Essays on American Life

Industrialization after the Civil War in America

Industrialization after the Civil War in America Industrialization after the civil war was a great turning point in the history of the modern America. It marks a period of great transformation in a country. The United States realized and underwent through a rapid development. This was a period whereby industries were being built and there was availability of more jobs for the American people (Rees, 2015). During this period, the political arena also faced corruption. After the civil war, the industrialization process took on a tremendous and an unpredictable change on many sectors in America. These changes as a ...

Introduction

Moby Dick is considered the great American novel. There are many reasons Moby Dick has earned this award, from the accolades of English critics in Melville’s day to the positive commentary by Literary critics and theorists today. Melville was a master of sentence style, and wrote many complex and highly structured sentences in the novel. Likewise, he filled his text with allusions and references to the greatest works of literature, including the Bible, Paradise Lost, King Lear, and the works of Ralph Waldo Emerson. While all of these elements contribute to the greatness of Moby Dick they are ...

The main work of Mark Twain is "The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn" written in 1885. This novel has the broadest aspect of the impact: it talks about democracy and humanity. These properties became fundamental for the American literature of XX century, so Mark Twain served as an example for the future writers. "The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn" has the same characters and the same time as in the "The Adventures of Tom Sawyer" . But this novel reveals a more mature attitude of the author, it covers all parts of human experience, and has a more profound importance union. The ...

"Walden or Life in the Woods" by Henry David Thoreau belongs to the vivid and memorable American works of classical literature. The personality of the author and the pages of his famous book highlight anti-capitalist, romantic, and utopian ideas that received considerable spread in the United States in the 30-40-ies of the last century and these ideas were a kind of protest against the brutality of the bourgeois industrial progress and its accompanying social ills.   The ideological pioneers of the anti-capitalist and romantic-utopian protests were called transcendentalists. It is a circle of prominent representatives of the American democratic intelligentsia, ...

The period following WWII, known as the Cold War era, spanned form 1945 to 1965, and was defined by the ongoing conflict between the Soviet and American nations. This era was defined by more than tension between two countries, but became an age of constant fear. The American people were afraid of communism and of subversion and aggression acted out on the American people by the Soviet nation. This fear ultimately infiltrated every aspect of American life, heavily impacting governmental policies and political agendas, as the nation’s leaders acted to protect the American people. One of the cultural ...

Loraine Hansberry’s iconic play A Raisin in the Sun tells the story of the beleaguered Younger family, who face racism and interpersonal strife in their life on Chicago’s south side. Given the title’s status as a line from a Langston Hughes play, “A Dream Deferred,” A Raisin in the Sun is itself about dreams, and the ways in which they are denied to people of color in America. The dreams of Walter, Benethea and Mama Younger are ‘deferred’ in this way throughout the play, showcasing the unique struggle that black families have to get ahead in ...

David Fincher’s 1999 film adaptation of the Chuck Palahniuk novel Fight Club provides a uniquely slick, stylish filmic presentation of the book’s gritty, darkly comic sensibilities. Tracking the life of a disillusioned, emasculated, narrator (known only as Jack in the film, played by Edward Norton) and his newfound rebellion against the existential crises of modern American life with the help of charismatic lowlife Tyler Durden (Brad Pitt), Fight Club explores both the immense appeal of rebelling against the hegemonic systems set up for men in late capitalist society and the unique beauty and eroticism of masculinity. Director ...

Introduction

The Trayvon Martin shooting of 2012, in which George Zimmerman shot a 17-year-old black youth whom he believed was acting in a threatening manner. The controversy surrounding the murder and its subsequent trial brought up intriguing and complicated discussions surrounding Florida’s Stand Your Ground laws, which stated Zimmerman had the right to defend himself with deadly force if he felt threatened. Stand Your Ground laws have encountered a great deal of discussion in recent years due to this case and many others, in which the issue of being able to defend yourself with lethal force is taken into ...

Steven Spielberg’s seminal 1977 science fiction film Close Encounters of the Third Kind charts the effect of a mysterious and traumatic alien abduction on average American man Roy Neary (Richard Dreyfuss) on both his psyche and his relationship with his family. In Jodi Dean’s essay “Fugitive Alien Truth,” the UFO abductee phenomenon is examined through a sociological and political lens, illuminating many social aspects of the cultural phenomenon of the abductee that are present in Close Encounters. As Roy’s sense of self and identity begins to shift gradually away from his family, and he struggles to ...

Abstract

When Invisible Man, the seminal novel by Ralph Ellison was published in 1953, it quickly established a reputation as one of the most important literary depictions of the struggles of African-Americans in the history of fiction. The central character, the titular ‘invisible man,’ struggles with a metaphorical invisibility that was endemic to the 20th-century attitudes of white hegemony toward African-Americans, and encapsulated the black experience as one of marginalization and oppression. These elements contribute greatly to manifesting a vision of black American life that expressly prevents blacks from achieving the same level of respectability and acceptance as whites, regardless ...

The term global finance describes the existence of a financial system that comprises of regulators and institutions that perform various financial transactions on an international front. By definition, the term does not constitute institutions and regulators that act on local and regional capacities. Instead, its primary components include huge financial institutions such as the IMF and a series of national agencies and federal departments. These agencies and departments include finance ministries, federal banks, and multinational private financial organizations. Contrarily, banking refers to the corporate activity of receiving and protecting private money as well as offering financial credit to earn ...

If I were to select an historical figure that has had the most vibrant and direct impact on me, it would be Benjamin Franklin. An American inventor, politician, philosopher and innovator, he is a figure whose resolve and imagination I have perpetually admired. He never rested, moving from discipline to discipline in an attempt to master all of them. He held an immense curiosity about the world around him, both in nature and in his fellow man. That type of altruism and sense of exploration is something I have held dear to myself, and hope I can merely come close ...