Random questions and answers (online) part 7

What should I learn?

* A consumer is a person or organization that uses or buys a product or service. * Credit refers to the ability of a customer to obtain goods or services before payment, based on the trust that payment will be made in the future. * Debt is something, typically money, that is owed or due. * The word economy refers to the wealth and resources of a country or region, especially in terms of the production and consumption of goods and services. * Someone with financial literacy possesses the knowledge and skillsets necessary to make informed and effective decisions with all of his or her financial resources. * Interests may refer to a fee paid by a borrower to the lender for the use of borrowed money; typically interest is calculated as a percentage of the principal (original loan amount). * The word loan may refer to something that's borrowed, especially a sum of money that is expected to be paid back with interest. * Personal finance refers to how you manage your money as an individual or family. We're talking about managing your money includes how you save, invest, and budget. Personal finance is about meeting personal financial goals, whether it's having enough for short-term financial needs, planning for retirement, or saving for your child's college education. You should write out a detailed plan for what to do with your financial resources. * A loan shark is someone (a lender) who offers loans with extremely high rates, typically under illegal conditions. * An emergency fund is readily available you have in the event of an emergency. * Compound interest is interest paid on interest previously earned. * Interest rate refers to a percentage earned on invested principal; the rate of return. * A check is a written, dated, and signed item that contains an order from the drawer that directs a bank to pay a definite sum of money to a payee. * A deposit is money that goes into a checking account, usually to gain interest. * A withdrawal refers to money that goes out of a checking account. * An annual fee is a yearly fee that's charged by the credit card company for the convenience of the credit card. * A credit report is a detailed report of an individual's credit history. * A credit score is a measure of an individual's credit risk; calculated from a credit report using, I think, some kind of standardized formula. A credit score measures the likelihood that someone will pay off his or her borrowings. The higher the score, the better. Scores range between 300 and 850. A score of 700 is considered good. * The FAFSA (Free Application for Federal Student Aid) is a form used by the federal government to determine a family's eligibility for grants, work-study, and loans to pay for college. * A grant is a form of federal or state financial aid that doesn't need to be repaid; it's usually given to students who demonstrate financial need. * A scholarship can be a grant or payment made to support a student's education, awarded on the basis of academic or other achievement. * A work study is a program that enables students to work part-time while attending school. * Community college can be an alternative to college that helps save money. * An Associate's degree is a 2-year degree. Its benefits are lower cost and specialized training. You can get jobs with this. * Trade schools allow students to learn basic professional skills in 2 years or less. * Not everyone can afford college with cash. * Marketing is a term that refers to the process of communicating the value of a product or service to customers. * Investing refers to the process of setting money aside to increase wealth over time for long-term financial goals such as retirement. * A portfolio is a list of all your investments. * Cotton and linen are materials used to make money. * In 1945, WW2 fuels an economic recovery, which helps with some problems brought on by the depression. * Drug withdrawal refers to physical and mental symptoms that occur after stopping or reducing intake of a drug. The characteristics of withdrawal depend on what drug is being discontinued. * People are emigrants when they leave their country of origin. When they arrive at their destination, they are immigrants. There is very little difference between immigrant and emigrant semantically; both words refer to a person who leaves one country in order to move to another (generally for a permanent or significant stay). The main difference is that immigrant is used in reference to the country moved to, and emigrant is used in reference to the country moved from. There are several ways of remembering how to distinguish between these words: people are emigrants when they leave their country of origin, and immigrants when they arrive at their destination, or an emigrant is given an additional M when moving to a new country. The verbs immigrate and emigrate are similarly related in meaning. While the words have been used interchangeably by some writers over the years, immigrate stresses entering a country, and emigrate stresses leaving. You are more likely to encounter emigrate used with the preposition from, and immigrate used with to or into. It should be noted, however, that we have significant evidence of each of these words being used with a variety of overlapping prepositions; the borders between these words are somewhat porous. * You're welcome...is a polite acknowledgement of a ' thank you', but a lack of a come back is not impolite. No one can take offense at being thanked, so if one doesn't respond to a thank you, it can be left that the effort to say thank you was humbly appreciated. * Is not responding to "good morning" rude? Yes, it seems so. A response does not necessarily need to be verbal, but ignoring someone after they spoke to you is. A nod, smile or curt response of "morning", is all it takes to acknowledge the person. * Jetties protect the shoreline of a body of water by acting as a barrier against erosion from currents, tides, and waves. Jetties can also be used to connect the land with deep water farther away from shore for the purposes of docking ships and unloading cargo. This type of jetty is called a pier. * Conventional wisdom has it that when people talk, the direction of their eye movements reveals whether or not they're lying. A glance up and to the left supposedly means a person is telling the truth, whereas a glance to the upper right signals deceit. * For most people, a short bout of sleep deprivation isn't a cause for concern. But frequent or prolonged sleep deprivation can cause serious health issues. Lack of sleep can lead to poor cognitive function, increased inflammation, and reduced immune function. Some of the most serious potential problems associated with chronic sleep deprivation are high blood pressure, diabetes, heart attack, heart failure or stroke. Other potential problems include obesity, depression, impairment in immunity and lower sex drive. Chronic sleep deprivation can even affect your appearance. * It's not unusual to lose your appetite when you're sick. At times, not eating seems to help, but sometimes it can make you feel that much weaker. So, should you really starve a fever? your immune system needs energy and nutrients to do its job, so eating and getting enough fluids is essential. Harvard Medical School agrees, saying that there's no need to eat more or less than usual if you have a cold or flu. Both institutions stress the importance of fluids. Colds and flu are usually caused by a viral infection, but a fever can happen for many reasons, including: a bacterial infection, inflammatory conditions, side effect of some medications and vaccines, dehydration or heatstroke. So, that brings up the next question: Does it matter what's causing the fever? Are there some types of fever that should be starved? A 2002 study Trusted Source suggested that eating nutrient-rich broth may help fight viral infections, while fasting may help the immune system fight bacterial infections. It's worth noting that it was a small study, involving only six young, healthy males. Study authors acknowledged the need for more research. In a 2016 study, researchers also found fasting to be helpful in fighting bacterial but not viral infections. However, this study was conducted on mice, not people. There simply hasn't been enough "feed a cold, starve a fever" research done on humans to know for certain. It's further complicated by the fact that there are so many causes of a fever. So, it's probably best to eat when your stomach can handle it and to go light on food when it can't. Either way, it's important to drink plenty of fluids to stay hydrated. * Vaccines have been in the news over the past year due to the COVID-19 pandemic. To date the COVID-19 vaccine has not been approved for children younger than 12 years old and no state has yet added it to their required vaccinations roster. However, the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) recommends getting 29 doses of 9 other vaccines (plus a yearly flu shot after six months old) for kids aged 0 to six. No US federal laws mandate vaccination, but all 50 states require certain vaccinations for children entering public schools. Most states offer medical and religious exemptions; and some states allow philosophical exemptions. Proponents say that vaccination is safe and one of the greatest health developments of the 20th century. They point out that illnesses, including rubella, diphtheria, smallpox, polio, and whooping cough, are now prevented by vaccination and millions of children's lives are saved. They contend adverse reactions to vaccines are extremely rare. Opponents say that children's immune systems can deal with most infections naturally, and that injecting questionable vaccine ingredients into a child may cause side effects, including seizures, paralysis, and death. They contend that numerous studies prove that vaccines may trigger problems like ADHD and diabetes. * The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is expected to announce a new warning for Johnson & Johnson's COVID-19 vaccine, following preliminary reports of a rare nerve condition that developed in a very small fraction of people who received the shot, according to recent news reports. But regulators say that the risks of developing this rare condition, known as Guillain-Barré syndrome, in which the immune system attacks the nerves, is very low and the benefits of receiving the vaccine still greatly outweigh the risks, according to The Washington Post. In the U.S., more than 12.8 million people have been vaccinated with Johnson & Johnson's COVID-19 vaccine, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). Still, the risk of developing the condition may be about three to five times higher in those who received the Johnson & Johnson vaccine as compared with the general U.S. population, according to the Times. Among the general U.S. population, about 3,000 to 6,000 people are thought to develop the condition each year, according to the Post. The warning will likely be added to the fact sheets that are given to health care providers and patients. The cases were mainly reported about two weeks after vaccination and mainly among males ages 50 years and older, according to a CDC statement, the Times reported. Guillain-Barré syndrome can cause muscle weakness and sometimes paralysis, and symptoms typically last for a few weeks to a couple years, according to the CDC. While Guillain-Barré has led to deaths and permanent nerve damage in some, most people fully recover, according to the CDC. Viruses and bacteria are typically the culprits in triggering the syndrome, but rarely, certain vaccines have also triggered it, according to the CDC. It's not surprising to find these types of adverse events associated with vaccination," Dr. Luciana Borio, a former acting chief scientist at the FDA, told the Times. The data so far show that the vaccine's benefits "continue to vastly outweigh the risks." The news is another setback for Johnson & Johnson's COVID-19 vaccine, which was put on a brief pause in April in the U.S. while experts discussed cases of rare blood clots that occurred among a tiny fraction of people who received it. Administration of the vaccine resumed after an advisory panel concluded that its benefits outweigh its risks, Live Science previously reported. * Don't pull anything out that's impaled to your body. Go to the closest emergency department right away. They're more likely to have equipment that are suited to your injury. * What is the emergency room (ER)? The ER is a department in a hospital or medical center. Unlike a doctor's office, you don't need an appointment. But that means many people may need treatment at the same time. * An Emergency Department treats life- or limb-threatening health conditions in people of all ages. It is the best option when you require immediate medical attention. Urgent Care is the middle ground between your primary care provider and the Emergency Department. * Go to an emergency room if you're experiencing unusual or bad headache, particularly if it started suddenly. You should also go if you're not able to speak, see, walk, or move. You should go if you're weak or drooping on one side of the body. Go if dizziness or weakness doesn't go away. * In the ER, a doctor or team of doctors and nurses will care for you. You may have X-rays, blood work, or other tests. You will need to wait for the results of any tests you have. You also may wait to see a doctor who specializes in treating your problem. * If you lose a permanent tooth, your best bet is to save the tooth and bring it along immediately to the dentist, where there is a chance they can repair or replace it. Alternatively, they can have a tooth implant placed instead, which will require a consultation with your pediatric or family dentist. * Permanent tooth loss can results in a myriad of consequences. Some being a reduced function, decay, and further loss of remaining teeth. A missing tooth can make it difficult to properly chew food clean your teeth, resulting in further decay. It can also cause other teeth to come lose and potentially fall out. * Carbon Dioxide is a non-flammable gas that extinguishes fire by displacing oxygen, or taking away the oxygen element of the fire triangle. The carbon dioxide is also very cold as it comes out of the extinguisher, so it cools the fuel as well. * Is eating food off of an airport floor ok? I think this is an interesting question. There's a theory that the plethora of allergies now being experienced in developed countries is due to a lack of exposure to pathogens during childhood. This is supported by at least some research showing that children raised on farms develop fewer allergies than those raised in cities. It is believed that growing up in a somewhat dirty environment strengthens the immune system. Now, "somewhat dirty" isn't the same as "filthy." I wouldn't eat anything off the floor in an airport, any more than I would off a city street. I'd be less worried if it had been dropped on a lawn (assuming no chemical treatment of the lawn) or the floor in your house. * No STD is harmless. Myth: You can catch an STD from a toilet seat, telephone or other object used by an infected person. Fact: STDs are transmitted by vaginal, anal, and oral sex. Some STDs may spread to a baby during pregnancy, childbirth, or breastfeeding. Sexually transmitted infections (STIs), sometimes referred to as sexually transmitted diseases (STDs), can be caused by viruses, bacteria, and parasites. These organisms can't live or thrive on hard surfaces — including toilet seats. Bacterial STIs can't survive outside of your body's mucous membranes. For this reason, it's nearly impossible to contract an STI from a toilet seat. Read on to learn more about germs on toilet seats, as well as proper ways to prevent STIs. Some viral and parasitic STIs can live outside of your body for a limited period of time. Theoretically, they may be transmitted from contact with a toilet seat. But this form of transmission is rare — and highly unlikely to occur. Bacteria, fungi, and viruses prefer the environment supplied by warm human tissue. This includes parasites like body lice. There are, however, potential exceptions to this rule: In some rare instances, a damp toilet seat can spread trichomoniasis. But for this to happen, it would need to be freshly deposited, plus come into immediate contact with your genital region. Hepatitis B might enter your body from a toilet seat through freshly deposited blood or semen. But for transmission to occur, an open wound would need to come into contact with the virus. There are different types of STIs. Transmission can vary between each type. All STIs can be transmitted through various forms of sexual activity, including: skin-to-skin contact, genital-to-genital contact, oral-genital contact. "Skin-to-skin contact" can occur when secretions like semen or saliva are shared skin to skin. There don't need to be any open sores present. STIs that are commonly transmitted this way include: herpes, human papillomavirus (HPV), syphilis, etc. * The hymen is a thin, fleshy tissue that's located at the opening of your vagina. ... Just like other parts of our body, hymens are a little different for everyone. Your hymen can be stretched open the first time you have vaginal sex, which might cause some pain or bleeding. * A microburst is a localized column of sinking air (downdraft) within a thunderstorm and is usually less than or equal to 2.5 miles in diameter. Microbursts can cause extensive damage at the surface, and in some instances, can be life-threatening. * Soil is a loose surface material that covers most land. It consists of inorganic particles and organic matter. Soil provides the structural support to plants used in agriculture and is also their source of water and nutrients. Soils vary greatly in their chemical and physical properties. * Your water bottle needs to be empty when you pass through the security checkpoint. The TSA officer might ask to check inside your water bottle to make sure it is empty. However, you are free to refill your water bottle after you have made it through the security checkpoint. * Indigestion refers to upper abdominal discomfort, described as burning sensation, bloating or gassiness, nausea, or feeling full too quickly after starting to eat. Indigestion can have causes that aren't due to underlying disease. Examples include eating too much, drinking too much, food intolerance, or taking pills on an empty stomach. * Dehydration may occur if you urinate too much because of an illness, such as diabetes, or as the result of "water pills" and other medications. * A diagnostic test is a test used to identify a condition or its cause. It is used to diagnose. A diagnostic test performed as a part of a medical exam may be used to identify the cause of symptoms or identify a disease. * Screening is a strategy used to check for diseases when there are no symptoms. Since screening may find diseases at an early stage, there may be a better chance of curing the disease. * The difference between screening tests is that screening tests essentially indicate suspicion of disease (often used in combination with other risk factors) that warrants confirmation while diagnostic tests provide a definite diagnosis. * Disorientation is an altered mental state. A person who's disoriented may not know their location and identity, or the time and date. It's often accompanied with other symptoms such as: confusion, or being unable to think with your normal level of clarity. delirium, or being confused and having disrupted attention. * A psychopath is a person who suffers from a chronic mental disorder with abnormal or violent behavior. A psychopath may be seen as an unstable and aggressive individual. * Affective disorders are illnesses that affect the way you think and feel. The symptoms may be quite severe. In most cases, they won't go away on their own. The most common affective disorders are depression and bipolar disorder. * Dysregulation, also known as emotional dysregulation, refers to a poor ability to manage emotional responses or to keep them within an acceptable range of typical emotional reactions. This can refer to a wide range of emotions including sadness, anger, irritability, and frustration. * The Hippocampus is a complex brain structure embedded deep into temporal lobe. It has a major role in learning and memory. It is a plastic and vulnerable structure that gets damaged by a variety of stimuli. Studies have shown that it also gets affected in a variety of neurological and psychiatric disorders. * The hippocampus is a sensitive part of the brain. A range of conditions can adversely affect it, including long-term exposure to high levels of stress. Several diseases and factors are known to impair the hippocampus' ability to do its job. 1.) Alzheimer's disease. The hippocampus is one of the first areas to be affected by Alzheimer's disease. An early sign of Alzheimer's is when a person begins to lose their short-term memory. They may also find it difficult to follow directions. The hippocampus is one of the first areas to be affected by Alzheimer's disease. An early sign of Alzheimer's is when a person begins to lose their short-term memory. They may also find it difficult to follow directions. 2.) epilepsy. Autopsies have suggested that between 50 and 75 percent of people with epilepsy have damage to the hippocampus. In people with severe depression, the hippocampus loses volume. Scientists are unsure whether the small size is the result of depression or if it is a contributing factor. There is evidence that stress has a negative impact on the hippocampus. * Alzheimer's disease, depression, and stress appear to be linked to a smaller-sized hippocampus. When treating someone with Alzheimer's, the size of the hippocampus can be used to diagnose the progress of the disease. * Here are some things a parent shouldn't say or do to their child: 1.) Degrading a child based on their appearance (body shaming etc.). This will likely only increase their physical insecurities and worry about their body image. 2.) Asking provocative questions about a child's actions is likely to make them feel insecure about the way they act around others. 3.) Selfish wishes (I wish you were different etc.). These kind of comments are likely to make a child prone to feeling as if they weren't meant to live, and just thinking this can be a catalyst a variety of emotional problems in the future. 4.) Making the child feel like a burden (it's expensive to look after you etc.). This isn't ok. 5.) Unhealthy comparisons (other kids are better than you etc.). This may only promote an unhealthy relationship between children, causing them to feel jealously and resentment toward one another. 6.) verbally abusive words (you're a loser etc.). These kind of remarks will damage a child's self-esteem. 7.) threatening abandonment (I'll leave you etc.). This is likely to cause abandonment issues within a child, fearing the people that they love will disappear because of who they are. When children with abandonment issues grow up, this belief may be ingrained unconsciously in their minds, making it difficult for them to have future relationships for fear of their partner leaving. 8.) giving empty promises (I'll take you there next time (but you don't) etc.). This can damage your relationship with your child. * Intelligence: the ability to acquire and apply knowledge and skills. It could also mean a person who has the ability to acquire and apply knowledge and skills. * Being smart is defined as having or showing a quick-witted intelligence. * Like many aspects of human behavior and cognition, intelligence is a complex trait that appears to be influenced by both genetic and environmental factors. Intelligence is challenging to study, in part because it can be defined and measured in different ways. Most definitions of intelligence include the ability to learn from experiences and adapt to changing environments. Elements of intelligence include the ability to reason, plan, solve problems, think abstractly, and understand complex ideas. Many studies rely on a measure of intelligence called the intelligence quotient (IQ). Researchers have conducted many studies to look for genes that influence intelligence. Many of these studies have focused on similarities and differences in IQ within families, particularly looking at adopted children and twins. These studies suggest that genetic factors underlie about 50 percent of the difference in intelligence among individuals. Other studies have examined variations across the entire genomes of many people (an approach called genome-wide association studies or GWAS) to determine whether any specific areas of the genome are associated with IQ. These studies have not conclusively identified any genes that have major roles in differences in intelligence. It is likely that a large number of genes are involved, each of which makes only a small contribution to a person's intelligence. Intelligence is also strongly influenced by the environment. Factors related to a child's home environment and parenting, education and availability of learning resources, and nutrition, among others, all contribute to intelligence. A person's environment and genes influence each other, and it can be challenging to tease apart the effects of the environment from those of genetics. For example, if a child's IQ is similar to that of his or her parents, is that similarity due to genetic factors passed down from parent to child, to shared environmental factors, or (most likely) to a combination of both? It seems clear that both environmental and genetic factors play a part in determining intelligence. * Research suggests that your intelligence can also mean an increased risk of you developing certain affective disorders. Psychologist and researcher, Ruth Karpinski, conducted a study in which all of her participants were members of American Mensa, a high IQ society, which requires all its members to have an IQ in the top 2%. The participants self-reported whether or not they were diagnosed with or suspected they had a range of mood disorders and anxiety disorders. Disorders reported included attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, or ADHD, and psychological diseases that included environmental and food allergies, asthma, and autoimmune diseases. According to the study, this implicates high IQ as being a potential risk factor for affective disorders, ADHD, and for an increased incidence of disease related to immune dysregulation. * Intelligent people also tend to be night owls. * Intelligent people tend to have high expectations. Meeting these expectations may hang as a bit of a burden upon your shoulders. And those expectations can ultimately cause you serious stress if you don't manage them effectively. Try taking it one step at a time with whatever you do. Look towards the future, and don't feel discouraged if it's not everything you want it to be. If you're worried about what you got on that one exam you took in school, odds are you'll stop fretting about after some time has passed. * Intelligent people tend to be overexcitable and have high energy. In the 1960s, Polish psychiatrist and psychologist, Kazimierz Dabrowski, introduced the concept that being highly gifted or intelligent is associated with psychological and physiological overexcitabilities, otherwise known as OEs. It's most often a sudden high energy towards a certain situation or topic. It displays itself in varying ways, such as a competitiveness, compulsive organizing, compulsive talking, impulsive behavior, etc. These OEs may be treated as a problem by teachers or parents, and I think that's unfortunate. Intelligent students and children might often be mislabeled or punished due to unawareness about OEs. I think more measures need to be taken to bring awareness to OEs, and gifted students who've been labeled as problematic should be given a chance to be understood. * Intelligent people tend to over analyze things. This could be linked to their OEs. * Intelligent people tend to be more prone to serious stress. * Why are many intelligent people self-destructive? Because they overthink. A lot. Overthinking: Something is on your mind and you continuously think about it, the thought gets deeper and you start thinking about circumstances, events and possibilities that could be... in the end you too many far out thoughts racing through your head. Intelligent people are, usually, intelligent because they are curious and love to spend their time solving problems, asking questions, meditating, having different experiences and growing their knowledge. Regular people, on the other hand, would probably prefer not to do any of that. Along with the creativity, the prowess and the gumption, intelligence brings with it an inherent instinct for unsustainable expansion and unintentional self-destruction. Self-destructive stage occurs when you lose control of your thoughts. If you get a lot of thoughts on your head you can get anxious about it sometimes, some of these thoughts will become negative, and you will start to feel sad. It is not unusual to feel sad when deep thinking, but the key most people, especially intelligent people, needs to master is getting out of it before is too late. * A lack of humor may be deemed as unattractive. Many studies of laughter indicate that it's a social phenomenon that can promote acceptance and loyalty within a group, even when the joke isn't really that funny at all. Humor can help create bonds. In fact, a 2025 study at the University of Kansas found the more times a man tries to be funny and the more times a woman laughs at his jokes, the more interested they are in each other. Conversely, when you don't react, no matter the joke, it suggests that you don't approve of the jokester. Not laughing can be a social cue that tells others to leave you alone. * Closed off body language can be deemed as unattractive. Do you tend to hunch or cross your arms often? That's closed off body language. Closed off body language can make you seem distanced and emotionally unavailable. These are two qualities that aren't considered to be very attractive in a potential mate or date. While you might cross your arms to keep yourself warm, your date might perceive your body language as defensiveness or even a sign that you disagree with them. * Negativity can be deemed as unattractive. Pessimism sometimes seems to be contagious and not very attractive. If you walk into a room with your head low and your words all jumbled, your insecurity can cause others to feel insecure. * According to conducted research, sleep deprivation can cause you to look less attractive. A 2013 Swedish study found that red eyes, hanging eyelids, and dark circles can make you look sad and stressed. * Narcissism is when you have an inflated sense of self-importance. If you boast about your accomplishments instead of taking an interest in actively asking or listening to others, you can come off as arrogant or even rude. * Some body odors can be naturally attractive because they indicate genetic compatibility based on our immune systems. Our sense of smell is powerful. Scents like lavender, vanilla, peppermint, and ginger have potential abilities to increase desire and performance, and avoiding bad body odor can improve people's perceptions of you. * People generally tend to like people who are open to communicate, show care towards others, and take care of themselves. * Arachnophobia is an extreme or irrational fear of spiders. It's one of the more common phobias on a global scale. It affects about 3.5-6.1% of the population in the world (which is around 300-400 million people). Women are twice as likely to have arachnophobia when compared to men. However, about 55% of people may harbor some fear of spiders. Acrachnophobia may be rooted in our evolution, because allegedly our ancestors found a apider's appearance frightening. * Ophidiophobia is a kind of phobia where you have an extreme fear of snakes. It is perfectly normal for adults and children to have fears, but having a simple fear of snakes is different from having a phobia. * Acrophobia is an extreme or irrational fear of heights. * Aerophobia is an abnormal and persistent fear of flying. Sufferers experience severe anxiety even though they usually realize that the flying does not pose a threat commensurate with their fear. Aerophobia also means an irrational fear of fresh air or drafts of air. * Cynophobia ‌is the fear of dogs. Like all specific phobias, cynophobia is intense, persistent, and irrational. ... Instead, specific phobias interfere with daily life and can cause serious physical and emotional distress. * Trypanophobia is an extreme fear of medical procedures involving injections or hypodermic needles. Children are especially afraid of needles because they're unused to the sensation of their skin being pricked by something sharp. By the time most people reach adulthood, they can tolerate needles much more easily. * Mysophobia is an extreme or irrational fear of dirt or contamination. * Astraphobia, also known as brontophobia, is a kind of phobia characterized by an intense fear of extremely loud but natural noises in the environment. Namely, lightning and thunder. * Hippopotomonstrosesquippedaliophobia is one of the longest words in the dictionary — and, in an ironic twist, is the name for a fear of long words. Sesquipedalophobia is another term for the phobia. * Nothing is more important to us on Earth than the Sun. The Sun warms our seas, stirs our atmosphere, generates our weather patterns, and gives energy to the growing green plants that provide the food and oxygen for life on Earth. * Autophobia Autophobia, or monophobia, is the fear of being alone or lonely. Being alone, even in a usually comforting place like home, can result in severe anxiety for people with this condition. People with autophobia feel they need another person or other people around in order to feel safe. * Claustrophobia is a fear of confined spaces. * While some people may feel uneasy about blood from time to time, hemophobia is an extreme fear of seeing blood, or getting tests or shots where blood may be involved. This phobia can have a serious impact on your life, especially if you skip important doctor appointments as a result. * Synesthesia is a neurological condition in which information meant to stimulate one of your senses stimulates several of your senses. People who have synesthesia are called synesthetes. ... Synesthetes can often "see" music as colors when they hear it, and "taste" textures like "round" or "pointy" when they eat foods. * Here are some benefits that come with natural light: 1. Boosts vitamin D. When exposed to sunlight, the skin absorbs vitamin D, a critical nutrient that prevents bone loss and reduces the risk of heart disease, weight gain, and various cancers. The so-called "sunshine vitamin" also doesn't discriminate based on whether you get your sunlight indoors or out. Meaning: increasing your natural light where you spend the most time, be it home or the workplace, is equally important. 2. Wards off seasonal depression. For many people, autumn is a giddy time of crunchy leaves and all things pumpkin spice. Getting as much natural light as possible can help keep these mood changes at bay. For about 6 percent of the population, fall kicks off a time of serious depression known as seasonal affective disorder (aka major depressive disorder with seasonal patterns). Another 14 percent experience the less debilitating (but still significant) "winter blues." 3. It improves sleep. Since mental health and sleep often go hand in hand, it should be noted that natural light affects both. A small 2014 study of office workers revealed that the more natural light exposure they received, the better sleep they experienced. Exposure to sunlight is thought to increase the brain's release of a hormone called serotonin. Serotonin is associated with boosting mood and helping a person feel calm and focused. 4. Reduces health risks of fluorescent lighting. The more time you spend in a source of natural light, the less time you'll likely spend in the unnatural light of fluorescent bulbs. Though compact fluorescent lamps are generally recognized as safe, for some people, exposure to fluorescent light appears to elicit an elevated stress response. With CFLs (compact florescent light bulbs) as your main light source day in and day out, this could increase your risk for migraines and eye strain. (P.S. Broken CFL bulbs can also emit dangerous amounts of mercury, so if you've got adventurous kids, keep these out of reach!) * What to do if you get a sunburn? * Is it bad to go outside with a sunburn? You can do even more damage by exposing burned skin to more rays, so wear light, protective clothing or a cover when you go outside. If you absolutely must go outside, be sure to use a coat or two of sunscreen, and avoid the strongest rays of the day from noon to early afternoon (or from like 10 O'Clock to 4 O'Clock). * Semen is made up of sperm cells, as well as a number of bodily secretions. These secretions include: prostatic fluid, which neutralizes the acidity of the vagina. seminal fluid, which contains proteins, fatty acids, and fructose to nourish the sperm. * Seminal fluid is a whitish liquid produced by the prostate glands and glands called the seminal vesicles. Sperm make up a small part of semen. * Because becoming pregnant is likely something that you want to carefully plan, it's important to remember that anytime sperm comes in contact with the vaginal canal, it's possible to become pregnant ⁠— even if most of the semen comes out or never goes in! * What are vocal cord disorders? Vocal cord disorders are any anatomical or functional issue that affects the vocal cords. The vocal cords (also called vocal folds) are two bands of smooth muscle tissue found in the larynx (voice box). The vocal cords vibrate and air passes through the cords from the lungs to produce the sound of your voice. Some of the more common vocal cord disorders include the following. Vocal Cord Disorder Description Laryngitis Laryngitis causes a raspy or hoarse voice due to inflammation of the vocal cords. Vocal nodules Vocal nodules are noncancerous calluses on the vocal cords caused by vocal abuse. Vocal nodules are often a problem for professional singers. They most often grow in pairs (one on each cord). The nodules most often form on parts of the vocal cords that get the most pressure when the cords come together and vibrate. Vocal nodules cause the voice to be hoarse, low and breathy. Vocal polyps A vocal polyp is a soft, noncancerous growth, similar to a blister. They can include blood within the blister that resolves over time to produce a clear blister. Voice polyps cause the voice to be hoarse, low and breathy. Vocal cord paralysis Paralysis of the vocal cords may happen when one or both vocal cords doesn't open or close properly. When one vocal cord is paralyzed, the voice can be weak or food or liquids can slip into the trachea and lungs, whereby people have trouble swallowing and may choke or cough when they eat. Patients with both vocal cords paralyzed may have trouble breathing. Vocal cord paralysis may be caused by the following: Head, neck, or chest injury. Problem during surgery. Stroke. Tumor. Lung or thyroid cancer Certain neurological disorders, such as multiple sclerosis or Parkinson's disease. Viral infection. Treatment may include surgery and voice therapy. Sometimes, no treatment is necessary and a person recovers on his or her own What causes vocal chord disorders? The most common cause of vocal fold disorders is vocal abuse or misuse. The type of vocal cord disorder (see above) may have different causes. This includes excessive use of the voice when singing, talking, coughing or yelling. Smoking and inhaling irritants are also considered vocal abuse. What are the symptoms of vocal chord disorders? Symptoms vary, based on the type of vocal cord disorder. They include changes in your normal voice, such as a raspy or hoarse voice, or a hoarse, low and breathy voice. Vocal cord paralysis may also cause trouble swallowing and coughing. How are vocal chord disorders diagnosed? Any hoarseness or change in voice that lasts longer than two weeks should be brought to the attention of your health care provider. It is important to see a voice specialist or ENT for a full examination of the vocal folds if symptoms do not resolve within four weeks. In addition to a complete medical history and physical exam, the health care provider may examine the vocal cords internally with a small scope called a laryngoscope. How are vocal cord disorders treated? Vocal cord disorders caused by abuse or misuse are easily preventable. In addition, most disorders of the vocal cords can be reversed. Your health care provider will figure out the best treatment based on: How old you are. * Your overall health and medical history. * How sick you are. * How well you can handle specific medicines, procedures, or therapies. * How long the condition is expected to last. * Your opinion or preference. Treatment may include any of the following: * Resting the voice. * Stopping the behavior that caused the vocal cord disorder. * A referral to a speech-language pathologist who specializes in treating voice, speech, language, or swallowing disorders. * Medicine. * Surgery to remove growths. Key points About Vocal Cord Disorders * * Vocal cord disorders can affect your voice or ability to talk. * Some of the more common vocal cord disorders include laryngitis, vocal nodules, vocal polyps, and vocal cord paralysis. * Vocal cord disorders are often caused by vocal abuse or misuse. * Symptoms may include a raspy, hoarse, low, or breathy voice, or trouble swallowing or coughing. * Any hoarseness or change in voice that lasts longer than 2 weeks should be brought to the attention of your healthcare provider. * Vocal cord disorders caused by abuse or misuse are easily preventable. Next steps Tips to help you get the most from a visit to your healthcare provider: * * Know the reason for your visit and what you want to happen. * Before your visit, write down questions you want answered. * Bring someone with you to help you ask questions and remember what your provider tells you. * At the visit, write down the name of a new diagnosis, and any new medicines, treatments, or tests. Also write down any new instructions your provider gives you. * Know why a new medicine or treatment is prescribed, and how it will help you. Also know what the side effects are. * Ask if your condition can be treated in other ways. * Know why a test or procedure is recommended and what the results could mean. * Know what to expect if you do not take the medicine or have the test or procedure. * If you have a follow-up appointment, write down the date, time, and purpose for that visit. * Know how you can contact your provider if you have questions. It's important that you take care of your vocal chords. * Here are ways to take care of your voice: 1. Drink plenty of water, especially when exercising. 2. If you drink caffeinated beverages or alcohol, balance your intake with plenty of water. 3. Take vocal naps—rest your voice throughout the day. 4. Use a humidifier in your home. Using a humidifier will add moisture to the air and prevent your vocal cords from getting too dry. It makes singing much more comfortable. * Black Lives Matter is a political and social movement originating among African Americans, emphasizing basic human rights and racial equality for Black people and campaigning against various forms of racism. Abbreviations: BLM, B.L.M. First recorded in 2013; the slogan that arose from the hashtag #BlackLivesMatter on social media after George Zimmerman was acquitted of murder in the shooting death of Trayvon Martin, an unarmed African American teenager. * Cancel culture refers to the practice or tendency of engaging in mass canceling as a way of expressing disapproval and exerting social pressure. * Facebook has been under scrutiny after word got out that the Trump-affiliated political consulting organization Cambridge Analytica stole data from 87 million of its users. The social media giant admitting it scans all of our conversations in the Messenger app didn't help its publicity, either. In wake of these events - relevant to all of the company's 2.2 billion monthly active users - Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg went to Capitol Hill to testify before the United States Congress about user privacy. The internet took full advantage of the live public hearing that took about five hours. Countless memes have surfaced, poking fun at 'Mr. Zuckerbot' and his company. * The term deepfake is typically used to refer to a video that has been edited using an algorithm to replace the person in the original video with someone else (especially a public figure) in a way that makes the video look authentic. The 'deep' in 'deepfake' is likely related to a process called 'deep learning. * Spotify has two main streams of income: ad revenue and subscriptions. With about 200 million subscribers worldwide, it's reported that over 90 percent of Spotify's revenue comes from its Premium subscriptions. The remaining is money from advertisements. * The SAT is an exam that universities use to assess a student's college readiness. Originally called the "Scholastic Aptitude Test," the SAT is made by a company called The College Board. "SAT" actually no longer stands for anything, given that studies have shown that standardized test scores can predict a student's performance in his or her first year of college—but nothing beyond that. That should give you some sense of what the SAT is today: a college admissions test. Not an IQ test, and definitely not a Magic-8 ball that probably shouldn't predict the rest of your life! The SAT is offered seven times a year: in March, May, June, August, October, November, and December. That is, unless you live outside of the United States. In that case, it's offered four times a year: in March, May, October, and December. When you're deciding when to take the test, don't just pick your favorite month! Your best SAT test date actually depends on many factors. Pick the date that's best for you and your goals! * A film screening is the displaying of a motion picture or film, generally referring to a special showing as part of a film's production and release cycle. To show the film to best advantage, special screenings may take place in plush, low seat-count theaters with very high quality (sometimes especially certified) projection and sound equipment, and can be accompanied by food and drink and spoken remarks by producers, writers, or actors. Special screenings typically occur outside normal theatrical showing hours. The different types of screenings are presented here in their order within a film's development. * Do you say Afghan or Afghani? I believe the correct term is Afghan although Afghani is often used as well. A citizen or native of Afghanistan. * An inverted cross is considered to be a sign of humility and surrender to Christ as demonstrated by St. Peter. * Laughter is the best medicine, so they say. Though it is not entirely clear which mechanisms in our brain are responsible for laughter, we do know laughter is triggered by many sensations and thoughts happening at once and that it activates many parts of our body.[1] We also know that laughter is social and contagious, and best of all, it usually feels good when we experience a good laugh and when we make someone else laugh.