here and there, imperfectly censored, and so long as one retained one's knowledge of Oldspeak it was possible to read them. In the future such fragments, even if they chanced to survive, would be unintelligible and untranslatable. It was impossible to translate any passage of Oldspeak into Newspeak unless it either referred to some technical process or some very simple everyday action, or was already orthodox(goodthinkful would be the Newspeak expression) in tendency. In practice this meant that no book written before approximately 1960 could be translated as a whole. Pre-revolutionary literature could only be subjected to ideological translation -- that is, alteration in sense as well as language. Take for example the well-known passage from the Declaration of Independence:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among men, deriving their powers from the consent of the governed. That whenever any form of Government becomes destructive of those ends, it is the right of the People to alter or abolish it, and to institute new Government. . .

It would have been quite impossible to render this into Newspeak while keeping to the sense of the original. The nearest one could come to doing so would be to swallow the whole passage up in the single word crimethink. A full translation could only be an ideological translation, whereby Jefferson's words would be changed into a panegyric on absolute government.

A good deal of the literature of the past was, indeed, already being transformed in this way. Considerations of prestige made it desirable to preserve the memory of certain historical figures, while at the same time bringing their achievements into line with the philosophy of Ingsoc. Various writers, such as Shakespeare, Milton, Swift, Byron, Dickens, and some others were therefore in process of translation: when the task had been completed, their original writings, with all else that survived of the literature of the past, would be destroyed. These translations were a slow and difficult business, and it was not expected that they would be finished before the first or second decade of the twenty-first century. There were also large quantities of merely utilitarian literature -- indispensable technical manuals, and the like -- that had to be treated in the same way. It was chiefly in order to allow time for the preliminary work of translation that the final adoption of Newspeak had been fixed for so late a date as 2050.

George Orwell

George Orwell's 1984

2009-05-10T09:09:00.000-07:00

In the novel 1984 George Orwell depicts a dystopia with his use of a futuristic setting while incorporating the fear of technology. A dystopia is a society where people lead dehumanized and often fearful lives. In a dystopia social and/or technological trends have contributed to a corrupted or degraded state of deprivation and oppression. Governmental tyranny and an exploitation of the people are also prominent in a dystopia.

George Orwell depicts a dystopia by using a futuristic setting with the Thought Police and vaporization. The Thought Police constantly monitors the thoughts of the citizens of Oceania ensuring that they will not disobey The Party or Big Brother. This ensures that the currently established government will stay in control. If the citizens even contemplate betraying The Party they will be vaporized which is where the Thought Police captures the citizen and they completely disappear. No one knows where they go only that they are erased from all memory and databases. He clearly generates fear by using these forms of technology currently impossible to enhance the theme of a dystopia.

Montage, the main character, fights his urge to fight The Party because he knows what his consequence will be but decides to join the Brotherhood for the common good of all mankind. This is how Orwell places his main character in dissent with society to enhance the overall theme of a dystopia.

In conclusion, Orwell creates a “perfect” dystopia by using a futuristic setting, the fear of technology and by placing the main character in dissent with society.

PLOT SUMMARY

The book starts in the year 1984 (what a surprise), set in Airstrip One, what we know as England. Airstrip One itself is the mainland of a huge country, called Oceania, which consists of North America, South Africa, and Australia. The country is ruled by the Party, which is led by a figure called Big Brother. The population of Oceania is divided into three parts:The Inner Party, the Outer Party and the Proles (the commoners & workers)

The narrator of the book is all-knowing and he is not participating in the action of the book himself. We are introduced to the protagonist of the story, Winston Smith.

Winston is a member of the Outer Party, working in the Records Department of the Ministry of Truth. His job is to rewrite documents and alter records and newspaper articles. The action starts when Winston begins to become skeptical of the ruling dictatorship of the party. Doing so he buys himself a book, a rare thing these days, to use it as a diary. As individual expression was forbidden by the Party, having a diary was a crime, which could be punished with death. There were so-called telescreens in each room, showing propaganda and political pamphlets, which had a built in camera and microphone to watch over the citizens. Keeping a secret book was not only forbidden, but also very dangerous. When Winston makes the first entry in the diary, he thinks about an experience he has made during the Two Minute Hate, a propaganda film that repeats each day. During this Film he caught the eye of O'Brien, a member of the Inner Party, of whom he thought that he might also stand critic to the regime. After the reflection, he finds that he has written the sentence: "Down with Big Brother" all over the page.

In the same night, Winston dreams about his mother and sister, who had starved to death in the war, because he had been so greedy. Then he dreams of being with a girl he has seen in the Records Department, during the Two Minute Hate. Early in the morning Winston is awaken by the harsh voice from the telescreen. During the performance of the exercises, Winston's thoughts move back to his childhood. The last thing he remembers clearly, is the World War. After the war, the party took control of the country, and from then on it was difficult to remember anything, because the party changed the history permanently to their own benefit.

After the exercises Winston goes to the Minitrue (Ministry of Truth), where his job is to alter records, and once altered, to throw them into the Memory Hole where they are destroyed. At dinner Winston Smith meets Syme, a philologist, who is working on the 11th edition of The Newspeak Dictionary. The goal of the Party is to eliminate "Oldspeak" and replace it with the robotic Newspeak. As he looks around in the dining room he catches the eye of the dark-haired girl he had dreamed of the same night.

Back home, Winston makes an entry into his diary about his meeting with a prostitute three years ago . He remembers her ugliness, but nevertheless he had sex with her. Winston had a wife, but she was very stupid and blindly followed the orders of the Party, which said that there may only be sex to produce "new material" for the Party. Sex for personal pleasure is a crime.
Winston beings to think that the only hope lies in the Proles who comprise over four-fifths of Oceania's population. Later he remembers another fact of his past: Jones, Aaronson and Rutherford, the last three survivors of the original leaders of the Revolution. They were arrested in 1965, and confessed to all sorts of sabotage on trial. They were pardoned, reinstated but not long after were arrested again, and finally executed. During the brief period Winston has seen them in the Chestnut Tree Cafe. In the same year a half page torn out of The Times came to Winston trough the transport tube in the Minitrue. This page of The Times showed the three men in Eastasia on a certain day. But Winston remembered clearly that they have confessed being in Eurasia on that day (At this time Eurasia was at war with Oceania, and Eastasia was an ally). Winston could have proved that the confessions were lies. The last entry Winston writes in his diary is that freedom is to say that two and two makes four. If this is granted everything else follows.

The next day Winston decides not to participate in the community actions, but to take a walk in the quarters of the Proles, around St. Pancras station. During the walk a Rocket-Bomb explodes nearby. After a while Winston finds himself in front of the junk-shop, where he had bought the diary. There he sees an old man just entering a pub. He decides to follow the man, and to ask him about the time before the revolution, but the old man has already forgotten nearly everything about this time, except for some useless personal things. Winston leaves the pub and goes to the Shop, where he purchases a glass with a pice of coral inside. Mr Carrington, the owner of the shop, leads him upstairs to show him an old- fashioned room. Winston likes the room because of its warmth and lack of telescreens. When Winston leaves the shop he suddenly meets the dark-haired girl in the street. He now believes that this girl is an amateur spy or even a member of the Thought Police, sent to follow him.

The next morning he meets the girl in the Ministry of Truth, and in the moment she passes, she falls down and cries out in pain. When Winston helps her up, she secretly presses a piece of paper into his hand. At the first opportunity he opens it and finds the startling message: "I love you" written on it. For a week he waits for an opportunity to speak with her. Finally he is successful, and he meets her in the canteen where they fix a meeting. Some time later they meet at the fixed place, where the girl gives Winston precise instructions how to get to a secret place on Sunday.

On Sunday, Winston is following the girl's directions and picks some bluebells for her on the way. Suddenly, she comes up behind him, telling him to be quiet because there might be some microphones hidden somewhere. They kiss and he learns her name: Julia. She leads him to another place where they cannot be observed. Before she takes off her blue party-overall, Julia tells Winston that she is attracted to him by something in his face which shows that he is against the party. Winston is surprised and asks Julia if she has done such a thing before. To his delight she tells him that she has done it scores of times, which fills him with a great hope. Evidence of corruption and abandon always gives him with hope. Perhaps the whole system is rotten, and will simply crumb to pieces one day. The more men she had, the more he loves her, and later when he looks at her sleeping body, he thinks that now even sex is a political act, another blow against the falseness of the Party.

Winston and Julia arrange to meet again. Winston rents the room above Mr Carringtons junk shop, a place where they can meet and talk without the fear of being observed. It is summer and the preparations for "Hate Week", an enormous propaganda event, are well forthcoming, and in this time Winston meets Julia more often than ever before. Julia makes him feel more alive, she makes him feel healthier, and he even puts on weight.

One day O'Brien speaks to Winston in the Ministry of Truth. He refers obliquely to Syme, who has vanished a couple of days before, and is now, as it is called in Newspeak, an unperson. In doing so O'Brien is committing a little act of thoughtcrime. O'Brien invites Winston to his house, to see the latest edition of the Newspeak dictionary. Winston now feels sure that the conspiracy against the Party he had longed to know about—the Brotherhood—does exist, and that in the encounter with O'Brien he has come into contact with its outer edge. He knows that he has embarked on a course of action which will lead , in one way or another, to the cells of the Ministry of Love. Some days later Winston and Julia meet each other to go to O'Brien's house, which lies in the district of the Inner Party. They are admitted to a richly furnitured room by a servant. To their astonishment O'Brien switches off the Telescreen in the room (normally it is impossible to turn it off). Winston blurts out that he wants to work against the Party and that he believes in the existence of the Brotherhood. Martin, O'Brien's servant, brings real red wine, and they drink a toast to Emanuel Goldstein, the leader of the Brotherhood. O'Brien asks them a series of questions about their willingness to commit various atrocities on behalf of the Brotherhood and gets their assent. They leave, and some days later Winston gets a copy of the book written by Emanuel Goldstein, simply called "The Book."

As Hate Week begins, the war with Eurasia suddenly stops and a war with Eastasia starts. This of course meant a lot of work for Winston. He had to change dozens of articles about the war with Eurasia. Nevertheless Winston finds time to read The Book. The Book has three chapters titled, "War is Peace", "Ignorance is Strength" and "Freedom is Slavery", which were also the main phrases of the party. The main ideas of the book are as follows:

War is important for consuming the products of human labour. If this work would be used to increase the standard of living, the control of the party over the people would decrease. War is the economy basis for a hierarchical society.
There is an emotional need to believe in the ultimate victory of Big Brother.
In becoming continuous, war has ceased to exist. The continuity of the war guarantees the permanence of the current order. In other words "War is Peace."
There have always been three main grades of society; the High, the Middle and the Low, and no change has brought human equality an inch nearer.
Collectivism doesn't lead to socialism. Wealth belongs to the new "high-class", the bureaucrats and administrators. Collectivism has ensured the permanence of economic inequality.
Wealth is not inherited from person to person, but it is kept within the ruling group.
The masses (proles) are given freedom of thought, because supposedly they don't think. A Party member is not allowed the slightest deviation of thought, and there is an elaborate mental training to ensure this, a training that can be summarised in the concept of doublethinking.

So far the book analyses how the Party works. It has not yet attempted to deal with the question as to how the Party has arisen.

The next morning when he awakes the sun is shining, and down in the yard a prole women is singing and working. Winston is again filled with the conviction that the future lies with the proles, that they will overthrow the greyness of the Party. But suddenly reality crashes in. "We are the DEATH", he says to Julia. An iron voice behind them repeats the phrase, the picture on the wall falls to bits to reveal a telescreen behind it. Uniformed men thunder into the room and they carry Winston and Julia out.

Winston finds himself in a cell in what he presumes is the Ministry of Love. He is sick with hunger and fear, and when he makes a movement or a sound, a harsh voice barks at him from the four telescreens. A prisoner who is dying of starvation is brought in, his face is skull-like. Later the man is brought to "Room 101" after screaming and struggling, and even offering his children as sacrifices in his stead.

O'Brien enters. Winston thinks that they must have got him too, but O'Brien says that they got him long time ago. A guard hits Winston, and he falls unconscious. When he wakes up he is tied down to a kind of bed. O'Brien stands beside the bed, and Winston feels that O'Brien, who is the torturer, is also somehow a friend. The aim of O'Brien is to teach Winston the technique of doublethinking, and he does it by inflicting pain in ever-increasing intensity. He reminds Winston that he wrote the sentence: "Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two makes four." O'Brien holds up four fingers of his left hand, and he asks Winston how many there are. Winston answers four a couple of times, and each time the pain increases (this is not done to make Winston lie, but to make him really see five fingers instead of four).

At the end of the session, under heavy influence of drugs and agony, Winston really sees five fingers. Now Winston is ready to enter the second stage of his integration (1. Learning, 2. Understanding, 3. Acceptance). O'Brien now explains why the Party works. The image he gives of the future is that of a boot stamping on a human face—forever. Winston protests, because he thinks that there is something in the human nature that will not allow this, he calls it "The Spirit of Man." O'Brien points out that Winston is the last humanist, he is the last guardian of the human spirit. Then O'Brien gets Winston to look at himself in the mirror. Winston is horrified by what he sees. The unknown time of torture has changed him into a shapeless and battered wreck. This is what the last humanist looks like.

