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Essay on progressiveism in america
Progressive era changes in america
Essay on progressiveism in america
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The author, John F. Kasson, wrote Amusing the Millions with the purpose to show how the attitude of Coney Island changed the attitudes of Americans from victorian views to more progressional views. The story starts of showing how Chicago and New York created parks in the middle of the city, so that people would have a space in the middle of the city to escape the hustle and bustle of the city. The thought of this is what initialized the amusement parks of Coney Island. During the start of the progressive era people like Frederick Olmstead challenged the standard of living. Victorian ideals included the belief that people needed to give up any fun, entertainment, and luxuries during their lives for the reward of going to heaven. In New York,
The Big Sort, written by Bill Bishop and published in 2009, takes an in-depth, wide-ranging look into the ways that American citizens are defining themselves and forming into like-minded groups. The people of the United States are categorizing their life choices, beliefs and practices in such a way that population areas both great and small are becoming alienated and isolated from one another, clustering in particular groups that share the same or similar interests and points of view. Individuals and groups that do not share equivalent ideas or ways of life with other individuals and groups are increasingly at odds, to the point of minimal contact and knowledge with the rest of the world that exists outside of their thought community. As a result of this, people are clumping to opposing ends of spectrums, whether they are political, religious or lifestyle choices and this is causing “sorting”, referring to the book’s title.
During the 1920’s, Atlantic City was famous for gambling and drinking. People all over would visit for entertainment and to get rich. After world war two crime and corruption took over the streets causing the city to enter an economic decline. Also following the war, cars became more available which led to the decrease of time spent at the city, people no longer had to wait for a train, they can now visit for a little and leave whenever. Less people staying at the hotels for longer, took away more of the cities money. In 1972, “ The New Yorker” published an article called the The Search for Marvin Garden’s by John McPhee who was smart and talented monopoly player. In the article, McPhee persuades Americans to be weary of what trying to become rich in order to be happy can produce and instead search for happiness in
The laboring poor’s leisure activity was brief, casual, and non-commercial. Amusement was and had to be cheap. It mostly consisted of walks, visiting friends, and reading the penny press. The people of the Lower East Side entertained with sights of interest and penny pleasures such as organ grinders and buskers, acrobats performed tricks and vendors and soda dispensers competed for customers.
During the late nineteenth century, America was undergoing a cultural change in society. An island with Amusement Parks and vast beaches was underway in development to change the face of America in ways no one could have imagined at the time. The island was referred to as Coney Island. Coney Island Amusement Parks was built in a span of 30 years that would provide the American people a place to relax and enjoy time together with their friends and family. As a whole, Coney Island at the turn of the century, offered the ways of the future in distinctive ways; through technological advances of the era. Around 1900, the Brooklyn Rapid Transit Company created steam railways that connected Manhattan and Brooklyn, thus making Coney Island much more accessible to people living the city (Source 2). Coney Island was a symbol of America in the early twentieth century, where all of America’s values and traditions were defined and brought into one place. In a sense, Coney Island took Americans from the Victorian age, to a more modern and futuristic sense of what America could potentially become. Changing economic and social conditions helped to create the basis of new mass culture that was carried on into the new century (Source 1)
The setting of the story helps to magnify its impact on the reader because it is set in a small town similar to the one many of us may know of, and that is symbolic of everything that we consider to be right in America. The story begins on a wonderful summer day in a small town. The author describes the day as very joyful but strikes a contrast between the surroundings of the town and the atmosphere of the people gathered in the square. The atmosphere is sober, where the adults ?stood together, away from the stones in the corner, and their jokes were quiet and they smiled rather then laughed."(268) This, in just the third paragraph, is a indication through symbolism of the townsfolk?s sober mood that something was amiss. The setting for the lottery also takes place in the same place as the square dances, the teen-age club, and the Halloween program.(268) This unifies our lives with those of the story sense we can relate to those types of events, and is symbolic in showing that even though this dastardly deed happens here that it is still the main place of celebration. Showing how easy it is for us, as human beings, to clean our conscientious by going back to a place that, on June 27, is a place of death and make it a place of delight.
10. The technology used in Coney Island's rides allowed the park managers to control crowds while simultaneously giving people the illusion of total autonomy as they navigated the park. This is a parallel to the cultural changes going on at the time, brought about in part by Coney Island. The new "mass culture" gave people a newly found sense of liberation from older, more restrictive values even though part of the reason why people were adopting this new culture was societal pressure.
The picture of Brooklyn presented by McCourt is almost cruelly miserable. In the first few chapters of the text there are moments of gentle humor and irony. For example, franks full immersion baptism when his mother dropped him into the font seemed to be a protestant symbol to the family. McCourt's humor has two main sources: childish innocence, including school boy humor, and the funny situations to which poverty can reduce people.