[2] * According to Freud, the ladder has dream connections with the sexual act. In modern folklore, walking under a ladder is considered bad luck. * Turbulence is caused when an airplane flies through waves of air that are irregular or violent, which cause the aircraft to bounce around yawing, pitching, or rolling. Pilots shouldn't be worried about turbulence—avoiding it is for convenience and comfort rather than safety. Pilots can forecast where it is and steer clear from it. * a synthetic analog of a legally restricted or prohibited drug, devised to circumvent drug laws. A designer drug is a drug whose properties have been chemically and illegally altered in a lab to mimic other drugs, but with new and often more powerful effects on the brain and the body. Typically, these drugs originate from plants, but their chemistry is altered. * Being married offers no protection from the dangers of loneliness: Studies indicate that roughly 20% of the general population suffers from chronic loneliness at any given time, and in one recent study of older adults, 62.5% of people who reported being lonely were married and living with their partner. — from Together but Still Lonely * For thousands of years, various cultures have had figures to represent death. One of the most common and enduring of these is the Grim Reaper—usually a skeletal figure, who is often shrouded in a dark, hooded robe and carrying a scythe to "reap" human souls. But how and when did this imagery come to be associated with death? The Grim Reaper seems to have appeared in Europe during the 14th century. It was during this time that Europe was dealing with what was then the world's worst pandemic, the Black Death, believed to be the result of the plague. It is estimated that about one-third of Europe's entire population perished as a result of the pandemic, with some areas of the continent suffering far greater losses than others. The original outbreak of the plague occurred during 1347-51, and outbreaks then recurred several other times after that. So, clearly, death was something that the surviving Europeans had on their mind, and it is not surprising that they conjured an image to represent it. But why the skeletal figure? Why the scythe? Why the robe? Skeletons are symbolic of death, representing the human body after it has decayed. The robe is thought to be reminiscent of the robes that religious figures of the time wore when conducting funerary services. The scythe is an apt image taken from agricultural practices of the time: harvesters used scythes to reap or harvest crops that were ready to be plucked from the earth...and, well, that's kind of what happens when humans die: they are plucked from this earth. * According to veterinary experts, mice may run in circles continually for various reasons including a brain parasite, brain tumor, inner ear infection, or as the result of a stroke. * Network providers usually come up with a report in case of message delay or delivery failure. ... Heavy traffic on the carrier's network, some issues with the mobile device, different networks, and error on the operator's server are most common for message delay. Contact your network provider if you cannot solve the issue. * A red tide is sometimes referred to as a harmful algae bloom (HAB). It's made up of microscopic algae or phytoplankton, which are essential to ocean life. When these algae receive excess nutrients, they can multiply uncontrollably, becoming a large mass that suffocates nearby ocean life. Some algae species, like Karenia brevis, can give the ocean a red tint, hence the name, red tide. However, not all red tides color the ocean. In some cases, HABs are not dense enough to give the ocean a particular hue. Their most prominent effect is often seen in the surrounding ecosystem. HAB toxins are harmful to the marine mammals, birds, and turtles that live in the water. They can also have an impact on the wildlife that feed on animals that are exposed to red tide. Is it ok to swim in red tides? Swimming is safe for most people. However, the Florida red tide can cause some people to suffer skin irritation, respiratory issues, and burning eyes. ... If you experience irritation, get out of the water and thoroughly wash off. Do not swim among dead fish because they can be associated with harmful bacteria. * Studies have shown repeatedly that people who read print books score higher on comprehension tests and remember more of what they read than people who read the same material in a digital form. That may be, in part, because people tend to read print more slowly than they read digital content. * Getting sleepy and eventually falling asleep after reading a few pages is a phenomenon that many, if not most, of us can relate to. ... As your brain works hard and your eye muscles tire, it's only natural that they would need rest, leading to eyes slowly closing and sleep taking over. Reading isn't bad for your eyes. * King James Version (KJV), also called Authorized Version or King James Bible, English translation of the Bible, published in 1611 under the auspices of King James I of England. The translation had a marked influence on English literary style and was generally accepted as the standard English Bible from the mid-17th to the early 20th century. * Life is but a dream = Dream or nightmare, we have the ability to choose what our life will be. We cannot decide what happens, but we can decide who we are, what we become, how we react, how we cope. It's our life, our dream. * Key difference between a model and supermodel: A 'model' can be referred to any person who is employed to promote or advertise any object fashionably, while a 'supermodel' is a highly paid professional fashion model who is often world famous * A distinction should be made between novels whose high sales are an accolade bestowed on literary merit and novels that aim less at aesthetic worth than at profits. The works of Charles Dickens were best sellers in their day, but good sales continue, testifying to a vitality that was not purely ephemeral. On the other hand, many best-selling novels have a vogue that is destined not to outlast the time when they were produced. It is a characteristic of this kind of best seller that the writing is less interesting than the content, and that the content itself has a kind of journalistic oversimplification that appeals to unsophisticated minds. The United States is the primary home of the commercial novel whose high sales accrue from careful, and sometimes cold-blooded, planning. A novel in which a topical subject—such as the Mafia, or corruption in government, or the election of a new pope, or a spate of aircraft accidents, or the censorship of an erotic book—is treated with factual thoroughness, garnished with sex, enlivened by quarrels, fights, and marital infidelities, presented in nonliterary prose, and given lavish promotion by its publisher may well become a best seller. It is also likely to be almost entirely forgotten a year or so after its publication. The factual element in the novel seems to be necessary to make the reader feel that he is being educated as well as diverted. Indeed, the conditions for the highest sales seem to include the reconciliation of the pornographic and the didactic. * At the 2008 Olympic Games, Bolt became the first man since American Carl Lewis in 1984 to win the 100 metres, 200 metres, and 4 × 100-metre relay in a single Olympics and the first ever to set world records (9.69 sec, 19.30 sec, and 37.10 sec, respectively) in all three events. * It's possible to fully saturate your muscles with creatine without doing a loading phase, though it may take longer. Thus, it may also increase the time it takes to reap the benefits of creatine. A creatine loading phase may be the fastest way to benefit from the supplement's effects. Research proves that a creatine loading phase can maximize your muscle stores within one week or less. * One of the most common reasons for a country changing its name is newly acquired independence. When borders are changed, sometimes due to a country splitting or two countries joining together, the names of the relevant areas can change. ... Often the older name will persist in colloquial expressions. * I think children open their presents on Christmas Eve in Germany. * Brussels is a city in Belgium. * Berlin is the capital of Germany. * The Berlin Wall was torn down in 1989. * The seine river is located in France. * Angie was a song about David Bowie's wife written by The Rolling Stones. * Panama is apart of North America. * The Panama Canal joins the Atlantic Ocean to the Pacific Ocean. * The US built the Panama Canal. * Panama declared independence from Colombia in 1903. * The national currency of Panama is balboas. * Easter Island is a treeless place. * Rapa Nui (or Easter Island, as it is commonly known) is home to the enigmatic Moai, stone monoliths that have stood watch over the island landscape for hundreds of years. Easter Island covers roughly 64 square miles in the South Pacific Ocean, and is located some 2,300 miles from Chile's west coast and 2,500 miles east of Tahiti. Known as Rapa Nui to its earliest inhabitants, the island was christened Paaseiland, or Easter Island, by Dutch explorers in honor of the day of their arrival in 1722. It was annexed by Chile in the late 19th century and now maintains an economy based largely on tourism. Easter Island's most dramatic claim to fame is an array of almost 900 giant stone figures that date back many centuries. The statues reveal their creators to be master craftsmen and engineers, and are distinctive among other stone sculptures found in Polynesian cultures. There has been much speculation about the exact purpose of the statues, the role they played in the ancient civilization of Easter Island and the way they may have been constructed and transported. The first human inhabitants of Rapa Nui (the Polynesian name for Easter Island; its Spanish name is Isla de Pascua) are believed to have arrived in an organized party of emigrants. Archaeology dates their arrival at between 700-800 A.D., while linguists estimate it was around the year 400. Tradition holds that the first king of Rapa Nui was Hoto-Matua, a ruler from a Polynesian subgroup (possibly from the Marquesa Islands) whose ship traveled thousands of miles before landing at Anakena, one of the few sandy beaches on the island's rocky coast. Did you know? After the decline of the moai culture, a new cult of bird worship developed on Easter Island. It was centered on a ceremonial village called Orongo, built on the rim of the crater of the Rano Kao volcano. The greatest evidence for the rich culture developed by the original settlers of Rapa Nui and their descendants is the existence of nearly 900 giant stone statues that have been found in diverse locations around the island. Averaging 13 feet (4 meters) high, with a weight of 13 tons, these enormous stone busts-known as moai-were carved out of tuff (the light, porous rock formed by consolidated volcanic ash) and placed atop ceremonial stone platforms called ahus. It is still unknown precisely why these statues were constructed in such numbers and on such a scale, or how they were moved around the island. Archaeological excavations of Easter Island reveal three distinct cultural phases: the early period (700-850 A.D.), the middle period (1050-1680) and the late period (post-1680). Between the early and middle periods, evidence has shown that many early statues were deliberately destroyed and rebuilt as the larger and heavier moai for which the island is most famous. During the middle period, ahus also contained burial chambers, and the images portrayed by moai are thought to have represented important figures that were deified after death. The biggest statue found dating to the middle period measures about 32 feet tall, and consists of a single block weighing about 82 tons (74,500 kilograms). The late period of the island's civilization was characterized by civil wars and general destruction; more statues were toppled, and many mataa, or obsidian spearpoints, have been found dating to that period. Island tradition claims that around 1680, after peacefully coexisting for many years, one of the island's two main groups, known as the Short-Ears, rebelled against the Long-Ears, burning many of them to death on a pyre constructed along an ancient ditch at Poike, on the island's far northeastern coast. The first known European visitor to Easter Island was the Dutch explorer Jacob Roggeveen, who arrived in 1722. The Dutch named the island Paaseiland (Easter Island) to commemorate the day they arrived. In 1770, the Spanish viceroy of Peru sent an expedition to the island; the explorers spent four days ashore and estimated a native population of some 3,000 people. Just four years later, the British navigator Sir James Cook arrived to find Easter Island's population decimated by what seemed to have been a civil war, with only 600 to 700 men and fewer than 30 women remaining. A French navigator, Jean-Francois de Galaup, comte de La Perouse, found 2,000 people on the island when he arrived in 1786. A major slave raid from Peru in 1862, followed by epidemics of smallpox, reduced the population to only 111 people by 1877. By that time, Catholic missionaries had settled on Easter Island and begun to convert the population to Christianity, a process that was completed by the late 19th century. In 1888, Chile annexed Easter Island, leasing much of the land for sheep raising. The Chilean government appointed a civilian governor for Easter Island in 1965, and the island's residents became full Chilean citizens. Easter Island today is an isolated triangle measuring 14 miles long by seven miles wide. Easter Island was formed by a series of volcanic eruptions. In addition to its hilly terrain, the island contains many subterranean caves with corridors that extend deep into mountains of volcanic rock. The island's largest volcano is known as Rano Kao, and its highest point is Mount Terevaka, which reaches 1,665 feet (507.5m) above sea level. It has a subtropical climate (sunny and dry) and temperate weather. Easter Island boasts no natural harbor, but ships can anchor off Hanga Roa on the west coast; it is the island's largest village, with a population of roughly 3,300. In 1995, UNESCO named Easter Island a World Heritage site. It is now home to a mixed population, mostly of Polynesian ancestry and made up of the descendants of the Long-Ears and Short-Ears. Spanish is generally spoken, and the island has developed an economy largely based on tourism. * Chile was inhabited by the Incas before it was conquered by Spanish explorers. * The southernmost region of Chile is called Cape Horn. * Tanzania has been known as a poor country. * Swahili and English are the official languages of Tanzania. * Lake Victoria is located in Tanzania. * The highest mountain in Africa is Mt. Kilimanjaro. * The most commonly grown fruit in France are grapes. * Napoleon had the Arc de Triomphe built in Paris. The Arc de Triomphe, in full Arc de Triomphe de l'Étoile, massive triumphal arch in Paris, France, one of the world's best-known commemorative monuments. The Arc de Triomphe is an iconic symbol of French national identity and took 30 years to build. The Tour de France bicycle race ends near it each year, and the annual military parade marking July 14—known both as French National Day and Bastille Day—begins its journey at the arch. * The agriculture industry in India is considered to be its most important industry. * The majority of inhabitants that make up India are of the Hindu religion. * The Philippines consists of more than 7000 islands. * There are more than 80 languages and dialects spoken in the Philippines. * Manila is the capital of the Philippines. * Mount Pinatubo, volcano, western Luzon, Philippines, that erupted in 1991 (for the first time in 600 years) and caused widespread devastation. Mount Pinatubo is located about 55 miles (90 km) northwest of Manila and rose to a height of about 4,800 feet (1,460 m) prior to its eruption. * The 2nd most spoken language in the US is Spanish. * Alligators and crocodiles live together in Everglades National Park in Florida. * Alaska is the largest state in the US. * The DC in Washington DC stands for District of Colombia. * Washington was established as the capital of the United States as the result of a compromise following seven years of negotiation by members of the U.S. Congress as they tried to define the concept of a "federal enclave." The new federal territory was named District of Columbia to honour explorer Christopher Columbus, and the new federal city was named for George Washington. * Before Washington, D.C., became America's capital in 1800, the Congress met in a number of different locations, including Baltimore, Trenton and New York City. After years of debate by the new nation's leaders about the selection of a permanent seat of government, Congress passed the Residence Act in July 1790, which declared that the capital would be situated somewhere along the Potomac River and granted President George Washington the power to choose the final site. The president also was given the authority to appoint three commissioners to oversee the federal city's development, and a deadline of December 1800 was established for the completion of a legislative hall for Congress and residence for the chief executive. In January 1791, George Washington announced his choice for the federal district: 100 square miles of land ceded by Maryland and Virginia (in 1846, the Virginia land was returned to the state, shrinking the district by a third). In September 1791, the commissioners named the federal city in honor of Washington and dubbed the district in which it was located the Territory of Columbia. The name Columbia, derived from explorer Christopher Columbus, was used during the American Revolution era as a patriotic reference for the United States (In 1871, the Territory of Columbia officially was renamed District of Columbia.) Meanwhile, in the spring of 1791, the president hired French-born architect and engineer Pierre Charles L'Enfant to lay out the capital city. L'Enfant, who served in the Continental Army during the Revolutionary War, created a design that featured wide avenues and open spaces; however, he clashed with George Washington's commissioners as well as local landowners and was forced to resign from the project after less than a year. L'Enfant's design was revised by later planners. Congress met in Washington for the first time in November 1800 (the man for whom the city was named had died in December of the previous year), and in February 1801 the District of Columbia, which at the time also included the cities of Alexandria and Georgetown, was placed under the control of Congress. Today, America's capital city has more than 650,000 residents, and they're represented by a non-voting delegate in the U.S. House of Representatives. The 23rd Amendment gave citizens of D.C. the right to vote for president, starting in 1964, and since 1974 Washingtonians have elected their own mayor and city council. * California is the state with the largest population. * Fish is the primary food of bald eagles, but they will eat a variety of other animals and birds. Their prey items include waterfowl and small mammals like squirrels, prairie dogs, raccoons and rabbits. They are also opportunistic predators, meaning that in addition to hunting for live prey, they will steal from other animals. * Italy, country of south-central Europe, occupying a peninsula that juts deep into the Mediterranean Sea. Italy comprises some of the most varied and scenic landscapes on Earth and is often described as a country shaped like a boot. * The official language of Italy is Italian. * Rome is the capital of Italy. * Spain, country located in extreme southwestern Europe. It occupies about 85 percent of the Iberian Peninsula, which it shares with its smaller neighbour Portugal. Spain is a storied country of stone castles, snowcapped mountains, vast monuments, and sophisticated cities, all of which have made it a favoured travel destination. The country is geographically and culturally diverse. Its heartland is the Meseta, a broad central plateau half a mile above sea level. Much of the region is traditionally given over to cattle ranching and grain production. * Madrid is the capital of Spain. * The strait of Gibraltar separates Spain from Africa. * A Spanish bullfighter is called a matador. * Panda bears are a type of bear that live in China. * Mount Everest, Sanskrit and Nepali Sagarmatha, Tibetan Chomolungma, Chinese (Pinyin) Zhumulangma Feng or (Wade-Giles romanization) Chu-mu-lang-ma Feng, also spelled Qomolangma Feng, mountain on the crest of the Great Himalayas of southern Asia that lies on the border between Nepal and the Tibet Autonomous Region of China, at 27°59′ N 86°56′ E. Reaching an elevation of 29,032 feet (8,849 metres), Mount Everest is the highest mountain in the world. Like other high peaks in the region, Mount Everest has long been revered by local peoples. * Great Wall of China, Chinese (Pinyin) Wanli Changcheng or (Wade-Giles romanization) Wan-li Ch'ang-ch'eng ("10,000-Li Long Wall"), extensive bulwark erected in ancient China, one of the largest building-construction projects ever undertaken. The Great Wall actually consists of numerous walls—many of them parallel to each other—built over some two millennia across northern China and southern Mongolia. The most extensive and best-preserved version of the wall dates from the Ming dynasty (1368-1644) and runs for some 5,500 miles (8,850 km) east to west from Mount Hu near Dandong, southeastern Liaoning province, to Jiayu Pass west of Jiuquan, northwestern Gansu province. It was built as protection against Mongol invaders. The Great Wall of China, frequently billed as the only man-made object visible from space, generally isn't, at least to the unaided eye in low Earth orbit. It certainly isn't visible from the Moon. You can, though, see a lot of other results of human activity. * Russia is the largest country in land mass. Vatican City is the smallest. * Moscow is the capital of Russia. * The Volga River is located in Russia. It's considered the longest River in Europe. * St. Petersburg was one known as Leningrad. * The Siege of Leningrad, also called 900-day siege, prolonged siege (September 8, 1941-January 27, 1944) of the city of Leningrad (St. Petersburg) in the Soviet Union by German and Finnish armed forces during World War II. The siege actually lasted 872 days. After Nazi Germany invaded the Soviet Union in June 1941, German armies had by early September approached Leningrad from the west and south while their Finnish allies approached to the north down the Karelian Isthmus. Leningrad's entire able-bodied population was mobilized to build antitank fortifications along the city's perimeter in support of the city's 200,000 Red Army defenders. * Saint Basil the Blessed, also called Pokrovsky Cathedral, Russian Svyatoy Vasily Blazhenny or Pokrovsky Sobor, church constructed on Red Square in Moscow. It's considered a cultural symbol of Russia. It was constructed between 1554 and 1560 by Tsar Ivan IV (the Terrible), as a votive offering for his military victories over the khanates of Kazan and Astrakhan. * New Zealand, Maori Aotearoa, island country in the South Pacific Ocean, the southwesternmost part of Polynesia. New Zealand is a remote land—one of the last sizable territories suitable for habitation to be populated and settled—and lies more than 1,000 miles (1,600 km) southeast of Australia, its nearest neighbour. The country comprises two main islands—the North and South islands—and a number of small islands, some of them hundreds of miles from the main group. The capital city is Wellington and the largest urban area Auckland; both are located on the North Island. * I think the main language of New Zealand is English. * Inhabitants of New Zealand may be called Kiwis. * Maoris were the first inhabitants of New Zealand. * Egypt, country located in the northeastern corner of Africa. Egypt's heartland, the Nile River valley and delta, was the home of one of the principal civilizations of the ancient Middle East and, like Mesopotamia farther east, was the site of one of the world's earliest urban and literate societies. Pharaonic Egypt thrived for some 3,000 years through a series of native dynasties that were interspersed with brief periods of foreign rule. It was conquered by Alexander the Great. * Pyramids were used as burial places for Egyptian kings and queens. * Cairo is the capital city of Egypt. It's also the largest city in Egypt. * Swaziland is a country. * Giraffes are considered to be the tallest mammals in the world. * The southernmost region of South Africa is called Cape of Good Hope. * Turkey is a country that occupies a unique geographic position, lying partly in Asia and partly in Europe. In other words, it's located in two continents. It's been considered to be apart of the Middle East. Throughout its history it has acted as both a barrier and a bridge between the two continents. Turkey is situated at the crossroads of the Balkans, Caucasus, Middle East, and eastern Mediterranean. It is among the larger countries of the region in terms of territory and population, and its land area is greater than that of any European state. * Inhabitants of Turkey are called Turks. * The capital of Turkey is Ankara. * Cyprus, Greek Kípros, Turkish Kıbrıs, an island in the eastern Mediterranean Sea renowned since ancient times for its mineral wealth, superb wines and produce, and natural beauty. A "golden-green leaf thrown into the Sea" and a land of "wild weather and volcanoes," in the words of the Greek Cypriot poet Leonidas Malenis, Cyprus comprises tall mountains, fertile valleys, and wide beaches. Settled for more than 10 millennia, Cyprus stands at a cultural, linguistic, and historic crossroads between Europe and Asia. * No statues are allowed in the Blue Mosque of Istanbul. * Japan, island country lying off the east coast of Asia. It consists of a great string of islands in a northeast-southwest arc that stretches for approximately 1,500 miles (2,400 km) through the western North Pacific Ocean. Nearly the entire land area is taken up by the country's four main islands; from north to south these are Hokkaido (Hokkaidō), Honshu (Honshū), Shikoku, and Kyushu (Kyūshū). Honshu is the largest of the four, followed in size by Hokkaido, Kyushu, and Shikoku. In addition, there are numerous smaller islands. * There are known to be many earthquakes of Japan. * The red circle on Japan's national flag represents the sun. Japan's national flag consists of a white field bearing a central red disk (a stylized sun). The flag has a width-to-length ratio of 2 to 3. According to tradition, the sun goddess Amaterasu founded Japan in the 7th century BC and was an ancestor of the first of its emperors, Jimmu. Even today the emperor is known as the "Son of the Sun," and a popular name for the country is "Land of the Rising Sun." * Itsukushima Shrine is a Shinto shrine on the island of the same name, also known as Miyajima, located in Hatsukaichi, Hiroshima Prefecture, Japan. Traditionally founded in the 6th century CE, the present layout of buildings dates to the 12th century CE. With its iconic torii gate, buildings on stilts standing over the sea, and soaring five-story pagoda, the shrine is one of the most easily recognisable of Japan's many ancient shrines. Itsukushima Shrine is an official National Treasure of Japan and has been listed by UNESCO as a World Heritage Site since 1996 CE. It was built by followers of Shintoism. * Somalia, easternmost country of Africa, on the Horn of Africa. It extends from just south of the Equator northward to the Gulf of Aden and occupies an important geopolitical position between sub-Saharan Africa and the countries of Arabia and southwestern Asia. The capital, Mogadishu, is located just north of the Equator on the Indian Ocean. Somalia is a country of geographic extremes. The climate is mainly dry and hot, with landscapes of thornbush savanna and semidesert, and the inhabitants of Somalia have developed equally demanding economic survival strategies. Somalia is well known as the home country of the pirates who terrorize key trade waters near the Horn of Africa. * Lions and leopards can be found in Somalia. Not tigers. * Cuba, country of the West Indies, the largest single island of the archipelago, and one of the more-influential states of the Caribbean region. The domain of the Arawakan-speaking Taino, who had displaced even earlier inhabitants, Cuba was claimed by Christopher Columbus for Spain in 1492. It became the Spanish empire's most-important source of raw sugar in the 18th century and later earned the sobriquet "Pearl of the Antilles." Though Spain had to fight several difficult and costly campaigns against independence movements, it retained rule of Cuba until 1898, when it was defeated by the United States. * Havana is the capital of Cuba. It is also the largest city in Cuba. * The rainy season in Cuba usually occurs in the Summer. * Citrus fruit, corn, and sugarcane are some of the main crops of Cuba. Corn is not one of them. * Cuba is located in North America. * Fidel Castro led a revolution in Cuba in 1959. * Brazil, officially Federative Republic of Brazil, Portuguese República Federativa do Brasil, country of South America that occupies half the continent's landmass. It is the fifth largest country in the world, exceeded in size only by Russia, Canada, China, and the United States, though its area is greater than that of the 48 conterminous U.S. states. Brazil faces the Atlantic Ocean along 4,600 miles (7,400 km) of coastline and shares more than 9,750 miles (15,700 km) of inland borders with every South American country except Chile and Ecuador. * Brasilia is the capital of Brazil. * Rio de Janeiro perhaps holds the most famous Carnival celebrations. • Do not ever bring excessive valuables and show it to public. ... * Do not carry money and credit card for pickpocketers attack. ... * Do not eat street foods, drink only bottled water. ... * Do not bring any strangers you meet outside to your hotel room. ... * Do not take public transportation. * Thailand, country located in the centre of mainland Southeast Asia. Located wholly within the tropics, Thailand encompasses diverse ecosystems, including the hilly forested areas of the northern frontier, the fertile rice fields of the central plains, the broad plateau of the northeast, and the rugged coasts along the narrow southern peninsula. Until the second half of the 20th century, Thailand was primarily an agricultural country, but since the 1960s increasing numbers of people have moved to Bangkok, the capital, and to other cities. * The elephants found in Thailand are considered to be smaller than the ones in Africa. * A majority of Thailand's inhabitants are Buddhist. * Bongkok is the capital of Thailand. * Thailand was once called Siam. * Argentina, country of South America, covering most of the southern portion of the continent. The world's eighth largest country, Argentina occupies an area more extensive than Mexico and the U.S. state of Texas combined. It encompasses immense plains, deserts, tundra, and forests, as well as tall mountains, rivers, and thousands of miles of ocean shoreline. Argentina also claims a portion of Antarctica, as well as several islands in the South Atlantic, including the British-ruled Falkland Islands (Islas Malvinas). * Tango originated in Argentina. * The Andes Mountains are located on Argentina's western border. * Buenos Aires is the capital of Argentina. * Argentina's entire western border is shared with Chile. * United Kingdom, island country located off the northwestern coast of mainland Europe. The United Kingdom comprises the whole of the island of Great Britain—which contains England, Wales, and Scotland—as well as the northern portion of the island of Ireland. The name Britain is sometimes used to refer to the United Kingdom as a whole. The capital is London, which is among the world's leading commercial, financial, and cultural centres. Other major cities include Birmingham, Liverpool, and Manchester in England, Belfast and Londonderry in Northern Ireland, Edinburgh and Glasgow in Scotland, and Swansea and Cardiff in Wales. * Big Ben, tower clock, famous for its accuracy and for its massive bell. Strictly speaking, the name refers to only the great hour bell, which weighs 15.1 tons (13.7 metric tons), but it is commonly associated with the whole clock tower at the northern end of the Houses of Parliament, in the London borough of Westminster. The tower itself was formally known as St. Stephen's Tower until 2012, when it was renamed Elizabeth Tower on the occasion of Elizabeth II's Diamond Jubilee, celebrating 60 years on the British throne. The hands of the clock are 9 and 14 feet. * Piccadilly Circus, busy London intersection and popular meeting place. Lying between the neighbourhoods of St. James (south) and Soho (north) in the borough of Westminster, it serves as the nexus of Coventry Street, Shaftesbury Avenue, Regent Street, and Piccadilly. * For centuries, historians and archaeologists have puzzled over the many mysteries of Stonehenge, a prehistoric monument. It supposedly took Neolithic builders an estimated 1,500 years to erect. Located in southern England, it is comprised of roughly 100 massive upright stones placed in a circular layout. While many modern scholars now agree that Stonehenge was once a burial ground, they have yet to determine what other purposes it served and how a civilization without modern technology—or even the wheel—produced the mighty monument. Its construction is all the more baffling because, while the sandstone slabs of its outer ring hail from local quarries, scientists have traced the bluestones that make up its inner ring all the way to the Preseli Hills in Wales, some 200 miles from where Stonehenge sits on Salisbury Plain. Today, nearly 1 million people visit Stonehenge, a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 1986, every year. * The English Channel, also called The Channel, French La Manche, narrow arm of the Atlantic Ocean separating the southern coast of England from the northern coast of France. * Australia, the smallest continent and one of the largest countries on Earth, lying between the Pacific and Indian oceans in the Southern Hemisphere. Australia's capital is Canberra, located in the southeast between the larger and more important economic and cultural centres of Sydney and Melbourne. * A baby kangaroo is called a Joey. * The large and dry region of the country has been called the "outback." * Australia is about the size of the US. * Tasmania is an island located off the southern coast of Australia, * A marsupial is an animal that carries its young in a pouch. Kookaburra isn't a marsupial. * The Great Barrier Reef is a reef that perhaps has the largest coral deposit in the world. It's located along the northeastern coast of Australia. * Saudi Arabia, arid, sparsely populated kingdom of the Middle East. Extending across most of the northern and central Arabian Peninsula, Saudi Arabia is a young country that is heir to a rich history. In its western highlands, along the Red Sea, lies the Hejaz, which is the cradle of Islam and the site of that religion's holiest cities, Mecca and Medina. In the country's geographic heartland is a region known as Najd ("Highland"), a vast arid zone that until recent times was populated by nomadic tribes. To the east, along the Persian Gulf, are the country's abundant oil fields. * A dromedary is a type of camel that can be found in Saudi Arabia. It has one hump. * Ubar was a lost city in Saudi Arabia that was hidden under sand. * Saudi Arabia is separated from Africa by the Red Sea. * Saudi Arabia is known for its natural resources like oil. * Rubʿ al-Khali, (Arabic: "Empty Quarter") also spelled Al-Rubʿ al-Khālī, vast desert region in the southern Arabian Peninsula, constituting the largest portion of the Arabian Desert. It covers an area of about 250,000 square miles (650,000 square km) in a structural basin lying mainly in southeastern Saudi Arabia, with lesser portions in Yemen, Oman, and the United Arab Emirates. The Rubʿ al-Khali is the largest area of continuous sand in the world. It occupies more than one-fourth of Saudi Arabia's total area and features varied topography. * Mexico, country of southern North America and the third largest country in Latin America, after Brazil and Argentina. Mexican society is characterized by extremes of wealth and poverty, with a limited middle class wedged between an elite cadre of landowners and investors on the one hand and masses of rural and urban poor on the other. But in spite of the challenges it faces as a developing country, Mexico is one of the chief economic and political forces in Latin America. * The national currency of Mexico is pesos. * Mexico City is the capital of Mexico. It's also the largest city in Mexico. * The Gulf of Mexico is located off Mexico's eastern coast. * Aztecs inhabited the country of Mexico before it was conquered by Spanish explorers. * Caterpillars cause the Mexican jumping bean to jump. * Greece, the southernmost of the countries of the Balkan Peninsula. Geography has greatly influenced the country's development. Mountains historically restricted internal communications, but the sea opened up wider horizons. The total land area of Greece (one-fifth of which is made up of the Greek islands) is comparable in size to England or the U.S. state of Alabama. Greece has more than 2,000 islands, of which about 170 are inhabited; some of the easternmost Aegean islands lie just a few miles off the Turkish coast. The country's capital is Athens, which expanded rapidly in the second half of the 20th century. * Olives are grown in Greece. Olives are considered a type of fruit. * The official language of Greece is Greek. * Air pollution has been considered as the biggest threat to Athens. * The Olympics were held in Greece around 776 B.C. * The Parthenon was built in honor of Athena. * Canada, second largest country in the world in area (after Russia), occupying roughly the northern two-fifths of the continent of North America. Despite Canada's great size, it is one of the world's most sparsely populated countries. This fact, coupled with the grandeur of the landscape, has been central to the sense of Canadian national identity, as expressed by the Dublin-born writer Anna Brownell Jameson, who explored central Ontario in 1837 and remarked exultantly on "the seemingly interminable line of trees...;the boundless wilderness...; the mysterious depths amid the multitudinous foliage." * A beaver's home is called a lodge. * The maple leaf had been a national symbol of Canada since at least 1868, and its red colour has been described as a symbol of Canadian sacrifice during World War I. Pearson's original flag proposal showed three red maple leaves on a white field with narrow blue vertical stripes at either end. * Ottawa is the capital of Canada. * English and French are the two official languages of Canada. * The CN Tower, also called Canadian National Tower, broadcast and telecommunications tower in Toronto. Standing at a height of 1,815 feet (553 metres), it was the world's tallest freestanding structure until 2007, when it was surpassed by the Burj Dubai building in Dubayy (Dubai), U.A.E. Construction of CN Tower began in February 1973 and involved more than 1,500 workers; the tower was completed in February 1974, and the attachment of its antenna was finished in April 1975. * The Pacific Ocean, a body of salt water extending from the Antarctic region in the south to the Arctic in the north and lying between the continents of Asia and Australia on the west and North and South America on the east. Of the three oceans that extend northward from the Antarctic continent, the Pacific is by far the largest, occupying about a third of the surface of the globe. Its area, excluding adjacent seas, encompasses about 63.8 million square miles (165.25 million square km). * When it comes to number of inhabitants, Asia ranks first by far. In mid-2016, there were over 4.4 billion people living on the continent alone - more than half of the world's total population. * Africa has the greatest number of countries. * There are 7 continents. * Mt. McKinley is the tallest mountain in North America. * At the end of 2007, the population of the world was believed to be more than 6.6 billion. By 2020, scientists estimate that 8 billion people will inhabit Earth and by 2030 that number could grow over 9 billion. * What is the difference between a sea and an ocean? Seas are smaller than oceans. A sea can be part of 1 of the 4 oceans (Atlantic, Pacific, Indian, and Arctic). The Caribbean Sea of North America, for instance, is in the Atlantic. Other seas, such as the Caspian Sea in Asia, are surrounded by land. * Niagara Falls is a famous American waterfall on the Niagara River that joins Lake Erie to Lake Ontario on the border between the USA and Canada. It actually consists of two waterfalls (the American Falls and the Horseshoe Falls), separated by Goat Island. They are a very popular tourist attraction, especially with honeymooners (= people who are just married), and are also used to produce electricity. Both the US and Canada have cities called Niagara Falls, and they are joined by Rainbow Bridge. * Although both a maze and labyrinth depict a complex and confusing series of pathways, the two are different. A maze is a complex, branching (multicursal) puzzle that includes choices of path and direction, while a labyrinth is unicursal, i.e., has only a single, non-branching path, which leads to the center. Labyrinths differ from mazes in that labyrinths have only one possible path, winding though it might be, while mazes have many different potential paths. * How tall is the world's tallest living tree? A giant redwood in California's Redwood National Park is perhaps the tallest tree on Earth. You could look out the top-floor window of a building 35 stories high—and still not see the top. Discovered in the summer of 2006, the tree, named Hyperion, rises more than 379 feet from its base on a steep slope in a remote part of Redwood National Park, just north of Eureka in Humboldt County. * What makes a skunk smell? That ghastly spray is the skunk's best defense and, boy, does it work! It comes from a fluid called musk, which is produced and stored in a pair of glands under the animal's tail. A skunk can propel its spray about 10 feet. * Skunk musk spray is a yellow-tinted oily liquid stored in two sacs located on opposite sides of the anus. Each sac holds about a teaspoon of musk and is enough for multiple sprays. ... Skunk musk is composed primarily of seven ingredients, six of which are sulfur-containing thiols that give the skunk musk its awful smell. * Skunk spray has been compared to tear gas, and with good reason. Skunk spray and tear gas are both lachrymators — chemical substances designed to irritate the eyes and nose, causing redness, mucus production, and tears. In some instances, the scent of skunk spray may even cause nausea. Thankfully, skunks don't go around looking to spray people and pets. Skunks are nocturnal, and tend to avoid humans and other animals. * Skunk odor can cause breathing issues. People with conditions that affect their respiratory systems, such as COPD or asthma, may have problems breathing. ... If you experience serious medical issues, such as an asthma attack or serious vomiting, you should check with your doctor. * A comic book is a magazine that presents a serialized story in the form of a comic strip. * Do people's true colors come out when drunk? Yes and no. I think it is a mixed bag. A lot of it comes down to the individual and the situation. Obviously the disinhibiting effects of alcohol can cause one to say and do things that they might normally want to say and do, but are otherwise unable to in a sober state of mind. At the same time, alcohol is a powerful intoxicant, to the point where the more intoxicated one is, the more nonsensical one becomes... I think that a lot of what happens when one is really drunk starts to become just that: nonsense. It is not necessarily reflective of who that person really is or what is really in their mind. It's just a jumbled mess. It is a complete breakdown of logic or rationality in the brain. So, yes. Alcohol can definitely reveal people's true colors. But it can also result in just random mental misfirings. And while that is no excuse for anyone's behavior while intoxicated, it might not necessarily be reflective of the "real" them. This is just my two cents on this issue. * No, dogs should never eat chocolate. This isn't just an urban legend. Chocolate contains toxic substances called methylxanthines, which are stimulants that stop a dog's metabolic process. Even just a little bit of chocolate, especially dark chocolate, can cause diarrhea and vomiting. A large amount can cause seizures, irregular heart function, and even death. Do not have chocolate in an accessible location for your dog. If your dog does ingest chocolate, contact a veterinarian or Pet Poison Helpline as soon as possible. * There's a world of choice in today's car market, what with more than 400 different models and many car types available. Making sense of it all can be difficult. What are the different types of cars? The first thing to know is that "cars" means "passenger vehicles of all types." For the purposes of keeping it simple, we've broken down all of those vehicle choices into nine major categories covering all of the basic types of vehicles from coupes to full-size sedans to crossover SUVs. * The easiest way to define a vehicle is by how it looks. What's the first thing you notice when a vehicle comes toward you on the street? Its shape. That's called the "body style." Is it tall and boxy? Low and sleek? How many doors does it have? Body style is the easiest way to categorize a vehicle. * SEDAN A sedan has four doors and a traditional trunk. Like vehicles in many categories, they're available in a range of sizes from small (subcompact vehicles like Nissan Versa and Kia Rio) to compacts (Honda Civic, Toyota Corolla) to mid-size (Honda Accord, Nissan Altima), and full-size (Toyota Avalon, Dodge Charger). Luxury brands like Mercedes-Benz and Lexus have sedans in similar sizes as well. COUPE MERCEDES-BENZ A coupe has historically been considered a two-door car with a trunk and a solid roof. This would include cars like a Ford Mustang or Audi A5—or even two-seat sports cars like the Chevrolet Corvette and Porsche Boxster. Recently, however, car companies have started to apply the word "coupe" to four-door cars or crossovers with low, sleek rooflines that they deem "coupe-like." This includes vehicles as disparate as a Mercedes-Benz CLS sedan and BMW X6 SUV. At Car and Driver, we still consider a coupe to be a two-door car. SPORTS CAR These are the sportiest, hottest, coolest-looking coupes and convertibles—low to the ground, sleek, and often expensive. They generally are two-seaters, but sometimes have small rear seats as well. Cars like the Porsche 911 and Mazda Miata are typical sports cars, but you can stretch the definition to include muscle cars like the Ford Mustang and Dodge Challenger. Then there are the high-end exotic dream cars with sky-high price tags for the one percent, cars like the Ferrari 488 GTB and Aston Martin Vantage, which stop traffic with their spaceship looks. STATION WAGON VOLVO Wagons are similar to sedans but have an extended roofline and a hatch door at the rear instead of a trunk. Some, like the Subaru Outback or Audi A4 Allroad, have elevated ground clearance and some rugged body cladding to make them more like a sport-utility vehicle (SUV), but they are nonetheless closely related to sedans. Wagons have fallen from favor during the past few decades and there are relatively few available for sale in the United States. HATCHBACK Traditionally, the term "hatchback" has meant a compact or subcompact sedan with a squared-off roof and a rear flip-up hatch door that provides access to the vehicle's cargo area instead of a conventional trunk. The Volkswagen Golf and Kia Rio are two typical hatchbacks. More recently, rear hatches have found their way on to some larger cars, like the Audi A7 and Kia Stinger. They look like sedans, but they actually have a steeply raked hatchback that affords easier accessibility to the cargo area and greater carrying capacity than a traditional trunk would. CONVERTIBLE Does the roof retract into the body leaving the passenger cabin open to the elements? If so, it's a convertible. Most convertibles have a fully powered fabric roof that folds down, but a few have to be lowered by hand. There are also a number of models with a retractable hardtop, as well as several unusual quasi-convertibles (called "targa tops") like the Mazda MX-5 Miata RF, Porsche 911 Targa and Corvette; only the forward section of their roofs retracts or can be removed by hand. SPORT-UTILITY VEHICLE (SUV) SUVs—often also referred to as crossovers—tend to be taller and boxier than sedans, offer an elevated seating position, and have more ground clearance than a car. They include a station wagon-like cargo area that is accessed through a flip-up rear hatch door, and many offer all-wheel drive. The larger ones have three rows of seats. Sizes start at subcompact (Hyundai Kona, Nissan Kicks), mid-size, and go all the way to full-size (Ford Expedition, Chevrolet Tahoe). Luxury brands offer many SUV models in most of the same size categories. MINIVAN Minivans are the workhorses of the family-car world, the best at carrying people and cargo in an efficient package. They're called minivans but they are far from "mini." That's because they are tall boxes-on-wheels with sliding side doors for easy access and a rear hatch that opens to a large cargo area. Most minivans have adjustable seats in their second and third rows that often can be removed or even folded into the floor to create a huge open cargo bay. The Honda Odyssey and Chrysler Pacifica are great examples of the breed. PICKUP TRUCK A pickup truck has a passenger cab and an open cargo bed in the rear. Virtually all pickups offer some form of all-wheel drive or part-time four-wheel drive—the latter for off-road use only. With one exception—the mid-sized Honda Ridgeline—pickup bodies are cabs mounted to a separate steel frame. The Ridgeline is more like a crossover with the rear section of the roof lopped off to expose a cargo bed. Currently, pickup trucks come in two size categories: full-size and mid-size. * An all-terrain vehicle (ATV) is defined as a motorized off-highway vehicle designed to travel on four low-pressure or non-pneumatic tires, having a seat designed to be straddled by the operator and handlebars for steering control. ATVs are subdivided into two types as designated by the manufacturer. * There's not enough evidence to suggest that sitting close to a screen causes impaired vision. However, it can cause other symptoms like neck and shoulder pain, eye strain, dry eyes, blurred vision, lowered cognitive performance. * Using ice packs can reduce inflammation and dulls sensation of pain. * Aloe is a plant whose gel may help heal burns and other injuries when applied to the skin. * Applying Sunblock can help prevent against the sun's UV rays, which can damage the skin over time. * Moisturizers can help hydrate and protect skin from damage. * What Does the SPF Number Mean? The SPF number tells you how long the sun's UV radiation would take to redden your skin when using the product exactly as directed versus the amount of time without any sunscreen. ... An SPF 30 allows about 3 percent of UVB rays to hit your skin. * But the truth is that higher-SPF products are only marginally better at shielding you from UVB, according to both the EWG and the Skin Cancer Foundation. SPF 30 blocks nearly 97% of UVB radiation, SPF 50 blocks about 98%, and SPF 100 blocks about 99%. * To treat sunburn peeling, you should apply aloe vera or a moisturizer