The only degradation that Winston has not been through is the betrayl of Julia. He said anything under torture, but inside he has remained true to her. Winston is much better now. For some time he has not been beaten and tortured, he has been fed quite well and allowed to wash. Winston realizes that he now accepts all the lies of the Party. He believes now that Oceania was always at war with Eastasia, and that he never had the photograph of Jones, Aaronson, and Rutherford that proved their innocence. Even gravity could be nonsense. But nevertheless Winston has some unorthodox thoughts that he cannot suppress.

Now it comes time for the last of the three steps, reintegration. Winston is taken to Room 101. O'Brien says that the room 101 is the worst thing in the world. For each person it is his own personal hell. For some it is death by fire or burial alive. For Winston it is a cage containing two rats, with a fixture like a fencing mask attached, into which the face of the victim is strapped. Then there is a lever, that opens the cage ,so that the rats can get to the face. O'Brien is approaching nearer with the cage ,and Winston gets the bad smell of the rats. He screams. The only way to get out of this is to put someone else between him and the horror."Do it to Julia," he screams in a final betrayal of himself. Winston is released.

As the story comes to a close, Winston is often sitting in the Chestnut Tree Café, drinking Victory Gin and playing chess. He now has a job in a sub-committee that is made up for others like himself. On a cold winter day he meets Julia, they speak briefly, but have little to say to each other, except that they have betrayed each other. A memory of a day in his childhood comes to Winston's mind: it is false. He is often troubled by false memories. He looks forward to the bullet; they will kill him some day. Now he realizes how pointless it was to resist. He loves Big Brother!

2009-04-26T09:48:00.000-07:00

Virginia Woolf's death:

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Virginia Woolf

2009-04-26T09:37:00.000-07:00

The Hours is a 2002 American/British drama film directed by Stephen Daldry. The screenplay by David Hare is based on the 1999 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel of the same title by Michael Cunningham.
The plot focuses on three women of different generations whose lives are interconnected by the novel Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf.

From the movie: Virginia Woolf and her husband at the train station. She would rather die in the violent jolt of London than stay in the quiet Richmond.

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A Brief HIstory of Vietnam War

2009-04-02T14:53:00.000-07:00

The Vietnam War was birthed from the conflict that started between the French and Vietnamese in 1950. France colonized the Indochina region in the mid 1800s and had ruled there up until 1954, when they lost the first Indochina War. During this time
communist China recognized the Democratic Republic of Vietnam, a government body proclaimed by Ho Chi Minh and defender against the French. Vietnam was then split into to "nations" through the Geneva Convention of 1954. North Vietnam was backed by the Soviet Union and the Peoples Republic of China, while South Vietnam was backed by more democratic states namely the United States.Dwight Eisenhower, president of the United States at the time, used South Vietnam as a counter revolutionary body against the communist party. Mainly through American funding, pseudo country received around a billion dollars in military aid and Ngo Dinh Diem, elected leader of the newly created country, put it to use by oppressing anyone who opposed him. Buddhist monks, suspected communists, college students, among others were among the victims of Diem's counter tactics against communism. Diem also set his sights on North Vietnam claiming they had been forcefully trying to take over its southern counterpart. Fighting escalated as the two sides fought for control. Meanwhile, the Communist Party of Vietnam took a slightly different approach. Their goal was to fight until the opposition no longer wanted to. The strategy relied on the war weariness of the United State's and South Vietnam's citizens to succeed. In 1960, the Kennedy administration took over the White House bringing with them a different policy toward Vietnam. They brought guerrilla tactics to the struggling country while increasing U.S. troop counts and introducing helicopters into the mix. In 1963, Diem was overthrown and killed, leading to chaos in South Vietnam. Three weeks later president Kennedy was assassinated.
The war, of course, continued to escalate from here. Lyndon Johnson, president of the United States after Kennedy, sent in an additional 200,000 troops and continued bombing raids. Communist backed North Vietnam also continued to fight. Ho Chi Minh declared that if the U.S. "want to make war for twenty years then we shall make war for twenty years. If they want to make peace, we shall make peace and invite them to afternoon tea." This all led to the Tet Offensive, which has gone down in history as a critical military failure for the United States, further splitting the country into pro- and anti-war movements and signaling a swing in momentum to the communist front.In 1968, negotiation began between the two warring sides, however, Nixon, now U.S. president, continued to aggressively fight using air raids. North Vietnam didn't quit, however. They continued to battle until 1975, when Saigon, capital of South Vietnam, was captured reunifying the Vietnam under communist control. The United States pulled their troops in 1973 but continued to aid the South until the fall of Saigon. On April 30, 1975, the war was officially declared over after two and a half decades of death and blood shed..As it is common in many wars at the end neither side won; US paid the war with 58.000 lifes and 350.000 casualities; the intensive use of napalm caused the death of a number between 1 million and 2 millions Vietnamese deaths and destructed great part of Vietnam’s forests. The use of “defolianti” as the famous “Orange agent” based on diossina caused great damage to the agriculture. This war will have heavy consequences on the image of the US during the cold war with Russia.

Lorenzo Ballati

Heart of Darkness and Apocalypse Now

2009-03-31T23:54:00.000-07:00

Here you can find an interesting analysis of the novella and the movie version compared.

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Apocalypse Now

2009-03-31T23:43:00.000-07:00

« My film is not on Vietnam... my film is Vietnam. » (Francis Ford Coppola)

LIGHTS AND SHADES OF THE SOUL: APOCALYPSE NOW

Apocalypse Now is a 1979 drama movie directed by Francis Ford Coppola.

It tells a fictional (made-up) story that takes place during the Vietnam War. It tells the story of an Army Captain who is sent on a boat deep into the jungle to capture a Special Forces colonel who has gone insane.

It was partly based on Joseph Conrad's novel about colonialism, Heart of Darkness.

Plot
U.S. Army Captain Benjamin L. Willard has returned to Saigon; a seasoned veteran, he is deeply troubled and apparently no longer fit for civilian life. A group of intelligence officers approach him with a special mission: go up-river into the remote Cambodian jungle to find Colonel Walter E. Kurtz, a former member of the United States Army Special Forces.
They state that Kurtz, once considered a model officer and future general, has allegedly gone insane and is commanding a legion of his own Montagnard troops deep inside the forest in neutral Cambodia.
Their claims are supported by very disturbing radio broadcasts and/or recordings made by Kurtz himself. Willard is ordered to undertake a mission to find Kurtz and "terminate... with extreme prejudice."
Willard studies the intelligence files during the boat ride to the river entrance and learns that Kurtz, isolated in his compound, has assumed the role of a warlord and is worshipped by the natives and his own loyal men.

After arriving at Kurtz' outpost, Willard leaves Chef behind with orders to call in an air strike on the village if he does not return. They are met by a borderline-psychotic freelance photographer (Hopper) who explains Kurtz's greatness and philosophical skills to provoke his people into following him.

Kurtz wishes to die at Willard's hands, and Willard, having subsequently granted Kurtz his wish, is offered the chance to succeed him in his warlord-demigod role. Juxtaposed with a ceremonial slaughtering of a water buffalo, Willard enters Kurtz's chamber during one of his message recordings, and kills him with a machete.

Lying bloody and dying on the ground, Kurtz whispers "The horror... the horror," a line taken directly from Conrad's novella.

Cast:

• Martin Sheen as Captain Benjamin L. Willard

• Marlon Brando as Colonel Walter E. Kurtz

• Robert Duvall as Lieutenant Colonel William Kilgore

• Harrison Ford as Colonel Lucas

• Dennis Hopper as American Photojournalist

HoD (?)

2009-03-29T10:38:00.000-07:00

It stands for "Heart of Darkness"

Conrad’s works, Heart of Darkness in particular, provide a bridge between Victorian values and the ideals of modernism. It stands on the dividing line between the TRADITIONAL and the MODERN NOVEL containing elements of both. His adventurous life took him to exotic places but he did not write adventurous stories , rather the settings where were complex mental state could be presented. GEOGRAPHICAL ISOLATION WAS A SYMBOL FOR PSYCHOLOGICAL ISOLATION.

Like their Victorian predecessors, these novels rely on traditional ideas of heroism, which are nevertheless under constant attack in a changing world and in places far from England.

Women occupy traditional roles as arbiters of domesticity and morality, yet they are almost never present in the narrative; instead, the concepts of “home” and “civilization” exist merely as hypocritical ideals, meaningless to men for whom survival is in constant doubt.

While the threats that Conrad’s characters face are concrete ones—illness, violence, conspiracy—they nevertheless acquire a philosophical character. Like much of the best modernist literature produced in the early decades of the twentieth century, Heart of Darkness is as much about alienation, confusion, and profound doubt as it is about imperialism.

Imperialism is nevertheless at the center of Heart of Darkness. By the 1890s, most of the world’s “dark places” had been placed at least nominally under European control, and the major European powers were stretched thin, trying to administer and protect massive, far-flung empires. Cracks were beginning to appear in the system: riots, wars, and the wholesale abandonment of commercial enterprises all threatened the white men living in the distant corners of empires. Things were clearly falling apart. Heart of Darkness suggests that this is the natural result when men are allowed to operate outside a social system of checks and balances: power, especially power over other human beings, inevitably corrupts. At the same time, this begs the question of whether it is possible to call an individual insane or wrong when he is part of a system that is so thoroughly corrupted and corrupting. Heart of Darkness, thus, at its most abstract level, is a narrative about the difficulty of understanding the world beyond the self, about the ability of one man to judge another.

Although Heart of Darkness was one of the first literary texts to provide a critical view of European imperial activities, it was initially read by critics as anything but controversial. While the book was generally admired, it was typically read either as a condemnation of a certain type of adventurer who could easily take advantage of imperialism’s opportunities, or else as a sentimental novel reinforcing domestic values: Kurtz’s Intended, who appears at the novella’s conclusion, was roundly praised by turn-of-the-century reviewers for her maturity and sentimental appeal. Conrad’s decision to set the book in a Belgian colony and to have Marlow work for a Belgian trading concern made it even easier for British readers to avoid seeing themselves reflected in Heart of Darkness. Although these early reactions seem ludicrous to a modern reader, they reinforce the novella’s central themes of hypocrisy and absurdity.

At the time Heart of Darkness was written, the British Empire was at its peak, and Britain controlled colonies and dependencies all over the planet. The popular saying that “the sun never sets on the British Empire” was literally true. The main topic of Heart of Darkness is imperialism, a nation’s policy of exerting influence over other areas through military, political, and economic coercion. The narrator expresses the mainstream belief that imperialism is a glorious and worthy enterprise. Indeed, in Conrad’s time, “empire” was one of the central values of British subjects, the fundamental term through which Britain defined its identity and sense of purpose.

Linkers

2009-03-18T10:07:00.001-07:00

Here you can view a short list of the most common linkers:

(click to enlarge)

The Importance of Being Ernest

2009-03-01T05:57:00.000-08:00

Ecco il link all'e-text della commedia di Oscar Wilde "The Importance of Bei ng Ernest".

In 2002 the movie featuring Rupert Everet, Colin Firth and Judi Dench:

Dandy and Dandyism

2009-02-18T08:04:00.000-08:00

Dandy and Dandyism

The trial of Oscar Wilde

2009-02-11T10:49:00.000-08:00

Oscar Wilde was involved in a homosexual relationship with Lord Alfred Douglas.

Douglas was the son of the Marquess of Queensbury – the man who provided the rules for professional boxing. The Marquess was outraged that Wilde would lead his son ‘astray’ and became determined to ruin the world famous playwright. He had originally planned to ruin the opening of The Importance of Being Earnest but Wilde got to hear of this and Queensbury was banned from attending. Instead he decided to leave a calling card on the notice board at Wilde’s gentleman’s club. It read, “ To Oscar Wilde, posing somdomite.” Wilde swore out a warrant for arrest of the Marquess of Queensbury on the charge of libel.

The result of all of this was a trial. The Marquess of Queensbury was represented by Edward Carson. Carson set out to prove that Oscar Wilde was, in fact, a homosexual and therefore that his client was not guilty of libel. Carson soon came up with the names of ten boys who Wilde had allegedly solicited for sex. He also obtained letters that Wilde had written to Douglas, revealing his feelings towards the Marquess’ son.

On the first day of the trial, Wilde attempted to have the proceedings overshadowed by his quick wit. But, over time, the dogged attacks by Carson wore him down. His humour was wearing thin. At one point the forty year old Wilde remarked to Carson, “You sting me and insult me and try to unnerve me; and at times one says things flippantly when one ought to speak more seriously.” When the trial concluded it was obvious that Queensbury had not committed an act of libel – Oscar Wilde was a homosexual. And so it was. The judge completely exonerated Queensbury, going further to actually state that he had been justified in calling Wilde a sodomite in public. Wilde’s friends urged him to get out of the country to avoid arrest on what was then the crime of homosexuality. Wilde’s pride, however, would not allow him to flee. He awaited arrest at the Cadogen hotel, confident that he could win. Yet, on the 5th of April the police did, indeed, arrive to arrest the world’s most famous playwright.