“The Lottery” starts out with “The morning of June 27th was clear and sunny, with the fresh warmth of a full-summer day; the flowers were blue blossoming profusely and the grass was richly green. The people of the village began to gather in the square,” (373) and in “The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas,” Le Guinn begins with “the Festival of summer came to the city of Omelas, bright-towered by the sea. The rigging of the boats in harbor sparkled with flags. In the streets between houses with the red roofs and painted walls, between old moss-grown gardens and under avenues of trees, past great parks and public buildings, precisions moved.” (380) With both Jackson and Le Guin’s short story the reader is lead to believe that something exciting and pleasurable is about to occur, however, the reader soon realizes that this particular event, while exciting, is no longer pleasurable. Le Guin depicts the people of Omelas smiles to be something of the past “But we not say the words of cheer much any more. All smiles have become archaic” and again when she describes the celebration as being something that the people have come to fear, “The joy built upon successful slaughter is not the right kind of joy; it will not do; it is fearful and it is trivial.” (382) In the “The Lottery,” Jackson indicates that although it is a beautiful summer day, full of new
Money is the root of all things evil. When a person puts money before their beliefs and values a lot of things can go wrong. Delia and Missie May are the two women Hurston wanted you to see what money do to two different type if people, one self-made and one depended on money given. Delia was the woman that had to work hard for everything she wanted and have. She is not a person who let money define her, whereas you have, Missie May, a housewife and her husband gives her everything she wanted and needed. It’s Funny how Hurston depicted two different kinds of bad marriages. In “The Gilded Six-Bits” the wife cheats on the husband, whereas in “sweat” the husband cheats on the wife. In both stories, Hurston tested a Woman’s strength and weakness by showing your love, regret and hate in two different viewpoints.
In Francis Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby, the city of New York possesses a “transitory” and “enchanted” quantity, which “for the last time in history” rivaled man's “capacity for wonder” (182). New York City, a symbol of American greatness and the American dream, contains very unamerican class distinction: those whose families have been prominent and rich for decades function as a de facto aristocracy, looking down upon and controlling (through vast wealth) the poor. These class distinctions are mirrored by geography, dividing up the maps into regions by wealth. The parallelism of the region and the residents results in the region symbolizing the residents. Through analyzing both the residents and the description of the region, a holistic understanding can be gained about the residents of Valley of Ashes, East Egg, and West Egg.
Who’s smarter at chess - computers or humans? Chess is all about ultimate way of thinking, which puts it on a same level as an extreme sport.In the eighteenth century, Wolfgang von Kempelen caused a stir with his clockwork Mechanical Turk—an automaton that played an eerily good game of chess, even beating Napoleon Bonaparte.CLIVE THOMPSON is a freelance journalist and blogger who writes for the New York Times Magazine and Wired.He blogs at collisiondetection.net. This essay is adapted from his book, Smarter Than You Think: How Technology Is Changing Our Minds for the Better (2013). A writer for Scientific American fretted that the inventor "Would Substitute Machinery for the Human Mind." Eighty years later, in 1997, this intellectual
Although plot and setting are important in showing the brutality in humanity, the characters within this short story expose the underlying message of the dangers of social insecurities. Old Man Warner, the oldest citizen in this dystopic town is a prime example of people blindly following tradition. Shirley Jackson explains in her short story that he has been a part of seventy seven “Lotteries” (Jackson 256). Warner has become accustom to the “Lottery” and truly believes it is necessary to keep the town civilized. This is dangerous because a lot of things could have changed in seventy-seven years such as changes in society’s
was appealing because in the city there was new technology available, but the increasing migration to the cities caused extreme poverty for families in the city and forced the wealthy to move. The large surplus of people into the city led to “the prodigious increase of the tenement-house population,” or the increasingly amount of people who lived in the dumbbell tenements (Riis 275). The dumbbell tenements were hardly a solution to the growing problem of people because they could, though not comfortably, accommodate an entire family in one room for a cheap price. The poor people who lived in the tenements were typically the families who needed to have all members, women and children alike, working to have the money they needed to live. In contrast to the poor, the wealthy people began to strongly dislike the growing population of poor in the beautiful cities, so the solution to their problems was to escape the stench that was the city and move to suburban areas just outside of the city. Many people saw the chance to be “commuters, [or] those who lived in the suburbs and traveled in and out of the city for work,” and they “began to increase in number” (American Memory Timeline). The wealthier people could to use their fortunes to leave the cities and live just outside of them, but they were still capable of commuting to the cities for work and leisure. Urbanization to the cities made for an overly-packed place for a family home, but it was the only place the poor could afford to live, unlike the rich who moved to suburban areas around the
“Come on, guys,” I yelled at my family, which consists of my mom Madonna, my father John, and my two sisters Alissa and Kara, as I ran frantically across the jam-packed parking lot to the opening gate that led to a world of adventure. As wide as the world around, my eyes pierced at the doorway to a world of fun. Families, of all sizes, were enjoying all the possibilities of fun. Hearing laughter and frightening screams, warned me of the experience waiting for me within the doorway to everlasting amazement. The sweet baked smell of funnel cakes swarmed into the fresh morning air. Before I knew it, my family and I were ready to enter Valleyfair, an amusement park that offers summertime fun to the maximum.
When he wrote the book he wanted to divide up the classes of people and show that each class of people faced problems of their own. He also wanted it to represent the American dream which at the time was social mobility, which is the idea of moving up the social ladder or the poor becoming rich, and the want for material things. Many of the characters in the book aspire to move up on the social ladder which at this time was almost impossible. They all had different motives for wanting to achieve success, such as Gatsby’s love for Daisy, or Myrtles desire for the finer things in life.