to the infected area. You can also take a cold shower or use anti-inflammatory pain medication like ibuprofen. Do not exfoliate or peel away loose skin once it's started, as this can cause infection. * According to the many-world's interpretation, our universe is one of many parallel universes that branch off from each other, nanosecond by nanosecond, without intersecting or communicating. * mere-exposure effect: the finding that individuals show an increased preference (or liking) for a stimulus as a consequence of repeated exposure to that stimulus. This effect is most likely to occur when there is no preexisting negative attitude toward the stimulus object, and it tends to be strongest when the person is not consciously aware of the stimulus presentations. [identified in 1968 by Robert B. Zajonc] * Some dermatologists believe that, as long as you don't have complications with usual sun exposure, you can sunbathe without sunscreen up to 20 minutes each day . To reduce the risk of sunburn, it may be best to stick to 5 to 10 minutes. * There's something you can learn about being friend zoned. How someone feels toward you shouldn't be seen as a reflection of who you are. It doesn't make you any less attractive, intelligent, talented, or kind. Instead of continuously chasing that individual, do yourself a favor and try to find someone who really values you. It is possible, and you owe it to yourself to find true happiness, not validation. * Studies have shown that confidence is the most attractive quality a person can have. When someone shows they're confident, you're less likely to second-guess yourself, and you know and believe in your value. People tend to notice when someone's confident, and the level of confidence you display tells people who you are as a person. * A person's intelligence can be seen as attractive because you're likely to have a stimulating conversation with that smart individual. * A study shows that holding a warmer beverage can make you more happy. * Everybody has their own way of communicating. It is influenced by cultural backgrounds, the way someone was raised, their gender, their temperament, and much more. ... At that point, true communication may become utterly impossible. Sometimes we may have a difficult time understanding another's feelings, needs and habits. * Get a mattress protector to prevent various stains from leaking through onto the mattress. * A kimono is a traditional formal Japanese robe known for its elaborate details. It is made up of numerous parts, often of hand-dyed silk, and is worn only on special occasions such as festivals and weddings. ... Wearing one is similar to wearing a fancy suit or a formal dress. * All forms of gambling are illegal in the states of Utah and Hawaii. * A Illinois State ID is used for identification (when banking, traveling, etc.) and is only available to those with a SSN. A Temporary Visitor Driver's License is used for driving ONLY and is available to those without a SSN. * The term dusk usually refers to astronomical dusk, or the darkest part of twilight before night begins. Sunset or sundown is the daily disappearance of the Sun below the horizon due to Earth's rotation. ... Dusk is at the very end of astronomical twilight, and is the darkest moment of twilight just before night. * The KKK wore hoods to try and exploit certain superstitions held by ex-slaves (whether these superstitions originated organically from African American culture or were instilled by slaveowners to terrify their slaves is hard to say) they were angling for a mythic status. And while African Americans obviously didn't believe the KKK were actually anything but racists in hoods, the amount of power they wielded with total impunity made them a potent force of terror. By the time of what's called the second klan, this mythos was codified in the infamous film The Birth of a Nation. This is where most klan iconography that we're familiar with originated. The Klan had two central (and contradictory) myths central to their power: that they were crusaders of pristine virtue, and that they can murder with impunity because they operate in total secrecy. This is part of why, no joke, the Superman radio show helped expose the KKK. By making all their rituals and "codes" public (which are laughable by actual steganography standards, stuff like acronyms and jargon basically), moreover having an American icon defeat them every week, the KKK was essentially demystified. It became increasingly difficult to be a klansman in secret and identify other klansmen in public, which made mass organization and intimidation tactics far less effective. * Though Church teaching holds that God has no literal sex because He possesses no definite body (a prerequisite of sex), classical and scriptural understanding states that God should be referred to (in most contexts) as masculine. * The surviving records say almost nothing about Pilate's life before he became prefect of Judea or after he was recalled to Rome. On the basis of information about other [Roman] governors and about how the Roman imperial system maintained control, we can reasonably guess that Pilate probably had some sort of military career in which he most likely distinguished himself in some way as an officer," Carter wrote. "We can also be fairly confident that he belonged to the upper stratum of Roman society, that his family was wealthy." * Jacob, of course, is the father of Joseph and all his siblings, but the thirteen siblings have four different mothers: Leah and Rachel, who are themselves sisters (the daughters of Laban), and Zilpah and Bilhah, who are the maidservants of Leah and Rachel, respectively. * In undoubtedly the most famous story about Washington's boyhood, he received a hatchet for a gift, and used it to hack at a cherry tree. When his father, Augustine, asked him who chopped down the tree, young George confessed, earning a hug and the fatherly praise that his honesty was worth more than 1,000 such trees. In reality, no evidence exists to suggest the nature of Washington's relationship with Augustine, who died when he was 11, and the story was invented by Mason Locke Weems, one of Washington's first biographers. A minister-turned-itinerant bookseller, "Parson" Weems published The Life and Memorable Actions of George Washington in 1800, a year after the great man's death; the cherry tree story didn't appear until the fifth edition came out in 1806. Weems's biography benefited from its focus on Washington's private side (particularly his close bond with his father) rather than his well-known public career, and became a huge bestseller read by generations of American schoolchildren. * According to some modern philosopher, notably Nietzsche, all stories, even scientific theories and religious teachings, are myths. * "white sustenance" may refer to colorless nourishment that doesn't nourish the body. * The phrase man of few words is used to describe someone who tends to be on the quieter side. It can refer to someone who gets their point across using a small amount of words when they speak. Example: Brian is a man of few words, he prefers to get directly to the point when he talks. * the notion of the maze is ancient; heroes throughout mythology have had to find their ways through dark, magical mazes in order to achieve some kind of special honor. * A traditional motif in folklore is the requirement of the hero to leave his own home grounds before facing the dangers of the unknown. * In this extract from E.E. Cumming's somewhere i have never travelled, gladly beyond poem, the poet is making an illogical comparison between the voice of his beloved's eyes, and roses and rain with the hands. The poet is trying to express the power of his beloved over him, and her importance to him. * A second element of mythology is the idea of an ancient, timeless magic. J. R. R. Tolkein in The Lord of the Rings novels and C. S. Lewis in The Chronicles of Narnia are among the authors who reference the idea of a magical or spiritual force whose great age makes it powerful. The idea of ancient magic draws on a scholarly tradition and on the idea that there is an ancient body of wisdom and formulas that only the wisest people know and utilize. Old magic establishes morals, and idealizes a past when humans and wizards understood the mystical potential of noble actions. * Based on the short story by Stephen King, the film Children of the Corn tells the story of the town of Gatlin, Nebraska. A demonic god, referred to as "He Who Walks Behind the Rows", has commanded that the children of Gatlin kill their parents and all adults to ensure that the cornfields will prosper. * Furries are people who have an interest in anthropomorphic animals, or animals with human qualities. ... Furries represent their fursonas through art, writing, online identities, or in the creation of "fursuits," which are elaborate costumes depicting the individual's animal. * Abracadabra is a word said by magicians when they perform a magic trick. It was considered a charm, supposedly constructed from the initials of the Hebrew words Ab (Father) Ben (son) and Ruach Acadasch (Holy Spirit) and once used as an antidote against various physical ills. The term has become associated with language, typically in the form of gibberish, used to give the impression of arcane knowledge or power. * The word alms refers to money or food given to the poor. * Abraham-men was a class of beggars who roamed through England, especially in the 16th and 17th centuries, usually feigning lunacy to obtain alms. * academy, a society of learned individuals organized to advance art, science, literature, music, or some other cultural or intellectual area of endeavour. From its original reference in Greek to the philosophical school of Plato, the word has come to refer much more generally to an institution of learning or a group of learned persons. Academy was the name of Plato's school near Athens. It was named after a legendary hero, Hecademus or Academus. The school had a long history, continuing until Justinian suppressed the philosophic schools in AD 529. At the close of the Middle Ages, academies began to be formed in Italy, for the study first of classical and then of Italian literature. One of the earliest was the Platonic Academy, founded in Florence in 1442 by two Greek scholars with the encouragement of Cosimo de' Medici. Literary academies sprang up throughout Italy in the 16th and 17th centuries; the most famous of these was the Crusca Academy, founded in Florence by A.F. Grazzini in 1582. The French Academy, which would become Europe's best-known literary academy, began in 1635. The Royal Spanish Academy was founded in 1713 to preserve the Spanish language, and it published a landmark Spanish dictionary for that purpose. Academies of science began to appear in the 16th century, and academies of fine arts, music, social sciences, medicine, mining, and agriculture were formed from the 18th century on. More than 50 countries now have at least one academy or learned society that is sanctioned by the state and represented on international councils of learned societies. The influence of the academies was greatest during the 17th and 18th centuries but declined during the 19th, in part because academies tended to resist new and unorthodox developments in science and culture. The United States, like Great Britain, Canada, and other English-speaking countries, has no state-established academies of science or literature—a fact reflective of English beliefs that culture should basically be a matter for private initiative. The first learned society in what would become the United States was founded by Benjamin Franklin in 1743 and was called the American Philosophical Society. The rival American Academy of Arts and Sciences was founded in 1779, and the National Academy of Sciences was founded in Washington, D.C., in 1863. Russia's Imperial Academy of Sciences was founded by Peter the Great in St. Petersburg in 1724 and renamed the Academy of Sciences in 1925. Academies and learned societies also followed European expansion elsewhere in the world. The Academies of Languages of Colombia (1871) and Venezuela (1873) provided affiliated institutions for the Royal Spanish Academy. More recently, state-sponsored societies were founded to promote the advancement of Western learning for national unity and development. The Japan Academy traces its roots back to the Tokyo Academy founded in 1879. The Chinese Academy of Sciences (Academica Sinica) was founded in 1928 to coordinate research in all fields. India's National Science Academy was established as the National Institute of Sciences in 1935, and the National Academy of Letters (Sahitya Akademi) was founded in 1952. International councils of learned sciences that are now sponsored by UNESCO are the International Council for Philosophic and Humanistic Studies (1919), the International Council of Scientific Unions (1919), and the International Social Sciences Council (1951). The term academy is also used to designate special secondary schools (often private and demanding in terms of entrance requirements) or colleges in which specific subjects are emphasized—e.g., military or naval affairs, agriculture, fine arts, music, or business. See also preparatory school. * Blood circulates the body 3 times every minute. * The English is an Indo-European language in the west Germanic group. Modern English is widely considered to be the lingua Franca of the modern world and is the standard language in a lot of fields, including computer coding, international business, and higher education. It's an official language in places like Singapore, Belize, Australia, the UK, Guyana, etc. * Adventists are Christian religious sects believing that the 2nd coming of Christ and the end of the world are near at hand. * Movements are divisions in longer pieces of music. * A measure is a segment of time corresponding to a specific number of beats. * The Chinese used inoculation techniques against smallpox as early as 1000 AD and similar techniques were also used in ancient Africa and Turkey. [2] The first instance of vaccine promotion in the United States was in 1721 when Cotton Mather, a Puritan minister, encouraged smallpox vaccination in response to an outbreak. [3] Vaccination as practiced today came into being when Edward Jenner, English physician and scientist, created the first smallpox vaccine using cowpox (a disease similar to smallpox that infects cows) and vaccinating an eight-year-old boy in 1796. [2] [3] Jenner's innovation was used for 200 years, with updates, and eradicated smallpox. [2]. In 1801 Benjamin Waterhouse, physician and co-founder and President of Harvard Medical School, began using the "Cowpox Vaccine," leading to Massachusetts becoming the first US state to promote the use of vaccination. [3] In 1809 the town of Milton, Massachusetts became the first US town to offer free smallpox vaccinations, which was followed by a state law that same year requiring the smallpox vaccination. [3] [4]. Later, on Feb. 27, 1813, US President James Madison signed into law An Act to Encourage Vaccination, which created the National Vaccine Agency (now part of the US Department of Health & Human Services). [5]. Massachusetts passed the first US state law mandating vaccinations for schoolchildren [5], followed by New York (1862), Connecticut (1872), Indiana (1881), Arkansas (1882), Illinois (1882), Virginia (1882), Wisconsin (1882), California (1888), Iowa (1889), and Pennsylvania (1895). [6] By 1963, 20 states would require immunization to attend public schools; and 29 states by 1970. [4]. In response to immunization laws, in 1878, the National Anti-Compulsory Vaccination Reporter stated that "the dangerous illnesses following the vaccine process are... on the whole... a greater evil to humanity than small-pox itself!" [7] The Anti-Vaccination Society of America was founded in 1879 in response to the states enacting vaccination mandates and with the belief that it "is undignified" to mandate vaccinations and that the "efficacy of vaccination as a disease preventative is a matter of individual opinion." [8] In 1882 the New England Anti-Compulsory Vaccination League was founded and in 1885 the Anti-Vaccination League of New York City was created. [7] With their influence, the anti-vaccination groups began getting vaccine mandates repealed in California, Illinois, Indiana, Minnesota, Utah, West Virginia, and Wisconsin. [7]. The first laboratory-created vaccine was for avian cholera (which most commonly infects chickens), developed by Louis Pasteur, French chemist and microbiologist, in 1879. [2] In 1885, Pasteur created the rabies vaccine, beginning an active period of vaccine development for human illnesses through the 1930s that saw vaccines developed for typhoid (1899), cholera (1911), diphtheria (1914), tuberculosis (1921), and tetanus (1924), among others. [2] Vaccines for polio (1955), measles (1963), mumps (1967), and rubella (1969) followed in the mid-twentieth century. [2]. During the active period of vaccine development, in 1901 the first Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine was awarded to Emil von Behring, a German physiologist, for his work developing serum therapy in connection to a diphtheria vaccination. [10]. On July 1, 1902, Congress passed An Act to Regulate the Sale of Viruses, Serums, Toxins, and Analogous Products (also referred to as the Biologics Control Act), which was the first legislation to control the quality of drugs, specifically the quality of vaccines. [2]. Later, on Feb. 20, 1905, mandatory vaccination was upheld by the US Supreme Court in Jacobson v. Massachusetts (7-2). [9] In the aftermath of the ruling more states across the country began to implement mandatory child vaccination as a condition of public school attendance. On Nov. 13, 1922, the constitutionality of mandatory vaccination of school children was once again challenged and upheld in the Zucht v. King; the US Supreme Court declined to hear the case, stating that it was "within the police power of a state to provide for compulsory vaccination." [11] [5]. In 1951, Jonas Salk, MD, and his team developed a method to cultivate the polio virus in monkey kidney tissue in order to be able to produce large amounts of the vaccine. [12] On Apr. 12, 1955 the results of the Salk vaccine trials showed the vaccine was 80-90% effective and the US government licensed the IPV polio vaccine the same day. [12] The vaccination program was suspended on May 8, 1955 to investigate paralysis resulting from the vaccine injection; changes to the production method were made and vaccination resumed on May 27, 1955. [12] The number of paralytic polio cases decreased from 28,985 in 1955 to 72 in 1965. [13] The last case of the disease in the United States was reported in 1993, and polio was declared eliminated in the western hemisphere on Sep. 29, 1994 by the Pan American Health Organization. [27] [12]. In 1986 the National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act [14] was passed in response to a large number of lawsuits filed claiming vaccines were causing adverse reactions including brain damage and death. [15] The act shielded medical professionals and vaccine manufacturers from liability if an individual suffered injury from receiving vaccines. The act mandated that vaccine injury claims be filed with the US Court of Federal Claims rather than filed directly against physicians or vaccine manufacturers in civil court. Unlike civil court, people filing injury claims are not required to prove negligence or failure to warn; they only need to prove that a vaccine caused injury. [16]. On Oct. 1, 1988, the National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program (VICP) was created under the National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act. [17] The VICP was "established to ensure an adequate supply of vaccines, stabilize vaccine costs, and establish and maintain an accessible and efficient forum for individuals found to be injured by certain vaccines." [17] Between 1989 and July 1, 2014, 3,645 compensation awards have been made (amounting to over $2.7 billion in awards and $113.2 million to cover legal costs) and 9,786 claims have been dismissed (amounting to $62.8 million paid to 4,925 dismissed claimants to cover legal costs). [17]. Subsequently, in 1990 the CDC and FDA created the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS). VAERS collects information about adverse events via reports filed by anyone, including medical professionals and family members. [18] VAERS receives about 30,000 reports each year. [18] 85-90% of VAERS reports are for "mild adverse events such as fever, local reactions [such as redness at the injection site], and episodes or crying or mild irritability." [18] The other 10-15% of VAERS reports is for "serious adverse events involving life-threatening conditions, hospitalization, permanent disability, or death, which may or may not have been caused by a vaccine." [18]. In 1993 the US Congress passed the Comprehensive Childhood Immunization Act of 1993 [19] that created the Vaccines for Children (VFC) program to provide vaccinations free of charge to children in need in order to increase the number of vaccinated children. Andrew Wakefield and the Autism Controversy: In Feb. 1998 Lancet published an article by Andrew Wakefield, MD, titled "Ileal-Lymphoid-Nodular Hyperplasia, Non-Specific Colitis, and Pervasive Developmental Disorder in Children." [20] The article claimed "Rubella virus is associated with autism and the combined measles, mumps, and rubella [MMR] vaccine... has also been implicated." [20] Anti-vaccination groups and parents began using Wakefield's article as rationale to opt-out of vaccinating their children. Between 2003 and 2012, Brian Deer, an investigative reporter, examined the story and published 36 articles which accused Wakefield of "falsifying medical histories of children and essentially concocting a picture, which was the picture he was contracted to find by lawyers hoping to sue vaccine manufacturers and to create a vaccine scare." [21] On Mar. 3, 2004 ten of the twelve co-authors of Wakefield's article released a "Retraction of an Interpretation" in Lancet, stating "We wish to make it clear that in this paper no causal link was established between MMR vaccine and autism as the data were insufficient." [22] Lancet retracted Wakefield's article on Feb. 2, 2010, stating "it has become clear that several elements of the 1998 paper by Wakefield et al are incorrect." [23] On Jan. 5, 2011, the British Journal of Medicine published an article stating that Wakefield received over $674,000 from lawyers and that, of 12 children examined, five had developmental problems before being vaccinated and three never had autism. [21] [24]. As a result, on May 24, 2011, Britain stripped Wakefield of his medical license, stating Wakefield had "abused his position of trust" and "brought the medical profession into disrepute." [21] Wakefield contends that the investigation of his work is part of a conspiracy to "discredit and silence his research" in order to "shield the government from exposure on the vaccine scandal." [25]. * Thimerosal and Autism: On July 9, 1999, in response to growing concern over a link between vaccination and autism, the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) and the US Public Health Service (PHS) recommended that thimerosal be removed from vaccines "as soon as possible." However, they also stated, "there are no data or evidence of any harm caused by the level of exposure that some children may have encountered in following the existing immunization schedule" and that "the large risks of not vaccinating children far outweigh the unknown and probably much smaller risk, if any, of cumulative exposure to thimerosal-containing vaccines over the first 6 months of life." [26]. In May 2003, Representative Dan Burton (R-IN) released a report titled "Mercury in Medicine - Taking Unnecessary Risks" in which he requested that the FDA remove thimerosal from the flu vaccine and recommended independent research on the link between thimerosal in vaccines and autism. [27]. In 2005, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. wrote an article co-published by Salon.com (June 16) and Rolling Stone (July 14) titled "Deadly Immunity," arguing that the 2000 Simpsonwood CDC Conference was spent "discussing how to cover up the damaging data" that there were a "staggering number of earlier studies that indicate a link between thimerosal and speech delays, attention-deficit disorder, hyperactivity, and autism." [28] The article was corrected multiple times within days of publication, and was retracted and deleted by Salon.com and Rolling Stone on Jan. 16, 2011. [28] [112] The controversy resulted in an 18-month investigation by the US Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions, which concluded that Kennedy's allegation was unsubstantiated and "thimerosal was [being] voluntarily removed from childhood vaccines distributed in the United States as a precaution," prompted by a joint request by the American Academy of Pediatrics and the US Public Health Service. [29] As of 2007, vaccines for children 6 years old and younger contain no thimerosal or only trace amounts, except for inactivated flu vaccines, which are available in both thimerosal-containing and preservative-free versions. By Nov. 30, 2009, the mercury-based preservative thimerosal had been phased out of all vaccines in the United States with the exception of certain influenza, meningococcal, and tetanus vaccines. [30]. On Aug. 27, 2010 the US Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit ruled (3-0) that there is no link between vaccination and autism in the case of Cedillo v. Secretary of Health and Human Services. [31] The decision upheld two earlier rulings: a 2007 ruling by the United States Court of Federal Claims Office of Special Masters and an affirmation of that ruling by the Court of Federal Claims. On Feb. 22, 2011, the US Supreme Court ruled (6-2) in the case of Bruesewitz v. Wyeth [32] that vaccine injury claims must continue to be filed with the US Court of Federal Claims set up under the National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act of 1986, and cannot be filed directly against physicians or vaccine manufacturers in civil court. On Aug. 25, 2011 the Institute of Medicine (IOM) issued a report, "Adverse Effects of Vaccines: Evidence and Causality." [33] The report brief stated that "evidence favors rejection of a causal relationship" between the Measles-Mumps-Rubella (MMR) vaccine and autism. [34] The Cochrane Collaboration, in a Feb. 15, 2012 independent investigation of studies on vaccines and autism concluded, "We could assess no significant association between MMR immunisation and the following conditions: autism, asthma, leukaemia, hay fever, type 1 diabetes, gait disturbance, Chrohn's disease, demyelinating diseases, or bacterial or viral infections." [35] A study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America (PNAS) on Oct. 6, 2015 found that infant rhesus macaques, whose physiology closely resembles human infants, injected with human childhood vaccines from the early 1990s (that contained thimerosal) and from 2008 (after thimerosal was phased out of childhood vaccines) exhibited no behavioral or neuropathological changes that could be linked to autism. [114] [115] A Mar. 5, 2019 study published in the Annals of Internal Medicine, studied 657,461 children over ten years in Denmark, and concluded, "The study strongly supports that MMR vaccination does not increase the risk for autism, does not trigger autism in susceptible children, and is not associated with clustering of autism cases after vaccination." [122]. * Potential Consequences for Unvaccinated Children and Their Parents: State laws in North Carolina, Ohio, and New York allow the public school system to suspend children who are not vaccinated. [36] [37] [38] Approximately 2,000 seventh- to twelfth-grade children not vaccinated against pertussis (whooping cough) were barred from attending classes in San Francisco in 2011. [39] On June 22, 2014, federal Judge William Kuntz upheld New York state law barring unvaccinated children from public school when other children have chickenpox. [38] [40] Many pediatricians will not treat children who have not been vaccinated. [41] Some legal experts believe that parents who do not vaccinate their children should be subject to criminal prosecution (including criminally negligent homicide and monetary damages) if their unvaccinated children infect and harm other children who are too young or immunocompromised to receive vaccines. [42]. * Eradication and Elimination of Disease: Elimination means that the disease is not present in a region, while eradication means that the disease does not exist anywhere globally. Smallpox was declared globally eradicated in 1980, the first and only disease to be eradicated thus far. Polio was declared eliminated in the United States in 1979 and in the Western Hemisphere in 1994. [120] Rubella was declared eliminated in the Americas on Apr. 29, 2015, and measles on Sep. 27, 2016. [116] [119] The World Health Organization states that eradication and elimination is the product of vaccination programs that promote high rates of inoculation, while those opposed to vaccination state that better sanitation and clean water led to the elimination of the diseases. [117] [118]. * Here are the pros and cons to vaccines: Pro 1 Vaccines can save children's lives. * The American Academy of Pediatrics states that "most childhood vaccines are 90%-99% effective in preventing disease." [43] According to Shot@Life, a United Nations Foundation partner organization, vaccines save 2.5 million children from preventable diseases every year [44], which equates to roughly 285 children saved every hour. The Centers for Disease Control (CDC) estimated that childhood immunization prevented about 419 million illnesses, 26.8 million hospitalizations, and 936,000 early deaths of children born between 1994 and 2018. [128] The measles vaccine has decreased childhood deaths from measles by 74%. [44]. Con 1 Vaccines can cause serious and sometimes fatal side effects. * According to the CDC, all vaccines carry a risk of a life-threatening allergic reaction (anaphylaxis) in about one per million children. [49] The rotavirus vaccination can cause intussusception, a type of bowel blockage that may require hospitalization, in about one per 20,000 babies in the United States. [49] Long-term seizures, coma, lowered consciousness, and permanent brain damage may be associated with the DTaP (diphtheria, tetanus, and pertussis) and MMR vaccines, though the CDC notes the rarity of the reaction makes it difficult to determine causation. [49] The CDC reports that pneumonia can be caused by the chickenpox vaccine, and a "small possibility" exists that the flu vaccine could be associated with Guillain-Barré Syndrome, a disorder in which the person's immune system attacks parts of the peripheral nervous system, in about one or two per million people vaccinated. [49]. Pro 2 The ingredients in vaccines are safe in the amounts used. * Ingredients, such as thimerosal, formaldehyde, and aluminum, can be harmful in large doses but they are not used in harmful quantities in vaccines. Children are exposed to more aluminum in breast milk and infant formula than they are exposed to in vaccines. [46] Paul Offit, MD, notes that children are exposed to more bacteria, viruses, toxins, and other harmful substances in one day of normal activity than are in vaccines. [46] With the exception of inactivated flu vaccines, thimerosal (a mercury compound) has been removed or reduced to trace amounts in vaccines for children under 6 years old. [47] The FDA requires up to 10 or more years of testing for all vaccines before they are licensed, and then they are monitored by the CDC and the FDA to make sure the vaccines and the ingredients used in the vaccines are safe. [48]. Con 2 Vaccines contain harmful ingredients. * Aluminum is used in some vaccines and excess aluminum in human bodies can cause neurological harm. [85] Formaldehyde, also found in some vaccines, is a carcinogen, and, according to VaxTruth.org, exposure can cause side effects such as cardiac impairment, central nervous system depression, "changes in higher cognitive functions," coma, convulsions, and death. [86] Glutaraldehyde, a compound used to disinfect medical and dental equipment, is used in some DTaP vaccinations and exposure can cause asthma and other respiratory issues. [86] Some flu vaccines contain cetyltrimethylammonium bromide (CTMB), a compound used as an antiseptic, which can be a skin, eye, and respiratory irritant. Some polio, TD, and DTaP vaccines contain 2-phenoxyethanol, an antibacterial that is a skin and eye irritant that can cause headache, shock, convulsions, kidney damage, cardiac and kidney failure, and death. [86] Some vaccines for the flu contain chicken egg protein, which can be harmful to children who are allergic to eggs. [87] Some vaccines for PCV, HPV, DTaP, Hep A, Hep B, and Hib contain yeast proteins which, according to VaxTruth and Joseph Mercola, MD, an alternative medicine proponent, contain MSG that can cause migraines, irritable bowel syndrome (IBS), asthma, diabetes, Alzheimer's, Lou Gehrig's disease, ADD, seizure, and stroke. [86][88]. Pro 3 Major medical organizations state that vaccines are safe. * These organizations include: CDC, Food and Drug Administration (FDA), Institute of Medicine (IOM), American Medical Association (AMA), American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP), UNICEF, US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), World Health Organization (WHO), Public Health Agency of Canada, Canadian Paediatric Society, National Foundation for Infectious Diseases (NFID), and American Academy of Family Physicians (AAFP). [49][50][43][51][52][54][55][56][57][58] The WHO states, "Vaccines are very safe." [59] The US Department of Health and Human Services states, "Vaccines are some of the safest medical products available." [51] A July 2020 study of FDA-approved vaccines from Jan. 1, 1996 through Dec. 31, 2015 conducted by researchers at the Tel Aviv Sourasky Medical Center in Israel stated "vaccines were found to be remarkably safe."[133]. Con 3 The government should not intervene in personal medical choices. * Medical decisions for children should be left to the parents or caregivers. Barbara Loe Fisher, Co-founder of National Vaccine Information Center, stated, "If the State can tag, track down and force citizens against their will to be injected with biological products of known and unknown toxicity today, there will be no limit on which individual freedoms the State can take away in the name of the greater good tomorrow." [89] Ron Paul, MD, former US Representative (R-TX), stated, "intimately personal medical decisions should not be made by government... Freedom over one's physical person is the most basic freedom of all, and people in a free society should be sovereign over their own bodies. When we give government the power to make medical decisions for us, we in essence accept that the state owns our bodies." [90]. Pro 4 Adverse reactions to vaccines are extremely rare. * The most common side effect of vaccines, anaphylaxis (a severe allergic reaction), occurs in one per several hundred thousand to one per million vaccinations. [60] According to Sanjay Gupta, MD, Chief Medical Correspondent for CNN and practicing neurosurgeon, "you are 100 times more likely to be struck by lightning than to have a serious allergic reaction to the vaccine that protects you against measles." [113] Ellen Clayton, MD, JD, Professor of Pediatrics and Law at Vanderbilt Law School, stated: "The MMR vaccine does not cause autism... The MMR and DTaP do not cause Type 1 diabetes. And the killed flu vaccine does not cause Bell's palsy, and it does not trigger episodes of asthma." [50] Combination vaccines, like MMR (measles, mumps, and rubella), have been used without adverse effects since the mid-1940s.[60]. Con 4 Mandatory vaccines infringe upon constitutionally protected religious freedoms. * Several religions oppose vaccines and mandatory vaccinations. The First Amendment of the US Constitution states, "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof." [91] In the ruling for Cantwell v. Connecticut (1939; 9-0), the US Supreme Court held that state and local governments' infringement upon religious freedom is also unconstitutional. [92] Some Christian Scientists consider vaccinations against their religion because founder Mary Baker Eddy stated that the "calm, Christian state of mind is a better preventative of contagion than a drug, or than any other possible sanative method... the 'perfect Love' that 'casteth out fear' is a sure defense." [93] Amish communities do not view all vaccinations as "necessary" and some believe that vaccinations weaken the immune system. [78][94] The Church of Illumination states that "the teachings of the Church unequivocally affirm that injections of vaccines and inoculations are a violation of these biblical teachings... Immunizations and vaccinations are a form of blood pollution because they have devastating effects on the regeneration of the soul that each Church member seeks to attain." [95] The Universal Family Church believes that parents should decide whether their children should be vaccinated and that "God intends the health decisions of individuals should... be honored by all authorities." [96]. Pro 5 Vaccines protect the "herd." * Herd immunity (or community immunity) means that when a "critical portion" (the percent of people who need to be vaccinated to provide herd immunity) of a population is vaccinated against a contagious disease it is unlikely that an outbreak of the disease will occur so most members of the community will be protected. [61] Children and adults who cannot be vaccinated due to age, poor health (who are immune-compromised or undergoing chemotherapy, for example), or other reasons rely on herd immunity to prevent contraction of vaccine-preventable diseases. [62] An Apr. 2019 measles outbreak resulted in the quarantine of over 200 people who had been exposed to the measles on the campuses of the University of California at Los Angeles and California State University. Because they could not verify their vaccinations, quarantining them raised the campus' herd immunity and blocked the spread of the disease. [123] In 2011, 49 US states did not meet the 92-94% herd immunity threshold for pertussis (whooping cough), resulting in a 2012 outbreak that sickened 48,277 people and was the biggest outbreak since 1955. [64][124] In 2005, an 18-month-old Amish girl contracted polio and spread the disease to four other unvaccinated children, but, because the community met the herd immunity threshold for the disease, there was no polio outbreak. [65][66]. Con 5 Vaccines can contain ingredients some people consider immoral or otherwise objectionable. * Some DTaP/IPV/Hib combination, Hep A/Hep B combination, HepA, MMR, and chickenpox vaccines are cultivated in cells from two fetuses aborted in the 1960s (listed as MRC-5 and WI-38 on package inserts). The Catholic Church, in a report about using vaccines made using cells from aborted fetuses, indicated that "there is a grave responsibility to use alternative vaccines" to avoid the "evil" of actively or passively participating in anything that involves voluntary abortion. [97] Some vaccines for DTaP, Hep A, RV, Hib, HPV, IPV, flu, MMR, and chickenpox are made using animal products like chicken eggs, bovine casein, insect cells, Cocker Spaniel cells, pig gelatin, and cells from African Green monkeys, making those vaccines conflict with some vegetarian and vegan philosophies. Others consider it problematic that some vaccines are produced using human albumin, a blood plasma protein. Pro 6 Vaccines save children and their parents time and money. * Vaccines cost less in time and money to obtain than infectious diseases cost in time off of work to care for a sick child, potential long-term disability care, and medical costs. [67] For example, children under five with the flu are contagious for about eight days, and, according to a 2012 CDC study, cost their parents an average of 11 to 73 hours of wages (about $222 to $1,456) and $300 to $4,000 in medical expenses. [68][69] Children with rotavirus are contagious for up to 30 days. [70] A 2018 study found that each case of measles in Arkansas cost the health department $47,962. [125] As of May 20, there were 880 cases of measles in 24 states in 2019, costing taxpayers an estimated $42.2 million. [125] [126] Furthermore, under the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA, or Obamacare) many vaccines are available to children and adults without copay. [71]. Con 6 Vaccines are unnatural, and natural immunity is more effective than vaccination. * Even pro-vaccine organizations state that natural vaccination causes better immunity. The Children's Hospital of Philadelphia notes that "It is true that natural infection almost always causes better immunity than vaccines. Whereas immunity from disease often follows a single natural infection, immunity from vaccines occurs only after several doses." [98] Mayo Clinic states that natural infection "often provides more complete immunity than a series of vaccinations." [99] Kurt Perkins, DC, a chiropractor and wellness expert, stated, "A vaccine violates all laws of natural immune defenses by taking a potential pathogen along with all the TOXIC ingredients (aluminum, formaldehyde, adjuvants, etc.) directly into your blood system. This process would never occur in building natural immunity. That last sentence is kind of an oxy-moron. Immunity is a natural thing. Vaccines are an artificial thing." [100]. Pro 7 Vaccines protect future generations. * Vaccinated mothers protect their unborn children from viruses that could potentially cause birth defects, and vaccinated communities can help eradicate diseases for future generations. Before the rubella vaccine was licensed in 1969, a global rubella (German measles) outbreak caused the deaths of 11,000 babies, and birth defects in 20,000 babies between 1963 and 1965 in the United States. [72] Women who were vaccinated as children against rubella have greatly decreased the chance of passing the virus to their unborn or newborn children, eliminating the birth defects, such as heart problems, hearing and vision loss, congenital cataracts, liver and spleen damage, and mental disabilities, associated with the disease. [51][72][73]. Con 7 The pharmaceutical companies, FDA, and CDC should not be trusted to make and regulate safe vaccines. * The primary goal of pharmaceutical companies is to sell drugs and make a profit. William Posey, Congressman (R-FL), stated in an Apr. 8, 2014 interview, "The incestuous relationship between the public health community and the vaccine makers and government officials should not be allowed to continue. I mean, you know, too many top CDC personnel go to work for the vaccine makers when they leave. That's a revolving door that creates a serious conflict of interest and perverts incentives that compromise integrity." [101] Julie Gerberding, President of Merck Vaccines, was the CDC director from 2002-2009. [102] A vaccine for Lyme disease, LYMErix, was licensed by the FDA and marketed for almost four years before being pulled from the market after several class action lawsuits were filed due to a potential causal relationship to autoimmune arthritis. [103] Rotashield, a vaccine for rotavirus (RV), was pulled from the market by the manufacturer nine months after it was introduced after it was discovered that the vaccine might have contributed to higher instances of intussusception (bowel obstruction). [104]. Pro 8 Vaccines eradicated smallpox and have nearly eradicated other diseases such as polio. * Children are no longer vaccinated against smallpox because the disease no longer exists due to vaccination. [74] The last case of smallpox in the United States was in 1948; the last case in the world was 1977 in Somalia. [74] In the twentieth century, there were 16,316 deaths from polio and 29,004 deaths from smallpox yearly in the United States; in 2012 there were no reported cases of polio or smallpox. [75] According to UNICEF, there were 500 cases of polio in 2014 worldwide (appearing only in three countries: Afghanistan, Nigeria, and Pakistan), down from 350,000 cases in 1988, thanks to vaccination programs. [52] Diphtheria killed 21,053 people yearly, measles killed 530,217 people yearly, mumps killed 162,344 people yearly, rubella killed 47,745 people yearly, and Hib killed 20,000 people yearly in the twentieth century United States; by 2012 each of these diseases were decreased by 99% because of vaccinations. [75]. Con 8 Diseases that vaccines target have essentially disappeared. * There is no reason to vaccinate against diseases that no longer occur in the United States. The CDC reported 57 cases of and nine deaths from diphtheria between 1980 and 2016 in the United States. [13][129] Fewer than 64 cases and 11 deaths per year from tetanus have been reported since 1989. [129] Polio has been declared eradicated in the United States since 1979. [105] There have been only 32 deaths from mumps and 42 deaths from rubella since 1979.[129]. Pro 9 Vaccine-preventable diseases have not disappeared so vaccination is still necessary. * The CDC notes that many vaccine-preventable diseases are still in the United States or "only a plane ride away." [76] Although the paralytic form of polio has largely disappeared thanks to vaccination, the virus still exists in Afghanistan, Nigeria, and Pakistan where there were 415, 103, and ten cases respectively between Jan. 2014 and May 14, 2019. [65][77][127] The polio virus can be incubated by a person without symptoms for years; that person can then accidentally infect an unvaccinated child (or adult) in whom the virus can mutate into its paralytic form and spread amongst unvaccinated people. [65] Between Jan. 1, 2019 and May 17, 2019, there were 880 individual measles cases reported in 24 states (compared to 372 cases in all of 2018). [131] Of those, 44 cases were directly imported from 12 other countries, including Philippines, Ukraine, Israel, and Thailand. [130] According to the WHO, in Jan. 2019 alone, there were 1,802 cases of measles in Philippines, 13,760 in Ukraine, 290 in Israel, and 797 in Thailand. [132] UNICEF reported that, globally, 453,000 children die from rotavirus, 476,000 die from pneumococcus (the bacterium that causes pneumonia, meningitis, and blood infections), 199,000 die from Hib (a bacterium that causes pneumonia and meningitis), 195,000 die from pertussis (whooping cough), 118,000 die from the measles, and 60,000 die from tetanus each year, all vaccine-preventable diseases. [52]. Con 9 Most diseases that vaccines target are relatively harmless in many cases, thus making vaccines unnecessary. * The chickenpox is often just a rash with blisters and can be treated with acetaminophen, cool compresses, and calamine lotion. [106] The measles is normally a rash accompanied by a fever and runny nose and can be treated with rest and fluids. [107][108] Rubella is often just a virus with a rash and low fever and can be treated with acetaminophen. [72][109] Rotavirus can normally be treated with hydration and probiotics. [110][111]. Pro 10 Vaccines provide economic benefits for society. * The CDC estimates that vaccinated children born between 1994 and 2018 have yielded net savings of $406 billion in direct costs and $1.9 trillion in societal costs, which includes money saved by preventing lost productivity due to disability and early death.[128] The United States saves about $27 per $1 invested in DTaP vaccination, and $13 per $1 spent on MMR vaccination. [80] UNICEF estimates that $6.2 billion could be saved in treatment costs if vaccines were more prominent in the world's poorest countries. [52] According to the International Vaccines Access Center at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, $62.9 billion could be saved by providing Hib, pneumococcal, and rotavirus vaccinations to the 73 poorest countries: $1.4 billion in treatment costs, $300 million in lost caretaker wages, $6.2 billion in lifetime productivity loss due to disability, and $55 billion in lifetime productivity loss because of death. [81]. Did You Know? 1. All 50 states require vaccinations for children entering public schools even though no mandatory federal vaccination laws exist. All 50 states issue medical exemptions, 47 states (excluding California, Mississippi, and West Virginia) permit religious exemptions, and 16 states allow an exemption for philosophical reasons. [1] 2. Between 1989 and July 1, 2014, 3,645 compensation awards have been made by the National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program (VICP) (amounting to over $2.7 billion in awards and $113.2 million to cover legal costs) and 9,786 claims have been dismissed (amounting to $62.8 million paid to 4,925 dismissed claimants to cover legal costs). [17] 3. The Centers for Disease Control (CDC) estimated that 732,000 American children were saved from death and 322 million cases of childhood illnesses were prevented between 1994 and 2014 due to vaccination. [45] 4. About 30,000 cases of adverse reactions to vaccines have been reported annually to the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) since 1990, with 10-15% classified as serious, meaning associated with permanent disability, hospitalization, life-threatening illness, or death. [18] 5. In 1855 Massachusetts passed the first US state law mandating vaccinations for schoolchildren [5], followed by New York (1862), Connecticut (1872), Indiana (1881), and Arkansas (1882). [6 * * * *