Wilde now faced a second trial to prove the charge of homosexuality. Now the truly lurid stuff started to come out. Hotel cleaners were called in to testify. Clerks told about the different male bed partners Wilde had been seen sharing rooms with. Despite this evidence the jury could not reach a decision. A second trial was ordered. Wilde was released on 5000 pounds bail on May 7th.

The second trial began on May 22. This time the jury was unanimous. Oscar Wilde was found guilty and sentenced to two years of hard labor at Pentonville Prison. At Pentonville Wilde found the going tough, almost unbearable. He was required to walk a treadmill for six hours each day. He became increasingly morose and unkempt. Jail officials feared that he was suicidal. Finally he was moved to Reading Jail. On May 18, 1897 he was released. But he was a broken man. Two and a half years after his release, on November 30, 1900 Oscar Wilde died while exiled in France. He was 46 years of age.

Famous words from Wilde’s discourse: "'The Love that dare not speak its name' in this century is such a great affection of an elder for a younger man as there was between David and Jonathan, such as Plato made the very basis of his philosophy, and such as you find in the sonnets of Michelangelo and Shakespeare. It is that deep, spiritual affection that is as pure as it is perfect. It dictates and pervades great works of art like those of Shakespeare and Michelangelo, and those two letters of mine, such as they are. It is in this century misunderstood, so much misunderstood that it may be described as the "Love that dare not speak its name," and on account of it I am placed where I am now. It is beautiful, it is fine, it is the noblest form of affection. There is nothing unnatural about it. It is intellectual, and it repeatedly exists between an elder and a younger man, when the elder man has intellect, and the younger man has all the joy, hope and glamour of life before him.”

The Picture of Dorian Gray

2009-02-11T10:41:00.000-08:00

Here's the lonk to the e-book.
Read the 1st and 2nd chapter.

À rebours by J.K.Huysmans

2009-02-09T06:52:00.000-08:00

À rebours (translated into English as "Against the Grain" or "Against Nature") (1884) is a novel written by the French novelist Joris-Karl Huysmans.

It is a novel in which very little happens; its narrative concentrates almost entirely on its principal character, and is mostly a catalogue of the tastes and inner life of Jean Des Esseintes, an eccentric, reclusive aesthete and antihero, who loathes 19th century bourgeois society and tries to retreat into an ideal artistic world of his own creation.

À rebours contained many themes which became associated with the Symbolist aesthetic. In doing so, it broke from naturalism and became the ultimate example of "decadent" literature.

(from Wikipiedia)

J. K. Huysmans, an important figure in the Aesthetic and Decadent movements, exemplified a style of homosexuality at a pivotal moment in the emergence of a gay identity.

He was born Charles-Marie-Georges Huysmans on February 5, 1848, in Paris, the only child of a French mother and Dutch father. He earned his degree under a private tutor, studied law at the University of Paris, and worked as a civil servant in the Ministry of the Interior, where he remained for thirty-two years.
A cosmopolitan man of refined taste and sensibility, Huysmans admired the descriptive writing of Charles Dickens, but practiced a poetic novel, a form known in France as the prose poem. This genre, which typically emphasized sensation and an elaborate or exotic setting, was perfectly suited to his elegant style and rich vocabulary.

Victorian Art

2009-02-06T00:25:00.000-08:00

Next lesson will be on The Nude in Victorian Art.
Here you can visualize the slides.

reply comments!!!

is

Tales of Ratiocination (Detective Fiction) by Poe

2009-01-27T10:18:00.000-08:00

Part of the genius of Edgar Allan Poe is that he exceeded in a number of different types of endeavors. In addition to his reputation as a poet, his originality in his literary criticisms, and the perfection he achieved in creating gothic tales of terror and science fiction, he is also acknowledged as the originator of detective fiction. Poe invented the term "Tale of Ratiocination." The ratiocination, however, is not just for the detective; Poe does not allow the reader to sit back and merely observe; the process of ratiocination which he sets up is also intended for the reader, as well as for the detective. In fact, the story becomes one in which the reader must also accompany the detective toward the solution and apply his own powers of logic and deduction alongside those of the detective. This idea becomes very important in all subsequent works of detective fiction. That is, in all such fiction, all of the clues are available for the reader, as well as the detective, to solve the crime (usually murder), and at the end of the story, the reader should be able to look back on the clues and realize that he could have solved the mystery. A detective story in which the solution is suddenly revealed to the reader is considered bad form. Poe, then, introduces one of the basic elements of the detective story — the presentation of clues for his readers, and in addition to the above, Poe is also credited with introducing and developing many other of the standard features of modern detective fiction.
For example, M. Auguste Dupin is the forerunner of a long line of fictional detectives who are eccentric and brilliant. His unnamed friend, who is a devoted admirer of the detective's methods, is less brilliant but, at times, he is perhaps more rational and analytical than Dupin is. He never, however, has the flashes of genius that the detective exhibits; instead, he begins the tradition of the chronicler of the famous detective's exploits — that is, he mediates between reader and detective, presenting what information he has to the reader, while allowing the detective to keep certain information and interpretations to himself. This technique has since been employed by numerous writers of detective fiction, the most famous being the Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson combination. Almost as popular are the well-known novels of Rex Stout, dealing with the eccentric Nero Wolfe and his sidekick, Archie Goodwin, further examples of Poe's methodology. In all the cases that these detectives attempt to solve, the eccentric detective has a certain disdain, or contempt, for the police and their methods, and this has also become a standard feature of many detective stories, along with the fact that the head of the police force feels, as he does in "The Murders in the Rue Morgue," that this amateur detective, while solving the murder, is a meddler.
Poe is clearly responsible for and should be given credit for giving literature these basics of the detective story as a foundation for an entirely new genre of fiction: (1) the eccentric but brilliant amateur sleuth; (2) the sidekick, or listener, or worker for the clever detective; (3) the simple clues; (4) the stupidity or ineptitude of the police; (5) the resentment of the police for the amateur's interference; and (6) the simple but careful solution of the problem through logic and intuition.

(http://www.cliffsnotes.com/WileyCDA/LitNote/Poe-s-Short-Stories-Summary-Analysis-and-Original-Text-Tales-Of-Ratiocination-Or-Detective-Fiction-Introduction-to-The-Murders-in-the-Rue-Morgue-and-The-Purloined-Letter-.id-145,pageNum-54.html )

THE ROLE OF WOMEN IN THE VICTORIAN AGE

2009-01-25T10:22:00.000-08:00

In the Victorian era women were seen as pure and clean. Because of this view, their bodies were seen as temples which should not be adorned with jewelery nor used for physical exertion or pleasurable sex. The role of women was to have children and tend to the house in contrast to men, according to the concept of Victorian masculinity. Although, women had been discriminated simply because of their sex; they did not stop fighting for their rights. In fact, women like Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Lucretia Mott were involved in the Antislavery Crusade in the 19th century. Stanton along with Mott marked history by starting a reform about women's rights at the Seneca Falls convention in 1848. Stanton fought for her rights and changed the perspective of many egotistical people not only through her logic, but with the rights that our founding fathers had given us through the Declaration of Independence. Fortunately, she made a positive impact for women in history giving us equal rights and most importantly the right to vote. Women like Margaret Fuller was one of first women to take advantage of her rights by shining her potential and becoming the first woman literary editor. Even though women were given rights; they still struggled for their independence. The ideology of women being seen as their husbands' "property" was also reflected in the household. For instance, women could not manage their own sexual activity or had any protection against physical abuse.
WOMEN AS GENERALS OF HOUSEHOLD
The first mention of a woman being described as the general of a household was in 1876 by Isabella Beeton in her manual Mrs Beeton's book of Household Management. Here she explained that the mistress of a household is comparable to the Commander of an Army or the leader of an enterprise. In order to run a respectable household and secure the happiness, comfort and well-being of her family she must perform her duties intelligently and thoroughly. For example, she has to organize, delegate and instruct her servants; she has to be the "sick-nurse" who takes care of ill family members. This requires a good temper, compassion for suffering and sympathy with sufferers, quiet manners, love of order and cleanliness; all qualities a woman worthy of the name should possess in the 19th century. A very special connection existed between women and their brothers. Sisters had to treat their brothers as they would treat their future husbands. Also, it was difficult to establish a reputation. For example, if one person in a family did something horrible, the whole family would have to suffer the consequences. Women as generals of households were very common. Women always were basically the generals of a strict and proper household.
WOMEN'S WORK
Large numbers of working class women worked in factories or in the garment industry or in laundries or at various other jobs. From the mid-1850s nursing became a respectable occupation for women. In England nursing schools were started to give women a proper training. Women were increasingly employed in offices in the later part of the century, the invention of the typewriter led to an increase in office jobs for women, as they were found to make better typists than men. When the telephone was invented they were employed as telephone switchboard operators. Some women broke into professions like medicine, law, and journalism.
WOMEN AND SEX
Victorian society preferred to avoid talking about sex. Although this is difficult to do, sexual activities were highly regulated in Europe by church and state law. Sexuality, viewed by the doctrines of medieval church, was considered as a gift from God; they followed the teachings of St. Paul and encouraged a life of chastity. Church law also ruled out sexual activities between the same genders and placed sexual limitations on married couples. Sexual relations were solely for the purpose of reproduction; therefore the church opposed sexual relations for the intentions of solely obtaining pleasure. As for adultery, courts treated women and men differently. They typically granted more severe consequences to female adulterers than to males. Courts argued that it was not right that a woman's child from a father not her husband should inherit her husband's property. Women were thought to be emotional, not intelligent and in charge of the household.
WOMEN AS EDUCATIONAL INEQUALS
In the early part of the Victorian era, girls of the upper and middle class were educated mainly in fashionable 'accomplishments' like French, drawing, painting, singing, dancing, etc. However, in the later part of the century girls education was taken more seriously and schools were started which offered girls an education broadly modelled on that of boys of the same class, with an emphasis on academic subjects and outdoor games. The expansion of the educational system for poor children meant that both boys and girls of the working class were guaranteed a basic education. From the 1870s, women's colleges were started in places like Oxford and Cambridge, which offered female students an education on a par with men's, though it wasn't until the 20th century that they gained full acceptance by the universities.
REFORMING DIVORCE LAW
Great changes in the situation of women took place in the 19th century, especially concerning marriage laws and the legal status of women. The situation that fathers always received custody of their children, leaving the mother completely without any rights, slowly started to change. In fact lots of imporatnt reforms and acts were made. For example was gave women limited access to divorce and was extended access to children to all women in the event of separation or divorce. Also while the husband only had to prove his wife's adultery, a woman had to prove her husband had not only committed adultery but also incest, bigamy, cruelty or desertion. An important change was caused by an amendment that made a woman an independent and separate person. From 1886 women could be made the sole guardian of their children if their husband died.
SECOND-CLASS CITIZEN
Even if Britain's head of state was a woman, Queen Victoria, women could not vote. But for much of the Victorian era neither could most men. The franchise was extended to include most men in towns and some countrymen in 1867, which doubled the electorate. However, agricultural labourers did not get the vote until 1884. Many women did not consider the vote to be of much importance anyway and some men were opposed to the idea of women getting involved in politics. They thought women would be better occupied concentrating on improving healthcare, education, and social services.

Silvia Licciardi, Eleonora Lenci

THE BIRTH OF THE DETECTIVE STORY

2009-01-25T02:50:00.000-08:00

THE BIRTH OF THE DETECTIVE STORY
By Matteo Baggiani & Francesco Poggi

A detective story has as protagonist a detective or a police officer that investigates on a crime or on a murder. There are different narrative techniques: the reader knows the development of the investigation step by step, but only at the end he discovers the identity of the assassin or he is acquainted with the criminal’s identity from the beginning and during the narration he fallows the detective’s investigation. Wystan Hugh Auden summarized the typical detective story’s plot in this way:” There is a murder, suspected people are many; one by one they are discarded except the assassin and he is arrested or he dies”.
This literary genre was born in the XIX century and it developed in the XX. From literature it extended to radio, cinema, television and comics. Even if the Norwegian writer Maurits Hansen wrote a novel ("The Murder of Engine Maker Rolfsen") in 1839 with some features of the detective novel, the exact year of the birth of this genre is 1841. In this year Edgar Allan Poe published “Murders in the Rue Morgue”, in which appeared the character of Auguste Dupin, the progenitor of all the detectives present in the following novels. Dupin is not a professional detective, he solved his cases using what Poe termed "ratiocination". Poe created the Dupin character before the word detective had been coined. It is unclear what inspired him but the character's name seems to imply "duping", or deception.
Edgar Allan Poe created this new genre because he was interested in describing the life of the lower classes where the criminality was extremely diffused: the birth of the detective story was a consequence of this attitude. Another cause of the origin of this genre was the fact that during the Victorian Age was established by Robert Peel the first organised police-force of the England: the Metropolitan Police.
Also in “Bleak House”(1853) by Charles Dickens there is an investigator Mr. Bucket. He is the key player in the murder investigation of Mr. Tulkinghorn and does solve the case. Dickens published his novels in split episodes in order to earn more money. But the author that took more inspiration from the character of Dupin was Arthur Conan Doyle for the detective Sherlock Holmes. He appeared for the first time in the novel “A Study in Scarlett”(1887). Sherlock Holmes was the first that applied the scientific method to solve his investigations, making criminology famous. The detective of Baker Street was supported by Sir John Watson, a sort of Conan Doyle alter ego and the narrator of all Holmes’ adventures.
In 1920 Agatha Christie published her first novel “The Mysterious Affair at Styles (Poirot a Styles Court)” in which appeared for the first time the figure of Hercule Poirot, a Belgian investigator. The author wanted her character not to be too similar to Sherlock Holmes both in the investigation method and especially in the physical aspect, in fact Poirot was short, fat, ugly, with mustache (his main characteristic).

Georges Simenon was the inventor of the Commissioner Maigret, another important protagonist of detective stories: he appeared in seventy five novels. This genre had a huge success and it arrived also in Italy where was called “Yellow Novel”. The reason why it was called in this way was because of the colour of the book covers of the first collection of detective story published in Italy by Arnoldo Mondadori in 1928. From this moment a lot of Italian authors started writing Yellow Novels and one of the most famous is Andrea Camilleri that set the adventures of the police commissioner Salvo Montalbano in his birth place, Sicily.

Gold Rush

2009-01-21T10:59:00.000-08:00

What is the gold rush?

A gold rush is a period of feverish migration of workers into the area of a dramatic discovery of commercial quantities of gold. Eight gold rushes took place throughout the 19th century in Argentina, Australia, Brazil, Canada, Chile, New Zealand, South Africa, and the United States.
Gold rushes were typically marked by a general buoyant feeling of a "free for all" in income mobility, in which any single individual might become abundantly wealthy almost instantly. The significance of gold rushes in history has given a longer life to the term, and it is now applied generally to denote any capitalist economic activity in which the participants aspire to race each other in common pursuit of a new and apparently highly lucrative market, often precipitated by an advance in technology.
Gold rushes helped spur permanent non-indigenous settlement of new regions and define a significant part of the culture of the North American and Australian frontiers. As well, at a time when money was based on gold, the newly-mined gold provided economic stimulus far beyond the gold fields. Gold rushes presumably extend back as far as gold mining, to the Roman Empire, whose gold mining was described by Diodorus Siculus and Pliny the Elder, and probably further back to Ancient Egypt and Saudi Arabia.
With gold prices soaring and poverty increasing, the world is currently experiencing an unprecedented gold rush. There are about 13 million to 20 million small-scale miners around the world, according to Communities and Small-Scale Mining (CASM). Approximately 100 million people are directly or indirectly dependent on small-scale mining. There are 800,000 to 1.5 million artisanal miners in Democratic Republic of Congo, 350,000 to 650,000 in Sierra Leone, and 150,000 to 250,000 in Ghana, with millions more across the Africa.

North American Gold Rushes

The first significant gold rush in the United States was the Georgia Gold Rush in the southern Appalachians, which started in 1829. It was followed by the California Gold Rush of 1848–52 in the Sierra Nevada, which captured the popular imagination. The California gold rush led directly to the settlement of California by Americans and the rapid entry of that state into the union in 1850. The gold rush in 1849 stimulated worldwide interest in prospecting for gold, and led to new rushes in Australia, South Africa, Wales and Scotland. Successive gold rushes occurred in western North America, moving north and east from California: Fraser Canyon, the Cariboo district and other parts of British Columbia, and the Rocky Mountains. Resurrection Creek, near Hope, Alaska was the site of Alaska's first gold rush more than a century ago, and placer mining continues today. Other notable Alaska Gold Rushes were Nome and the Forty Mile River.

California Gold Rush

The California Gold Rush (1848–1855) began on January 24, 1848, when gold was discovered by James Wilson Marshall at Sutter's Mill, in Coloma, California. News of the discovery soon spread, resulting in some 300,000 men, women, and children coming to California from the rest of the United States and abroad.
These early gold-seekers, called "forty-niners," travelled to California by sailing boat and in covered wagons across the continent, often facing substantial hardships on the trip. While most of the newly-arrived were Americans, the Gold Rush attracted tens of thousands from Latin America, Europe, Australia and Asia. At first, the prospectors retrieved the gold from streams and riverbeds using simple techniques, such as panning. More sophisticated methods of gold recovery were later developed that were adopted around the world. Gold, worth billions of today's dollars was recovered, which lead to great wealth for a few. However, many returned home with little more than they started with.
The effects of the Gold Rush were substantial. San Francisco grew from a tiny hamlet of tents to a boomtown, and roads, churches, schools and other towns were built throughout California. A system of laws and a government were created, leading to the admission of California as a state in 1850. New methods of transportation developed as steamships came into regular service and railroads were built. The business of agriculture, California's next major growth field, was started on a wide scale throughout the state. However, the Gold Rush also had negative effects: Native Americans were attacked and pushed off traditional lands, and gold mining caused environmental harm.

Development of gold recovery techniques

In 1853 hydraulic mining was used on ancient gold-bearing gravel beds that were on hillsides and bluffs in the gold fields. In a modern style of hydraulic mining first developed in California, a high-pressure hose directs a powerful stream or jet of water at gold-bearing gravel beds. The loosened gravel and gold would then pass over sluices, with the gold settling to the bottom where it is collected. By the mid-1880s, it is estimated that 11 million ounces (340 t) of gold (worth approximately US$6.6 billion at November 2006 prices) had been recovered via "hydraulic king. This style of hydraulic mining later spread around the world.
A by product of this method of extraction was that large amounts of gravel and silt, in addition to heavy metals and other pollutants, went into streams and rivers. Many areas still bear the scars of hydraulic mining since the resulting exposed earth and downstream gravel deposits are unable to support plant life.
Quartz Stamp Mill in Grass Valley crushes the quartz before the gold is washed out.
After the Gold Rush had concluded, gold recovery operations continued. The final stage to recover loose gold was to prospect for gold that had slowly washed down into the flat river bottoms and sandbars of California's Central Valley and other gold-bearing areas of California (such as Scott Valley in Siskiyou County). By the late 1890s, dredging technology (which was also invented in California) had become economical, and it is estimated that more than 20 million ounces (620 t) were recovered by dredging (worth approximately US$12 billion at November 2006 prices).Both during the Gold Rush and in the decades that followed, gold-seekers also engaged in "hard-rock" mining, that is, extracting the gold directly from the rock that contained it (typically quartz), usually by digging and blasting to follow and remove veins of the gold-bearing quartz. Once the gold-bearing rocks were brought to the surface, the rocks were crushed, and the gold was separated out (using moving water), or leached out, typically by using arsenic or mercury (another source of environmental contamination).Eventually, hard-rock mining wound up being the single largest source of gold produced in the Gold Country.

Profits

Although the conventional wisdom is that merchants made more money than miners during the Gold Rush, the reality is perhaps more complex. There were certainly merchants who profited handsomely. The wealthiest man in California during the early years of the Gold Rush was Samuel Brannan, the tireless self-promoter, shopkeeper and newspaper publisher. Brannan alertly opened the first supply stores in Sacramento, Coloma, and other spots in the gold fields. Just as the Gold Rush began, he purchased all the prospecting supplies available in San Francisco and re-sold them at a substantial profit. However, substantial money was made by gold-seekers as well. For example, within a few months, one small group of prospectors, working on the Feather River in 1848, retrieved a sum of gold worth more than $1.5 million by 2006 prices.
On average, many early gold-seekers did perhaps make a modest profit, after all expenses were taken into account. Most, however, especially those arriving later, made little or wound up losing money. Similarly, many unlucky merchants set up in settlements that disappeared, or were wiped out in one of the calamitous fires that swept the towns springing up. Other businessmen, through good fortune and hard work, reaped great rewards in retail, shipping, entertainment, lodging, or transportation.
Boarding houses, food preparation, sewing, and laundry were highly profitable businesses often run by women (married, single, or widowed) who realized men would pay well for a service done by a woman. Brothels also brought in large profits, especially when combined with saloons/gaming houses.
By 1855, the economic climate had changed dramatically. Gold could be retrieved profitably from the goldfields only by medium to large groups of workers, either in partnerships or as employees. By the mid-1850s, it was the owners of these gold-mining companies who made the money. Also, the population and economy of California had become large and diverse enough that money could be made in a wide variety of conventional businesses.

Klondike Gold Rush

The news spread to other mining camps in the Yukon River valley. Gold was first discovered in Rabbit Creek which was later named Bonanza Creek because so many people came to the creek for gold. The Bonanza, Eldorado, and Hunker Creeks were rapidly staked by miners who had been previously working creeks and sandbars on the Forty mile and Stewart Rivers.
News reached the United States in July 1897 at the height of a significant series of financial recessions and bank failures in the 1890s. The American economy had been hard hit by the Panic of 1893 and the Panic of 1896 which caused widespread unemployment. Many who were adversely impacted by the financial crises were motivated to try their luck in the gold fields. The first successful prospectors arrived in San Francisco, California on July 15 and in Seattle, Washington on July 17, setting off the Klondike stampede. In 1898, the population in the Klondike may have reached 40,000, which threatened to cause a famine.
Men from all walks of life headed for the Yukon from as far away as New York, the United Kingdom, and Australia. Surprisingly, a large proportion were professionals, such as teachers and doctors, even a mayor or two, who gave up respectable careers to make the journey. Most were perfectly aware their chances of finding significant amounts of gold were slim to none, and went for the adventure. As many as half of those who reached Dawson City kept right on going without doing any prospecting at all. Thus, by bringing large numbers of entrepreneurial adventurers to the region, the Gold Rush significantly contributed to the economic development of Western Canada, Alaska and the Pacific Northwest.
Most prospectors landed at the Alaskan towns of Skagway, or Dyea, both located at the head of the Lynn Canal. From these towns they travelled the Chilkoot Trail and crossed the Chilkoot Pass, or they hiked up to the White Pass into and proceeded thence to Lake Lindeman or Bennett Lake, the headwaters of the Yukon River. Here, some 25 to 35 (40 to 56 km) gruelling miles from where they landed, prospectors built rafts and boats that would take them the final 500-plus miles (800-plus km) down the Yukon to Dawson City, near the gold fields. Stampedes had to carry a year's supply of goods — about a ton, more than half of it food — over the passes to be allowed to enter Canada. At the top of the passes, the stampedes encountered Canada's North West Mounted Police (NWMP and now the Royal Canadian Mounted Police) post that enforced that regulation, as well as customs and duties. It was put in place to avert shortages like those that had occurred in the previous two winters in Dawson City, and also to restrict the entry of guns, particularly handguns, into British territory. Another reason was to keep out of Canadian territory the criminal element which had established itself in Skagway and the other Yukon Ports (then still claimed as British territory), as well as the fears by British and Canadian authorities about a possible armed takeover of the goldfields as an American territory.
Once the bulk of the prospectors arrived at Dawson City, most of the major mining claims of the region were already established. However, any major potential unrest with the idle population was averted with the firm authority of the NWMP under the command of Sam Steele.

Leonardo D'Alessandro and Andrea Navicelli

"OLIVER TWIST" by Charles Dickens

2009-01-17T10:44:00.000-08:00

“Oliver Twist or the Parish Boy's Progress” was the second novel published by Charles Dickens. Its first edition appeared, on a monthly review with the title of “Bentley's Miscellany”, from February 1837 to April 1839, with illustrations realized by George Cruikshank. It’s still considered one of the most famous and influential of Dickens’ works and it was one of the first examples of social novel in literature, besides being the first English novel that chose a child as a protagonist. The anti-romantic portrayal of pourer people’s and of criminals’ life, as well as the overthrow of the novel of formation and a desecrating black humour used by the author to analyse the evil of the nineteenth century English society, were completely new for that period. As a matter of fact the fundamental nucleus of this novel were the poverty, the juvenile job, the urban crime and the intrinsic hypocrisy of Victorian culture. The book’s subtitle, “The Parish Boy's Progress”, was a reference to John Bunyan’s Christian novel “The Pilgrim's Progress” (the pilgrim's trip), since the tone of “Oliver Twist” clashed with the optimism of Bunyan’s novel.

The Plot:
Oliver was a small orphan, who was born in a Work House, that passed the first years of his life in a smaller Work House managed by Mrs Mann. Here the growth of the boy was allowed thanks to the use of very severe methods. After nine years, Oliver was brought to the Work House in which he was born, where he soon became a problem for the managers and for Mr. Bumble, that busied himself with the discipline of the boys. After an episode in which Oliver was involved against his will, the manager of the institute decided to get rid of him, offering 5 pounds to whoever wanted to bring with him the boy. So Oliver was entrusted to Gamfield, a chimney-sweeper who wanted the child as an apprentice. A judge, understanding the violent nature of the chimney-sweeper, prevented that it happened.Therefore Oliver was ordered to serve a coffins’ manufacturer, Mr. Sowerberry, but, exasperated by the continuous hits that he suffered, he escaped reaching London. There he met a contemporary, Jack Dawkins, nicknamed "Doger the robber". The new companion of adventures allowed Oliver to know a Jewish, Fagin, a sinister receiver of stolen goods. The boy was given hospitality by the jewish and he was taught the work of the thief . During a theft to Mr. Brownlow, Oliver, exchanged for the true thief, was arrested. Brownlow, a member of the high society, cleared him of the crime and offered him hospitality. After a few times, Fagin, who was afraid due to the possible revelations that Oliver could do, entrusted Sikes (a burglar always accompanied by a big dog) and his lover, the young Nancy, to kidnap the boy. Oliver, threatened, was forced to help Sikes to rob Mr. Brownlow’s house. The intrusion, however, was discovered and the Jewish Fagin came to an agreement with Monks, a mysterious man, to kill Oliver. After Nancy had known about the conspiracy, she told it to Rose and Mrs Maylie, that had assisted Oliver, wounded during the attempt of the robbery. But Nancy’s betrayal was discovered by Sikes, who killed her. So a crowd of people followed the assassin that, during the escape, accidentally remained hung. Mr. Brownlow ordered to arrest and to hang Fagin and, in the end, he discovered that Monks was, in the reality, Oliver’s stepbrother. Finally Oliver found the affection of a true family and the father that he had never had in the figure of Mr. Brownlow.