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undersized; a small animal or person

How should I eat for sports?

A Guide to Eating for Sports Reviewed by: Mary L. Gavin, MD Print en español Guía de alimentación para deportistas Eat Extra for Excellence The good news about eating for sports is that reaching your peak performance level doesn't take a special diet or supplements. It's all about working the right foods into your fitness plan in the right amounts. Teen athletes have different nutrition needs than their less-active peers. Athletes work out more, so they need extra calories to fuel both their sports performance and their growth. So what happens if teen athletes don't eat enough? Their bodies are less likely to achieve peak performance and may even break down muscles rather than build them. Athletes who don't take in enough calories every day won't be as fast and as strong as they could be and might not maintain their weight. Athletes and Dieting Teen athletes need extra fuel, so it's usually a bad idea to diet. Athletes in sports where there's a focus on weight — such as wrestling, swimming, dance, or gymnastics — might feel pressure to lose weight. But drastically cutting back on calories can lead to growth problems and a higher risk of fractures and other injuries. If a coach, gym teacher, or teammate says that you need to go on a diet, talk to your doctor first or visit a dietitian who specializes in teen athletes. If a health professional you trust agrees that it's safe to diet, they can work with you to create a healthy eating plan. Eat a Variety of Foods When it comes to powering your game for the long haul, it's important to eat healthy, balanced meals and snacks to get the nutrients your body needs. The MyPlate food guide can guide you on what kinds of foods and drinks to include in your diet. Vital Vitamins and Minerals Besides getting the right amount of calories, teen athletes need a variety of nutrients from the foods they eat to keep performing at their best. These include vitamins and minerals. Calcium and iron are two important minerals for athletes: Calcium helps build the strong bones that athletes depend on. Calcium — a must for protecting against stress fractures — is found in dairy foods, such as low-fat milk, yogurt, and cheese. Iron carries oxygen to muscles. To get the iron you need, eat lean meat, fish, and poultry; leafy green vegetables; and iron-fortified cereals. Protein Power Athletes may need more protein than less-active teens, but most get plenty through a healthy diet. It's a myth that athletes need a huge daily intake of protein to build large, strong muscles. Muscle growth comes from regular training and hard work. Good sources of protein are fish, lean meats and poultry, eggs, dairy, nuts, soy, and peanut butter. Carb Charge Carbohydrates are an excellent source of fuel. Cutting back on carbs or following low-carb diets isn't a good idea for athletes. That's because restricting carbs can make you feel tired and worn out, which can hurt your performance. Good sources of carbs include fruits, vegetables, and grains. Choose whole grains (such as brown rice, oatmeal, whole-wheat bread) more often than processed options like white rice and white bread. Whole grains provide the energy athletes need and the fiber and other nutrients to keep them healthy. Sugary carbs such as candy bars or sodas don't contain any of the other nutrients you need. And eating candy bars or other sugary snacks just before practice or competition can give athletes a quick burst of energy, but then leave them to "crash" or run out of energy before they've finished working out. Fat Fuel Everyone needs some fat each day, and this is extra true for athletes. That's because active muscles quickly burn through carbs and need fats for long-lasting energy. Like carbs, not all fats are created equal. Choose healthier fats, such as the unsaturated fat found in most vegetable oils, fish, and nuts and seeds. Limit trans fat (like partially hydrogenated oils) and saturated fat, found in fatty meat and dairy products like whole milk, cheese, and butter. Choosing when to eat fats is also important for athletes. Fatty foods can slow digestion, so it's a good idea to avoid eating them for a few hours before exercising. Skip the Supplements Sports supplements promise to improve sports performance. But few have proved to help, and some may do harm. Anabolic steroids can seriously mess with a person's hormones , causing unwanted side effects like testicular shrinkage and baldness in guys and facial hair growth in girls. Steroids can cause mental health problems, including depression and serious mood swings. Some supplements contain hormones related to testosterone, such as DHEA (dehydroepiandrosterone). These can have similar side effects to anabolic steroids. Other sports supplements (like creatine) have not been tested in people younger than 18. So the risks of taking them are not yet known. Salt tablets are another supplement to watch out for. People take them to avoid dehydration, but salt tablets can actually lead to dehydration and must be taken with plenty of water. Too much salt can cause nausea, vomiting, cramps, and diarrhea and may damage the stomach lining. In general, you are better off drinking fluids to stay hydrated. Usually, you can make up for any salt lost in sweat with sports drinks or foods you eat before, during, and after exercise. Ditch Dehydration Speaking of dehydration, water is as important to unlocking your game power as food. When you sweat during exercise, it's easy to become overheated, headachy, and worn out — especially in hot or humid weather. Even mild dehydration can affect an athlete's physical and mental performance. There's no one set guide for how much water to drink. How much fluid each person needs depends on their age, size, level of physical activity, and environmental temperature. Athletes should drink before, during, and after exercise. Don't wait until you feel thirsty, because thirst is a sign that your body has needed liquids for a while. Sports drinks are no better for you than water to keep you hydrated during sports. But if you exercise for more than 60 to 90 minutes or in very hot weather, sports drinks may be a good option. The extra carbs and electrolytes may improve performance in these conditions. Otherwise your body will do just as well with water. Avoid drinking carbonated drinks or juice because they could give you a stomachache while you're training or competing. Don't use energy drinks and other caffeine-containing drinks, like soda, tea, and coffee, for rehydration. You could end up drinking large amounts of caffeine, which can increase heart rate and blood pressure. Too much caffeine can leave an athlete feeling anxious or jittery. Caffeine also can cause headaches and make it hard to sleep at night. These all can drag down your sports performance. Game-Day Eats Your performance on game day will depend on the foods you've eaten over the past several days and weeks. You can boost your performance even more by paying attention to the food you eat on game day. Focus on a diet rich in carbohydrates, moderate in protein, and low in fat. Here are some tips: Eat a meal 3 to 4 hours before activity. Include plenty of carbs and some protein but keep the fat low. Fat takes longer to digest, which can cause an upset stomach. Carbs may include pasta, bread, fruits, and vegetables. Avoid sugary foods and drinks. When there are 3 hours or less before game or practice, eat a lighter meal or snack that includes easy-to-digest carbohydrate-containing foods, such as fruit, crackers, or bread. After the game or event, experts recommend eating within 30 minutes after intense activity and again 2 hours later. Your body will be rebuilding muscle and replenishing energy stores and fluids, so continue to hydrate and eat a balance of lean protein and carbs. Everyone is different, so get to know what works best for you. You may want to experiment with meal timing and how much to eat on practice days so that you're better prepared for game day. Reviewed by: Mary L. Gavin, MD Date reviewed: January 2021 (Kids health)

What should I know about Abraham Lincoln?

Abraham Lincoln, byname Honest Abe, the Rail-Splitter, or the Great Emancipator, (born February 12, 1809, near Hodgenville, Kentucky, U.S.—died April 15, 1865, Washington, D.C.), 16th president of the United States (1861-65), who preserved the Union during the American Civil War and brought about the emancipation of enslaved people in the United States. Among American heroes, Lincoln continues to have a unique appeal for his fellow countrymen and also for people of other lands. This charm derives from his remarkable life story—the rise from humble origins, the dramatic death—and from his distinctively human and humane personality as well as from his historical role as saviour of the Union and emancipator of enslaved people. His relevance endures and grows especially because of his eloquence as a spokesman for democracy. In his view, the Union was worth saving not only for its own sake but because it embodied an ideal, the ideal of self-government. In recent years, the political side to Lincoln's character, and his racial views in particular, have come under close scrutiny, as scholars continue to find him a rich subject for research. The Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C., was dedicated to him on May 30, 1922. Life Lincoln was born in a backwoods cabin 3 miles (5 km) south of Hodgenville, Kentucky, and was taken to a farm in the neighbouring valley of Knob Creek when he was two years old. His earliest memories were of this home and, in particular, of a flash flood that once washed away the corn and pumpkin seeds he had helped his father plant. His father, Thomas Lincoln, was the descendant of a weaver's apprentice who had migrated from England to Massachusetts in 1637. Though much less prosperous than some of his Lincoln forebears, Thomas was a sturdy pioneer. On June 12, 1806, he married Nancy Hanks. The Hanks genealogy is difficult to trace, but Nancy appears to have been of illegitimate birth. She has been described as "stoop-shouldered, thin-breasted, sad," and fervently religious. Thomas and Nancy Lincoln had three children: Sarah, Abraham, and Thomas, who died in infancy. In December 1816, faced with a lawsuit challenging the title to his Kentucky farm, Thomas Lincoln moved with his family to southwestern Indiana. There, as a squatter on public land, he hastily put up a "half-faced camp"—a crude structure of logs and boughs with one side open to the weather—in which the family took shelter behind a blazing fire. Soon he built a permanent cabin, and later he bought the land on which it stood. Abraham helped to clear the fields and to take care of the crops but early acquired a dislike for hunting and fishing. In afteryears he recalled the "panther's scream," the bears that "preyed on the swine," and the poverty of Indiana frontier life, which was "pretty pinching at times." The unhappiest period of his boyhood followed the death of his mother in the autumn of 1818. As a ragged nine-year-old, he saw her buried in the forest, then faced a winter without the warmth of a mother's love. Fortunately, before the onset of a second winter, Thomas Lincoln brought home from Kentucky a new wife for himself, a new mother for the children. Sarah Bush Johnston Lincoln, a widow with two girls and a boy of her own, had energy and affection to spare. She ran the household with an even hand, treating both sets of children as if she had borne them all; but she became especially fond of Abraham, and he of her. He afterward referred to her as his "angel mother." His stepmother doubtless encouraged Lincoln's taste for reading, yet the original source of his desire to learn remains something of a mystery. Both his parents were almost completely illiterate, and he himself received little formal education. He once said that, as a boy, he had gone to school "by littles"—a little now and a little then—and his entire schooling amounted to no more than one year's attendance. His neighbours later recalled how he used to trudge for miles to borrow a book. According to his own statement, however, his early surroundings provided "absolutely nothing to excite ambition for education. Of course, when I came of age I did not know much. Still, somehow, I could read, write, and cipher to the rule of three; but that was all." Apparently the young Lincoln did not read a large number of books but thoroughly absorbed the few that he did read. These included Parson Weems's Life and Memorable Actions of George Washington (with its story of the little hatchet and the cherry tree), Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe, John Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress, and Aesop's Fables. From his earliest days he must have had some familiarity with the Bible, for it doubtless was the only book his family owned. In March 1830 the Lincoln family undertook a second migration, this time to Illinois, with Lincoln himself driving the team of oxen. Having just reached the age of 21, he was about to begin life on his own. Six feet four inches tall, he was rawboned and lanky but muscular and physically powerful. He was especially noted for the skill and strength with which he could wield an ax. He spoke with a backwoods twang and walked in the long-striding, flat-footed, cautious manner of a plowman. Good-natured though somewhat moody, talented as a mimic and storyteller, he readily attracted friends. But he was yet to demonstrate whatever other abilities he possessed. After his arrival in Illinois, having no desire to be a farmer, Lincoln tried his hand at a variety of occupations. As a rail-splitter, he helped to clear and fence his father's new farm. As a flatboatman, he made a voyage down the Mississippi River to New Orleans, Louisiana. (This was his second visit to that city, his first having been made in 1828, while he still lived in Indiana.) Upon his return to Illinois he settled in New Salem, a village of about 25 families on the Sangamon River. There he worked from time to time as storekeeper, postmaster, and surveyor. With the coming of the Black Hawk War (1832), he enlisted as a volunteer and was elected captain of his company. Afterward he joked that he had seen no "live, fighting Indians" during the war but had had "a good many bloody struggles with the mosquitoes." Meanwhile, aspiring to be a legislator, he was defeated in his first try and then repeatedly reelected to the state assembly. He considered blacksmithing as a trade but finally decided in favour of the law. Already having taught himself grammar and mathematics, he began to study law books. In 1836, having passed the bar examination, he began to practice law. Prairie lawyer The next year he moved to Springfield, Illinois, the new state capital, which offered many more opportunities for a lawyer than New Salem did. At first Lincoln was a partner of John T. Stuart, then of Stephen T. Logan, and finally, from 1844, of William H. Herndon. Nearly 10 years younger than Lincoln, Herndon was more widely read, more emotional at the bar, and generally more extreme in his views. Yet this partnership seems to have been as nearly perfect as such human arrangements ever are. Lincoln and Herndon kept few records of their law business, and they split the cash between them whenever either of them was paid. It seems they had no money quarrels. Within a few years of his relocation to Springfield, Lincoln was earning $1,200 to $1,500 annually, at a time when the governor of the state received a salary of $1,200 and circuit judges only $750. He had to work hard. To keep himself busy, he found it necessary not only to practice in the capital but also to follow the court as it made the rounds of its circuit. Each spring and fall he would set out by horseback or buggy to travel hundreds of miles over the thinly settled prairie, from one little county seat to another. Most of the cases were petty and the fees small. The coming of the railroads, especially after 1850, made travel easier and practice more remunerative. Lincoln served as a lobbyist for the Illinois Central Railroad, assisting it in getting a charter from the state, and thereafter he was retained as a regular attorney for that railroad. After successfully defending the company against the efforts of McLean county to tax its property, he received the largest single fee of his legal career—$5,000. (He had to sue the Illinois Central in order to collect the fee.) He also handled cases for other railroads and for banks, insurance companies, and mercantile and manufacturing firms. In one of his finest performances before the bar, he saved the Rock Island Bridge, the first to span the Mississippi River, from the threat of the river transportation interests that demanded the bridge's removal. His business included a number of patent suits and criminal trials. One of his most effective and famous pleas had to do with a murder case. A witness claimed that, by the light of the moon, he had seen Duff Armstrong, an acquaintance of Lincoln's, take part in a killing. Referring to an almanac for proof, Lincoln argued that the night had been too dark for the witness to have seen anything clearly, and with a sincere and moving appeal he won an acquittal. By the time he began to be prominent in national politics, about 20 years after launching his legal career, Lincoln had made himself one of the most distinguished and successful lawyers in Illinois. He was noted not only for his shrewdness and practical common sense, which enabled him always to see to the heart of any legal case, but also for his invariable fairness and utter honesty. Lincoln's family While residing in New Salem, Lincoln became acquainted with Ann Rutledge. Apparently he was fond of her, and certainly he grieved with the entire community at her untimely death, in 1835, at the age of 22. Afterward, stories were told of a grand romance between Lincoln and Rutledge, but these stories are not supported by sound historical evidence. A year after the death of Rutledge, Lincoln carried on a halfhearted courtship with Mary Owens, who eventually concluded that Lincoln was "deficient in those little links which make up the chain of woman's happiness." She turned down his proposal. So far as can be known, the first and only real love of Lincoln's life was Mary Todd. High-spirited, quick-witted, and well-educated, Todd came from a rather distinguished Kentucky family, and her Springfield relatives belonged to the social aristocracy of the town. Some of them frowned upon her association with Lincoln, and from time to time he, too, doubted whether he could ever make her happy. Nevertheless, they became engaged. Then, on a day in 1841 that Lincoln recalled as the "fatal first of January," the engagement was broken, apparently on his initiative. For some time afterward, Lincoln was overwhelmed by terrible depression and despondency. Finally the two were reconciled, and on November 4, 1842, they married. Four children, all boys, were born to the Lincolns. Edward Baker was nearly 4 years old when he died, and William Wallace ("Willie") was 11. Robert Todd, the eldest, was the only one of the children to survive to adulthood, though Lincoln's favourite, Thomas ("Tad"), who had a cleft palate and a lisp, outlived his father. Lincoln left the upbringing of his children largely to their mother, who was alternately strict and lenient in her treatment of them. The Lincolns had a mutual affectionate interest in the doings and welfare of their boys, were fond of one another's company, and missed each other when apart, as existing letters show. Like most married couples, the Lincolns also had their domestic quarrels, which sometimes were hectic but which undoubtedly were exaggerated by contemporary gossips. She suffered from recurring headaches, fits of temper, and a sense of insecurity and loneliness that was intensified by her husband's long absences on the lawyer's circuit. After his election to the presidency, she was afflicted by the death of her son Willie, by the ironies of a war that made enemies of Kentucky relatives and friends, and by the unfair public criticisms of her as mistress of the White House. She developed an obsessive need to spend money, and she ran up embarrassing bills. She also staged some painful scenes of wifely jealousy. At last, in 1875, she was officially declared insane, though by that time she had undergone the further shock of seeing her husband murdered at her side. During their earlier married life, she unquestionably encouraged her husband and served as a prod to his own ambition. During their later years together, she probably strengthened and tested his innate qualities of tolerance and patience. With his wife, Lincoln attended Presbyterian services in Springfield and in Washington but never joined any church. He once explained: When any church will inscribe over its altar, as its sole qualification for membership, the Saviour's condensed statement of the substance of both Law and Gospel, "Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind, and thy neighbor, as thyself," that church will I join with all my heart and all my soul. Early in life Lincoln had been something of a skeptic and freethinker. His reputation had been such that, as he once complained, the "church influence" was used against him in politics. When running for Congress in 1846, he issued a handbill to deny that he ever had "spoken with intentional disrespect of religion." He went on to explain that he had believed in the doctrine of necessity—"that is, that the human mind is impelled to action, or held in rest by some power over which the mind itself has no control." Throughout his life he also believed in dreams and other enigmatic signs and portents. As he grew older, and especially after he became president and faced the soul-troubling responsibilities of the Civil War, he developed a profound religious sense, and he increasingly personified necessity as God. He came to look upon himself quite humbly as an "instrument of Providence" and to view all history as God's enterprise. "In the present civil war," he wrote in 1862, "it is quite possible that God's purpose is something different from the purpose of either party—and yet the human instrumentalities, working just as they do, are of the best adaptation to effect His purpose." Lincoln was fond of the Bible and knew it well. He also was fond of Shakespeare. In private conversation he used many Shakespearean allusions, discussed problems of dramatic interpretation with considerable insight, and recited long passages from memory with rare feeling and understanding. He liked the works of John Stuart Mill, particularly On Liberty, but disliked heavy or metaphysical works. Though he enjoyed the poems of Lord Byron and Robert Burns, his favourite piece of verse was the work of an obscure Scottish poet, William Knox. Lincoln often quoted Knox's lines beginning: "Oh! why should the spirit of mortal be proud?" He liked to relax with the comic writings of Petroleum V. Nasby, Orpheus C. Kerr, and Artemus Ward, or with a visit to the popular theatre. Early political career of Abraham Lincoln When Lincoln first entered politics, Andrew Jackson was president. Lincoln shared the sympathies that the Jacksonians professed for the common man, but he disagreed with the Jacksonian view that the government should be divorced from economic enterprise. "The legitimate object of government," he was later to say, "is to do for a community of people whatever they need to have done, but cannot do at all, or cannot do so well, for themselves, in their separate and individual capacities." Among the prominent politicians of his time, he most admired Henry Clay and Daniel Webster. Clay and Webster advocated using the powers of the federal government to encourage business and develop the country's resources by means of a national bank, a protective tariff, and a program of internal improvements for facilitating transportation. In Lincoln's view, Illinois and the West as a whole desperately needed such aid for economic development. From the outset, he associated himself with the party of Clay and Webster, the Whigs. As a Whig member of the Illinois State Legislature, to which he was elected four times from 1834 to 1840, Lincoln devoted himself to a grandiose project for constructing with state funds a network of railroads, highways, and canals. Whigs and Democrats joined in passing an omnibus bill for these undertakings, but the panic of 1837 and the ensuing business depression brought about the abandonment of most of them. While in the legislature he demonstrated that, though opposed to slavery, he was no abolitionist. In 1837, in response to the mob murder of Elijah Lovejoy, an antislavery newspaperman of Alton, the legislature introduced resolutions condemning abolitionist societies and defending slavery in the Southern states as "sacred" by virtue of the federal Constitution. Lincoln refused to vote for the resolutions. Together with a fellow member, he drew up a protest that declared, on the one hand, that slavery was "founded on both injustice and bad policy" and, on the other, that "the promulgation of abolition doctrines tends rather to increase than to abate its evils." During his single term in Congress (1847-49), Lincoln, as the lone Whig from Illinois, gave little attention to legislative matters. He proposed a bill for the gradual and compensated emancipation of enslaved people in the District of Columbia, but, because it was to take effect only with the approval of the "free white citizens" of the district, it displeased abolitionists as well as slaveholders and never was seriously considered. Lincoln devoted much of his time to presidential politics—to unmaking one president, a Democrat, and making another, a Whig. He found an issue and a candidate in the Mexican War. With his "spot resolutions," he challenged the statement of President James K. Polk that Mexico had started the war by shedding American blood upon American soil. Along with other members of his party, Lincoln voted to condemn Polk and the war while also voting for supplies to carry it on. At the same time, he laboured for the nomination and election of the war hero Zachary Taylor. After Taylor's success at the polls, Lincoln expected to be named commissioner of the general land office as a reward for his campaign services, and he was bitterly disappointed when he failed to get the job. His criticisms of the war, meanwhile, had not been popular among the voters in his own congressional district. At the age of 40, frustrated in politics, he seemed to be at the end of his public career. For about five years Lincoln took little part in politics, and then a new sectional crisis gave him a chance to reemerge and rise to statesmanship. In 1854 his political rival Stephen A. Douglas maneuvered through Congress a bill for reopening the entire Louisiana Purchase to slavery and allowing the settlers of Kansas and Nebraska (with "popular sovereignty") to decide for themselves whether to permit slaveholding in those territories. The Kansas-Nebraska Act provoked violent opposition in Illinois and the other states of the old Northwest. It gave rise to the Republican Party while speeding the Whig Party on its way to disintegration. Along with many thousands of other homeless Whigs, Lincoln soon became a Republican (1856). Before long, some prominent Republicans in the East talked of attracting Douglas to the Republican fold, and with him his Democratic following in the West. Lincoln would have none of it. He was determined that he, not Douglas, should be the Republican leader of his state and section. Lincoln challenged the incumbent Douglas for the Senate seat in 1858, and the series of debates they engaged in throughout Illinois was political oratory of the highest order. Both men were shrewd debaters and accomplished stump speakers, though they could hardly have been more different in style and appearance—the short and pudgy Douglas, whose stentorian voice and graceful gestures swayed audiences, and the tall, homely, almost emaciated-looking Lincoln, who moved awkwardly and whose voice was piercing and shrill. Lincoln's prose and speeches, however, were eloquent, pithy, powerful, and free of the verbosity so common in communication of his day. The debates were published in 1860, together with a biography of Lincoln, in a best-selling book that Lincoln himself compiled and marketed as part of his campaign. In their basic views, Lincoln and Douglas were not as far apart as they seemed in the heat of political argument. Neither was abolitionist or proslavery. But Lincoln, unlike Douglas, insisted that Congress must exclude slavery from the territories. He disagreed with Douglas's belief that the territories were by nature unsuited to the slavery-based economy and that no congressional legislation was needed to prevent the spread of slavery into them. In one of his most famous speeches, he said: "A house divided against itself cannot stand. I believe the government cannot endure permanently half slave and half free." He predicted that the country eventually would become "all one thing, or all the other." Again and again he insisted that the civil liberties of every U.S. citizen, white as well as Black, were at stake. The territories must be kept free, he further said, because "new free states" were "places for poor people to go and better their condition." He agreed with Thomas Jefferson and other founding fathers, however, that slavery should be merely contained, not directly attacked. In fact, when it was politically expedient to do so, he reassured his audiences that he did not endorse citizenship for Blacks or believe in the equality of the races. "I am not, nor ever have been, in favour of bringing about in any way the social and political equality of the white and Black races," he told a crowd in Charleston, Illinois. "I am not nor ever have been in favour of making voters or jurors of Negroes, nor of qualifying them to hold office, nor to intermarry with white people." There is, he added, "a physical difference between the white and Black races which I believe will forever forbid the two races living together on terms of social and political equality." Lincoln drove home the inconsistency between Douglas's "popular sovereignty" principle and the Dred Scott decision (1857), in which the U.S. Supreme Court held that Congress could not constitutionally exclude slavery from the territories. In the end, Lincoln lost the election to Douglas. Although the outcome did not surprise him, it depressed him deeply. Lincoln had, nevertheless, gained national recognition and soon began to be mentioned as a presidential prospect for 1860. On May 18, 1860, after Lincoln and his friends had made skillful preparations, he was nominated on the third ballot at the Republican National Convention in Chicago. He then put aside his law practice and, though making no stump speeches, gave full time to the direction of his campaign. His "main object," he had written, was to "hedge against divisions in the Republican ranks," and he counseled party workers to "say nothing on points where it is probable we shall disagree." With the Republicans united, the Democrats divided, and a total of four candidates in the field, he carried the election on November 6. Although he received no votes from the Deep South and no more than 40 out of 100 in the country as a whole, the popular votes were so distributed that he won a clear and decisive majority in the electoral college. The Lincoln presidency After Lincoln's election and before his inauguration, the state of South Carolina proclaimed its withdrawal from the Union. To forestall similar action by other Southern states, various compromises were proposed in Congress. The most important, the Crittenden Compromise, included constitutional amendments guaranteeing slavery forever in the states where it already existed and dividing the territories between slavery and freedom. Although Lincoln had no objection to the first of these amendments, he was unalterably opposed to the second and indeed to any scheme infringing in the slightest upon the free-soil plank of his party's platform. "I am inflexible," he privately wrote. He feared that a territorial division, by sanctioning the principle of slavery extension, would only encourage planter imperialists to seek new territory for slavery south of the American border and thus would "put us again on the highroad to a slave empire." From his home in Springfield he advised Republicans in Congress to vote against a division of the territories, and the proposal was killed in committee. Six additional states then seceded and, with South Carolina, combined to form the Confederate States of America. Thus, before Lincoln had even moved into the White House, a disunion crisis was upon the country. Attention, North and South, focused in particular upon Fort Sumter, in Charleston Harbor, South Carolina. This fort, still under construction, was garrisoned by U.S. troops under Major Robert Anderson. The Confederacy claimed it and, from other harbour fortifications, threatened it. Foreseeing trouble, Lincoln, while still in Springfield, confidentially requested Winfield Scott, general in chief of the U.S. Army, to be prepared "to either hold, or retake, the forts, as the case may require, at, and after the inauguration." In his inaugural address (March 4, 1861), besides upholding the Union's indestructibility and appealing for sectional harmony, Lincoln restated his Sumter policy as follows: The power confided to me, will be used to hold, occupy, and possess the property, and places belonging to the government, and to collect the duties and imposts; but beyond what may be necessary for these objects, there will be no invasion—no using of force against, or among the people anywhere. Then, near the end, addressing the absent Southerners: "You can have no conflict, without being yourselves the aggressors." Outbreak of the U.S. Civil War No sooner was he in office than Lincoln received word that the Sumter garrison, unless supplied or withdrawn, would shortly be starved out. Still, for about a month, Lincoln delayed acting. He was beset by contradictory advice. On the one hand, General Scott, Secretary of State William H. Seward, and others urged him to abandon the fort; and Seward, through a go-between, gave a group of Confederate commissioners to understand that the fort would in fact be abandoned. On the other hand, many Republicans insisted that any show of weakness would bring disaster to their party and to the Union. Finally Lincoln ordered the preparation of two relief expeditions, one for Fort Sumter and the other for Fort Pickens, in Florida. (He afterward said he would have been willing to withdraw from Sumter if he could have been sure of holding Pickens.) Before the Sumter expedition, he sent a messenger to tell the South Carolina governor: I am directed by the President of the United States to notify you to expect an attempt will be made to supply Fort-Sumpter [sic] with provisions only; and that, if such attempt be not resisted, no effort to throw in men, arms, or ammunition, will be made, without further notice, or in case of an attack upon the Fort. Without waiting for the arrival of Lincoln's expedition, the Confederate authorities presented to Major Anderson a demand for Sumter's prompt evacuation, which he refused. On April 12, 1861, at dawn, the Confederate batteries in the harbour opened fire. "Then, and thereby," Lincoln informed Congress when it met on July 4, "the assailants of the Government, began the conflict of arms." The Confederates, however, accused him of being the real aggressor. They said he had cleverly maneuvered them into firing the first shot so as to put upon them the onus of war guilt. Although some historians have repeated this charge, it appears to be a gross distortion of the facts. Lincoln was determined to preserve the Union, and to do so he thought he must take a stand against the Confederacy. He concluded he might as well take this stand at Sumter. Lincoln's primary aim was neither to provoke war nor to maintain peace. In preserving the Union, he would have been glad to preserve the peace also, but he was ready to risk a war that he thought would be short. After the firing on Fort Sumter, Lincoln called upon the state governors for troops (Virginia and three other states of the upper South responded by joining the Confederacy). He then proclaimed a blockade of the Southern ports. These steps—the Sumter expedition, the call for volunteers, and the blockade—were the first important decisions of Lincoln as commander in chief of the army and navy. But he still needed a strategic plan and a command system for carrying it out. General Scott advised him to avoid battle with the Confederate forces in Virginia, to get control of the Mississippi River, and by tightening the blockade to hold the South in a gigantic squeeze. Lincoln had little confidence in Scott's comparatively passive and bloodless "Anaconda" plan. He believed the war must be actively fought if it ever was to be won. Overruling Scott, he ordered a direct advance on the Virginia front, which resulted in defeat and rout for the federal forces at Bull Run (July 21, 1861). After a succession of more or less sleepless nights, Lincoln produced a set of memorandums on military policy. His basic thought was that the armies should advance concurrently on several fronts and should move so as to hold and use the support of Unionists in Missouri, Kentucky, western Virginia, and eastern Tennessee. As he later explained: I state my general idea of this war to be that we have the greater numbers, and the enemy has the greater facility of concentrating forces upon points of collision; that we must fail, unless we can find some way of making our advantage an over-match for his; and that this can only be done by menacing him with superior forces at different points, at the same time. This, with the naval blockade, comprised the essence of Lincoln's strategy. Leadership in war of Abraham Lincoln As a war leader, Lincoln employed the style that had served him as a politician—a description of himself, incidentally, that he was not ashamed to accept. He preferred to react to problems and to the circumstances that others had created rather than to originate policies and lay out long-range designs. In candour he would write: "I claim not to have controlled events, but confess plainly that events have controlled me." His guiding rule was: "My policy is to have no policy." It was not that he was unprincipled; rather, he was a practical man, mentally nimble and flexible, and, if one action or decision proved unsatisfactory in practice, he was willing to experiment with another. From 1861 to 1864, while hesitating to impose his ideas upon his generals, Lincoln experimented with command personnel and organization. Accepting the resignation of Scott (November 1861), he put George B. McClellan in charge of the armies as a whole. After a few months, disgusted by the slowness of McClellan ("He has the slows," as Lincoln put it), he demoted him to the command of the Army of the Potomac alone. He questioned the soundness of McClellan's plans for the Peninsular Campaign, repeatedly compelled McClellan to alter them, and, after the Seven Days' Battles to capture Richmond, Virginia (June 25-July 1, 1862), failed, ordered him to give them up. Then he tried a succession of commanders for the army in Virginia—John Pope, McClellan again, Ambrose E. Burnside, Joseph Hooker, and George Gordon Meade—but was disappointed with each of them in turn. Meanwhile, he had in Henry W. Halleck a general in chief who gave advice and served as a liaison with field officers but who shrank from making important decisions. For nearly two years the Federal armies lacked effective unity of command. President Lincoln, General Halleck, and War Secretary Edwin M. Stanton acted as an informal council of war. Lincoln, besides transmitting official orders through Halleck, also communicated directly with the generals, sending personal suggestions in his own name. To generals opposing Robert E. Lee, he suggested that the object was to destroy Lee's army, not to capture Richmond or to drive the invader from Northern soil. (Encyclopedia Britannica)