Film & Musical:
“Oliver Twist” has been used as a subject for a lot of cinema and television adaptations. In particular the most famous adaptations for the great screen were “Oliver Twist” by David Lean and, in 2005, Roman Polanski’s homonym film. In 1988, instead, Walt Disney Pictures had realized a film of animation inspired to the novel, “Oliver & Company”. The novel has furnished, besides, a starting point for an English musical of great success, “Oliver!”.
Roman Polansky represents on the screen the classical novel written by Dickens and, in particular, the figure of the protagonist, Oliver, with a lot of possible references, that seem to be less explicit than the original one (the author’s aim that consists in underling the picture of the children used, in very bad general conditions, in Workhouses). As a matter of fact, behind Oliver’s figure we can also see, from a different point of view, the same picture of the film’s director who, when he was still a child, managed to escaped by the nazis. But in reality, behind the protagonist’s traits, we can also notice all the children that continue to be exploited still nowadays. On the other hand, the director Roman Polansky maintains Dickens’ spirit, the spirit of an author who, since he was the son of a prisoner and he was used to the hard work since the first years of his life, has to tell his readers and the world still a lot of aspects of the reality where he himself lived.

Federica Parisi ed Elena Perini

Darwin and Darwinism

2009-01-16T10:46:00.000-08:00

Charles Robert Darwin was born in Shrewsbury, England on 12 February 1809. He was the fifth of six children of doctor Robert Darwin and Susannah Wedgwood. When he was 16 he began studying medicine but he renounced for lack of interest. Then his father sent him to the University of Cambridge to become an Anglican priest, but he didn’t want to become that. So he studied theology but also natural science. In 1831 he started a long journey of five years around the world as naturalist on the research ship “Beagle”. During this voyage he collected an enormous quantity of biological and geological observations. He found fossils of extinct animals that were similar to modern species, noticed many variations among plants and animals of the same general type. His more famous observations were on the Galapagos Islands, archipelago to the west of South America, where he noted 13 different types of mockingbirds and different tortoise’s shape from island to island. Darwin came home in 1836 and in 1839 he married his rich cousin Emma Wedgwood: they went to live in a country’s residence called down house and they had 10 children. Darwin didn’t have economical problems and so he continued his studies: in 1859 he published “On The Origin of Species”. Charles Darwin died in Downe, England on 19 April 1882 and then he was buried in Westminster Abbey close to Isaac Newton.

In 1836, after his return to London from the voyage on the Beagle, Darwin started to analyze his observations. He was influenced by Malthus’s essay “On the principle of the population”: food and other factors controls the population, only the strongest being could survive. Darwin was also influenced by Lamarck’s theory of evolutionism: each species derived from another species, and there was the inheritance of characters. So there should be a gradual and slow evolution of species and the primary mechanism for evolution was a process called natural selection. He published “The Origin of Species” in 1859 and after that Darwin continued to write on botany, geology, and zoology until his death. Darwin explained that individuals of the same species differ for genetic characteristics: the characteristics that lead individuals to have more favourable features in certain environmental conditions are favoured. When individuals with certain characteristics inherited survive and reproduce while others with different hereditary characters are eliminated, the population will slowly change. After a long period of time natural selection leads to an accumulation of changes that differentiate groups of organisms. The same Darwin knew that his theory would have difficulties to be accepted and he published his work after a long time because he wanted to gather as much evidence to confirm his theory and because he was afraid to put himself against the creationist thought of the Victorian society.

Reactions due to the spread of Darwinism were immediate. Some intellectuals made satire on the Darwin’s theories. Some biologists supported that Darwin was not able to demonstrate experimentally his theories, while others criticized him saying that he could not explain the origin of the changes, or how they are transmitted to succeeding generations. The Anglican church attacked violently Darwin because he said materialism and indirectly denied the creation in six days by God. Last year, 126 years after his death, Anglican church apologized with the great scientist.

Lapi Matteo

CHARLES DICKENS

2009-01-16T07:43:00.000-08:00

Charles Dickens was born on 7 February 1812, in Landport, Portsmouth, in Hampshire, the second of eight children to John Dickens and his wife, Elizabeth Barrow. When he was five, the family moved to Chatham, Kent. In 1822, when he was ten, the family relocated to 16 Bayham Street, Camden Town, in London.
Just before his father's arrest, the 12-year-old Dickens had begun working ten-hour days at Warren's Blacking Warehouse, on Hungerford Stairs, near the present Charing Cross railway station. He earned six shillings a week pasting labels on jars of thick shoe polish.
In March 1836 he wrote his first novel “The Pickwick Papers” and with this work he became famous.
On 2 April 1836, he married Catherine Thomson Hogarth (1816 – 1879), the daughter of George Hogarth, editor of the Evening Chronicle. After a brief honeymoon in Chalk, Kent, they set up home in Bloomsbury. They had ten children.
Dickens made two trips to North America. In 1842, he travelled with his wife to the United States and Canada and in 1844-45 he went in Italy and he visited Genoa, Rome, Naples and Florence and, after this journey he wrote “Pictures from Italy 1844-45”
When he came back in England he worked in some journal, the most famous is Daily News.
When Dickens separated from his wife in 1858, divorce was almost unthinkable, particularly for someone as famous as he was. He put an announcement on journals and accused her of incapacity in take care the children and the family.
Georgina, Catherine's sister, helped him and we think that he falled in love with her.
An indication of his marital dissatisfaction may be seen when, in 1855, he went to meet his first love, Maria Beadnell. Maria was by this time married as well, but seemed to have fallen short of Dickens's romantic memory of her.
On 9 June 1865 he was involved in railway accident of Staplehurst where six wagon of train falled from the bridge, the only wagon that remained on the bridge was Dickens'. This event is called “The miracle of the wagon”.
Charles was on this train because he was coming back from France where he had met Ellen Ternan and with her he forgot his wife.
During 1869 he collapsed, showing symptoms of mild stroke.
He suffered another stroke on 8 June 1870, after a full day's work and five years after the Staplehurst crash, on 9 June 1870, he died at his home in Gad's Hill Place. He was buried in Westminster Abbey in the Poet's corner.
The major part of his novels were published in a serial form, published in monthly installments, the most famous are “Oliver Twist”, that was published from 1837 to 1839, and “David Copperfield”, that was published from 1849 to 1850.
Many elements within the novel follow events in Dickens' own life, and it is probably the most autobiographical of all of his novels. David Copperfield is considered also an industrial novel because it talks about the misery of the Industrial Revolution, when the exploitation in the factories was very common.
The story is told almost entirely from the point of view of the first person narrator, David Copperfield himself, and was the first Dickens novel to do so.
The principal theme is the disciplining of the hero's emotional and moral life.
Characters in the novel generally belong to one of three categories: Those who have disciplined hearts, those who lack disciplined hearts, or those who develop disciplined hearts over time.
Some of the characters of this novel come from the real life of Dickens, as Maria Beadnell (his first love).
On 18 December 1843 he published “A Christmas Carol”. From this book we have taken the major part of our Christmas' traditions.
Christmas tree, presents, Santa Claus, good feelings, greeting card, dinner, family, holiday, snow, carols, charity, sweet come from this book.
In honour of the author, one crater of Mercury was called Dickens by International Astronomic Union.

Camilla Capaccioli, Sara Poggiali

2009-01-16T06:34:00.000-08:00

WORKHOUSES

Officially workhouses were defined as places that could support paupers and poor people that couldn’t sustain themselves in board and lodging; the first workhouses dates back to 1652 in Exeter. There is however some written evidence that workhouses existed before this date; records mention a workhouse in 1631 in Abingdon.
In 1601 Queen Elizabeth made a new law about poor; in this law she made no mention about workhouses. Nevertheless the act stated that “materials should be bought to provide work for the unemployed able-bodied". The act did propose the building of housing for the impotent poor, which included the elderly and chronically sick.
The system was funded through rates, a local tax. The workhouse system began to evolve in the 17th century as a way for parishes to decrease the cost to rate-payers. This form of indoor relief was a deterrent to the able-bodied who were required to work usually without pay. The Workhouse Test Act made it possible for parishes to deny outdoor relief and only provide indoor relief.
The workhouse was not necessarily regarded as a place of punishment and some workhouses gained the nickname "Pauper palaces" because of their pleasant conditions.
The passing of the Workhouse Test Act in 1723, gave parishes the option of denying out-relief and offering claimants only the workhouse.
Gilbert's Act of 1782 simplified and standardized the procedures for parishes to set up and run workhouses, either on their own, or by forming a group of parishes called a Gilbert Union. Under Gilbert's scheme, able-bodied adult paupers would not be admitted to the workhouse, but were to be maintained by their parish until work could be found for them. Although relatively few workhouses were set up under Gilbert's scheme, the practice of supplementing labourers' wages out of the poor rate did become widely established.
Inmates were free to enter and leave as they liked and would receive free food and accommodation. Workhouse life was deliberately made as harsh and degrading as possible so that only the truly destitute would apply. Attempts were also made to provide moral guidance, training and education to the poor. Workhouse conditions were governed by the Consolidated General Order, a formidable series of rules governing every aspect of workhouse life such as diet, dress, education and discipline. The workhouse system underwent several administrative reforms and was abolished on 1st April 1930, being replaced by other social legislation for the unemployed and retired.

LORENZO QUERCIOLI & MATTEO RICOTTINI

Queen Victoria

2009-01-14T10:28:00.000-08:00

QUEEN VICTORIA (1819-1901)

Queen Victoria was born in 1819, daughter of Victoria Maria Luisa and Edoardo of the Hannover dinasty. But there are many doubs about this paternity: in fact one hypotesis is that she was the daughter of the secretary of her mother, Sir John Conroy. One probable proof that shows Conroy’s paternity is that neither Victoria nor her descendants were affected by the genetic illness of her grandfather, George III, that was ill of mental insanity. An other important thing to say abouut Victoria is that she was affected by Hemophlia, but no one of her predecessors presented that genetic desease.So there is a probability that this illness was introduced for the first time by Sir Conroy.

She became a very intelligent and clever woman; from her youth she studied many languages like Italian, Greek, Latin and French and when she get the throne she showed to know very well the story and the condition of her country. She was crowned as “Queen Victoria, for God glory, of the United Kingdom and Irlan, Defender of the faith”.The nation was identified with Queen: she was beloved by middle classes especially for her behaviour and moral values. During her reign, England had an unprecedent material progress, social reforms and imperial expansion; she reduced the working hours of women and children and she made a school reform thinking that “the ignorance will not let England enter gloriously in the XX century”. The expansion of the British Empire during the age of Queen Victoria happend all over the world: there were several wars both to protect English interests and also to gain new territories. England extended his power into Asia, for examle in India, Africa, like in Egipt and Kenia, Central America and Oceania. She never overruled parlament and became a mediatore above the two main party politics: Liberals and Conservatives.
During her reign there were many premiers and one of those was Lord Merlbourne, who was Queen lover for a short time before her marriage. In fact the sentimental life of Queen Victoria is a bit complicated.
When she was sixteen she met for the first time the man who will be her husband: her cousin Albert. They spent a happy life toghether until Albert’s death in 1861.
Their was a real love marriage and in just 11 years they had 9 sons, even if some of them died because of hemophilia. The inaspected death of Albert caused to Vittoria a period of depression: a legend tells that the Queen carried on sleeping with a clothes of his husband and every morning she ordinated to prepare the bathroom for Albert. She became istheric and unable to govern, so someone bring to the castle a man: John Brown, the ex adviser of Albert.
He was a rude and often drunk man, but between them grew up a sexual relationship: for this reason he was called the “stallion of the Queen”. During her story with Brown she felt in love with the premier Disraeli: he sent her erotic poems and she gave in back many gift. But her last love was a younger Indian boy, Abdul Karim; she discoverd that he was a spy so she could not spend her last time in India as she dreamed. The most strange event happend during her seolture: she was buried dressing her wedding dress, having Albert’s hat in one hand and in the other hand she had a picture and a ring of John Brown.

Queen Victoria’s reign was the longest in the history of England, from 1837 to 1901. She organized her Diamond Jubilee (60 years of reign) where all the premiers of English colonies took part.
The Queen died in 1901 when she was 82: she was ill and old, but she asked for a trip in the coach in Osborne; during the trip she close softly the eyes without open them again.
Nowdays there are many places named after Queen Victoria: the Australian state Vittoria, the capital of Seychelles (Port Victoria), the biggest african lake (Lake Victoria) and the biggest waterfalls of the word (Waterfalls Victoria).

Martina Sartoni & Irene Andreini

The great exhibition of the industry of all nations-1851

2009-01-13T07:45:00.000-08:00

Introduction

When queen Victoria came to the throne in 1837 started a long period, called “the Victorian Age” in which there were an unprecedented material progress, imperial expansion , political development social reforms with the consequent of a great period of stability and pace.
This features, in fact, were the basis for The development of second industrial revolution, typically dated between 1870 and 1914. It was a second phase of the Industrial Revolution, involving several developments within the chemical, electrical, , petroleum and steel industries. Other key developments during this period include the introduction of steam-driven steel ships, the development of the airplane, Mass production of consumer goods, the perfection of canning, mechanical refrigeration, and other food preservation techniques, and the invention of the telephone. So during this period there was one of the most important exhibition of the industry.

The great exhibition

The events that bring to the Great Exhibition of 1851 were prompted by the success of the French Industrial Exposition of 1844, so it was suggested to the English Government that it would be most advantageous to British industry to have a similar exhibition in London. So the exhibition was intended to raise the level of industrial design, to display production and acquire new and larger markets, to celebrate the modern industrial technology, but also to show at all the people the new invention, lots of this were unknown. It was open in the Crystal Place in Hyde Park for five months and fifteen days from may to October. Crystal Palace was built for these exhibition and it was a palace of glass and steal. Over six million visitors came to see some fourteen thousand exhibitors, of which Great Britain was the most important. At different of the French Exposition “the great exhibition” was very internationally in fact the object came from all the countries, also the colonialist country, like India, Australia, and China. Prince Albert, Victoria’s consort, was an enthusiastic promoter of a self-financing Exhibition of All Nations. He was one of the promoter of the exhibition, in fact he was the president of the Royal Commission for the exhibition and persuaded the government to make these exhibition. The palace was divided in sectors where the states could show own manufactures. There were well represented engineering, raw materials, and scientific instruments, military arms and models, chemicals, naval architecture, philosophical instruments, civil engineering, musical instruments, anatomical models, glass chandeliers, and animal and vegetable manufactures, trains with the new locomotive and the new sewing-machine. There were many electrical applications, although there was as yet little understanding of their potential except in the case of the electric telegraph. A large area was given over to machinery, some of it powered by the Exhibition's own steam engines. The exibitors were Africa, Canada, the West Indies, the Cape of Good Hope, , Persia, Greece, Egypt, and Turkey, Spain, Portugal, Madeira and Italy, Prussian, Malta, Australia, New Zeeland, China, German and Switzerland. There were the Medieval Court, and the English Sculpture Court, the great British Furniture Court. India showed the own rich ornament. England showed the mineral products; the cotton fabric and carriage courts, leather, furs, minerals and machinery, cotton and woollen power-looms in motion; flax, silk, and lace, rope-making lathes, tools and minerals, marine engines, hydraulic presses, steam machinery.
France was very important, in fact showed its machinery, arms and instruments, and ornamental furniture, occupying two large sectors. Belgium, showed in particular carpets. Austria, showed her beautiful furniture courts; Russia, showed its vases, ornaments and clothes and hats, and at the end the United States, showed in particular the new agricultural machinery like steam-power tractor. In the palace was represented the history of arts and architecture from ancient Egypt to Renaissance. There were a sector where was made a circus and a theatre. After the Great exhibition the Crystal Palace was disassembled and was re-built in Sydeham where it was re-opened in 1854, but in 1936 was destroyed by a fire.
Today the Great Exhibition is became a symbol of the Victorian age.

FEDERICO FALORNI

Colonialism & Imperialism

2009-01-07T23:08:00.000-08:00

Colonialism

The word “colonialism”derives from the latin verb “colère”, that means “to coltivate”. There are two types of colony: colony of people, in wich a land is conquered and inhabited by new people; colony of exploitation, in wich a land is conquered in order to overwork the population that inhabits it exploiting it trough mines and plantations. Imperialism originated from this kind of colony.
After 1880 the main european nations like England, France, Germany, Belgium and Italy started to conquer colonies in Africa, Asia and Oceania.
The development of the conquest started with the military partecipation of the nations and continued with industrial and trader affairs that abused colony's raw materials. The main reasons of colonial development in XIX century were four:
I.Economic: research of raw materials
II.politics: nationalism, all the nation must have been politically superior to the others
III.Cultural: superiority of the white man compared to black man
IV.Social: the large increase of population
All these components caused colonialism. In a large part of cases this trial was exasperated and aggressive because it was dominated only by colon's thirst for wealth and power.
Same nations, England on all, imposed on their colonies even their culture and lifestyles. This situation caused the making of new “indigenous” middle-class which later, such as in India and South Africa, will take in their hands the administration of their nations, and then the indipendence.
France and England were the first european nations that colonized Africa: France (that was already in possesion of Algery since 1830) extended its possesion in western and equatorial parts of the continent (Senegal, Madagascar, Tunisy), while England, that had substracted Egypt from Turkey for the control of Suez's Channel, entered upon of colonial system that from El Cairo arrived to Cape Town (Sudan, Uganda, Kenya, South Africa). Here England substracted lands of Orange and Transvaal from Boers due to mineral deposits. In the Africa's sharing were partecipating even Belgium (Congo), Italy (Somalia and Eritrea) and Germany (south-western Africa).
In Asia european colonial expansionism met with very ancient empires like the Chinese and the Japanese. England was the first to run the blockede of chinese harbours. The industrial and economic development, better ways of communications and the new commercial organizations leaded to the overmark of colonies' resourches. European nations gained benefits from this politics of exploitation, diffused besides their civilization, their culture, their system of government, religion and language.
Colonial expansionism had repercussions even on the european politics system because the relation of power between the nations was completely lacerated. That contributed to the outbreak of the I World War.
Imperialism

Imperialism started after the great geographic discoveries of XVI century.
The reasons of the imperialism were different:
I.Economic reasons: colonial lands were market-place for wares and a source of raw materials under cost
II.Politics reasons: the conquest of large colonies signified internetional prestige
III.Cultural reasons: in the society began to assert nationalism (prestige of one's own nation as the primary value) and racism
An event of great importance was the millenary chinese empire's end, between 1800 and 1900. The european irruption leaded bad effects. In the meanwhile, grew a new leading class that became rich with trade, while the people continued to live in misery. Before this situation, there were xenophobe and conservative reactions.

British Imperialism

England layed the founds of its own colonial empire in XVI century developing the navy, with East India Company that entered in challange with the spanish naval power.
The main theme of British imperialism was the assertion of determinate races and nation's superiority compared to other people of the Earth. As these last was unable of utilizing their country's wealthes, the “higher” nations claimed the right to take possession of it.
Writers and politicians applied these thesis to the english people and developed the theme of the civilization's mission that England had to carry out in the world.
England granted a large political and economical autonomy to the most ancient colonies (Canada, Australia and New Zeland).
The most important colonial estate of England was India. Firstly was only a stiff overwork (the indian cotton's manufacture was completely ruined by english competition). Later, after some rebellions, England modified its own way to govern India engaging itself to modernize India's economy and to create a middle-class of indian officers educated in order to collaborate in managing the country.
The most brutal aspect of english colonization was the war against China, in order to force it to accept the wicked opium's trade.
This drug was imported in China by english traders when changed it with chinese products. Opium beared in few years catastrophical consequences on people.
England answered to the chinese's protest with the so callaed Opium's War from 1839 to 1842.
The defeat of China leaded to the english installation in Hong Kong and to a series of unfair commercial dealings, imposed with strenght.

Marco Seminara & Leonardo Trapassi

Lucy

2009-01-06T03:48:00.000-08:00

Lucy is a beauty and charming young woman. This character appears for the first time in “Dracula” after Jonathan’s story in Dracula’s castle. She is a good friend of Jonathan’s girlfriend Mina.
Lucy lives at Whitby with her old mother, she writes some letters to Mina, telling her about three men who try to win Lucy’s love: these three are the American Q. Morris, the respectable doctor Seward and Arthur Holmwood that will became his boyfriend.
Lucy asks Mina to came at Whitby, so the narration as epistolary exchange between the two friends stops, and stars the diary form with the two different points of view (Mina’s and Lucy’s diary).
Lucy falls in love with Arthur so she declares to the other two suitors her refusal. During this time in Whitby happens a strange fact: a ship, during a stormy night arrives from the sea with on board only the dead captain tied to the helm; someone says that something similar to a dog is jumped out to the ship.
A night Lucy, during one of her frequently crises of sleep-walking, goes out home and when Mina becomes aware of this she looks for her friend and she finds Lucy near the place where the ship was found. After that night Lucy is always tired and her colour is more pale. Mina decides to ask help to doctor Seward but also he doesn’t understand what is happening to Lucy, and calls Van Helsing his old professor from Amsterdam that immediately understands the problem and he tries to explain this to Seward, Mina, Arthur and Morris. Lucy was bitten by a vampire and soon she dies and becomes a vampire too.
Van Helsing is arrived too late and he had not to avoid the Lucy’s death. Now she is a vampire and they must kill her, because she every night goes out from her crypt to bits and hurts some children.
The difficult duty is entrusted to Arthur, the one that Lucy loved, Van Helsing explains that he must hit Lucy’s vampire with a stake of wood in the heart. So Arthur just grieved about the death of his lover now he must hit that body again and finally Lucy’s aim will be free.

Matteo Baggiani

2008-12-16T12:28:00.000-08:00

VLAD III

Dracula’s character has his origin in the historical figure of Vlad III, the prince of Wallachia, known due to the atrocities he committed during his reign.
His father, Vlad II, had managed to maintain his principality’s liberty and religious independence, thanks to a policy based on several volte-faces that led him, in 1437, to support the Sultan and the Turkish advance. So the Sultan, after he had noticed the prince’s volte-face, invited him to deal with him. It was in that moment that Vlad III, since he had been brought by his father in front of the presence of the Sultan as an hostage, could learn the Turkish torture’s techniques, that were used to punish the prisoners and the convicts. In particular he was excited and surprised at the possibility of impaling all his enemies, which allowed him to receive the name of “Tepes” (that in the Romanian language means “The Impaler”).
It dealt with a terrible instrument of torture that implied a long and painful pangs of death and that Vlad III chose for whoever was condemned to death, eliminating all the “social differences” concerning the way of dying of fellows of different social status. On the contrary, the rich people were impaled higher than the others, with the use of a silver stake.
Vlad III showed his cruelty to every human being who dared face him, with a series of killings that are remained in the historical memory and whose atrocity is destined not to disappear even in the future, thanks to the enchanting figure of the most famous vampire in the world, Dracula.

Elena Perini

Vlad the Impaler

2008-12-15T06:43:00.000-08:00

Vlad the Impaler
Vlad III:
Vlad III, Prince of Walachia, more commonly known as Vlad the Impaler was a Wallachian voivode. His three reigns were in 1448, 1456–1462, and 1476. He was also a defender of Walachia against Ottoman expansionism.

Origin of the surname:
His Romanian surname "Drăculea" means "Son of Dracul" and is derived from his father's title, Vlad the Dragon. The word "Dracul" means "the Devil" in modern Romanian but in Vlad's day also meant "Dragon". The suffix "Ulea" can be translated as "Son of".

Atrocities:
According to the pamphlets, he appears to have been particularly concerned with female chastity. Girls who lost their virginity, adulterous wives, and unchaste widows were all targets of Vlad's cruelty. Such women often had their sexual organs cut out or their breasts cut off. They were also often impaled through the vagina on red-hot stakes that were forced through the body until they emerged from the mouth.
One report tells of the execution of an adulterous wife. The woman's breasts were cut off, and then she was skinned and impaled in a square in Târgovişte with her skin lying on a table.
Another report tells that in 1459 in the day of San Bartholomew in Braşov Vlad invited some merchants that hate him. After the dinner when the merchants were replete he ordered to his to quarter the first and then he forced the second to eat the food that his friend had in his stomach. The last merchant was boiled and then Vlad gave his body to his dogs.
One day Vlad also arrested all the nobles of his reign. The older nobles and their families were impaled on the spot. The younger and healthier nobles and their families were marched north from Târgovişte to the ruins of Poienari Castle in the mountains above the Argeş River. Vlad the Impaler was determined to rebuild this ancient fortress as his own stronghold and refuge. The enslaved boyars and their families were forced to labour for months rebuilding the old castle with materials from another nearby ruin. According to the stories, they labored until the clothes fell off their bodies and then were forced to continue working naked. Very few of the old gentry survived the suffering of building Vlad's castle. Throughout his reign, Vlad systematically eradicated the old boyar class of Wallachia.
Vlad also viewed the poor, sick and beggars as thieves. One horrific tale tells of him inviting all the sick and poor in the area to a large dinner only to have them locked inside and the building burned.
However Vlad III was extremely generous with his servants but he was also extremely cruel with his enemies.

Death:
Vlad died in a battle in 1476, after some important victories against Turks, maybe betrayed also by his allies.