social anxiety 3

a feeling of apprehension in the presence of others

What should I know about abortion?

abortion, the expulsion of a fetus from the uterus before it has reached the stage of viability (in human beings, usually about the 20th week of gestation). An abortion may occur spontaneously, in which case it is also called a miscarriage, or it may be brought on purposefully, in which case it is often called an induced abortion. Spontaneous abortions, or miscarriages, occur for many reasons, including disease, trauma, genetic defect, or biochemical incompatibility of mother and fetus. Occasionally a fetus dies in the uterus but fails to be expelled, a condition termed a missed abortion. Induced abortions may be performed for reasons that fall into four general categories: to preserve the life or physical or mental well-being of the mother; to prevent the completion of a pregnancy that has resulted from rape or incest; to prevent the birth of a child with serious deformity, mental deficiency, or genetic abnormality; or to prevent a birth for social or economic reasons (such as the extreme youth of the pregnant female or the sorely strained resources of the family unit). By some definitions, abortions that are performed to preserve the well-being of the female or in cases of rape or incest are therapeutic, or justifiable, abortions. Numerous medical techniques exist for performing abortions. During the first trimester (up to about 12 weeks after conception), endometrial aspiration, suction, or curettage may be used to remove the contents of the uterus. In endometrial aspiration, a thin, flexible tube is inserted up the cervical canal (the neck of the womb) and then sucks out the lining of the uterus (the endometrium) by means of an electric pump. In the related but slightly more onerous procedure known as dilatation and evacuation (also called suction curettage, or vacuum curettage), the cervical canal is enlarged by the insertion of a series of metal dilators while the patient is under anesthesia, after which a rigid suction tube is inserted into the uterus to evacuate its contents. When, in place of suction, a thin metal tool called a curette is used to scrape (rather than vacuum out) the contents of the uterus, the procedure is called dilatation and curettage. When combined with dilatation, both evacuation and curettage can be used up to about the 16th week of pregnancy. From 12 to 19 weeks the injection of a saline solution may be used to trigger uterine contractions; alternatively, the administration of prostaglandins by injection, suppository, or other method may be used to induce contractions, but these substances may cause severe side effects. Hysterotomy, the surgical removal of the uterine contents, may be used during the second trimester or later. In general, the more advanced the pregnancy, the greater the risk to the female of mortality or serious complications following an abortion. In the late 20th century a new method of induced abortion was discovered that uses the drug RU 486 (mifepristone), an artificial steroid that is closely related to the contraceptive hormone norethnidrone. RU 486 works by blocking the action of the hormone progesterone, which is needed to support the development of a fertilized egg. When ingested within weeks of conception, RU 486 effectively triggers the menstrual cycle and flushes the fertilized egg out of the uterus. Whether and to what extent induced abortions should be permitted, encouraged, or severely repressed is a social issue that has divided theologians, philosophers, and legislators for centuries. Abortion was apparently a common and socially accepted method of family limitation in the Greco-Roman world. Although Christian theologians early and vehemently condemned abortion, the application of severe criminal sanctions to deter its practice became common only in the 19th century. In the 20th century such sanctions were modified in one way or another in various countries, beginning with the Soviet Union in 1920, with Scandinavian countries in the 1930s, and with Japan and several eastern European countries in the 1950s. In some countries the unavailability of birth-control devices was a factor in the acceptance of abortion. In the late 20th century China used abortion on a large scale as part of its population-control policy. In the early 21st century some jurisdictions with large Roman Catholic populations, such as Portugal and Mexico City, decriminalized abortion despite strong opposition from the church, while others, such as Nicaragua, increased restrictions on it. A broad social movement for the relaxation or elimination of restrictions on the performance of abortions resulted in the passing of liberalized legislation in several states in the United States during the 1960s. The U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Roe v. Wade (1973) that unduly restrictive state regulation of abortion was unconstitutional, in effect legalizing abortion for any reason for women in the first three months of pregnancy. A countermovement for the restoration of strict control over the circumstances under which abortions might be permitted soon sprang up, and the issue became entangled in social and political conflict. In rulings in 1989 (Webster v. Reproductive Health Services) and 1992 (Planned Parenthood v. Casey), a more conservative Supreme Court upheld the legality of new state restrictions on abortion, though it proved unwilling to overturn Roe v. Wade itself. In 2007 the Court also upheld a federal ban on a rarely used abortion method known as intact dilation and evacuation. In a later ruling, Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization (2022), the Court overturned both Roe and Casey, holding that there is no constitutional right to abortion. The public debate of the issue has demonstrated the enormous difficulties experienced by political institutions in grappling with the complex and ambiguous ethical problems raised by the question of abortion. Opponents of abortion, or of abortion for any reason other than to save the life of the mother, argue that there is no rational basis for distinguishing the fetus from a newborn infant; each is totally dependent and potentially a member of society, and each possesses a degree of humanity. Proponents of liberalized regulation of abortion hold that only a woman herself, rather than the state, has the right to manage her pregnancy and that the alternative to legal, medically supervised abortion is illegal and demonstrably dangerous, if not deadly, abortion. (Encyclopedia Britannica)

lunar

relating to the moon

What should I know about American history before 1865?

More than 1 million Germans immigrated to the US during the 1840s and 1850s. Many of them came with slightly more financial resources than the Irish, and many settled on farms or in cities in the Midwest. In new and growing cities such as Milwaukee, St. Louis, and Chicago, the majority of residents were foreign born, mostly from Germany. • Germans introduced new traditions into American culture—including the Christmas Tree and beer, both of which were relatively unknown in the US at the time. • The rapid growth of new European groups terrified native-born Americans. • By 1850, the US could be described as a more ethically diverse nation with a great influx of immigrants like Asians (mostly Chinese), Irish, Germans, and Mexican Americans (of mixed European, African, and Indian ancestry) coming into the country. With the growth of these immigrant groups, the US could be deemed as a more Catholic country, and with the coming of so many white immigrants, the percentage of African Americans in the population shrank even though their actual number grew. Many European Protestants grew to be angry about a growth in Catholicism. Many Protestants may have seen Catholicism as a degrading religion and Irish Catholics as an inferior race. • The Know-Nothing Party was an Anti-immigrant party formed from the wreckage of the Whig Party and some disaffected Northern Democrats in 1854. The party originated as a result of anti-immigrant groups coming together to form as one big group. It was generally known as the Know-Nothing Party because when members were asked about the party, they were told to say "I know nothing." In the 1850s, the Know-Nothings elected 8 governors, more than 100 members of Congress, mayors in several major cities, and many state legislators. The Know-Nothing Party's platform was anti-Catholic and anti-immigrant, including plans to limit Catholic political power by banning immigrants from holding office and requiring them to wait 21 years to become citizens. They also came up with stereotypes for immigrants. Even though this party didn't last long, it's considered to have a significant impact on the nation's political system. It helped bring an end to the Second Party System that had begun with the emergence of the Democratic and Whig parties in the 1820s. • The US land commission was issued to challenge the Mexican land grants on which many had a fortune rested upon it. Many of the old families that lived in the areas of the west that the US acquired had lost their land. Being of Mexican descent meant 2nd-class citizenship for a long time to come. • Like their counterparts in California, the small Mexican or Tejano population in Texas didn't fare well after Texas joined the US. • Juan Seguín was considered to be one of the heroes of the American side of the decisive battle of San Jacinto and mayor of San Antonio. He joined the exodus to Mexico. • Mexicans were subjected to much injustice from the whites. • Joaquin Murrieta became a California legend—feared in the white Community, honored in the Mexican community—because of his vengeance on those who'd stolen his gold claim, raped his wife, Rosa, and hung his brother. Murrieta stole horses and gold and killed those who'd raped and murdered his loved ones before he, in turn, was discovered and killed by the California Rangers in 1853. Kangaroo courts (unauthorized and obviously biased courts) and lynchings were all too common as traditional community relationships were destroyed by distance and greed. • After the War of 1812, Southern planters experienced new economic benefits from slavery, benefits that grew with each decade as the world's cotton market exploded and slave labor made it possible and profitable for American slave-grown cotton to satisfy this market. Cotton becomes 2/3 of all US exports. Since most of the cotton was produced by slave labor, the new demand for cotton greatly increased the value of individual slaves. Thus, just as slavery was dying out in the North—for both economic and ethical reasons—the new cotton economy of the South made slavery far more profitable than ever before. The result was an agriculture system that by the 1840s produced 60 percent of the world's cotton and made the South, and particularly some elite Southerners, extremely wealthy and prepared to offer new ethical rationales for slavery. • Slavery dominates southerner's political thoughts. • The Gag Rule was implemented by Congress to put matters concerning slavery to the side for later discussion. • Around 80% of southerners didn't own slaves. • As cotton prices kept increasing from the 1830s to the 1850s, close to a million slaves were moved from the coast to new cotton states, where they had to learn the different and difficult work of tending cotton. • As slavery became profitable, Northern public opinion was turning against it. • More people were joining what had been a small group of abolitionists in viewing human bondage as a terrible wrong and a stain on the honor of a nation dedicated to human freedom. • Slavery starts disappearing in the North. • The Liberty Party was a party formed by anti slavery forces to oppose slavery. They elected James G. Barney as president. The party's goal was to advocate the extension of slavery to new areas of the country. • Defenders of slavery are known for developing the ideology of the racial inferiority of Africans, which, they insisted, meant that they needed to be kept in a subservient role. These defenders also contrasted work in Northern factories and noted that slaves, unlike factory workers, weren't fired when work got slow or they grew old, but, rather, were provided for throughout their lives. Southern apologists also became increasingly angry with Northern critics of slavery. • Edmund Ruffin was a Southern agronomist who in the 1850s turned to defending Southern slavery. He advocated secession of the Southern states after Lincoln's election and fought in the first battles of the Civil War. At the end of the Civil War, he committed suicide rather than live under what he called "yankee rule." • Slave life had gotten somewhat better throughout the 1800s because the slaves were able to live in cabins instead of being crammed into cramped quarters. This improvement in the life of slaves was considered to be better than the lives of some Northern or European workers and peasants. • The slave population of the US grew from 1.5 million slaves in 1820 to 4 million slaves in 1860. After 1808, it was illegal and difficult to bring new slaves into the country, so much of this growth reflected reproduction among existing slaves. Many saw this growth as a sign of the new and better treatment that slaves were receiving. In the US, slaves were surviving, reproducing, and providing significant profits to others. • Newspaper advertisements for runaway slaves could be used as evidence that thousands and thousands of slaves tried to run away from the places they were kept in. • The Underground Railroad was a support system developed by anti-slavery groups in the upper South and the North to assist fugitive slaves in escaping the South. It became known as a route to freedom in the North. • Henry Highland Garnet was born a slave in Maryland who wrote about the harsh conditions of slavery to instill fear in the hearts of many slaveholders. While he was a child, his family set out on the pretext of going to the funeral of a slave on a nearby plantation but went instead to the home of a Quaker Underground Railroad conductor in Delaware who started them on the road to freedom in NYC, where each member of the family took a name in ceremony of "baptism to liberty." Henry Highland Garnet's "Address to the Slaves of the United States of America" is written in 1843. • Frederick Douglass was also born a slave in Maryland around 1817. He made an attempt to escape in 1835 but was caught. He tries running away to the North a 2nd time and succeeds. He meets William Lloyd Garrison and becomes a famous abolitionist and orator. He writes Narrative of the life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave. He'll eventually be known as the "South's worst nightmare." • Harriet Tubman was a former slave who escapes to the North in 1849 to become a famous conductor of the Underground Railroad. She led perhaps a few hundred slaves to freedom. She's referred to as "Moses." • Gabriel Prosser was a slave who led over 1000 slaves on August 30, 1800, in a planned attack on Richmond, Virginia. • In 1822, Denmark Vesey and his supporters planned to burn the military and financial center of Charelston, South Carolina, murder the white residents, and then seize the city's caches of weapons and gold. They would then set sail for a new life of freedom in Haiti. Vesey, who had purchased his own freedom, had been plotting his revolt for years. He's supposed to have led the largest slave revolt. • In 1831, Nat Turner led a revolt that was considered more successful than Vesey's. Terror spread throughout the South when Turner's forces killed over 60 slave-owning whites before the revolt was finally defeated by state and federal troops. Over 100 slaves were killed in the fighting or executed after capture. Turner himself was captured and interviewed by his white, court-appointed attorney, Thomas Gray, before he was executed. Turner was known to be a religious man whose prayers convinced him "that [he] was ordained for some great purpose in the hands of the Almighty," that the Almighty's purpose included freedom for American slaves. Southern fear of slave revolts increased as a result of what Nat Turner did. Repressive laws were passed all across the South. • Both Nat Turner's and Denmark Vesey's rebellions were known for giving hope to African Americans. • David Walker, who was born free in Ohio, published his Appeal to the Colored Citizens of the World in Boston in 1829 to suggest that the slaves create an uprising. • The Liberator was a newspaper dedicated to the anti-slavery cause. It was launched by William Lloyd Garrison in 1831. • American Anti-Slavery Society is founded in Boston in 1833 that was dedicated to the abolition of slavery. • American Anti-Slavery Society launches campaign to send anti-slavery agents to every state of the Union in 1836. • William Lloyd Garrison was one of the key members who helped launch the American Anti-Slavery Society. He was almost lynched in Boston for his anti-slavery efforts. • Free labor offers economic opportunity to those who take part in it if they want to work for it, and if they don't they can leave. Slaves were deemed to not have this opportunity. • Theodore Dwight Weld was a spokesperson for the more religious wing of the abolitionist movement. He was attacked by an antiabolition mob in Troy, New York. He was stoned but survived. He wrote for the anti-slavery cause afterwards. • The Oberlin Abolitionism emerges from the revivals led by Charles G. Finney in upstate NY in the 1820s. Preachers in this movement advocated the opposition to slavery, stating that it was a sin. Theodore Dwight Weld was commissioned to choose the preachers. • Elijah Lovejoy was killed by a mob in 1837 after he'd set up a small printing press to publish anti slavery literature. • The Seneca Falls Woman's Rights Convention was a significant convention demanding women's equality in legal rights, held in upstate NY in 1848. There were over 300 attendees. It was organized by Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Lucretia Mott. • The Seneca Falls Woman's Rights Convention was attended by Frederick Douglass. • Lucy Stone was a commencement speaker at Seneca Falls but a man spoke for her because women weren't permitted to speak to the public. • On July 20th, 1848, 68 women and 32 men signed off on a Declaration of Sentiments and Resolutions at the end of their 2-day meeting in Seneca Falls, NY. It called for full equality, including the right to suffrage, for women. The document follows the form of the Declaration of Independence. This is often viewed as the opening statement of the women's rights movement in the US. This document would make history and achieve a lot of recognition. • Seneca Falls provided the foundation for a half-century-long campaign for women's rights and women's suffrage. • Sarah Grimke's Letters on the Equality of the Sexes and the Condition of Women is written in 1838 to illustrate the very close ties between women's rights and the abolitionist movement. • Angelina Grimke was Sarah's sister. They were both born to a slaveholding family, and they both fought with their family on the matters concerning slavery. They both became the 1st female representatives of the American Anti-Slavery Society, which was based in NYC at the time. • Elizabeth Blackwell was the 1st woman to receive an M.D. degree. • Amelia Bloomer was a reformer who participated in the Seneca Falls Convention. She came up with the bloomer trousers which was a statement in women's clothing. These clothing items essentially meant that women could wear pants, liberating themselves from the long hoop skirts that were virtually required wear for middle-class women and that made any sort of activity, from walking upstairs to physical activity out of doors, extremely difficult. • Sojourner Truth was a former slave. Sojourner's Truth's "Ain't I a Woman?" speech happens in 1851. The speech would show a link between anti-slavery and the women's rights campaigns. • William Lloyd Garrison burns a copy of the Constitution as "source and parent of the other atrocities" of slavery in the US in 1854. He also burns a copy of the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850. Chapter 11 notes • The Democratic Review was a NYC newspaper edited by John L. O'Sullivan that urged the nation to annex the independent Republic of Texas. • The Manifest Destiny was a doctrine expressed in 1845 that advocated an inevitable expansion of White Americans across the continent that was ordained by God and was a means to spread Protestant Christianity and Jacksonian Democracy to more individuals. The Manifest Destiny quickly became a popular term and for many a core American belief. The term was coined by John L. O'Sullivan. • The idea that the US had a "manifest destiny" to expand its territory to the Pacific coast led to more than simply acquiring land, though between 1845 and 1848, the US almost doubled in size, from 1.8 million square miles to almost 3 million. Advocates of manifest destiny claimed that the US should rule the heart of North America from the Atlantic Ocean to the Pacific and from a still-to-be-defined border with British Canada to an even more undefined border with the Republic of Mexico. • Many began to believe that the US was specially chosen by divine will to bring liberty and democracy to the planet—and especially North America—during the 1840s. • Many Americans supported Manifest for different reasons. Land speculators and those promoting the extension of the nation's railroads wanted to exploit the vast lands in the west. Farmers dreamed of starting over in rich—and cheap—new lands. Workers believed that rapid national expansion would guarantee industrial profits and thus their jobs, or give them a chance to start over if necessary. Protestant leaders and missionaries saw US control of the new lands as an opportunity to ensure that a Protestant US, not a Catholic Mexico, controlled the continent. • Manifest Destiny also referred to a patriotic belief that the nation had a divine mission to become a world power. • There were many disputes between the US and Mexico concerning land borders. • The Adam-Onís Treaty was passed in 1819 to allow Spain to cede Florida to the US, along with Spanish claims to Oregon, in exchange for US recognition of the Sabine River as the border between US Louisiana and Spanish Texas. Even in 1819, some in Congress wanted more land and criticized the treaty for that reason. • Mexico gained independence from Spain in 1821. • Texas becomes a part of the Republic of Mexico. • Tejanos are people of Spanish or Mexican descent born in Texas. • Mexico offered land grants to US settlers to populate Texas so they didn't risk losing it. • Empresario was the name given to a colonizing agent who received a land grant from the Spanish or Mexican government in return for organizing settlements. • The Spanish Government had given Missouri merchant Moses Austin permission to start a colony in Texas, believing that more settlers—whatever their origin—would help stabilize a border area that was far from the population centers of either Mexico or the US. • Stephen F. Austin was Moses' son. He rode with Erasmo Seguín, a Tejano with liberal political views, into Texas to build a new settlement. It was at this time that Mexico won its independence from Spain, and he made an alliance with the Spanish Government and became an American empresario who received huge swaths of land. Stephen Austin's settlement would become the first American colony established in Texas in 1821. • The Mexican Government, aware that it could do little to stop settlement and anxious for a buffer against Indian tribes and the US, hoped that settlers in Texas would create a stable population of loyal citizens. • A Californio is a person of Mexican descent—and after 1821, citizen of Mexico—living in California. • Mexico abolished slavery, especially in Texas, in 1829. • Distance, difficult travel conditions, and an unstable government in Mexico City with more pressing concerns closer to home allowed an American community to develop in Texas that was officially governed by 1 set of laws but lived by its own rules. • The Mexican government's benign neglect of the American community in Texas ended in 1830 when the Mexican Congress closed Texas to further American immigration and the importation of slaves. Mexico also insisted that trade be routed through established ports in Mexico rather than directly between Texas and the US. The government also stationed more soldiers in Texas to enforce these new rules. Some of these revolts drew Tejano support. • Revolts against Mexican authority begin in Texas in 1830. • Mexico doesn't think it's a good idea to give land to the US anymore because they won't convert to their standards of culture. • Americans in Texas capture the Alamo, drive out Mexican army in 1835. • Texas declares independence from Mexico in 1836. • The Alamo was a Franciscan mission at San Antonio, Texas. It was the site of a siege and massacre of Texans by Mexican troops in 1836. When American forces were defeated at the Alamo in 1836, the phrase "Remember the Alamo" was taken up by many Texans as a rallying cry in opposition to the Mexican army led by Santa Anna. They would also use this cry during the war with Mexico. • Sam Houston was the chosen leader for an organized Texan army. He led the victory at the Battle of San Jacinto. • Treaty of Velasco recognizes the independent Republic of Texas in 1836 and withdraws all Mexican troops from Texas. Santa Anna was forced to sign this. • Sam Houston is elected as the president of the new Republic of Texas. • Alta California was a name given to a post of the Republic of Mexico. • Father Junípero Serra was a Franciscan priest who was sent to Alta California with instructions to find a chain of missions that would aid in converting the California Indians to Catholic Christianity, put them to work for the Spanish, and establish a stronger presence to protect against possible Russian expansion. Father Serra and his Franciscan successors created a chain of missions stretching from San Diego to San Francisco. • The Franciscan friars meant to save the Indian souls and bring them the gifts of Spanish culture, but they also worked them hard to ensure a good economic return for the missions, maintaining tight control and a tough discipline. • John C. Frémont led what he claimed was a mapmaking expedition overland from St. Louis, arriving in Monterrey, California, in late December 1845. He's known for ordering a US warship to arrive in Monterrey in April 1846 to stir up a pro-American revolt in California. This once distant outpost was quickly becoming an important focus of attention in the growing tensions between the US and Mexico. • Andrew Jackson's creation of the Democratic Party as a vehicle to continue his political philosophy and support his handpicked successors is considered to be one of his most significant achievements. The 2 pillars on which his party was deemed to be built on were, first, a small federal government that wouldn't be concerned with things such as a federal bank or many internal improvements and, second, the concept of Manifest Destiny, epitomized in the removal of Indians from East of the Mississippi and the acquisition of new lands west of the river. • Congress passes the gag rule to forbid any discussion of slavery in 1836. It lasted until 1844. John Quincy Adams opposes this. • The Financial Panic of 1837 was a major economic downturn brought on by temporary excesses in international trade and the inability of the US to control the currency or make credit available after the closing of the 2nd bank of the US. • The Specie Circular was a proclamation issued by President Andrew Jackson in 1836 stipulating that only gold or silver could be used as payment for public land. • Webster-Ashburton Treaty resolves US-Canadian border dispute in 1842. It also allowed for closer cooperation in suppressing the African slave trade. • Treaty of Wang-hsia gave the US open trading rights in China in 1844. • William Harris Garrison was the 9th president of the US. He's known for delivering a speech at his inauguration about the Whig agenda without a coat on, and he caught a bad cold which turned into pneumonia and he died a month later. John Tyler replaces him as president. • John Tyler wants to make it clear that he wasn't just an "acting President." Congress at the time was known to be dominated by Whig party candidates, and when Tyler vetoed some of their bills he's expelled from the Whig Party. He's also known for helping admit Texas as a state. • John Tyler sets the precedent that a VP should take over if President dies. • John K. Polk of Tennessee was nominated by the Democratic Party to be president. He gets the nickname "Young Hickory" because of the similarities he displays when being compared to Andrew Jackson. He's known as a dark horse who does some things like winning the Mexican American War and making the US into a Continental nation and doesn't run for re-election. • For a while Oregon was generally ignored by the press and Congress. The Oregon territory was shared by the US and Britain. • James K. Polk was inaugurated as president in 1845. • Polk establishes 4 goals in his inaugural address: lower tariff (walker tariff (25%)), reestablish independent treasury (not national bank), he settles the "Oregon question," adds California and Texas. • Polk promises to get all of the Oregon territory. He negotiates with the British to set the boundary at the 49th parallel. • The US annexation of Texas happened in 1845. • Mexico had warned the US that if the US had annexed Texas that they would be willing to go to war because Mexico still claimed the territory. • Polk sent former Louisiana congressman John Slidell to Mexico City to negotiate by offering $25 million to purchase California and New Mexico. Santa Anna refuses the offer. • Although there were tensions between Americans and the government of Mexico from Texas to California, the heart of the concerns in 1846 had to do with Texas. While both countries negotiated about whether or not the US would annex Texas, another question loomed: just what constituted Texas? The Republic of Texas had never governed any land west of the Nueces River. Many in the US and Mexico considered that River to be the western boundary of Texas. But Polk and many Texans claimed that the Rio Grande was the border, a claim that made Texas a much bigger state. Moreover, Polk really wanted not only Texas as far as the Rio Grande but also New Mexico and California. He would purchase it if he could, but he also considered a war as a viable way to secure that land. • While the negotiations continued, Polk ordered General Zachary Taylor to cross the Sabine River into Texas in June 1845 and from there continue to "approach as near the boundary line, the Rio Grande, as prudence will dictate." Taylor went as far as the Nueces River, and he was on the lookout for any Mexican troops that crossed the Rio Grande and saw it as an act of war. In April 1846, Mexican troops were deemed to have crossed the Rio Grande fought with Taylor's troops and 11 Americans were killed on April 25th, 1806. When Polk claims to Congress that "American blood" was shed on their territory, the US goes to war with Mexico. • The US war with Mexico (also called the Mexican-American War) began in 1846. • Once the war began, others, including newly elected Congressman Abraham Lincoln of IL, joined John Quincy Adams in opposition. An aspiring Whig politician, Lincoln voiced his suspicions about the war. He thought that president Polk "is deeply conscious of being in the wrong...that he ordered General Taylor into the midst of a peaceful Mexican settlement, purposely to bring on a war." • I think a major reason that the Americans were defeating the Mexicans was because of the superior technology that they had at the time-rifles that shot farther and better artillery. • Taylor defeated a large Mexican force and captured the crucial Mexican town of Monterrey in September 1846. • Santa Anna marched north to engage Taylor, whom he knew was now short of troops. In February 1847, the 2 armies met at what Americans called the Battle of Buena Vista. Taylor wins that battle. • Winfield Scott leads the largest amphibious invasion before D-Day into the heartland of Mexico. He captured Mexico City in 1847. • The US captures about a half of Mexico. • The US had lost 12,518 soldiers and spent almost $100 million in the war. Mexico had lost many more lives-soldiers and civilians-and its economy was devastated. • The Bear Flag Revolt was led by recent American immigrants who temporarily declared California to be an independent Republic until US forces took control of the territory. • The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo ended the war with Mexico in 1848 and granted the US control of all of Texas, New Mexico, and California. The Treaty also allowed for the Rio Grande River to become the western border of the Republic of Texas. • The Free Soil Party was committed to ensure that all states would be free of slavery. The Free Soilers did not propose abolishing slavery where it already existed but opposed any extension of slavery into any new territories. • The acquisition of Oregon and California not only expanded the US to the Pacific coast but also allowed the nation to become a dominant player all across the Pacific Ocean. • On January 24, 1848, John Marshall, a carpenter at the fort and mill owned by Swiss native Johann Sutter on the American River in Northern California, was deepening the channel going into the mill's water wheel when he noticed some odd material in the water. He reported, "Boys, I believe I have found a gold mine." His was the first discovery of gold, which would quickly lead to the California Gold Rush. • The Gold Rush in California began in 1848. The rush to find gold had brought from all over the world thousands of new residents to California and produced millions of dollars in new wealth for the region and the US. • Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862) is a famous transcendentalist and a close friend of Ralph Waldo Emerson. In 1849, he published "On the Duty of Civil Disobedience." The essay, which reflected his opposition to the war with Mexico and his personal refusal to pay taxes to support it, has at least 2 themes: Thoreau's opposition to most, if not all, government, and his belief that civil disobedience-in this case breaking an immoral law-was the right thing to do. Thoreau's belief in refusing to obey an unjust law and a willingness to face the consequences has made him a model for others who advocated civil disobedience, including Martin Luther King Jr. or Mohandas Gandhi, who both led nonviolent protests to win independence. Thoreau was arrested for not paying taxes, and was released a day later. He can be known as a model for civil disobedience. • The Golden Age of Whaling began after the War of 1812 and continued into the outbreak of the Civil War in 1861. This era of whaling had contributed to the growth of the American economy. • Herman Melville's Moby Dick was published in 1851. • Millard Fillmore becomes the 13th president of the US. • Commodore Perry enters Tokyo Harbor, begins opening Japan to the US in 1853. • Gadsden Purchase is the last acquisition of land made by the US in the Continental US in 1853. The US paid $10 million for a strip of land in what is now southern New Mexico and Arizona that would be used for a southern transcontinental railroad from New Orleans to El Paso and Los Angeles. • The Kanagawa Treaty was an 1854 agreement-the 1st between the US and Japan-that opened 2 Japanese ports to American commerce, protected shipwrecked sailors, and ended Japan's 200 years of isolation. Chapter 13 notes • Pro slavery senators like John C. Calhoun and Jefferson Davis were worried about California being admitted as a free state, but they were even more worried about abolitionism in the North, which had been growing since the 1840s. • Southerners tended to view all abolitionists as extremists. • At the core of the Abolitionist movement were those known as the radical abolitionists for whom slavery was the greatest evil in the nation, an evil that needed to end immediately and completely. Many Northerners were sympathetic with the radicals but not so willing to move as quickly or do as much to oppose slavery. • The Free Soil Party was a political party dedicated to ensure that all states would be free of slavery. The Free Soilers didn't propose abolishing slavery where it already existed but opposed any extension of slavery into any new territories. Many Northerners fell into the free-soil category. • Many of the tensions that erupt in 1850 date back to the US War with Mexico in the 1840s. • In 1846, Democratic congressman David Wilmot of Pennsylvania proposed an amendment called the Wilmot Proviso to a military appropriations bill, prohibiting slavery in any territory acquired from Mexico. The amendment stipulated that "as an express and fundamental condition to the acquisition of any territory from the Republic of Mexico...neither slavery nor involuntary servitude shall ever exist in any part of said country." This so-called Wilmot proviso sprang from growing anger among Northern Democrats at what they saw as the pro-Southern tilt of the Polk administration. With support from Northern Whigs, the amendment passed the House but died in the Senate where Southern Senators were able to block all such measures in 1846 and 1847. A Boston newspaper said of the Proviso, "As if by magic, it brought to a head the great question that is about to divide the American people." By 1850, that question—the question of slavery's possible extension into any new territories—is deemed to have created divisions that cut across party lines, whether Democrat or Whig. • Henry Clay creates the Compromise of 1850 to avoid a sectional crisis. • The 1st compromise would admit California as a state but organize New Mexico under a territorial government with no "restriction or condition on the subject of slavery," a plan that was a silent concession to what Stephen Douglas would call "popular sovereignty"; that voters in a territory or state should settle the issue of slavery there. In the meantime, as a territory, New Mexico would have no votes in the Senate, a key concern of slaveholders in Congress since they were certain—probably rightly—that New Mexico would opt to enter the Union as a free state. The second compromise Clay proposed would resolve the contested question of the Texas-New Mexico border by giving more land to New Mexico and giving Texas $10 million to pay off the debts of the former Republic of Texas. Since many Southerners held Republic of Texas bonds, this proposal had great appeal in the South. The third proposal abolished the slave trade, but not slavery itself, in the District of Columbia. Finally, to ensure Southern support, Clay proposed a fourth compromise: a law enhancing slaveholders' right to reclaim slaves who fled to the North and new federal agents to help them. All of these compromises may have seemed to Clay like a careful balance that would appeal to both sections. In fact, most members of Congress from each section disliked it, claiming that it didn't go nearly far enough in the direction they wanted. • President Millard Fillmore favored compromise. • The Compromise of 1850 including the Fugitive Slave Act is passed in 1850. President Millard called the package a "final settlement," but not everyone agreed. • The Fugitive Slave Act created a new set of federal agents to help track runaway slaves and required authorities in the North to assist Southern slave catchers and return runaway slaves to their owners. As a result of the implementation of this law, slave catching was very profitable. Because of the number of runaway slaves, slave catching became a growth industry in the US before 1850. There were Court-appointed federal commissioners who would be in charge of determining whether a person claimed by a slave catcher was truly a slave or actually a free person. Commissioners were paid a double fee every time they found that a person was a fugitive slave as opposed to a free person, and there was no appeal from their decisions. Finally, the law provided for a $1000 fine and up to a year in jail for anyone who helped a fugitive slave. Many free blacks living in the North were worried, and many, knowing that it would be difficult to prove that they had been born free, moved to Canada before any trouble could arrive. The Fugitive Slave Act causes an uproar from many living in the North. • Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin was written in response to the Fugitive Slave Act. Uncle Tom's Cabin is published in book form in 1852. Within a year, 310,000 copies were in print, making it the bestselling book of the century, other than the Bible. If any one book brought home a picture of slavery to moderate or ambivalent Northerners, it was Uncle Tom's Cabin. This book enrages the South. De Bow's Southern and Western Review, one of the nation's largest proslavery publications at the time, said the novel was "insulting to the South, because Mrs. Stowe wants the world to believe that all she has written is true!" In the turmoil of the 1850s, however, the book galvanized antislavery opinion not only in the North but also in England where it was credited with playing a role in keeping Britain neutral during the Civil War. The book angered both Southerners who rationalized slavery and Northerners, many of whom first saw the nature of slavery through its pages. • Popular sovereignty was a solution to the slavery crisis suggested by Senator Lewis Cass of Michigan by which territorial residents, not Congress, would decide slavery's fate in any proposed new state. • Southern senators feared an effort to create another free state out of Nebraska and blocked the bill. After several failed efforts at compromise, Stephen A. Douglas proposed to split Nebraska into 2 territories—Nebraska and Kansas—and allow each territory to decide whether to allow slavery. He called this approach "popular sovereignty"—letting each territory decide for itself whether to allow or ban slavery in its jurisdiction. Others had used the term before him, but Douglas became its most prominent proponent. He wanted to use these territories to have railroads built through them that would lead to the Pacific Coast. The term "political sovereignty" sounded Democratic—at least for white voters—but it explicitly repealed the Missouri Compromise of 1820, which banned slavery north of Missouri no matter what local residents said. The Missouri Compromise held the Union together for 34 years, and making any modifications to it might lead to an outcry. The proposal to split the Nebraska territory and allow popular sovereignty to overrule the Missouri Compromise got Douglas the support he needed from Southern senators, but it also factored into the creation of a serious firestorm as he knew it would. Defenders of slavery were delighted at hearing this plan, but the outrage from abolitionists and moderates was intense. Moderate free-soil advocates united with radical abolitionists in opposition. Five state legislatures and hundreds of meetings and conventions sent petitions to Congress declaring "This crime shall not be consummated." • Kansas-Nebraska Act is passed in 1854 to create Kansas and Nebraska Territories but leaving the question of slavery open to local residents. It became a defining issue in the 1854 elections for Congress. • Battles between antislavery and proslavery factions within Kansas dominated the national news for the next several years. • The Republican Party is founded in 1854 by Senator William H. Seward of New York and other Northern Whigs and Free Soil Party members. The party was dedicated to stopping the spread of slavery in any place in the nation where it didn't exist. • Proslavery "border ruffians" from Missouri and abolitionists from the North began pouring into the territory of Kansas. Given the presence of so many guns and such anger, it wasn't surprising that bloodshed would quickly follow. • A civil war in Kansas known as "Bleeding Kansas" breaks out between pro- and antislavery forces, and it led to significant bloodshed and national attention for Kansas. The conflicts that ensue as a result of Bleeding Kansas goes on from 1854 to 1859. These conflicts would harden public opinion in both the North and South. • John Brown was an antislavery activist who took part in the violence of Bleeding Kansas. He and his sons killed slave owners with broad swords. He's known for going to Kansas to "strike terror in the hearts of the proslavery people." • Violence was not only limited to Kansas. In Washington, Congressman Preston Brooks of South Carolina, who believed that protecting the status of Kansas as a slave state was a "point of honor," badly beat a Massachusetts senator named Charles Sumner in the Senate chamber after Sumner delivered his "Crime against Kansas" speech favoring a free-state Kansas. • Abraham Lincoln of Illinois was a one-term Whig congressman who began a campaign for a seat in the US Senate that would allow him to oppose the Kansas-Nebraska Act on the national stage. His opponent concerning this matter is Stephen A. Douglas. Outside of Springfield, IL, Lincoln was deemed to be a nobody at the time going up against one of the more well-known political figures of the country. • Dred Scott V. Sandford was a Supreme Court case brought by Dred Scott, a slave demanding his freedom based on his residence in free territories, though brought there as a slave. The case resulted in one of the most far-reaching decisions in the history of the Supreme Court. It began in St. Louis, Missouri, in 1846 when abolitionists urged Dred Scott, a slave, to sue for his freedom because his owner, an army surgeon, had taken him to Illinois and then on to Fort Snelling in what is now Minnesota (then simply the northern tip of the Louisiana Purchase where the Missouri Compromise banned slavery). After living for years in free territory, his lawyers claimed, Scott had earned his freedom. In a series of trials and appeals, Scott's case went back and forth. Scott lost the first time, but on retrial in state court in St. Louis, he won his freedom. But because of proslavery ideas hardening across the South, the Missouri Supreme Court then overturned the decision on appeal in 1852 and returned Scott to slavery. Scott's lawyers took their case all the way up to the US Supreme Court in 1856. The Supreme Court also decided against the case. • The Supreme Court's Dred Scott decision was made in the spring of 1857. • After the Supreme Court's decision on the Dred Scott case, many Americans, North and South, concluded that slavery had to be banned everywhere or nowhere. • Abolitionists soon purchased Scott and set him and his wife free. There is much outrage from the North because of the Supreme Court's decision. • Lecompton Constitution is a proslavery state constitution drafted in 1857 by Kansas territorial delegates elected under questionable circumstances. It was adopted in Kansas, but a free-soil majority boycotted the election in 1857. • The Panic of 1857 was a banking crisis that caused a credit crunch in the North; it was less severe in the South, where high cotton prices spurred a quick recovery. The Panic exacerbated the economic split between the regions. Overproduction of wheat in the North was a significant factor in precipitating the crisis, and the prices of wheat fell sharply. In iron- and coal-producing areas of the country, Pennsylvania and Ohio, demand for steel fell, people lost their jobs, banks failed, and panic ensued. The Republican platform of 1860 supported a tariff both to provide revenue for the government and to protect Northern industry. The platform solidified support for the Republicans, especially in Pennsylvania and New Jersey. It also showed how deeply these states were cut off from the interests of the South where the tariff raised the cost of manufactured goods but did nothing to keep the price of cotton high.