Leonardo D’Alessandro

VLAD III

2008-12-14T14:57:00.000-08:00

Vlad III from Valacchia was a Polish voivode.
Also known as Vlad Tepes or Vlad The Impaler, he was the prince of Valacchia in 1448, from 1456 to 1462, and in 1476. Thanks to his dominion Valacchia principality kept its indipendence from Ottoman empire. Because of his cruelty he was called Tepes, that in Rumanian language means “impaler”.
He was as cruel as other contemporaneous western princes, but some narrations about his cruel deeds gave a distort vision of the national Rumanian hero.

THE NAME NATURE
Vlad, like his father Vlad II, belonged to the Dragon Order, one of some medieval religious knightly orders. It was founded in 1408 by Sigmund from Luxembourg, who was a Hungarian king, and his second wife, Barbara Cilli. The order’s purpose was to protect Christianity and to fight against Turkish people.
Vlad’s father was called “Dracul”, which means “dragon”, because it became his symbol. So the son was called “Draculea”. In Rumanian language “Dracul” also means Devil and so Vlad was called “Devil’s Son”. Probably this is the reason of the leggend about his character.

VLAD’S ATROCITIES
His favourite way to torture was the impalement. His methods were substantially two: the first consisted in the use of a spiky pole which perforated the condemned in the abdomen and put him up. Death could be immediate or could come after some hours.
The second impalement method consisted in the use of a rounded bar which was spreaded with grease and introduced into victim’s rectum. After that the condemned was put up and his own weight made the bar pass into his body; death could come also after two days. He adopted this method by Turkish people and created come differente methods to impale robbers, enemy warriors and treacherouses. Rich men were impaled with a Silver bar and put up above the others. Unfaithful women were impaled in front of their houses.

VLAD’S DEATH
Vlad was delivered in 1475. Then he had to organize a sort of crusade against Turkish people. In 1496, after some successes, he was bordered by Ottoman army; he died on battlefield. There are some hypotesis about the place where his corpse was put. Some think that it was burnt, others think that it was cut to pieces. Some people also think that the corpse was found in the city of Snagov, but archaeological searches found out only horse bounds.

Andrea Navicelli

Vlad III Prince of Valacchia

2008-12-14T12:15:00.000-08:00

Vlad III of Valacchia was a Rumanian prince. Vlad III was also called Vlad Ţepeş (pronounced tse'pesh)or Vlad the Impaler. He was prince of Valacchia in 1448, from 1456 to 1462 and finally in the 1476. Thanks to his dominion, the principality of Valacchia succeeded in maintaining its independence from the Ottoman empire. For the cruelty used towards the prisoners he was nicknamed Ţepeş, that in Rumanian it means the Impaler.

The origin of the name and the tortures of Vlad:

Vlad as his father Vlad II, belonged to the order of the Dragon, one of the chivalrous orders of the Middle Ages’ religious, created in 1408 by Sigismondo of Luxemburg, king of Hungary. The purpose of the order was to protect the Catholicism and to fight against the Turks. His father Vlad II had called Dracul whosemeant it was "Dragon" since these it became his symbol. For this his child, Vlad III , was called in Rumanian “Drăculea”. But in Rumanian the term Dracul could also be interpreted as Devil. Vlad III became, therefore "Child of the Devil ". But the name with which Vlad was really remembered it is Romanian "Ţepeş", since that was the torture that reserved to his own enemies, above all the Turks because this kind of punishment was typically Ottoman.
The tool of torture preferred by Vlad was the impalement, and he created different methods to impale the thieves, the hostile warriors, the Sultan's ambassadors, the traitors. Vlad invented a way to impale the rich, stretching them more aloft some others or making to cover the pole with the silver, he invented a way to impale the merchants making to engrave some nicks on the pole so that to increase the time of the agony.

Federica Parisi

Vlad III by Martina M

2008-12-14T11:54:00.000-08:00

Vlad III more commonly known as Vlad the Impaler, was also known as Vlad Dracula or simply Dracula. He had three reigns and Vlad the Impaler is known for the exceedingly cruel punishments he imposed during his reign.
His Romanian surname “Dràculea” means “Son of Dracul” and is derived from his father’s title, Vlad the Dragon.
The word “Dracul” means “the Devil” in modern Romanian.
Vlad was very likely born in the citadel of Sighisoara, in Transylvania in 1431. He was born as the second son to his father Vlad Dracul and his mother Princess Cneajna of Moldavia and he had two brothers.
The legend of Vlad Tepes is mostly the result of different stories about him. The Romanian, German, and the Russian stories all have their origins in the 15th century.
Besides the written stories the Romanian oral tradition provides another important source for the life of Vlad the Impaler.
Among the Romanian peasantry, Vlad Tepes was remembered as a just price who defended his people from foreign aggression, whether those foreigners were Turkish invaders or German merchants.
Vlad’s father was under considerable political pressure from the Ottoman sultan.
Vlad’s father was assassinated in the marshes near Balteni in 1447 by rebellious boyars, after that the sultan put Vlad III on the throne.
In 1456, Hungary invaded Serbia to drive out the Ottomans, and Vlad III simultaneously invaded Wallachia with his own contingent.
Since the death of Vlad’s grandfather in 1418, Wallachia had fallen into a some chaotic situation.
Vlad the Impaler had impaled 20.000 Turkish prisoner in only night.
During this reign Vlad killed a large amount of people.
Vlad died in 1476 at 45 years old during a battle.
Bram Stoker novel’s is based on the story of Vlad III and the society saw Count Dracula as Vlad.

The legend of Vlad Tepes is mostly the result of different stories about him. The Romanian, German, and the Russian stories all have their origins in the 15th century.
Besides the written stories the Romanian oral tradition provides another important source for the life of Vlad the Impaler.
Among the Romanian peasantry, Vlad Tepes was remembered as a just price who defended his people from foreign aggression, whether those foreigners were Turkish invaders or German merchants.
Vlad’s father was under considerable political pressure from the Ottoman sultan.
Vlad’s father was assassinated in the marshes near Balteni in 1447 by rebellious boyars, after that the sultan put Vlad III on the throne.
In 1456, Hungary invaded Serbia to drive out the Ottomans, and Vlad III simultaneously invaded Wallachia with his own contingent.
Since the death of Vlad’s grandfather in 1418, Wallachia had fallen into a some chaotic situation.
Vlad the Impaler had impaled 20.000 Turkish prisoner in only night.
During this reign Vlad killed more people.
Vlad death in 1476 at 45 years old during the battle.
The Bram Stoker novel’s is based on the story of Vlad III and the society see Count Dracula while Vlad.

by Martina Mari

JONATHAN HARKER

2008-12-14T10:33:00.000-08:00

Jonathan Harker is a man who is sent by Mr Hawkins, his boss, to Transilvania, to drive a bargain with count Dracula, a count who lives in a castle in a Carpathian Mountains.
During the journey Jonathan is scared by the people he meets that tell him horrific stories about the castle but he countines his journey. When he meets Dracula he thinks that the count is a strange person and he notices rapidly he is in trap in the castle and that Dracula is a vampire, so he begins to look for a way to escape.
Secretely he tries to visit all the room of the castle but a lot of them are locked, during one of his “tours” he has a dangerous encounter with brides of Dracula but the count saves him.
Then, after some attempts, Jonathan manages to escape from the castle and finds a refuge at a convent. After that he joins with the other characters to kill Dracula, they destroy the crates of ground that the count had construct and at the end they manage to kill Dracula, and Jonathan and Mina, some years later, have a son that name Quincy, in honour of Quincy Morris.
Harker is presented as the protagonist of the story but he is a static character, in fact he has a role established from the begin of the novel to the end.

Camilla Capaccioli

Lucy

2008-12-14T10:19:00.000-08:00

This is my work on Lucy.

MatteBag

Vlad III

2008-12-14T10:08:00.000-08:00

Vlad III was the monarch of Wallachia, near Transilvania, in the 15th century (his kingdom continued from 1431 or 1432 to 1476). Son of Vlad II appointed under the "Order of the dragon" from which derives his son's designation "Draculea": the dragon's son (the term "Drac" means olso daemon).Vlad III became "the daemon's son" and probably that was the base of the legend linked with this macabre figure.He was known olso as "Vlade tepes" becouse of his strange and horrible way to torture enemies, learned during the Turkish prison. The monarch used to punish his victim by impaling them on stakesin two different ways: or using a pointed stake to pierce victim's abdomen; or using a stond stake that slide slowly into victim's buttoks. In this way he
Vlad III used olso different ways to impaling his enemies related to their blames (thieves, Ambassadors, warriors etc) and moreover he liked have dinner in the middle of the forks in which were impaled the victims or show them publicly.Olso about Vlad III's death there are some charming and ambiguous misteries couse we don't know perfectly the sort of his body and some recently archeological research discovered in the Vlad's tomb only horse's bones.

Matteo Ricottini

VAN HELSING

2008-12-14T08:51:00.000-08:00

Van Helsing is a foundamental character for the development of the story. We see him for the first time when Dr.Seward doesn't manage to cure Lucy from her "illness". So Dr.Seward decides to call Van Helsing from Holland. When he visits Lucy he realises that there's something more than an ordinary illness. In fact he informs the other characters of the existens of a supernatural creature: a vapire. Now Lucy has became a woman vampire too who sucks human's blood in order to survive. So Van Helsing explains that they have to kill her definetly. Than, thanks to Jonathan's diary, Van Helsing manages to find Dracula's castle. Here with Mina and the other male characters (Jonathan, Dr.Seward, Lord Godalming and Quincy Morris) they kill for ever the vampire that, before dying, transforms himself in dust. Van Helsing was the only who knew the presence of the vampire. Without his intervention Dr.Seward and the others couldn't helped Lucy and saved Mina.

Silvia Licciardi

Mina Murray

2008-12-14T07:48:00.000-08:00

Mina Murray is a young girl of noble origins in fact, she's 24 years old. Later she takes the last name of her spouse Jonathan Harker.

She is a teacher, typewriter and stenographer. she has also the passion to have a corrispondence with her friend Lucy Westerna. After the escape of Jonathan from the castle of Conte Dracula, Mina went in Transylvania and care for him. The two married before returning in England. Later on, Mine and Jonathan join to the group of Abraham Van Helsing, intent upon to find and to kill the vampire.Come to acquaintance of this threat, Dracula is revenged biting Mina and making her drinking her blood to condemn her to become a vampire. However, in this way, between Dracula and Mina it comes established a mysterious tie that will help the group of Van Helsing to trace Dracula.At the end Mina becomes free from the tie in fact she returns human.

Mina is the reincarnation of Elisabeth, count Vlad III Dracula’s wife (in the movie by F.F. Coppola); for this reason Dracula is interested in her.

Daniele Turco

VAN HELSING

2008-12-14T07:37:00.000-08:00

Van Helsing is a singular character.

He is a famous doctor who is introduced in the story by Dr Seward.

Dr Seward calls Van Helsing because he doesn't know Lucy's illness and he isn't able to save her. Van Helsing is the only one who understands the reason of Lucy's illness.

He shows to know many aspects of Dracula and he knows what they have to do to destroy the vampire. In fact he becomes a sourt of head of the group and he organizes the actions against the count coordinating the movements of the other.

But Van Helsing is a man of action too. Meanwhile the men follow Dracula to kill him, Van Helsing goes with Mina to Dracula's castle and he kills the three women destroying all vampires.

His role in the story is very important; he represents the knowledge, he's the only one who knows what they are fighting and the way to fight him; he is the one who gives the means to destroy the threat.

Van Helsing is the mind of the group.

Sara Poggiali

VLAD TEPES, CALLED “DRACULA”

2008-12-14T07:07:00.000-08:00

Born in Sighiçoara in 1431, in the centre of Romania, on the Carpathians, Dracula, whose real name was Vlad Tepes Draculea, was a prince of Wallachia. The name “Tepes” meant “impaler”: the favourite method to eliminate his enemies.
“Draculea” meant “little dragon”, cause of he was the son of a dragon: the father Dracul, whose duty was to defend the Christianity from the Turkish on the Balkans.
Nevertheless, cause of his little army, he often preferred to make agreements with Turkish, paying in nature or with money, until he decided to deliver to the Turkish sultan two sons of him as hostages: one of them was the 12th years old Vlad Tepes: the sultan promised he wouldn’t invaded Wallachia.
Then Dracula had been educated to the court of the powerful and rich Turkish sultan, and to the court of Mohammed II, learning to use the terror as instrument of power.
When Vlad came back in Wallachia in 1448 to take possess of it, with the help of Turkish, after father’s death, he had to face the Boyars: from whom he was defeated, then he went in Moldavia and in a night of the year 1459, after he had invited 500 Boyars at dinner, as sign of peace, he called his army and made them impale around his palace in Tirgoviste.
The impalement, learnt by Dracula in Turkey, was a method of torture and execution involving a person being pierced with a long stake. The penetration could be through the sides, through the rectum, through the vagina, or through the mouth. This method brought to a painful death; sometimes taking days. The stake would often be planted in the ground, leaving the impaled person suspended to die.
Dracula didn’t use only the method of impalement, but others too: stake, hot oil, decapitation, etc.
During his life he had killed 100.000 people, excluding obviously the enemies died during the fights.
Successively he solved personally the problem of the heirs to the throne, gathering them in a palace and burning it.
In Transylvania he made impale 20.000 people in an only night, he had two wives and a lot of lovers, one of them told him she was pregnant for joke: he disembowelled her to be sure she was joking.
Dracula was really brave: he loved to direct his army in the first line; with his army of 30.000 unities, he opposed to the Balkan army, composed by 250.000 unities.
He applied the tactics of the “burn land”, going away leaving nothing to the enemies, using the technique of guerrilla too and dazing with psychological war the enemies, like as he blocked the way with Muslim, taken as prisoners previously.
Vlad, who was indifferent to religion, decided to convert himself and took part in the anti-Turkish campaigns.
He died in 1476 during a battle near Bucharest: he was discovered and killed by some traitor Boyars.
His head was cut and taken in Costantinopoli; Vlad was buried in the monastery of Snagov.
Immediately a lot of torments and legends of him born in that place; when the cadaver was discovered in 30 years of XX century, in his tomb they found only a yellow silk dress with silver buttons.
Today in Romany Vlad is considered as an hero of national indipendence.