What should I know about social phobia?

What Is Social Phobia? It's natural to feel self-conscious, nervous, or shy in front of others at times. Most people get through these moments when they need to. But for some, the anxiety that goes with feeling shy or self-conscious can be extreme. When people feel so self-conscious and anxious that it prevents them from speaking up or socializing most of the time, it's probably more than shyness. It may be an anxiety condition called social phobia (also called social anxiety). What Happens When Someone Has Social Phobia? Extreme feelings of shyness and self-consciousness build into a powerful fear. As a result, a person feels uncomfortable participating in everyday social situations. People with social phobia can usually interact easily with family and a few close friends. But meeting new people, talking in a group, or speaking in public can cause their extreme shyness to kick in. With social phobia, a person's extreme shyness, self-consciousness, and fears of embarrassment get in the way of life. Instead of enjoying social activities, people with social phobia might dread them — and avoid some of them altogether. What Causes Social Phobia? Like other phobias, social phobia is a fear reaction to something that isn't actually dangerous — although the body and mind react as if the danger is real. This means that someone feels physical sensations of fear, like a faster heartbeat and breathing. These are part of the body's fight-flight response. They're caused by a rush of adrenaline and other chemicals that prepare the body to either fight or make a quick getaway. This biological mechanism kicks in when we feel afraid. It's a built-in nervous system response that alerts us to danger so we can protect ourselves. With social phobia, this response gets activated too often, too strongly, and in situations where it's out of place. Because the physical sensations that go with the response are real — and sometimes quite strong — the danger seems real too. So the person will react by freezing up, and will feel unable to interact. As the body experiences these physical sensations, the mind goes through emotions like feeling afraid or nervous. People with social phobia tend to interpret these sensations and emotions in a way that leads them to avoid the situation ("Uh-oh, my heart's pounding, this must be dangerous — I'd better not do it!"). Someone else might interpret the same physical sensations of nervousness a different way ("OK, that's just my heart beating fast. It's me getting nervous because it's almost my turn to speak. It happens every time. No big deal."). What Fears Are Involved? With social phobia, a person's fears and concerns are focused on their social performance — whether it's a major class presentation or small talk at the lockers. People with social phobia tend to feel self-conscious and uncomfortable about being noticed or judged by others. They're more sensitive to fears that they'll be embarrassed, look foolish, make a mistake, or be criticized or laughed at. No one wants to go through these things. But most people don't really spend much time worrying about it. The fear and anxiety are out of proportion to the situation. How Can Social Phobia Affect Someone's Life? With social phobia, thoughts and fears about what others think get exaggerated in someone's mind. The person starts to focus on the embarrassing things that could happen, instead of the good things. This makes a situation seem much worse than it is, and influences a person to avoid it. Some of the ways social phobia can affect someone's life include: Feeling lonely or disappointed over missed opportunities for friendship and fun. Social phobia might prevent someone from chatting with friends in the lunchroom, joining an after-school club, going to a party, or asking someone on a date. Not getting the most out of school. Social phobia might keep a person from volunteering an answer in class, reading aloud, or giving a presentation. Someone with social phobia might feel too nervous to ask a question in class or go to a teacher for help. Missing a chance to share their talents and learn new skills. Social phobia might prevent someone from auditioning for the school play, being in the talent show, trying out for a team, or joining in a service project. Social phobia not only prevents people from trying new things. It also prevents them from making the normal, everyday mistakes that help people improve their skills still further. What Is Selective Mutism? Some kids and teens are so extremely shy and so fearful about talking to others, that they don't speak at all to some people (such as a teacher or students they don't know) or in certain places (like at someone else's house). This form of social phobia is sometimes called selective mutism. People with selective mutism can talk. They have completely normal conversations with the people they're comfortable with or in certain places. But other situations cause them such extreme anxiety that they may not be able to bring themselves to talk at all. Some people might mistake their silence for a stuck-up attitude or rudeness. But with selective mutism and social phobia, silence stems from feeling uncomfortable and afraid, not from being uncooperative, disrespectful, or rude. Why Do Some People Develop Social Phobia? Kids, teens, and adults can have social phobia. Most of the time, it starts when a person is young. Like other anxiety-based problems, social phobia develops because of a combination of three factors: A person's biological makeup. Social phobia could be partly due to the genes and temperament a person inherits. Inherited genetic traits from parents and other relatives can influence how the brain senses and regulates anxiety, shyness, nervousness, and stress reactions. Likewise, some people are born with a shy temperament and tend to be cautious and sensitive in new situations and prefer what's familiar. Most people who develop social phobia have always had a shy temperament. Not everyone with a shy temperament develops social phobia (in fact, most don't). It's the same with genes. But people who inherit these traits do have an increased chance of developing social phobia. Behaviors learned from role models (especially parents). A person's naturally shy temperament can be influenced by what he or she learns from role models. If parents or others react by overprotecting a child who is shy, the child won't have a chance to get used to new situations and new people. Over time, shyness can build into social phobia. Shy parents might also unintentionally set an example by avoiding certain social interactions. A shy child who watches this learns that socializing is uncomfortable, distressing, and something to avoid. Life events and experiences. If people born with a cautious nature have stressful experiences, it can make them even more cautious and shy. Feeing pressured to interact in ways they don't feel ready for, being criticized or humiliated, or having other fears and worries can make it more likely for a shy or fearful person to develop social anxiety. People who constantly receive critical or disapproving reactions may grow to expect that others will judge them negatively. Being teased or bullied will make people who are already shy likely to retreat into their shells even more. They'll be scared of making a mistake or disappointing someone, and will be more sensitive to criticism. The good news is that the effect of these negative experiences can be turned around with some focused slow-but-steady effort. Fear can be learned. And it can also be unlearned, too. Dealing With Social Phobia People with social phobia can learn to manage fear, develop confidence and coping skills, and stop avoiding things that make them anxious. But it's not always easy. Overcoming social phobia means getting up the courage it takes to go beyond what's comfortable, little by little. Here's who can support and guide people in overcoming social phobia: Therapists can help people recognize the physical sensations caused by fight-flight and teach them to interpret these sensations more accurately. Therapists can help people create a plan for facing social fears one by one, and help them build the skills and confidence to do it. This includes practicing new behaviors. Sometimes, but not always, medications that reduce anxiety are used as part of the treatment for social phobia. Family or friends are especially important for people who are dealing with social phobia. The right support from a few key people can help those with social phobia gather the courage to go outside their comfort zone and try something new. Putdowns, lectures, criticisms, and demands to change don't help — and just make a person feel bad. Having social phobia isn't a person's fault and isn't something anyone chooses. Instead, friends and family can encourage people with social phobia to pick a small goal to aim for, remind them to go for it, and be there when they might feel discouraged. Good friends and family are there to celebrate each small success along the way. Overcoming Social Phobia Dealing with social phobia takes patience, courage to face fears and try new things, and the willingness to practice. It takes a commitment to go forward rather than back away when feeling shy. Little by little, someone who decides to deal with extreme shyness can learn to be more comfortable. Each small step forward helps build enough confidence to take the next small step. As shyness and fears begin to melt, confidence and positive feelings build. Pretty soon, the person is thinking less about what might feel uncomfortable and more about what might be fun. Reviewed by: Shirin Hasan, MD Date reviewed: August 2018 (Kids health)

What should I know about trust?

Trust—or the belief that someone or something can be relied on to do what they say they will—is a key element of social relationships and a foundation for cooperation. It is critical for romantic relationships, friendships, interactions between strangers, and social groups on a large scale, and a lack of trust in such scenarios can come with serious consequences. Indeed, society as a whole would likely fail to function in the absence of trust. Why Trust Matters EM Karuna/ Shutterstock The sense that one can depend on another person lays the groundwork for social exchanges yielding benefits like affection, a sense of security, and achievements that would be impossible alone. When trust is absent—or someone betrays the trust that has been invested in them—the possibility of a successful future relationship diminishes. Trust comes in as many varieties as there are links between people. In well-functioning relationships, individuals can trust that a parent or romantic partner will show them love, that business partners will hold up their end of a deal, and that someone in a position of power will wield it responsibly. To an extent, people also trust complete strangers—doctors, taxi drivers, first-time babysitters—to follow social rules and not to take advantage of them or their loved ones despite the opportunity. Why does trust matter for relationships? Trust is a cornerstone of any social relationship, whether romantic, professional, or between friends. People who trust each other can work together more effectively at home, at work, or elsewhere. They are also more willing to share intimate information, which can reduce the risk of anxiety and depression and build a stronger sense of self. Why is it important to have trust in a workplace? Trust is key for collaboration, the open exchange of ideas, and a strong workplace culture. Workplaces high in trust have less turnover, improved relationships, and less susceptibility to groupthink. Workers in low-trust organizations are less likely to speak up or to help others who need it, which can weaken morale and the company's bottom line. How does trust improve society? Trust is, in many ways, the key to social harmony. Group members who trust each other will be more willing to cooperate, and will thus be able to achieve more than individual members alone; trust also cultivates a larger sense of safety and allows individuals to devote energy to social improvements, rather than self-protection. Can most people be trusted? Because motivations and responses vary widely across situations, it's likely not possible to say whether or not most people can be trusted all of the time. However, the belief that most people are generally trustworthy, known as "generalized trust," appears to be correlated with higher intelligence, better health, and overall life satisfaction. What is the connection between trust and moral character? Trustworthiness is a key element of moral character, along with other positive traits like honesty, courage, and a prediction for fairness. Those who behave with integrity are more likely to earn the trust of others, which is often the cornerstone of a strong first impression and, ultimately, a healthy and rewarding relationship. Are humans hardwired to trust others? Recent neuroscience research on the mechanisms of trust suggests that human brains are naturally prone to trusting others. In one study, brain regions associated with positive emotions and decision-making lit up when someone trusted a close associate to play a game fairly, indicating that feelings of trust trigger social reward centers in the brain. Are there cultural differences in trust? Yes, levels of trust vary widely between cultures. Americans, for instance, have been found to be more trusting than Germans or the Japanese. Levels of trust can even vary within societies; Northern Italians, for example, have been found to be more willing than Southern Italians to keep money in banks, which indicates greater societal trust. Who to Trust and Why Work colleagues in meeting, two women shaking hands with man sitting at table Trust involves a degree of vulnerability. In trusting that a co-worker will follow through on a promise to help with a project, one risks the possibility that the colleague will renege at the last minute. Trusting a romantic partner to remain faithful opens a person up to the risk of crushing betrayal. When trust is warranted, however, the return on investment can be great and significantly benefit mental well-being. Thus, the ability to determine who one can and cannot trust—and to appropriately update these perceptions over time—is vital. But it's often not an easy judgment to make—especially because some individuals excel at winning the trust of people they intend to victimize. How, then, can we know who to trust? It could be useful to consider specific characteristics when deciding whether, how much, and in what ways to trust another person. Judging someone's intentions can be helpful, but intentions—as well as confidence—can be misleading. Trusting someone to help solve a difficult problem requires that one make an assessment of their competence, too. Why do we trust strangers? Trusting unknown people may seem ill-advised, but it's something most people do every day. Researchers have proposed several potential explanations for why we trust strangers, including mutual benefit (we trust others based on the assumption that doing so will likely benefit both parties) and social norms (we trust others because we believe we're expected to). What qualities make a person trustworthy? Trustworthy people share several key traits. The most obvious is their follow-through: they do what they say they will do. Research has also found that trustworthy people, especially leaders, tend to be transparent in their decision-making and motivation, listen to others' input, and put the interests of others over their own self-interest. Are certain personality traits predictive of trustworthiness? Yes. High levels of certain personality traits, including agreeableness and conscientiousness, consistently predict trustworthiness. Other personality characteristics also play a role; for instance, guilt-proneness, or one's tendency to anticipate feeling guilt after wrongdoing, is highly predictive of trustworthiness in one study. Is it possible to be too trusting? Yes, certain people are unusually prone to trusting others even when there are clear indicators that they are untrustworthy. This is often attributed to personality traits such as high levels of agreeableness or openness. Williams Syndrome, a rare disorder sometimes called the "opposite of autism," leads those who live with it to treat everyone, even strangers, as trustworthy, which can lead to negative consequences. The Roots of Distrust Upset couple after fight, sitting on couch looking away from each other Some people can be highly trusting of others, which is often a matter of personality; people higher on the personality trait of agreeableness, for example, tend to more readily indicate that they find other people trustworthy. But for others—particularly those who have been victimized or betrayed in the past—building trust can be a slow, laborious process; for some, it may feel downright impossible. Many people who are consistently distrusting have good reason for being so. But a tendency not to trust others can have severe consequences in a number of domains—particularly interpersonal relationships—and can exacerbate loneliness, depression, or antisocial behavior. Though mistrustful individuals often feel as though they have a right to feel that way, working with a professional to identify the root cause of trust issues and take steps toward overcoming them can be immensely helpful for improving well-being and cultivating healthy relationships. Does anxiety make it harder to trust other people? Anxiety can make it difficult to know who to trust. But while negative emotions, including anxiety, may result in excessive distrust, that's not the only possible outcome. In one study, anxious participants actually found it more difficult to recognize untrustworthy people, and continued to collaborate with them even when their behavior did not warrant it. Where do "trust issues" come from? Chronic distrust—colloquially known as "trust issues"—have several possible sources. For some, early relationships with caregivers taught them that their needs would not be met and that others would continuously let them down. Trauma can also damage trust; traumatized individuals often find it difficult to let their guard down, even with loved ones. Trust issues may also be a matter of personality; naturally less agreeable people tend to be more prone to distrusting others. Why don't I trust anyone? Some people who struggle to trust can pinpoint a specific traumatic event that shattered their worldview. For others, it may be a matter of personality; less agreeable individuals, for instance, tend to be less trusting. Distrust may also be due to neglectful or distant caregivers relaying early-life messages that others cannot be consistently relied on. Why doesn't my partner trust me? Feeling eternally distrusted by a partner can be enormously painful. In some cases, personality disorders (such as borderline personality disorder) may lead people to "test" their partner's trustworthiness with repeated accusations. Other distrustful partners may have been hurt in the past, or grew up in an environment where a trusting nature was taken advantage of. How to Improve and Repair Trust Group of young coworkers doing trust falls in brick office On an interpersonal level, the ability to trust others who have earned it—and, in certain instances, to repair trust after it's been broken—are essential to emotional well-being and strong, healthy relationships. On a larger scale, improving trust between group members can help workplaces, organizations, and societies function more smoothly by increasing social harmony and laying the groundwork for heightened productivity. While improving trust isn't always easy—and takes serious dedication from all parties involved—it is possible the majority of the time. Moving slowly when necessary, communicating honestly, and following through on promises are all key to building trust, whether between individuals, within an organization, or between countries. What are ways to build trust in a relationship? Romantic partners, friends, or family members can build trust in their relationship through mutual respect; open, honest communication; engaging in an equal amount of give and take; and gradually displaying more vulnerability around each other. Following through on promises consistently also helps to build trust over time. Is it possible to rebuild trust after betrayal? Yes, but it can be difficult. Betrayed individuals who are struggling to trust may find it helpful to work with a therapist. They can also take "calculated risks" around those they are considering trusting—sharing a small bit of intimate information and observing how it is received and how they feel—before gradually increasing their investment. How can a couple regain trust after infidelity? Partners can regain trust after infidelity through a process of rigorous honesty—from both parties—and through the slow, deliberate demonstration that the trust-breaker is sorry, has taken responsibility for their actions, and can be counted on going forward. Working with a therapist can help many couples navigate this process in a healthy, respectful way. How can I trust myself more? Learning to trust oneself requires self-compassion and patience. Many people who don't trust their own instincts or second-guess their choices received early-life messages that they were unimportant, unintelligent, or otherwise "bad." Deliberately identifying and challenging those messages—with the help of a trusted therapist, if necessary—is necessary to regaining self-trust. How can I learn to trust again? Those looking to trust again—either after a significant betrayal or after a lifetime of smaller hurts—are advised to cultivate open, honest communication while gradually increasing the level of vulnerability they display with others. Once someone has demonstrated that they can be trusted with small intimacies, it will feel easier to let one's guard down further. Is it possible to cure lifelong trust issues? While it's not always possible for trust issues to be "cured," their effects can certainly be lessened. Therapy, as well as a deliberate focus on practicing self-compassion and vulnerability, can help someone lessen their natural tendency to distrust others and build (or rebuild) healthy relationships. How can a workplace increase trust among coworkers? Organizations can increase trust by promoting accountability, making both progress and setbacks public, engaging in ethical practices at each level of the organization, and seeking and incorporating input from all employees. After a misstep, those responsible can help restore trust by owning the mistake and outlining a clear plan for stopping it from recurring. How can a society build greater trust among citizens? Building societal trust is both a top-down and a bottom-up process. From the top, governments can promote trust by increasing transparency around decision-making, not tolerating corruption, and encouraging and incorporating community input. From the bottom, positive actions that build "social capital"—like volunteering, altruism, and cooperation—have been associated with increased societal trust. (Psychology Today)

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What should I know about the controversy over Ye's comments?

Adidas cuts ties with rapper Kanye West over anti-Semitism By Faarea Masud Business reporter 25 October 2022 Updated 26 October 2022 Clothing giant Adidas has cut ties with rapper Ye, known as Kanye West, saying it does "not tolerate antisemitism and any other sort of hate speech". Adidas's Yeezy brand collaboration with Mr West was put under review, after he showed a "White Lives Matter" T-shirt design at Paris Fashion Week. Days later, the rapper posted anti-Semitic comments on his Twitter account. His products will be pulled from sale with immediate effect, said Adidas. The sportswear brand has previously said the Yeezy brand collaboration with Ye was one of the most successful in the company's history. Cutting the partnership means Adidas will make a net loss of £217m in 2022 as a result, it said. Ye, who has been diagnosed with bipolar disorder, had previously accused Adidas of stealing his designs in a now-deleted Instagram post. In a statement on Tuesday, Adidas wrote: "Adidas does not tolerate antisemitism and any other sort of hate speech. Ye's recent comments and actions have been unacceptable, hateful and dangerous, and they violate the company's values of diversity and inclusion, mutual respect and fairness." Adidas puts Kanye West Yeezy deal under review Kanye West to buy right-wing platform Parler Instagram and Twitter suspended Ye's account in the days following his anti-Semitic remarks. Among various celebrities decrying Ye's anti-Semitic remarks were former 'Friends' actor David Schwimmer, and Ye's former wife Kim Kardashian, a reality TV star who is currently studying to become a lawyer. On Monday, Ms Kardashian stated on Twitter: "Hate speech is never OK or excusable. I stand together with the Jewish community and call on the terrible violence and hateful rhetoric towards them to come to an immediate end." Ye's business partnerships have also come under increasing pressure: Bank JP Morgan and clothing retailer Gap said in recent months that they were ending their relationship with Ye. Ye accused Gap of not honouring terms of their deal, including by failing to open standalone stores for his Yeezy fashion label. Gap wrote in a statement on Tuesday that it will be removing Yeezy Gap products from its stores, and that it had shut down the YeezyGap.com website. "Antisemitism, racism and hate in any form are inexcusable and not tolerated... We are partnering with organisations that combat hate and discrimination," Gap said on its Instagram account, @yeezyxgap. Although Adidas put its relationship under review after Ye showed his "White Lives Matter" T-shirt, the company did not say the collection was the reason for the review. It told the BBC it had made the decision to put the partnership under review after "repeated efforts to privately resolve the situation" of being accused by Ye of "stealing" his designs. The phrase "Black Lives Matter" was widely used after George Floyd, an unarmed black man, was killed by a police officer in Minneapolis in the summer of 2020. It has since become a political and social movement that seeks to highlight racism experienced by black people, particularly incidents of police brutality and racially motivated violence. High-end fashion house Balenciaga and talent scouts Creative Artists Agency also cut ties with Ye earlier in October. Film and television production company MRC said on Monday it will not be airing its recently completed documentary on the rapper. "Kanye is a producer and sampler of music. Last week he sampled and remixed a classic tune that has charted for over 3,000 years - the lie that Jews are evil and conspire to control the world for their own gain... As leaders of this company (a Jew, a Muslim, and a Christian), we feel duty bound to say to all of you this is a pernicious, terrible use of false logic," MRC wrote on Monday. On 15 October, speaking on US podcast Drink Champs, Ye defended his anti-Semitic tweet, adding: "Jewish people have owned the black voice... whether it's through all of us being signed to a record label, or having a jewish manager", and that "the jewish media blocked me out". Drink Champs apologised for and removed the episode. American football player Aaron Donald and basketball star Jaylen Brown have terminated their contracts with Kanye West's sports marketing agency, Donda Sports, after his anti-Semitic comments. On Monday, NBA All-Star Brown said he planned to stay with Donda, but reversed his decision a day later. 'Net worth falls' Shares in Adidas fell as much as 8% after the announcement but have since pared their losses. Adidas had warned in its last financial forecast in October that deterioration in its business in China, along with lower consumer demand in major Western markets, have put pressure on its profit forecasts for 2022. The brand is also looking for a new chief executive, after announcing in August that current boss Kasper Rorsted would be leaving in 2023. A spokesperson for Campaign Against Antisemitism said: "Adidas has finally joined other brands and agencies and cut ties with Ye (Kanye West). This would not have happened without the almost 175,000 who signed our petition and the celebrities and influencers on both sides of the Atlantic and around the world who helped promote it and amplified the message." The rapper has also lost his position in Forbes magazine's list of billionaires. The magazine estimates the loss of the Adidas partnership has cut Ye's net worth from $1.5bn to $400m. The BBC has contacted Ye's representatives for comment. (BBC)

Should I rethink trust?

Will we ever learn? We'd barely recovered from Enron and WorldCom before we faced the subprime mortgage meltdown and more scandals that shook our trust in businesspeople. Which raises the question: Do we trust too much? In this article, Stanford professor and social psychologist Kramer explores the reasons we trust so easily—and, often, so unwisely. He explains that genetics and childhood learning make us predisposed to trust and that it's been a good survival mechanism. That said, our willingness to trust makes us vulnerable. Our sense of trust kicks in on remarkably simple cues, such as when people look like us or are part of our social group. We also rely on third parties to verify the character of others, sometimes to our detriment (as the victims of Bernard Madoff learned). Add in our illusions of invulnerability and our tendencies to see what we want to see and to overestimate our own judgment, and the bottom line is that we're often easily fooled. We need to develop tempered trust. For those who trust too much, that means reading cues better; for the distrustful, it means developing more receptive behaviors. Everyone should start with small acts of trust that encourage reciprocity and build up. Having a hedge against potential abuses also helps. Hollywood scriptwriters, for instance, register their treatments with the Writers Guild of America to prevent their ideas from being stolen by the executives they pitch. To attract the right relationships, people must strongly signal their own honesty, proactively allay concerns, and, if their trust is abused, retaliate. Trusting individuals in certain roles, which essentially means trusting the system that selects and trains them, also works but isn't foolproof. And don't count on due diligence alone for protection; constant vigilance is needed to make sure the landscape hasn't changed. For the past two decades, trust has been touted as the all-powerful lubricant that keeps the economic wheels turning and greases the right connections—all to our collective benefit. Popular business books proclaim the power and virtue of trust. Academics have enthusiastically piled up study after study showing the varied benefits of trust, especially when it is based on a clear track record, credible expertise, and prominence in the right networks. Then along came Bernie. There was "something about this person, pedigree, and reputation that inspired trust," mused one broker taken in by Bernard Madoff, who confessed to a $65 billion Ponzi scheme—one of the largest and most successful in history. On the surface, Madoff possessed all the bona fides—the record, the résumé, the expertise, and the social connections. But the fact that so many people, including some sophisticated financial experts and business leaders, were lulled into a false sense of security when dealing with Madoff should give us pause. Why are we so prone to trusting? Madoff is hardly the first to pull the wool over so many eyes. What about Enron, WorldCom, Tyco, and all the other corporate scandals of the past decade? Is there perhaps a problem with how we trust? Highlights—and lowlights—in the public's trust of business People's trust in business takes a hard hit during scandals and ... I have been grappling with this question for most of my 30 years as a social psychologist, exploring both the strengths and the weaknesses of trust. In the wake of the recent massive and pervasive abuses—and with evidence of more scandals surfacing each day—I think it's worth taking another look at why we trust so readily, why we sometimes trust poorly, and what we can do about it. In the following pages, I present the thesis that human beings are naturally predisposed to trust—it's in our genes and our childhood learning—and by and large it's a survival mechanism that has served our species well. That said, our willingness to trust often gets us into trouble. Moreover, we sometimes have difficulty distinguishing trustworthy people from untrustworthy ones. At a species level, that doesn't matter very much so long as more people are trustworthy than not. At the individual level, though, it can be a real problem. To survive as individuals, we'll have to learn to trust wisely and well. That kind of trust—I call it tempered trust—doesn't come easily, but if you diligently ask yourself the right questions, you can develop it. Let's begin by looking at why we're so prone to trust. To Trust Is Human It all starts with the brain. Thanks to our large brains, humans are born physically premature and highly dependent on caretakers. Because of this need, we enter the world "hardwired" to make social connections. The evidence is impressive: Within one hour of birth, a human infant will draw her head back to look into the eyes and face of the person gazing at her. Within a few more hours, the infant will orient her head in the direction of her mother's voice. And, unbelievable as it may seem, it's only a matter of hours before the infant can actually mimic a caretaker's expressions. A baby's mother, in turn, responds and mimics her child's expression and emotions within seconds. In short, we're social beings from the get-go: We're born to be engaged and to engage others, which is what trust is largely about. That has been an advantage in our struggle for survival. As social psychologist Shelley Taylor noted in her summary of the scientific evidence, "Scientists now consider the nurturant qualities of life—the parent-child bond, cooperation, and other benign social ties—to be critical attributes that drove brain development...accounting for our success as a species." The tendency to trust made sense in our evolutionary history. Research has shown that the brain chemistry governing our emotions also plays a role in trust. Paul Zak, a researcher on the cutting edge of the new field of neuroeconomics, has demonstrated, for instance, that oxytocin, a powerful natural chemical found in our bodies (which plays a role in a mother's labor and milk production) can boost both trust and trustworthiness between people playing experimental trust games. (Even a squirt of oxytocin-laden nasal spray is enough to do it.) Other research has also shown how intimately oxytocin is connected with positive emotional states and the creation of social connections. It's well documented that animals become calmer, more sedate, and less anxious when injected with oxytocin. Trust kicks in on remarkably simple cues. We're far more likely, for example, to trust people who are similar to us in some dimension. Perhaps the most compelling evidence of this comes from a study by researcher Lisa DeBruine. She developed a clever technique for creating an image of another person that could be morphed to look more and more (or less and less) like a study participant's face. The greater the similarity, DeBruine found, the more the participant trusted the person in the image. This tendency to trust people who resemble us may be rooted in the possibility that such people might be related to us. Other studies have shown that we like and trust people who are members of our own social group more than we like outsiders or strangers. This in-group effect is so powerful that even random assignment into small groups is sufficient to create a sense of solidarity. As psychologist Dacher Keltner and others have shown, physical touch also has a strong connection to the experience of trust. In one experiment involving a game widely used to study decisions to trust, an experimenter made it a point, while describing the task, to ever so lightly touch the backs of individuals as they were about to play the game. People who received a quick and unobtrusive touch were more likely to cooperate with, rather than compete against, their partner. It's no coincidence, Keltner noted, that greeting rituals throughout the world involve touching—witness the firm, all-American handshake. So what does all this research add up to? It shows that it often doesn't take much to tip us toward trust. People may say they don't have a lot of trust in others, but their behavior tells a very different story. In fact, in many ways, trust is our default position; we trust routinely, reflexively, and somewhat mindlessly across a broad range of social situations. As clinical psychologist Doris Brothers succinctly put it, "Trust rarely occupies the foreground of conscious awareness. We are no more likely to ask ourselves how trusting we are at any given moment than to inquire if gravity is still keeping the planets in orbit." I call this tendency presumptive trust to capture the idea that we approach many situations without any suspicion. Much of the time this predisposition serves us well. Unless we've been unfortunate enough to be victims of a major violation of trust, most of us have had years of experiences that affirm the basic trustworthiness of the people and institutions around us by the time we become adults. Things seldom go catastrophically wrong when we trust, so it's not entirely irrational that we have a bias toward trust. But Our Judgment Is Sometimes Poor If it's human to trust, perhaps it's just as human to err. Indeed, a lot of research confirms it. Our exquisitely adapted, cue-driven brains may help us forge trust connections in the first place, but they also make us vulnerable to exploitation. In particular, our tendency to judge trustworthiness on the basis of physical similarities and other surface cues can prove disastrous when combined with the way we process information. One tendency that skews our judgment is our proclivity to see what we want to see. Psychologists call this the confirmation bias. Because of it we pay more attention to, and overweight in importance, evidence supporting our hypotheses about the world, while downplaying or discounting discrepancies or evidence to the contrary. In one laboratory game I conducted, individuals who were primed to expect a possible abuse of trust looked more carefully for signs of untrustworthy behavior from prospective partners. In contrast, those primed with more positive social expectations paid more attention to evidence of others' trustworthiness. Most important, individuals' subsequent decisions about how much to trust the prospective partners were swayed by those expectations. A confirmation bias wouldn't be so bad if we weren't heavily influenced by the social stereotypes that most of us carry around in our heads. These stereotypes reflect (often false) beliefs that correlate observable cues (facial characteristics, age, gender, race, and so on) with underlying psychological traits (honesty, reliability, likability, or trustworthiness). Psychologists call these beliefs implicit theories, and the evidence is overwhelming that we aren't conscious of how they affect our judgment. Most of the time our implicit personality theories are pretty harmless; they simply help us categorize people more quickly and render social judgments more swiftly. But they can cause us to overestimate someone's trustworthiness in situations where a lot is at stake (for instance, our physical safety or financial security). To make matters worse, people tend to think their own judgment is better than average—including their judgment about whom to trust. In a negotiation class I teach, I routinely find that about 95% of MBA students place themselves in the upper half of the distribution when it comes to their ability to "size up" other people accurately, including how trustworthy, reliable, honest, and fair their classmates are. In fact, more than 77% of my students put themselves in the top 25% of their class, and about 20% put themselves in the top 10%. This inflated sense of our own judgment makes us vulnerable to people who can fake outward signs of trustworthiness. It's not just biases inside our heads that skew our judgment. We often rely on trusted third parties to verify the character or reliability of other people. These third parties, in effect, help us "roll over" our positive expectations from one known and trusted party to another who is less known and trusted. In such situations, trust becomes, quite literally, transitive. Unfortunately, as the Bernie Madoff case illustrates, transitive trust can lull people into a false sense of security. The evidence suggests that Madoff was a master at cultivating and exploiting social connections. One of his hunting grounds was the Orthodox Jewish community, a tight-knit social group. The biases described thus far contribute to errors in deciding whom to trust. Unfortunately, the wiring in our brains can also hinder our ability to make good decisions about how much risk to assume in our relationships. In particular, researchers have identified two cognitive illusions that increase our propensity to trust too readily, too much, and for too long. The first illusion causes us to underestimate the likelihood that bad things will happen to us. Research on this illusion of personal invulnerability has demonstrated that we think we're not very likely to experience some of life's misfortunes, even though we realize objectively that such risk exists. Thus, although we know intellectually that street crime is a major problem in most cities, we underestimate the chances that we will become victims of it. One reason for this illusion, it's been argued, is the ease with which we engage in a kind of compensatory calculus and call up from memory all the steps we've taken to mitigate such risks (for instance, avoiding dark alleys or making it a habit to cross the street when we see an ominous stranger approaching). The second and closely related illusion is unrealistic optimism. Numerous studies have shown that people often overestimate the likelihood that good things will happen to them—that they will marry well, have a successful career, live a long life, and so on. Even when people are given accurate information regarding the true odds of such outcomes, they still tend to think they will do better than average. As if all these biases and illusions weren't enough, we also have to contend with the fact that the very simplicity of our trust cues leaves us vulnerable to abuse. Unfortunately for us, virtually any indicator of trustworthiness can be manipulated or faked. A number of studies indicate that detecting the cheaters among us is not as easy as one might think. I have been studying deceptive behavior in my lab experiments—and teach about it in my business school courses on power and negotiation. In one exercise, I instruct some participants to do everything they can to "fake" trustworthiness during an upcoming negotiation exercise. I tell them to draw freely on all their intuitive theories regarding behaviors that signal trustworthiness. So what do these short-term sociopaths say and do? Usually, they make it a point to smile a lot; to maintain strong eye contact; to occasionally touch the other person's hand or arm gently. (Women mention touching as a strategy more than men do and, in their post-exercise debriefs, also report using it more than men do.) They engage in cheery banter to relax the other person, and they feign openness during their actual negotiation by saying things like "Let's agree to be honest and we can probably do better at this exercise" and "I always like to put all my cards on the table." Their efforts turn out to be pretty successful. Most find it fairly easy to get the other person to think they are behaving in a trustworthy, open, cooperative fashion (according to their negotiation partners' ratings of these traits). Additionally, even when students on the other side of the bargaining table were (secretly) forewarned that half the students they might encounter had been instructed to try to fool them and take advantage of them, their ability to detect fakers did not improve: They didn't identify fakers any more accurately than a coin flip would have. Perhaps most interesting, those who had been forewarned actually felt they'd done a better job of detecting fakery than did the other students. We've seen why we trust and also why we sometimes trust poorly. Now it's time to consider how to get trust back on track. If we are to harvest its genuine benefits, we need to trust more prudently. Temper Your Trust We can never be certain of another's motivations, intentions, character, or future actions. We simply have to choose between trust (opening ourselves to the prospect of abuse if we're dealing with an exploiter) or distrust (which means missing out on all the benefits if the other person happens to be honest). The shadow of doubt lingers over every decision to trust. That said, there is much that you can do to reduce the doubt—in particular, by adjusting your mind-set and behavioral habits. Here are some preliminary rules for tempering trust. The shadow of doubt lingers over every decision to trust. But you can do a lot to reduce that doubt. Rule 1 | Know yourself. People generally fall into one of two buckets when it comes to their disposition toward trust. Some trust too much and too readily. They tend to take an overly rosy view, assuming that most people are decent and would never harm them. Thus they disclose personal secrets too early in relationships or share sensitive information in the workplace too indiscriminately, before prudent, incremental foundations of trust have been laid. They talk too freely about their beliefs and impressions of others, without determining whether the person they're conversing with is a friend or a foe. Their overly trusting behavior sets them up for potential grief. In the other bucket are people who are too mistrustful when venturing into relationships. They assume the worst about other people's motivations, intentions, and future actions and thus hold back, avoiding disclosing anything about themselves that might help create a social connection. They're reluctant to reciprocate fully because they fear they'll trust the wrong people. They may make fewer mistakes than their more trusting counterparts do, but they have fewer positive experiences because they keep others at a distance. The first rule, therefore, is to figure out which of the buckets you fall into, because that will determine what you need to work on. If you're good at trusting but are prone to trust the wrong people, you must get better at interpreting the cues that you receive. If you're good at recognizing cues but have difficulty forging trusting relationships, then you'll have to expand your repertoire of behaviors. Rule 2 | Start small. Trust entails risk. There's no way to avoid that. But you can keep the risks sensible—and sensible means small, especially in the early phases of a relationship. Social psychologist David Messick and I coined the term shallow trust to describe the kinds of small but productive behaviors through which we can communicate our own willingness to trust. A good example of this is a gesture made by Hewlett-Packard in the 1980s. HP's management allowed engineers to take equipment home whenever they needed to, including weekends, without having to go through a lot of formal paperwork or red tape. That sent a strong message that the employees taking it off-site could be trusted. The fact that the equipment was subsequently returned validated that trust and, over time, cemented it. Imaginative acts of trust of this sort breed trustworthiness in return. They don't involve much risk, but they broadcast that you're willing to meet people halfway. Salting your world with lots of small trusting acts sends a signal to others who are themselves interested in building good relationships, and decades of research by social psychologist Svenn Lindskold and others have proved that it leads to more positive interactions. It works because it's incremental (and thus manages the risks intelligently) and contingent (that is, tied to reciprocity). By taking turns with gradually increasing risks, you build a strong and tempered trust with the other person. Rule 3 | Write an escape clause. In our study of trust dynamics in high-stakes situations, Debra Meyerson, Karl Weick, and I found that if people have a clearly articulated plan for disengagement, they can engage more fully and with more commitment. Hedging one's bets in this way may seem as if it would undermine rather than reinforce trust. (After all, how can you expect me to trust you completely if I know you don't trust me completely?) Yet, paradoxically, hedges allow everyone in an organization to trust more easily and comfortably—and even to take larger risks. Because I know your dependence on me is hedged a bit (you have a good backup plan), I have more breathing room as well. All of us know the system will survive the occasional, unavoidable mistakes that permeate any complex organization or social system. A study I did of novice screenwriters trying to break into the entertainment industry, a domain where betrayals of trust are commonplace, provides a good example of how this works. To get a chance to develop their original ideas for movies or television shows, screenwriters first have to pitch them to agents, independent producers, and studio executives. Once they've done so, however, their ideas are out there—and always at risk of being stolen. (And it's a real prospect: No less a writer than Art Buchwald had this experience when pitching an idea for a movie about an African prince visiting America—an idea that suddenly showed up on the screen a few years later as Coming to America, with Eddie Murphy in the starring role. In 1988, Buchwald sued Paramount, claiming the idea was his, and won.) One way to hedge the risk is to write up the treatment and register it first with the Writers Guild of America, which prevents others from claiming it as their own. A second important hedge in Hollywood is to have an agent who can pitch the idea so widely that its authorship becomes well known. Hollywood is a small world, and making something common knowledge in a small world is a good hedging strategy. Rule 4 | Send strong signals. To ensure that trust builds from small initial acts to deeper and broader commitments, it's important to send loud, clear, and consistent signals. Some of the social signals we send are too subtle, though we don't realize it. In one study I did exploring perceptions of reciprocal trust, I found that both managers and subordinates overestimated how much they were trusted by the people in the other category. This discrepancy in self-other perception—a trust gap—has an important implication: Most of us tend to underinvest in communicating our trustworthiness to others, because we take it for granted that they know or can readily discern our wonderful qualities of fairness, honesty, and integrity. Sending strong and clear signals not only attracts other tempered trusters but also deters potential predators, who are on the lookout for easy victims sending weak and inconsistent cues. That's why having a reputation for toughness is critical; reputation is among the most powerful ways we communicate who we are and what kinds of relationships we seek. Robert Axelrod, a pioneer in this stream of research, used the colorful term provocability to capture this idea: In order to keep your trust relations on an even keel, and the playing field level, you have to be willing not only to take chances by initially trusting a bit (signaling the willingness to cooperate) but also to retaliate strongly, quickly, and proportionately (signaling that you will strike back when your trust is abused). His research showed that you can be nice and not finish last—but only if you are firm and consistent with respect to punishing offenses. Rule 5 | Recognize the other person's dilemma. It's easy for our self-absorbed brains to fall into the trap of thinking only from our own point of view: After all, it's our own trust dilemmas that we find so anxiety provoking and attention getting. (Whom should I invest my money with? Whom should I allow to operate on me?) We often forget that the people we're dealing with confront their own trust dilemmas and need reassurance when wondering whether (or how much) they should trust us. Some of the best trust builders I've studied display great attention to, and empathy for, the perspective of the other party. They are good mind readers, know what steps to take to reassure people, and proactively allay the anxiety and concerns of others. A good example is President John F. Kennedy in his famous commencement address at American University in 1963, in which he praised the admirable qualities of the Soviet people and declared his willingness to work toward mutual nuclear disarmament with Soviet leaders. We know from Soviet memoirs that Premier Nikita Khrushchev was impressed, believing that Kennedy was sincere in trying to break from the past and could be trusted to work on this issue. Rule 6 | Look at roles as well as people. Many studies highlight the central importance of personal connections in the trust-building process—and appropriately so. This finding does not necessarily mean, however, that your trust in leaders or persons of power must be based on a history of sustained personal contact. Research that Debra Meyerson, Karl Weick, and I did on what we call swift trust showed that high levels of trust often come from very depersonalized interactions; in fact, personal relations sometimes get in the way of trust. An important element of swift trust is the presence of clear and compelling roles. Deep trust in a role, we found, can be a substitute for personal experience with an individual. Role-based trust is trust in the system that selects and trains the individual. Robyn Dawes, a psychologist who specializes in human judgment, once observed, "We trust engineers because we trust engineering and that engineers [as individuals] have been taught to apply valid principles of engineering." Thus, the role is a proxy for personal experience and guarantees expertise and motivation—in short, trustworthiness. Of course, role-based trust isn't foolproof. People on Main Street trusted people on Wall Street for a long time precisely because the U.S. financial system seemed to be producing reliable results that were the envy of the rest of the world. But flawed or not, in deciding whom to trust we still need to take the roles people play into account. Rule 7 | Remain vigilant and always question. When we're hungry, we think about food until we've satisfied our hunger; then our minds move on to the next task confronting us. Human beings seek closure—and that's true of our decisions in trust dilemmas as well. We worry about the trustworthiness of a prospective financial adviser, so we do our due diligence. Once we've made a decision, however, we tend not to revisit it so long as nothing seems to have changed. That's dangerous. Once we've made a decision to trust, we tend not to revisit it. That's dangerous. In analyzing accounts of formative trust experiences, I've found that people whose trust was abused were often in situations where they discovered—too late—that the landscape had changed, but they failed to notice because they thought they had already long ago figured out the situation. Despite the fact that a boss's attitude toward them had shifted or someone in the organization was poisoning their reputation, they were living with a false sense of security. They let their vigilance lapse. The Madoff scandal is a good example. Many people who invested their life savings with Bernie Madoff initially did their due diligence. But once they'd made their decision, their attention turned elsewhere. They were too busy making their money to manage it—which they often didn't feel comfortable doing anyway, because they didn't think of themselves as financial experts. As Holocaust survivor and Nobel Peace Prize winner Elie Wiesel, one of Madoff's many victims, stated, "We checked the people who have business with him, and they were among the best minds on Wall Street, the geniuses of finance. I teach philosophy and literature—and so it happened." The challenge in revisiting trust is that it requires questioning the people we trust, which is psychologically uncomfortable. But when it comes to situations in which our physical, mental, or financial security is on the line, our trust must be tempered by a sustained, disciplined ambivalence. Our predisposition to trust has been an important survival skill for young children and, indeed, for us as a species. Recent evidence, moreover, shows that trust plays a critical role in the economic and social vitality of nations, further affirming its fundamental value. But what helps humanity survive doesn't always help the human, and our propensity to trust makes us vulnerable as individuals. To safely reap the full benefits of trust, therefore, we must learn to temper it. The seven rules I offer here by no means represent a complete primer on how to trust judiciously. The science of trust is also much less complete than we would like, although it is growing rapidly as neuroeconomists, behavioral economists, and psychologists use powerful new techniques such as brain imaging and agent modeling to discover more about how we make judgments about whom to trust and when. But for all their shortcomings, these rules will help you make a good start on what will be a lifelong process of learning how to trust wisely and well. A version of this article appeared in the June 2009 issue of Harvard Business Review. (HBR)

churlish

(adj.) lacking politeness or good manners; lacking sensitivity; difficult to work with or deal with; rude

Social Anxiety Disorder (Social Phobia)

fear of interacting with others or being in social situations that might lead to a negative evaluation

What are some signs of trust issues?

Signs of Trust Issues Written by WebMD Editorial Contributors Medically Reviewed by Dan Brennan, MD on November 17, 2020 Trust is the reliance on the character, ability, strength, or truth of someone or something. Trust is essential to the development of healthy, secure, and satisfying relationships. Although there has been significant research on the subject, relatively little is known about how and why interpersonal trust develops, how it's maintained, and how it unravels when betrayed. Any relationship depends on trust in order to exist. However, sometimes that trust isn't as genuine or as honest as it should be. If one or both partners questions the other's activities, words, or actions, a lack of trust can form. This leads to problems called trust issues. What Are Trust Issues? Individuals with lower levels of trust — or trust issues — tend to monitor and occasionally test their partner's degree of support and responsiveness in their relationship. When a relationship lacks trust, it allows for the potential development of harmful thoughts, actions, or emotions, such as negative attributions, suspicion, and jealousy. Over time, this can lead to bigger problems, such as emotional or physical abuse. Trust issues can also be linked with: Depression Adjustment disorders (difficulty dealing with certain stresses) Anxiety Fear of abandonment Attachment issues Post-traumatic stress Schizophrenia Signs of Trust Issues Here are some of the signs and symptoms to watch out for: Don't Believe What Other People Say Individuals with trust issues have a tendency to "fact check" what others tell them. Even if there's no reason to doubt the honesty of their partner, friend, or even colleague, they don't take what they say as truth unless they confirm it themselves. Always Expect the Worst If someone expects their loved ones to betray them — even if the people in question never have before — they may have trust issues. A lack of trust may lead to suspicion of other people's motives and behavior. Keep People at a Distance Someone with trust issues may not be eager to open up or get close to others, even if they long for deep and meaningful relationships. They may have trouble letting themselves go, being vulnerable, and/or being physically intimate. Jealous Behaviors Romantic jealousy is considered a complex combination of thoughts (i.e., cognitive jealousy), emotions (i.e., emotional jealousy), and behaviors (i.e., behavioral jealousy) that result from a perceived threat to one's romantic relationship. Cognitive jealousy represents a person's rational or irrational thoughts, worries, and suspicions concerning a partner's faithfulness, whereas emotional jealousy refers to a person's feelings of upset in response to a jealousy-evoking situation. Behavioral jealousy involves detective/protective measures a person may take, such as going through their partner's belongings or looking through their text messages or emails. Research examining an individual's motives for engaging in "snooping" behavior also found trust to be an important factor. Specifically, individuals who perceived that their partners disclosed less personally relevant information to them were more likely to engage in snooping behavior, especially when they reported lower levels of trust. Together, these findings indicate that distrust is an important determinant in experiencing and expressing jealousy. This study aims to further refine this association by examining trust and jealousy in the context of attachment theory. Dealing With Trust Issues If you or your loved one is showing signs of trust issues, you're not alone — and there are ways to build trust, which may help strengthen romantic, platonic, and familial relationships and improve your sense of well-being. Some ways to address trust issues include: Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) Cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) can help people get to the root of their trust issues. CBT is a type of talk therapy. Its practitioners believe that thoughts influence behavior. In CBT, a person talks to a health professional about his or her problems. A therapist using CBT might help someone with trust issues learn new ways of thinking to combat their negative feelings, help people separate past problems from future fears, and gain confidence to rebuild trust in existing relationships. Rebuilding Trust There are four general factors to enhancing trust in a close relationship: Honesty and integrity Nondefensiveness Understanding Direct communication If your friend, partner, or loved one has trust issues, strive to be more honest and transparent in all your personal interactions, learn to be less defensive in communicating with them, accept and appreciate the differences between you and them, and be straightforward in asking for what you want from your relationship. In doing so, you'll both feel more open to loving and being loved — and trusting one another. (WebMD)

What should I know about Whitney Houston?

Whitney Houston, (born August 9, 1963, Newark, New Jersey, U.S.—died February 11, 2012, Beverly Hills, California), American singer and actress who was one of the best-selling musical performers of the 1980s and '90s. The daughter of Emily ("Cissy") Houston—whose vocal group, the Sweet Inspirations, sang backup for Aretha Franklin—and the cousin of singer Dionne Warwick, Whitney Houston began singing in church as a child. While still in high school, she sang backup for Chaka Khan and Lou Rawls and modeled for fashion magazines. At age 19 she signed with Arista Records, whose president, Clive Davis, groomed the gospel-based singer for crossover pop success. Her debut album, Whitney Houston (1985), yielded three number one singles in the United States: "Greatest Love of All," which became her signature; "Saving All My Love for You"; and "How Will I Know." Whitney (1987) delivered four more number ones and earned Houston a Grammy Award (for the single "I Wanna Dance with Somebody"). In 1992 Houston married singer Bobby Brown and made her motion-picture debut in The Bodyguard; the film featured her rendition of Dolly Parton's "I Will Always Love You," which stayed at number one for 14 weeks. The film's soundtrack dominated the Grammys the following year, with Houston winning the awards for album of the year, record of the year, and best female pop vocal performance. In the mid-1990s she continued acting, in films such as Waiting to Exhale (1995) and The Preacher's Wife (1996), and the soundtrack of each film generated hit singles for her. In 1998 Houston released My Love Is Your Love, which did not sell as well as previous efforts but was praised by the critics and earned her another Grammy Award. In 2001 she signed a new multialbum contract with Arista for $100 million, but personal difficulties soon overshadowed her recording career. Houston's tumultuous relationship with Brown (the couple divorced in 2007) provided fodder for the tabloids, as did her acknowledged drug use and financial issues. Her 2002 album, Just Whitney, was a personal response to her detractors, but its sales were disappointing compared with earlier efforts. Other than a lacklustre holiday album, One Wish (2003), Houston spent subsequent years in a state of virtual retirement. In February 2009 she began a comeback effort with a four-song set at Clive Davis's annual pre-Grammy Awards gala. The performance was greeted warmly, and in June Houston announced that an album of new material would be available later that year. I Look to You was released in August to positive reviews, and standout songs included the up-tempo "Million Dollar Bill" (penned by Alicia Keys) and the title track, a slow-building ballad written by R. Kelly. In February 2012 Houston died in a bathtub at a Beverly Hills hotel shortly before Davis's pre-Grammy party. A coroner's report released in March stated that the cause of death was accidental drowning, with heart disease and cocaine use listed as contributing factors. Houston posthumously appeared in the musical film Sparkle (2012), which she had coproduced. She was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2020. In January 2015 Houston's only child, Bobbi Kristina Brown, was found unconscious in a bathtub at her home near Atlanta. She died in July. (Encyclopedia Britannica)

Why do some people make me feel uncomfortable?

Why Some People Just Make You Feel Uncomfortable If you feel uncomfortable around certain people, new research suggests why. Posted November 27, 2018 Reviewed by Jessica Schrader Do certain people give you, for lack of a better term, the creeps? When you're near them, do you have the feeling that they're looking you over and possibly judging you? What is it that makes you feel so strange in their presence? If you're lucky, you can move out of their sight and not have to deal with their unwanted gaze. However, you may have no choice if you're stuck with them in a meeting or at someone's house for a small social gathering. What makes things worse is that you don't know exactly what it is that gives you this feeling of discomfort — but you definitely know it's there. In a new study on a specific form of interpersonal discomfort, Tel Aviv University's Orly Bareket and colleagues (2018) examined the correlates of sexually objectifying stares as directed at women by men. Clearly, if you're the target of such unwanted attention, you know just how miserable it makes you feel that certain parts of your body are being examined in excruciating detail. As noted by Bareket and her coauthors, "Sexual objectification is the perception of the human body merely as an object of sexual use" (p. 1). When the objectification takes the form of an ogle or leer, the target (generally a woman) can experience a range of deleterious outcomes such as impaired cognitive performance, feelings of bodily shame, and anxiety over her physique. If you've been through this experience, you know that the objectifying gaze can become a distraction from whatever it is you're supposed to be doing. Instead of concentrating on the task at hand, you start to question whether there's something ugly or defective about your appearance. There is research on people who engage in this objectifying gaze behavior, and as summarized by the authors, it includes the fact that men who leer are also more likely to perpetrate sexual assaults. Even if they don't go to this extreme, their tendency to look at a woman's body rather than her face means that they are less able to communicate effectively, because they miss out on the many nonverbal cues provided by the face. It's possible, further, that by objectifying female targets, these men judge them as "less competent, warm, and moral, as well as less suitable for leadership" (p. 2). On the other hand, as the authors suggest, you might look at another person's body if you're in search of a romantic partner and are in a context where such gazes become less inappropriate. However, you wouldn't make a judgment about who to become intimately involved with on the basis of that person's body alone. You would also want to assess such attributes as personality and intelligence, which require that you look at the person's face as well as the body. Objectification theory suggests that the tendency to separate a gaze at a woman's body from the gaze at her face results in her being seen entirely as a sexual object: "The male gaze creates the possibility for treating a woman's body, body parts, or sexual functions as separated out from her person or as if they are capable of representing her" (p. 2). In other words, when a man's gaze is directed at a woman's body, he will treat her as someone who exists entirely for his use and pleasure. Previous research attempting to establish whether this is true, as Bareket et al. suggest, was limited by the fact that the findings depended on self-report, in which men indicated how much they stare at women in objectifying ways. Instead, it is necessary to use a measure of objectification that is not subject to the distortion of self-report, in which people tend to deny engaging in socially undesirable behavior. The obvious solution to the problem of self-report is to watch the actual gazes of experimental participants with eye tracking. The researcher can use this technology to measure exactly where men's eyes wander when they look at female targets. The Israeli researchers took advantage of this technology while also asking their male participants to complete measures of objectifying attitudes. The 61 male participants, most of whom were college students, and all of whom were Jewish, ranged in age from about 20 years old to over 40. (The average age was 26 years old.) The experimenters placed them in an eye tracking apparatus while they viewed two sets of stimuli, all of which were photographs of women. In the first set, the women had an "ideal" Western body shape and were wearing white tank tops with jeans or gray sweatpants. They all had the same neutral body position and facial expression. In the second set of photographs, the women wore their own clothing, and all were smiling. The male participants thought they were in a study of impression formation, and the instructions indicated they should provide a quick positive or negative judgment of the women in the photo. The questionnaire measure of sexual objectification of women asked participants to state their agreement with items such as: "If a woman is attractive, she doesn't need to have anything interesting to say," "Women are usually flattered when you look at them," "I would enjoy watching a female stripper," and "Commenting on women's physical features is only natural." The key variables of interest in the eye-tracking part of the study were "dwell times" of eye movements directed at the face, chest, and pelvis of the women in the photographs. The researchers measured sexual objectification of the female in the photo by subtracting the time looking at the woman's face from the time spent looking at her chest or hips. As the authors predicted, the men with higher dwell times on the sexual parts of the women's bodies also had higher scores on the explicit measure of sexual objectification. The findings, Bareket et al. conclude, support the idea that "men who are likely to gaze at women's bodies at the expense of their faces also endorse attitudes that justify and normalize the sexual objectification of women" (p. 8). The Israeli study's findings suggest, then, why certain people make you feel uncomfortable. The subtle form of sexism represented by a man's stare is difficult to pin down. You might know that something is off but not know exactly what it is, and you'll be even less likely to resist that unwanted gaze. Although this study examined sexist attitudes, the authors also point out that such implicitly held attitudes about a group of people can be involved in other forms of prejudice and discrimination. Perhaps you feel that a person of a different color skin, ethnicity, or nationality is looking at and judging you, but you have no concrete proof that there is any negative intent of attitude being directed your way. If you're an older person, you may feel that young people also look at you in a critical or judgmental way, but unless they say something, you can't be quite sure. To sum up, the reason that some people make you feel uncomfortable may have far less to do with you than with them. If you can move on, either physically or mentally, you'll be able to avoid having that unwanted gaze thwart your own potential for fulfillment. (Psychology Today)

social anxiety disorder 2

an anxiety disorder involving the extreme and irrational fear of being embarrassed, judged, or scrutinized by others in social situations

What should I know about Beyoncé

Beyoncé, in full Beyoncé Giselle Knowles, (born September 4, 1981, Houston, Texas, U.S.), American singer-songwriter and actress who achieved fame in the late 1990s as the lead singer of the R&B group Destiny's Child and then launched a hugely successful solo career. At age nine Beyoncé formed the singing-rapping girl group Destiny's Child (originally called Girl's Tyme) in 1990 with childhood friends. In 1992 the group lost on the Star Search television talent show, and three years later it was dropped from a recording contract before an album had been released. In 1997 Destiny's Child's fortunes reversed with a Columbia recording contract and then an eponymous debut album that yielded the hit single "No, No, No Part 2." Their follow-up album, The Writing's on the Wall (1999), earned the group two Grammy Awards and sold more than eight million copies in the United States. Survivor (2001), the group's third album, reached the number one spot on the Billboard 200 chart. Early solo career and Destiny's Child reunited Beyoncé was clearly the leader of the group and wrote hit songs for Destiny's Child, such as the saucy "Bootylicious." Eventually, the group parted ways to pursue individual projects. Beyoncé used her songwriting talents to pen her first solo album, Dangerously in Love (2003). The album debuted to rave reviews, and, aided by the exuberant single "Crazy in Love," which featured rapper Jay-Z, it topped charts around the world. In 2004 Beyoncé won five Grammy Awards, including best contemporary R&B album and best female R&B vocal performance. Destiny's Child reunited in 2004 to release Destiny Fulfilled. While generally not as acclaimed as the group's previous efforts, the album sold more than seven million copies worldwide and spawned several hit singles. The trio embarked on a world tour in 2005, during which they announced that the group would officially disband. That same year they released #1's, a collection of well-known songs and number one hits. B'Day, I Am...Sasha Fierce, 4, and Beyoncé In 2006 Beyoncé released her second solo studio album, B'Day, which featured several coproducers, including the hit-making duo the Neptunes. Although much of the album carried echoes of 1970s-style funk, the pop ballad "Irreplaceable" became its most successful single. In 2008 she and Jay-Z married, and the union made them one of the top-earning couples in the entertainment industry. Later that year Beyoncé released the double album I Am...Sasha Fierce. Whereas the first half (I Am) found her in an introspective mood, the second (Sasha Fierce) contained songs better suited to the dance floor. The album as a whole generated several hits, including the assertive "Single Ladies (Put a Ring on It)," and it contributed to Beyoncé's dominance of the 2010 Grammy Awards. Her six awards, which included those for song of the year, best female pop vocal performance, and best contemporary R&B album, amounted to the most Grammys collected by a female artist in a single night Days after a triumphant headlining performance at England's Glastonbury Festival, Beyoncé released 4 (2011), a genre-bending mix of ballads and dance tracks that evoked influences ranging from Motown-era torch songs to the audio collages of rapper M.I.A. In early 2013 Destiny's Child reunited for a halftime appearance at the Super Bowl and released a new song, "Nuclear." Shortly thereafter Beyoncé collected a Grammy for her single "Love on Top." She returned later in the year with the confidently sensuous and expressive Beyoncé, which boasted brand-name producers and appearances from, among others, the Nigerian author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie and the singer's toddler daughter, Blue Ivy. The record, initially offered exclusively on iTunes, was promoted as a "visual album," with music videos made to accompany each track. The single "Drunk in Love," which featured Jay-Z, was awarded several Grammys, including best R&B song. Lemonade, the Carters, Homecoming, and act i: RENAISSANCE On the expansive and musically variegated Lemonade (2016), Beyoncé focused on themes of betrayal and perseverance. Conceived as another visual album, it debuted as an HBO television special. Lemonade attracted considerable acclaim, and it netted Beyoncé two Grammys, including a best music-video award for the anthemic "Formation." In 2018 Beyoncé and Jay-Z released a collaborative album, Everything Is Love, credited to the Carters, and it took the Grammy for best urban contemporary album. That same year Beyoncé became the first Black woman to headline the Coachella Valley Festival in Indio, California. Her highly acclaimed performance, which featured marching bands from historically Black colleges, was the subject of Homecoming, a Netflix documentary and live album released in 2019. Although Beyoncé worked on a number of projects between studio albums, fans were left waiting for a new solo album. In 2022 she finally delivered with act i: RENAISSANCE. Acting career and soundtracks In 2001 Beyoncé made her acting debut in the television movie Carmen: A Hip Hopera, which aired on MTV. Her role as Foxxy Cleopatra in Austin Powers in Goldmember (2002) made her a film star and led to parts in The Fighting Temptations (2003) and The Pink Panther (2006). In 2006 she played Deena Jones in Dreamgirls, the film adaptation of the 1981 Broadway musical about a 1960s singing group. Beyoncé's performance was nominated for a Golden Globe Award and her song "Listen" for an Academy Award. She later starred in Cadillac Records (2008), in which she portrayed singer Etta James, and the thriller Obsessed (2009) before providing the voice of a fairylike forest queen in the animated Epic (2013). For the 2019 remake of Disney's The Lion King, Beyoncé voiced the character of Nala and performed several songs on the soundtrack, including "Spirit," an original song she cowrote, and a rendition of "Can You Feel the Love Tonight." She also concurrently released an album inspired by the movie, The Lion King: The Gift. Songs from that record were later featured in the visual album Black Is King (2020), which aired on the streaming service Disney+. For the single "Black Parade," Beyoncé earned the Grammy for best R&B performance in 2021. That year she received three other awards to set the record for most Grammys (28) won by a female artist. Beyoncé later cowrote and performed "Be Alive" for the film King Richard (2021), and it received an Oscar nomination for best original song. (Encyclopedia Britannica)

What did Ye have to say about his fallout from his antimsemetic remarks?