Lorenzo Quercioli

VLAD III DRACULEA PRINCE OF WALLACHIA

2008-12-14T06:57:00.000-08:00

Vlad III was born in 1431 in Sighisoara in Wallachia and he was known with the name of "Vlad Tepes" (that in Rumanian means impaler). Vlad was a member of the order of the Dragon: this order had the aim to protect the Christendam and to fight against the Turk invasion. Vlad III was the son of Vlad II that was called Dracul (dragon or devil in Rumaninan) and for this reason Vlad Tepes was called also the "Devil's son". During all his life, the prince of Wallachia had to fight against the Turks and he bacame famous for his atrocity towards his enemies: he tortured them by impalling them with two different methods (depending on the social class of the victim).
We can see Vlad's cruelty in some different episodes: in 1460 in the city of Sibiu, he impaled 10000 people and spread the corpses with honey in order to attract every kind of insect; in 1461 an ambassador of the Sultan didn't take off his turban in the presence of Vlad so the prince made nail it on the messenger's head. Vlad reigned on the Wallachia for three times: the first on 1448, the second from 1456 to 1462 and the third in 1475. During all his reigns he impaled between 40000 to 100000 people until he died in 1476 during a battle against Ottomans. We hadn't precise informations about Vlad's corpse: some people think that it was burned, some others think that it was divided and exposed in Istanbul and some others think that it was buried in a church in Snagov.

Francesco Poggi

Vlad III of Valacchia

2008-12-14T06:19:00.000-08:00

HIS LIFE:
Vlad III was born in Sighişoara,Valacchia, on 2nd November of 1431 and he was a Voivòda,a special rank of general in East of Europe of tha times, and also the prince of that territories.
Uder his domination he managed in keeping the indipendece by Ottoman Empire, so this actions won him the title of hero, on the other hand his cruelty won him the appellative of Ţepeş(that means the impaler).
He was imprisoned from 1462 after the treason of Mattia Corvino of Hungary and got back his freedom in 1475 thanks to Stephen the Great,but he had to marry Stephen's daughter, to change his religion, and to lead a crusade against the Turkish in the 1476,in which he found the death on the battlefield.

THE ORIGIN OF HIS NAME:
Vlad III was also known as Drăculea and as The Tepes.
The first refers to Vlad II,the father of Vlad III, who was known as Dracul: in rumanian language this word means at the same time dragon and devil.
The second was the result of Vlad cruelty against Turkish and other enmies of his:he used to impale them in lots of way always new, and he enjoyed watching them suffer and died

Lorenzo Bettazzi

2008-12-14T06:12:00.000-08:00

The true history of Vlad III “the Tapes”

Vlad III Dracula was born in 1431 in Sighisoara, a medieval village in Transylvania and he was the son of Vlad II, the Prince of Wallachia. Since he was young he didn’t receive many attentions from his father, who was mainly mindful of his firstborn, and so he was assigned to Byzantine monks in order to receive a Christian education.
In the middle of 15th century Vlad II was oppressed by many foreign powers and was forced to interrupt the war against Turks in order to obtain the military support of Sultan Murad, who invited him to Adrianople to treat. However Vlad II , aware of the inclemency of Turks, brought with him his two sons – Vlad III and Radu – to offer them as hostages to save his life.
During his imprisonment Vlad III had the opportunity to learn the techniques used by Turks to torture prisoners, and he remained so impressed by the torture of impaling that, during his second reign, he inflicted it to such a high number of convicted that he started to be known as “the tapes” (which means “the impaler” in the Rumanian language).
In 1447 as soon as he received the news of his father’s death he decided to escape from his prison in order to recover the throne of his father, but his first reign lasted only a few months due to the return of Vladislao, who has been appointed successor to his father during his imprisonment. In 1456 Vlad III managed to regain the throne and he immediately started such a cruel repression against his enemies that earned the role of protagonist in Stoker’s novel: Dracula. At the end of his second reign he was deposed thanks to a deception of Turks and he managed to obtain his reign back only in 1475 but, just one year later, he was killed on the battlefield.

Renfield

2008-12-14T05:54:00.000-08:00

This is my work about Renfield: the description of the character and his role in the story.
R. M. Renfield is one of the characters of "Dracula". He’s a patient of Doctor Seward’s mental hospital because of his madness. He’s 59 years old, he has a sanguine temperament, great physical strength, he’s morbidity excitable. After Count Dracula’s arrival in England he begins to deteriorate and to have a very strange behaviour. In fact he uses sugar to catch flies, he uses flies to feed spiders, he uses spiders to feed birds and finally he eats birds. So he’s a zoophagus and often invokes a mysterious lord. In the story the protagonists understand a relationship between Renfield and Dracula: the mad is not a vampire but he wants to become that. Renfield’s variable behaviour is a sort of indication of Dracula’s movements in London.

Lapi Matteo

Vlad III

2008-12-14T03:01:00.001-08:00

This is my work on Vlad III, it is the description about the life and the horrific punishment of this leader.

Semox

about Dracula...

2008-12-09T10:00:00.000-08:00

It is believed that the character of Dracula in Bram Stoker’s novel was based upon the historical figure Vlad Tepes (pronounced tse-pesh), who intermittently ruled an area of the Balkans called Wallachia in the mid 15th century.

He was also called by the names Vlad III, Vlad Dracula and Vlad the Impaler. The word Tepes stands for "impaler" and was so coined because of Vlad’s propensity to punish victims by impaling them on stakes, then displaying them publicly to frighten his enemies and to warn would-be transgressors of his strict moral code. He is credited with killing between 40,000 to 100,000 people in this fashion.

The Tell-Tale Heart short movie

2008-11-30T03:15:00.000-08:00

This is a movie version of "The Tell-Tale Heart"

It's really frightening, isn't it?

Write down your impressions.

Answers of the listening on "Cloning"

2008-11-25T11:57:00.000-08:00

Ok! Here we are..! Hi guys! I’ve been working for hours to do this homework but finally I’ve done it! =)

What are the main types of cloning? The main types of cloning are: reproductive cloning, where a new baby will be created and therapeutic cloning, where only some of the cells will be copied.

What is the aim of stem cells into the body? Stem cells regenerate tissue: they replace cells that are lost through natural processes.

What are scientists actually studying? Scientists are studying the possibility of treating certain diseases such as Parkinson, hearth disease or disease of the brain by introducing new stem cells into the body; embryo cells are the centre of much of the current research.

How was the sheep Dolly created? The sheep Dolly was created trough cloning: a nucleus taken from an adult sheep cell was inserted into an empty egg.

Why would therapeutic cloning be useful? Therapeutic cloning can solve reject problems in organ transplants.

What does Professor Gardner think would be possible in the future? Professor Gardner thinks it may be possible to extract the nucleus of a cell from the patient to briefly clone an embryo of him and then to use the embryo stem cell to treat him. In future this method could even be used to create a personalized bank of stem cells that can be stored and used when the patient needs them.

What kind of ethical dilemmas are the governments facing? The governments are facing such ethical dilemmas: should scientist be allowed to harvest stem cells from embryos? Should the cloning of human embryos be permitted?

In Britain what is the limit of time research? In Britain the research is permitted on embryos up to fourteen days old.

What is Professor Donaldson’s opinion on the cloning research? Professor Donaldson thinks that the creation of a human being through cloning should not be permitted under any circumstances. It’s illegal at the moment and should remain illegal.

Why is not possible in certain states to make research of embryos? In certain states the research on embryos is not possible because an embryo, however young, is considered a human being. Embryo has the potential to become a human being.

"the sheep Dolly"

Lorenzo Quercioli

trak listening 25-11-08

2008-11-25T05:23:00.000-08:00

Hewre's the listening on "Cloning"

is

Edgar Alla Poe: Tales of Imagination

2008-11-17T13:13:00.001-08:00

E.A. Poe, besiodes being the creator of the Detective Story, is considered the master of the short story in general.

Here you can find the links to two of his most famous short stories:
a) The Tell-Tale Heart
b) The Black Cat

The female figure in Jane Austen's novels

2008-11-06T16:00:00.000-08:00

At long last I'am able to write this topic. I hope this is ok, so I only wish good reading.

Bye,bye Semox

2008-11-05T05:34:00.000-08:00

I really apologise for being late but my adsl connection was broken ...:)..

hope u enjoy the reading, and sorry for the grammar mistakes!

The main theme of Jane Austin's novels is the countrygentry life, especially linked to the theme of marriage: the role and the social position of the English women in the 17th century is the principal aspect of Austin's novels.

The most important thing for a woman of that time was to get married. There aren't any characters describing better this concept than the two mothers of the novels, Ms Bennet and Ms Dashwood; their principal interest was to see their daughter married, and this desicion was such important to be taken fom all the family. But at the end, we see that the heroines manage to marry their real love who isn't always the man choosen by the family; there is always the happyendig.

The detailed description of the females figure is used by J. Austin to describe better all the different aspects of the female mind and all the different points of view of the women.
For example Elizabeth, the heroine of "Pride & Prejudice",is a very strong and instincive woman and she' s a very proud of herself girl. When she meet Darcy, she refuses to submit to his ideas, showing her proud personality. In the novel there is a journey towards selfknoledge and selfawareness of the two characters that ends with a changing of their personality.

On the other side Elinor, one of the heroines of "Sense & Sensibility" rapresents the way a thypical 17th c. woman had to be. She's sensitive but prudent in showing her feelings. She's very self-control and she's got an inner balance during all the developement of the novel.

And completely different is the personality of Elinor's sister, Marianne, that is irrational, istintive and she doesn't have problems to show her feelings and her thoughts to the men she's in love with.

The heroine that is more similar to Jane Austin's personality is in my opinion Elinor, because of her big control on herself ond on her feelings.

marty s.

THE FEMALE FIGURE IN JANE AUSTEN'S NOVELS

2008-11-03T05:06:00.000-08:00

Jane Austen was the master of the Novel of Manner. She had a short and uneventful life: she was the daugther of a rector of a church, she received a complete learning and she was very linked to her sister Cassandra. After this short description we can understand how her style would be. The character that represents her attitude is Elinor in "Sense and Sensibility": she's a reflective woman, she has a lot of different qualities, but well balanced (reason and passion, sense and sensibility....). Marianne, that is the second heroine of the novel, instead, is more an impulsive and sensible character but she's an intelligent woman and along the novel she gradually acquires sense.
Also in "Pride and Prejudice" female characters have important roles. Elizabeth, the heroine, is a very clever woman capable of complex ideas and impressions. She has a really strong personality, she refuses the roles imposed on her by her family. We can see her attitude and strong personality when she accuses Darcy of pride and when she refuses his proposal of marriage: she is a really uncommon girl, expecially for the period in which she lives. Elizabeth's strong personality is in contrast with her sister's. Jane (this was her name), in fact, isn't a round character with her own personality, she is more a type, a flat character.
In these two works the female figures have a central role maybe because of the life and the education received by Jane Austen. But all these women are different from each others because the English author wanted to investigate and to show every different facet of the human mind, expecially the female mind.
Jane Austen succeeded in doing it introducing her characters in amorous weaves that usually ended with an happy ending (one or more weddings).

Francesco Poggi

the origin of the vampire stories

2008-11-02T10:28:00.000-08:00

For those who are interested in the Gothic genre I propose the reading of the first "vampire" story: "The Vampire" by John William POLIDORI, published in 1819...

For the Italian version click here.

We have to wait until 1897 for the pubblication of DRACULA by Bram Stoker, the most representative novel of the sub-genre.

Enjoy it!

audio file of the class test

2008-10-30T09:28:00.000-07:00

Now that you're at home, try to listen at the track again...maybe, it'll be easier to understand!

The Gothic Novel

2008-10-13T00:27:00.000-07:00

In order to summarise the main concepts related to the origin of the Gothic Novel I've prepared these slides for you.
Just give a look and reply a comment adding your personal notes!

Waiting 4 u!

Hi everybody!

2008-10-12T23:49:00.000-07:00

Hello class!

Welcome in this brand new space for our chatting on English literature.
Hope everything is gonna be ok.
You're all invited to give your personal contribution.
Feel free to post a comment and share your works, summary, documents...

Have a good work!

ilaria salvadori