Kanye West comments on fallout from his antisemitic remarks By Dan Heching, CNN Updated 12:00 PM EDT, Mon October 31, 2022 (CNN) After a week of financial fallout following antisemitic remarks on social media and in interviews, Kanye West is commenting on those thoughts, as well as what he's said about George Floyd and Black Lives Matter. In a rambling 16-minute video shared by WmgLab Records on YouTube Saturday and seemingly recorded at some point after Adidas ended its business relationship with West on Tuesday, the artist appears to address a crowd of paparazzi and bystanders gathered outside a building as he exits. "I think Adidas felt like cause everyone was ganging up on me that they had the right to just take my designs," West told the small crowd. "I feel like this is God humbling me right now," he continued. "Because there's two things that are happening. A lot of times when I would say 'I am the richest Black man,' it would be a defense that I would use for the mental health conversation. ...What's happening right now is I'm being humbled." West went on to address backlash over his suggestion in a recent podcast interview that George Floyd's death was caused by fentanyl use. "When the idea of Black Lives Matter came out, it made us come together as a people," he said. "So, I said that, and I questioned the death of George Floyd, it hurt my people. It hurt the Black people. So, I want to apologize to hurting them [sic] because right now God has shown me by what Adidas is doing, and by what the media is doing, I know how it feels to have a knee on my neck now. So I thank you, God for humbling me and letting me know how it really felt. Because how could the richest Black man ever be humbled other than to be made to not be a billionaire in front of everyone off of a comment." West also discussed his "exhaustion" caused by the reaction to him wearing a MAGA hat that was "misdiagnosed" as a mental health disorder and his refusal to a take medication that he said would make him "one pill" away from Michael Jackson or Prince. "At a time like this, if I was on medication right now, then one pill could have been swapped out, and it would have been Michael Jackson or Prince all over again," West said. He also compared himself to Emmett Till, who was brutally lynched in 1955 at age 14, and said at times he has felt like Malcom X and Martin Luther King Jr. "I'm just not worried. Period," West said in response to someone in the crowd who asked if he was worried that he had ruined his legacy. "God is alive." Antisemitic demonstrators referenced West in signs raised in Los Angeles last weekend and Jacksonville, Florida this weekend. In the video, West did not apologize for his antisemitic remarks but seemed to try to distance himself from any "hate group." "I have no association to any hate group," West said as he closed his remarks in prayer. "If any hate happens upon any Jewish person, it is not associated (gestures to himself) because I am demanding that everyone walk in love." (CNN)

What is abortion?

Termination, whether miscarriage or therapeutic, before 20 weeks of gestation. Spontaneous abortion is miscarriage. Occurs in 15-20% of clinically recognized pregnancies.

memento mori

an object serving as a warning or reminder of death, such as a skull

Why might someone have issues with his or her mom?

I Hate My Mom: What to Do When You Feel This Way By Sanjana Gupta Updated on November 01, 2021 Medically reviewed by Margaret Seide, MD Many people have yelled "I hate you" at their mom, often when they're adolescents and are mad about not getting their way. They probably didn't mean it at the time and looking back they may even regret their rebellious behavior. However, in some cases, people actually do hate their mothers, sometimes for good reason. This can be a difficult situation to be in, because mothers are typically characterized as warm, caring, and nurturing. If you've been mistreated by a person who's supposed to give you unconditional love and support, it can cause you to question your own self-worth and feel guilty and ashamed. People sometimes feel hatred for their mothers if they fail to meet their expectations of what a mother should be, says Sabrina Romanoff, PsyD, a clinical psychologist and professor at Yeshiva University, New York City. Below, Romanoff unpacks the complex reasons why you might hate your mom. Reasons Why You Might Hate Your Mother Your mother was once solely responsible for your vitality and responded to your every need. Therefore, we hold intense bonds with our mothers. That intensity often impedes our ability to view our mothers as humans, along with the flaws and damage that correspond with that. People usually harbor feelings of hatred towards their mothers when they believe they've been mistreated, neglected, or abused. — SABRINA ROMANOFF, PSYD Relationships with mothers are often complicated. Rarely are mothers 'all-bad' figures, and therein lies the problem. Moreover, hate is complicated and is usually reserved for people who we have diversified feelings towards. In other words, it is much easier to accept a flawed person when we have a minimal history with them or don't have to rely on them. So, if your mother always behaved abusively and treated you horribly, you likely would not hold discord in your view of her. As a result, it might be easier to accept her as she is and sever all contact. The problem is that mothers, like all humans, are imperfect. Meaning that they have good and bad qualities. Our experience of them depends on both the magnitude of their flaws and also on our ability and capacity to accept their mistakes and faults. If your mother was abusive, if you struggle to accept her shortcomings, or more commonly, if she was inconsistent in her treatment of you or to others, you likely will have an adverse reaction each time she violates your expectations of her. Inconsistent parents change their minds often, don't make strong decisions, lack structure, and don't engage with their kids in a predictable way.1 If your mother was inconsistent in her parenting, you may have trouble believing that she is reliable or predictable. Research also suggests that this style of parenting can contribute to feelings of anxiety.2 However, underneath your feelings of hate, lies the love the child version of you still has for your mother. Despite mistreatment, children still hold out hope for their caretakers to treat them in the way they believe loving mothers should. And, ultimately, perpetual disappointment usually creates an intense, negative reaction, like hate. Coping Strategies Hating your mother can be confusing and emotionally draining since hatred is a more severe form of anger. It's important to prioritize self-care and make any changes to your lifestyle that are necessary for you to cope. It's also natural for you to feel angry. Romanoff explains how you can use your anger productively to set boundaries. Setting Boundaries Anger is usually a healthy reaction to indicate a boundary has been violated. The key to anger is recognizing it and learning how to use it productively. A productive reaction to anger is to first identify when it is occurring, and then pause to reflect on the source and cause. If you are able to understand how your boundary has been violated, you can respond effectively by standing up for yourself constructively, using assertive communication, and re-establishing the boundary that has been defined. This process is not as easy as it sounds, as anger often makes for impulsive action. Although it might feel rewarding to satisfy this urge in the moment, it almost always leads to regrettable consequences, such as name-calling, hurtful comments, threats, or physical aggression. This is because anger seeks retaliation—to hurt the other as you have been hurt yourself. If you don't take the time to pause and understand what your anger is in response to, you will be unable to re-create the violated boundary. Instead, you will be left with the carnage of your impulsive anger-driven response, which usually corresponds with feelings of guilt as you may then feel obligated to apologize to the aggressor. This creates a vicious cycle of reciprocal jabs between each of you without getting either of your needs met in a productive way. Instead, use your anger as a guide to help you learn more about yourself, your boundaries, and what you need from others, and in turn, teach the people around you how you need to be treated. — SABRINA ROMANOFF, PSYD Therapy can be a helpful tool to teach you how to use your anger productively and set boundaries that protect your mental health. Self-Care Going through a rough patch with your mother can be emotionally challenging. However, practicing self-care by prioritizing your needs and putting them above the needs of others can help you cope. This can take different forms depending on the dynamics of your relationship with your mother. For instance, it could mean asking your mother for some space or telling her you don't want to spend the holidays together anymore. If you live with your mother, it could involve lifestyle changes, where you move out if you're old enough to, or seek help if you're a victim of abuse. If you are a victim of child abuse or know someone who might be, call or text the Childhelp National Child Abuse Hotline at 1-800-422-4453 to speak with a professional crisis counselor. For more mental health resources, see our National Helpline Database. A Word From Verywell People may sometimes hate their mothers if they have been mistreated by them or repeatedly let down. This hatred is a strong emotion that can be difficult to cope with. While it is often expressed impulsively as anger, it can be helpful to set boundaries instead. It's also essential to prioritize your own needs and care for your mental health. (Verywellmind)

What does it mean to trust my gut?

Gut Feelings Are Real, but Should You Really 'Trust Your Gut'? Medically reviewed by Timothy J. Legg, PhD, PsyD — By Crystal Raypole on January 27, 2021 A sixth sense, hunch, or gut feeling: Whatever you choose to call it, the sudden flash of insight from deep within can inspire plenty of faith. The old saying "trust your gut" refers to trusting these feelings of intuition, often as a way to stay true to yourself. Following your instinct can certainly direct you toward the best path for you. And yet, you might wonder whether you should put so much trust in a feeling, an instinct you can't explain. Wouldn't sticking to logic and reason help you make better decisions? Not always. Science suggests intuition can be a valuable tool in some circumstances. It seems those gut feelings do mean something, and they can often help you make good choices. What do 'gut feelings' actually feel like? Ever experienced a nagging feeling of unease about a situation? Suddenly felt suspicious about someone you just met? You can't explain your feelings logically, but you know something isn't quite right. Or maybe a rush of affirmation or calm floods you after a tough decision, convincing you that you're doing the right thing. Gut feelings can evoke a range of sensations, some not unlike the physical feelings associated with anxiety. Other, more positive sensations might seem to confirm your choice. Some people describe gut feelings as a small internal voice, but you'll often "hear" your gut talking to you in other ways. Signs of a gut feeling a flash of clarity tension or tightness in your body goosebumps or prickling stomach "butterflies" or nausea a sinking sensation in the pit of your stomach sweaty palms or feet thoughts that keep returning to a specific person or situation feelings of peace, safety, or happiness (after making a decision) These feelings tend to come on suddenly, though they aren't always strong or overwhelming. You might experience them as a faint whisper or the barest sense of uneasiness, but they could also feel so strong, you can't imagine ignoring them. If it seems like your brain is encouraging you to take notice of these feelings, well, you're not far from the mark. Where do they come from? Though gut feelings often seem to come out of nowhere, they aren't random. They don't actually originate in your gut, either. The gut-brain connection makes it possible for emotional experiences to register as gastrointestinal distress. When you feel anxious, fearful, or certain that something's wrong, you might experience stomach twinges, pain, or nausea. That's where the name "gut feeling" comes from. Experts have come up with a few potential explanations for these feelings. Normal brain processes ResearchTrusted Source links these flashes of intuition to certain brain processes, such as evaluating and decoding emotional and other nonverbal cues. As you go about your day, your brain collects and processes sensory data from your environment. You're perfectly aware of some of this information. For example, if you notice two people shouting and pushing each other outside a store just ahead, you'll probably cross the street. But you wouldn't say your gut told you to move, since you made a reasoned decision based on available information. Your brain carries out these processes automatically to help prepare you for any situation that might come up. Since these processes run in the "background," you may not always realize what you're observing or what it means. What if you suddenly feel a strong urge to cross the street? There's no obvious reason behind your impulse, but you can't ignore it, or the tingling at the back of your neck. A few seconds after you cross, the sign on the building ahead comes crashing down, right where you would have been walking. You stare in disbelief, heart pounding. How did you know that would happen? This flash of intuition probably doesn't relate to any mystical sixth sense. It's more likely that as you walked, you made some unconscious observations. Maybe one corner of the sign hung loose, wavering in the wind and slapping against the building. Perhaps other pedestrians noticed and stepped out of the way, and you followed without realizing it. Predictions based on experience You can also think of gut feelings as a type of prediction based on experiences. Even memories you don't fully recall, or information you aren't consciously aware of, can guide you. A 2016 study that attempted to measure intuition tested this idea: Researchers asked student participants to look at a screen of tiny moving dots and determine whether the dots moved toward the right or left side of the screen. At the same time, the researchers also showed participants images designed to inspire positive or negative emotions: a puppy, a baby, a gun, a snake. These images told them which way the dots were moving on the screen. Participants only saw these images through one eye, but they didn't know they were seeing them. They viewed the dots through a mirror stereoscope, a device that allowed researchers to block those images from their conscious awareness. When participants "saw" these images, their decisions became faster and more accurate. Skin conductance responses, which measure physiological arousal, suggest the participants also reacted to the images physically — even though they never realized what they were looking at. Consider these examples of how existing knowledge — even if you aren't aware of it — can trigger gut feelings. A group of friends ask you to dinner at a popular restaurant. Something tells you not to go, and you pass on the invite. A few days later, you hear that nearly everyone who went came down with food poisoning. That's when you remember reading a critique of the restaurant that pointed out several unsanitary food preparation practices. Or you match with someone on an online dating app and meet in person after a few weeks of texting. Things start off well, but suddenly you feel uncomfortable, though you can't say why. Eventually you say you're not feeling well and leave. Back home, trying to puzzle out what happened, you glance back over their profile and early messages. Some of the information — their last job, where they went to school, how their last relationship ended — completely conflicts with what they said on the date. You didn't catch the lies in the moment, but they still served as red flags to wave you off. Gut feelings vs. anxiety and paranoia Gut feelings bring up some of the same physical sensations as anxiety, so it can be tough to tell the two apart. You might also worry your mistrust of someone suggests paranoia. Let's say you told a friend about what happened on your date instead of digging into those messages. "Your nerves got the better of you," they said knowingly. "It's totally normal to feel nervous when you finally meet someone great." You felt certain something wasn't right about them, but you decide your suspicions must have come from nerves after all. Here are some guidelines for distinguishing between gut feelings, anxiety, and paranoia. Gut feelings lead you in a clear direction That sense of knowing you recognize as a gut feeling tends to come up in specific situations or when thinking about a certain person. This intuition usually leads you toward a concrete decision or action. Anxiety, on the other hand, tends to focus on the future and often has less definition. With anxiety, you might find yourself worrying about all manner of concerns, particularly those you can't change or control. You might come up with several solutions to cope with potential negative scenarios but not feel certain about any of them. Paranoia isn't based on fact Paranoia is an irrational suspicion of others and their actions. You might feel convinced someone means you harm, though you have no reason to mistrust them and no evidence to support your doubts. These feelings often show up in different situations across your life. In other words, you probably won't suspect just one person. You may not recognize right away what fueled a gut feeling, but time and consideration can lead to deeper insight, even proof — just like the proof you found in your date's messages. To explore the feeling, try asking yourself things like, "What specifically bothers me about this person or situation?" or "Has something like this happened before?" Anxiety lingers Gut feelings tend to pass once you make a decision. You might even notice a sense of relief or calm has replaced them. Anxiety is more than a passing feeling, though. It typically leaves you on constant alert for potential threats. When you resolve one concern, you might begin worrying about something else or begin to doubt your decision. No matter what you do or where you go, that persistent background rumble of fear and unease follows. When should you trust your gut? Gut feelings can be very real things, grounded in observation and experience. Still, you may not want to use them to make every decision. Here's a look at a few scenarios where trusting your gut is probably a safe bet. When you can separate them from wishful thinking Wishful thinking happens when you want something to happen so badly, you begin to believe it will happen. Say you've always wanted to publish a novel, but you only have a few chapters written. But you just know — in your gut — your writing is good enough to catch the attention of an editor. They'll respond immediately, eager for more, you tell yourself. When you explain you're struggling to fit writing in among the demands of daily life, they'll offer an advance that allows you to take time off and focus on your book. In the end, you send the chapters out and start preparing a letter of resignation for work. It's difficult to rely on intuition when you lack the experience to back it up. Your desire to get published interferes with the reality that very few first-time authors get paid to finish writing a book. When you need to make a quick decision ResearchTrusted Source suggests the wealth of experience already cataloged in your brain can serve you well when you need to decide something quickly. Sometimes you'll want to weigh options, compare reviews, or get as many facts as possible. In some situations, though, you may not have much time to deliberate. Say you're looking at an apartment. The neighborhood seems fine, the building quiet, and the apartment itself is gorgeous. You love it, but you'd prefer to spend more time researching potential flaws or downsides before making up your mind. As you finish your tour, the landlord says, "It's yours if you want it, but I have four other people waiting, so I can only give you about 10 minutes to decide." If your gut says "Yes! Rent it. This is the place!" you're probably safe to listen. But if this is your first time picking a place on your own, it might be best to get a bit more experience under your belt first. When you're trying to get in touch with your needs Logic and reason can't always compare with your intuitive knowledge of what you need. After all, you know yourself best. Tonight is your friend's birthday party, but you don't want to go. You feel tired and drained, and a loud, crowded room sounds like the worst possible place to spend your evening. Even though you know you might feel a little better once you're actually there, an internal voice insists, "No way." Go ahead and skip it (really). Listening to your body can help you make decisions that support your needs in the moment. When you lack data Gut feelings can't replace cold, hard evidence, but you may not always have facts to consider. Or you might have some data, just not enough to guide you to an answer. Perhaps you're trying to choose between two job offers that seem pretty equal on paper, or deciding whether to go on a second date with someone you feel less than enthusiastic about. Your emotions can play an important role in decisions, so trust them. The choice you make might resonate more soundly with your sense of self. 0 seconds of 0 seconds The bottom line Time and practice can hone your intuition, so give your gut feelings the consideration they deserve. Tuning in to your emotions and bodily cues can help you practice listening to your gut and learning when to trust it. When you struggle to identify gut feelings or have a hard time separating them from anxious thoughts, a therapist can help you cultivate the ability to tell them apart. Crystal Raypole Crystal Raypole has previously worked as a writer and editor for GoodTherapy. Her fields of interest include Asian languages and literature, Japanese translation, cooking, natural sciences, sex positivity, and mental health. In particular, she's committed to helping decrease stigma around mental health issues. (Healthline)

memento

something kept as a reminder of a past event; a souvenir

9/11 Attacks

the U.S. was attacked by the Al Qaeda which resulted in the War on Terrorism and the Patriot Acts

mommy issues

When Mommy Dearest Isn't So Dear: Unpacking 'Mommy Issues' Medically reviewed by Bethany Juby, PsyD — By Crystal Raypole — Updated on September 5, 2022 Do you have a strained or complicated relationship with your mother? Maybe difficulties from childhood carried over into your adult relationships, setting the stage for complications with romantic partners or your own children. People often call these difficulties "mommy issues." While the term itself may sound a little cringeworthy, it does describe some very real distress. Many expertsTrusted Source would argue that your mother is the most important figure of your early childhood. If she abused you, manipulated you, or failed to provide essential emotional support, the psychological aftereffects can persist into your adult life. So-called mommy issues can also result from overprotective or overly permissive mother-child dynamics. Maybe she did all the household chores and looked the other way when you made mistakes. Or perhaps she tried to be your best friend and confidant, not your mother. These doting, loving parenting styles may not seem so negative, but they can also have some serious effects. You had no control over the way she chose to parent, so you aren't to blame for any outcomes of a toxic maternal relationship. Still, it's worth making the effort to address any relationship difficulties you experience. After all, you can control your behavior now. How do they show up? Patrick Cheatham, a psychologist in Portland, Oregon, explains that people who have a strained or toxic maternal relationship often expect romantic partners to fulfill needs their mother could not. When relationships do play out like this, he goes on to say, you might end up idealizing your partner. When this doesn't happen, you experience some disillusionment that leads you to shove them off the pedestal, so to speak. Does this mean I had a 'bad' mother? Not always. It's easy to see how people with unloving or emotionally unavailable mothers might carry lingering scars as a result of harsh or distant treatment. But what if she simply wasn't there? Maybe your mom died or couldn't care for you properly because she had physical or mental health issues and lacked support. She might have even made the choice to leave you with your other parent because she thought it would give you the best possible life. Her absence can create feelings of abandonment or rejection, no matter her reasons or lack of control over the situation. You might try to seek this missed love from other mother figures or romantic partners. The need for their affection might leave you with the urge to do everything possible to keep them happy so they don't leave, too. Sometimes, this can show up as clinginess or people-pleasing. There's also, of course, too much of a good thing. Perhaps, far from neglecting you, your mother smothered you with well-intentioned guidance and refused to let you make your own choices. Growing up unable to meet your own needs and expecting partners to support you can lead to some pretty unhealthy dependence. Mommy issues in men People usually apply the term "mommy issues" to men who display some of the following traits and behaviors: an expectation that romantic partners will provide more than a fair share of household labor or emotional support trust issues or difficulty showing vulnerability a strong need for affection and approval or difficulty showing affection or rapid shifts between the two "cold feet" when it comes to relationship commitment a need for maternal guidance when making decisions difficulty spending time with or discussing their mother relationship anxiety discomfort with intimacy extreme sensitivity to real or perceived criticism underdeveloped relationship boundaries a habit of dating people who share certain similarities with their mother Can women have them? Yes, but they probably won't look the same. Anyone can experience distress as a result of a painful or estranged maternal relationship, but gender can affect how these issues show up. Daughters of unkind or overly judgmental mothers might grow up with a poorly developed sense of self-worth. If your mother spent a lot of time pinpointing your flaws or critiquing your appearance, you might have a lot of shame and insecurity as an adult. This sometimes contributes to unhealthy relationship patterns or mental health symptoms, including depression and anxiety. An enmeshed relationship, or one that lacked normal parent-child boundaries, can cause problems, too. Maybe she tried to be your best friend when all you really wanted was a mom who set boundaries, enforced limits, and told you to be careful around "bad boys" instead of begging for details of your sex life. This can create an entirely different set of complications. Maybe you do everything you can to shock your mother into giving you some tough parenting love or withdraw completely to keep her from popping in every part of your life. This can be tough when you want motherly guidance as you establish yourself as an adult, and pursue relationships and children of your own. How do they compare to 'daddy issues'? If you've heard of mommy issues, you've probably heard of "daddy issues," too. Both these terms have their roots in attachment theory, which we'll go over below. They also relate to Freud's controversial Oedipus complex theory. Neither, however, are diagnoses that any credible mental health professional recognizes. You may have heard that women have daddy issues and men have mommy issues. In reality, people of any gender can experience psychological distress as a result of an unfulfilling relationship with either parent. People sometimes use the term "daddy issues" in the context of sexual behavior, something both inaccurate and stigmatizing. All it really means is that your less than ideal relationship with your father affects your adult relationships. Someone who has so-called daddy issues might: have trouble trusting partners form romantic attachments easily or struggle with intimacy experience relationship insecurity or anxiety need a lot of validation and emotional support seek out partners with some of the same traits as their father Some of these sounding familiar? That's right: They're pretty similar to traits associated with mommy issues. Do they really affect relationships that much? Just above, you heard that mommy (and daddy) issues relate back to attachment theory. Here's why that's important. Attachment theoryTrusted Source suggests babies are born with the need to attach to their primary caregiver. This bond is usually formed with your mother. It becomes your first relationship and partly lays the groundwork for other important relationships you develop throughout life — namely, with romantic partners. According to attachment theory, there are two main types of attachment, along with several subtypes. Secure attachment "Adult attachment style is remarkably congruent with childhood attachment style," Cheatham explains. "You might consider attachment the way people balance intimacy with identifying and then preventing or protecting themselves from perceived risks in relationships," he says. When your mother is available to meet most of your physical and emotional needs from the get-go, you'll most likely grow up securely attached. You could depend on her, so you feel comfortable trusting other important people in your life. Securely attached people generally feel safe and embrace intimacy within relationships. Insecure attachment Perhaps your mother was physically or emotionally absent or showed up sometimes, but not always. In either case, your attachment styleTrusted Source might turn out to be somewhat insecure. Anxious attachment Anxious attachment is a type of insecure attachment. It might suggest your mother was sometimes unavailable. Your mom might have showed inconsistent affection or struggled to provide support when stressed or caught up in her own issues. Maybe she was distracted by work, put her partner first, or couldn't be fully present due to health concerns. With an anxious attachment style, you might feel terrified your partner will also reject you or fail to provide support and need constant reassurance to believe otherwise. Even with reassurance, you struggle to trust them, so you find yourself checking in (or checking up on them) often. Avoidant attachment Avoidant attachment is another type of insecure attachment. It might develop when your mother ignored you or treated you harshly. Maybe she was overly critical and expected you to keep your emotions and behavior completely under control. Instead of offering support, she expected you to look after yourself and meet your own needs. With an avoidant attachment style, you might prefer to avoid relationships, especially committed ones. You were discouraged from showing emotions or expressing needs, so you never learned to do so. Partners might see you as distant, even cold, since you need to maintain plenty of independence and control. Disorganized attachment If you didn't experience a consistently secure relationship with your mother when you were very young, you may have a disoriented and disorganized attachment style. Children with disorganized attachment don't respondTrusted Source in a consistent way when the mother goes away or comes back. They may find separation confusing, throw tantrums, and be inconsolable. When the mother returns, the child may appear to seek closeness but also avoid the parent. This behavior can also lead to further neglect and abuse and may increase the risk of mental health issues later in life. It can also affect how you relate to romantic and intimate partners. Learn more about the complexities of attachment theory. What other effects can they have? In addition to affecting your romantic relationships, mommy issues can come into play when you become a parent yourself. In many families, parents traditionally looked to girls to help maintain household harmony, take care after younger siblings, and generally work toward becoming a mother. Sons, on the other hand, traditionally had more freedom inside and outside the home, including more forgiveness of behavioral lapses. These expectations are changing. Phrases like "boys will be boys" are going out the window as people increasingly recognize the flaws with a binary view of gender. That's great news for future generations, but many adults today still experience "mommy issues" that reflect gendered assumptions. Fatherhood Some men might struggle to complete any household task, from laundry to picking up after themselves, because they were never expected to do so. They might look for a female partner who will manage these responsibilities and continue the cycle. Cheatham explains they might also have unrealistic expectations when it comes to their partner's parenting. Motherhood On the other hand, some adults (women in particular) might bend over backward to be a better parent than their mother was to them. "Parenting might be more complex for women who have a complicated or estranged maternal relationship," Cheatham explains. Society already tends to place overly high expectations on mothers, which can be a lot of added pressure if you're also trying to make sure you aren't recreating the relationship you had with your mother. Remember, though, there are plenty of ways to be a good parent. Maybe your mother wasn't always there for you, but she might have tried her best with her available resources — just as you will for your children. Can they be resolved? It can take some good hard work to overcome the effects of a difficult maternal relationship. An important first step in the right direction involves acknowledging how your mother's parenting style might have contributed to the traits and behaviors creating problems in your current relationships. A lack of awareness around these issues makes healthy resolution pretty tough to achieve, but identifying them can enable you to begin making changes. Say you realize you fear rejection from your partner because your mother threatened to leave if you weren't good. From here, you might work to remind yourself that your partner loves you and wants to be with you. Of course, this isn't always easy to do alone, even with healthy support from a partner. That's where therapy comes in. What can you do if you suffer from mommy issues? Professional support can have benefits for any kind of attachment issues. A therapist won't diagnose you with mommy issues, but they will acknowledge the lasting effects a strained or toxic maternal relationship can have, and they can offer support as you begin addressing these concerns. In therapy, you can: explore what you needed but didn't get from your relationship with your mother practice setting healthy boundaries address mental health symptoms like anxiety and depression along with people-pleasing tendencies, codependency, or toxic shame make a plan for talking with your mother and working through issues together, if it feels right and appropriate to you develop skills for healthy romantic relationships A therapist can also offer guidance on what healthy parental relationships look like in adulthood. It's completely normal and OK to update your mother about your life, but remember, it's your life. Your mom shouldn't make your decisions, shape your career, or select your romantic partner (unless your culture practices arranged marriage, and you've given her permission to set one up). Takeaway Rather than writing off real concerns with overused terms that don't get at the heart of the matter, let's call "mommy issues" what they are: attachment issues. Your attachment to your mother absolutely can have an impact on your romantic life, but support from a therapist can help you work to develop more secure, stable relationships. Crystal Raypole Crystal Raypole has previously worked as a writer and editor for GoodTherapy. Her fields of interest include Asian languages and literature, Japanese translation, cooking, natural sciences, sex positivity, and mental health. In particular, she's committed to helping decrease stigma around mental health issues. (Healthline)

quetzal

a brilliantly coloured bird that lives in the tropical rainforests of Central and South America

Schizophrenia

a psychological disorder characterized by delusions, hallucinations, disorganized speech, and/or diminished, inappropriate emotional expression

What should I know about religions in North America?

New Religions come to America • Protestant extremists-known as Puritans or in some cases Separatists-were people who wanted more change within the Church of England (which was also known as the Anglican or Episcopal Church). They adhered to the belief that everyone should read and understand the Bible. They went against prayer books that were Anglican or Catholic. They were called Puritans because they wanted to "purify" the church. • Another group called the Pilgrims (they were also called Separatists) founded a second English colony in North America at Plymouth, Massachusetts, in 1620. They were the first group of dissenters to leave England for the Americas. They got a grant of land from the Virginia Company, and they were financed by their own separate investors. They got a ship for the journey. They passed through stormy weather during their voyage, but they'd eventually arrive in North America. They landed way north of the destination they wanted to go to, and so they made an agreement in 1620 that's referred to as the Mayflower Compact. The agreement was made on the ship that brought them to Plymouth. • Samoset was a native of what is now Maine, which was visited by English fishermen a lot. Samoset was sent from Massoit, the chief of the Wampanoag tribe, to welcome the pilgrims after their voyage. • Squanto was a translator. He was captured by English explorers and was able to describe to the Pilgrims various parts of London. He helped them find good meals. • William Bradford was the governor of Plymouth who came up with the idea of organizing a weeklong festival to commemorate the help they received from the Native Americans. This would be called the "First Thanksgiving"(the Pilgrims never actually used that word to describe it). • The Massachusetts Bay Company was a joint stock Company used to explore and settle in North America. They helped create a settlement called Salem in 1629, just north of present-day Boston. • John Winthrop was a passionate Puritan. He was around during the Great migration when some twenty thousand people came over to Massachusetts. He described Massachusetts as a "city upon a hill." It was the hope of Puritans that people would view their commonwealth as a model for how society should operate in old England. • The Great and General Court was the colony's governing body. It started the first meeting on New England soil. It started as a business venture and turned into a government. • King Charles l was the successor and son of King James. He was extremely hostile towards Puritans. He sent British militia to keep watch over the British citizens in North America. This led the British citizens to create an armed resistance of British authorities. • Harvard was established in 1636 as a means of providing literacy amongst men. The Puritans valued literacy as it was needed to understand the Bible. • The Fundamental Orders of Connecticut was an independent colony created by Hartford Colonists in response to the restrictiveness of the government in Boston. • Rhode Island was founded in 1636. Roger Williams was the founder of RI. Roger Williams was a Puritan who advocated for the freedom of conscience within individuals. He got into trouble with civil authority after saying they couldn't enforce a law opposing blasphemy, and so he walked 65 miles from his home in Salem, Massachusetts, to create a colony called Providence. This place would serve as a haven for religious dissenters. • Anne Hutchinson causes a stir with the way she preached. She believed that God's inspiration could come quicker than what Puritans initially believed. The fact that she was preaching went against the notion that men should only preach. She was kicked out of her colony for all she did in causing trouble for Boston authorities. She was killed in an Indian attack. • The Halfway Covenant was an agreement made in 1662 by the Massachusetts clergy to allow adults who were baptized to have their children baptized, even if they were not members of the congregation. • Maryland was founded by first Lord Baltimore, AKA George Calvert, in 1634. It served as a haven for English Catholics who were persecuted back in England. It was a proprietary colony, which is a colony created when the English monarch granted a huge tract of land that would be a person's private property. Maryland was the model of a proprietary colony. Maryland was given to Culvert by King Charles l. • The Headright system was a system of land distribution during the early colonial era that gave settlers a set amount of land for each "head" (or person) that lived within the colony. It was established in Virginia in 1618. The headright system expands in Maryland, giving each settler one hundred acres and more for a family. It made moving to Maryland popular. Maryland was the first colony to create laws governing slavery. People born into slavery were in it for life. (AP US Notes)

What should I know abandonment issues?

Identifying and Managing Abandonment Issues Medically reviewed by Jennifer Litner, PhD, LMFT, CST — By Kimberly Holland and Kristeen Cherney on May 7, 2020 Symptoms In children Risk factors Causes Treatment How to help Recovery Outlook What is fear of abandonment? Fear of abandonment is a type of anxiety that some people experience when faced with the idea of losing someone they care about. Everyone deals with death or the end of relationships in their lifetime. Loss is a natural part of life. However, people with abandonment issues live in fear of these losses. They may also exhibit behaviors that push people to leave so they're never surprised by the loss. A fear of abandonment isn't a recognized condition or mental health disorder, per se. Instead, it's considered a type of anxiety and is treated as such. Initial behaviors of abandonment fear are often not purposeful. Over time, however, the reaction these behaviors get — plus the attention that comes with it — can become self-reinforcing. That can cause someone to repeat the behaviors in order to get the response again. This behavior can have unhealthy consequences. Over time, it can ruin relationships. It can also prevent the development of healthy bonds. The key to treating abandonment issues is to find psychological treatment or therapy. Continue reading to find out how these fears develop and how they can be stopped. What are the symptoms? People with abandonment fears exhibit many of the same behaviors, though some may be more prominent than others. These symptoms include: Cycling through relationships. Some may engage in numerous shallow relationships. They may fear intimacy and find a reason to leave a relationship before the other person can. Sabotaging relationships. Some may act irrationally to get out of relationships. For example, you may knowingly push away a partner so you won't feel hurt if they leave. Clinging to unhealthy relationships. Some people with abandonment issues may stay in relationships despite a desire to leave. The fear of being alone is more powerful. Needing constant reassurance. Some may constantly seek out a friend or partner and demand emotional guarantees. They may regularly urge friends or partners to make broad statements, such as "I'll always be here," and then say they're lying. Symptoms of abandonment issues in children Kids with healthy emotional attachments to their parents often become upset when they're left, even if only for a short time. Some level of this reaction is natural. However, it may be a sign of an underlying mental health condition when it leads to: Separation anxiety. If a child becomes anxious about their parents going somewhere in advance, the child may be expressing abandonment fears. Panic. If a child begins to panic when they don't see their parents, their overreaction may be a sign of an issue. A fear of being alone. Some children won't sleep without their parents or even let them step out of the room. Risk factors Some abandonment issues and fears become invasive. They can prevent someone from leading a normal, healthy life. A history of any of the following may increase the risk of a type of abandonment fear: Neglect. People who have been neglected, abused, or abandoned, especially during childhood, are more likely to develop this issue. Likewise, adults who were neglected as a child are more likely to repeat the behaviors with their own children. Stress. High levels of stress may make naturally occurring anxiety worse. This can worsen fears and lead to new anxieties. Traumatic events. Those who have experienced an injury or death or been a victim of a crime may be more likely to develop these issues. What causes abandonment issues? Healthy human development requires knowing that physical and emotional needs are met. During childhood, this reassurance comes from parents. During adulthood, it can come from personal and romantic relationships. Events can interrupt this assurance at any age. When this happens, abandonment fears may develop. These events may include: Death. Death is natural, but that doesn't make it less traumatic. Losing a loved one unexpectedly can create an emotional void that can be filled by fear. Abuse. Physical and sexual abuse, along with other types of abuse, can create lingering mental health issues, including a fear of abandonment. Poverty. If basic needs aren't met, this can lead to a scarcity mindset. This may lead to fears that emotional resources, such as love, attention, and friendship, are likewise limited. Relationship loss. Divorce, death, infidelity — they all happen. For some individuals, the end of a relationship can be too painful. It may lead to lingering fears. How to treat abandonment issues Treatment for abandonment issues focuses on establishing healthy emotional boundaries. You need to build an arsenal of responses to deploy when you feel old thought patterns emerging again. Primary treatments for abandonment issues include: Therapy. Seek out the help of a mental health professional, such as a therapist or counselor. They can help you overcome fears of being abandoned. They'll also work with you to understand where the fear originates and what you can do when you sense the fear rising. Self-care. People with abandonment issues may benefit from self-care. Making sure emotional needs are met is important for friendships and relationships. This way, you're able to better provide for your partner, friend, or child. Helping someone with fear of abandonment Helping a loved one living with abandonment issues can be difficult. After all, if you bring up your concerns, their instinct may be to challenge you and your loyalty to them. While people with abandonment fears differ, these techniques may help you care for someone who has a fear of abandonment: Pause the conversation Highly emotional conversations will inevitably become unproductive. When this happens, pause the conversation. Let them know you care but step away for a few hours. Be supportive of both yourself and the person with abandonment fears. People with abandonment issues may struggle more with this, particularly if their conversation partner leaves without telling them where they're going. Let them know: where you're going how long you'll be away when you'll return When you return, begin the conversation from a less emotional place. Support and validate their fears Validation is an important part of trust in a relationship. When supporting a loved one with a fear of abandonment, validation means that you acknowledge their feelings without judgment. Such understanding of their fears is a key to maintaining communication. Validating a loved one's fears doesn't necessarily mean you agree with them. Instead, you're supporting their feelings to further build on trust and compassion. Consider this six-level approach Psychology Today identified to help you get started: Be present. Actively listen to your loved one's concerns without multitasking. Reflect. Summarize your loved one's feelings verbally in an authentic way so you can reach an understanding without judgment. Mind-reading. Sometimes it can be difficult for loved ones to describe their emotional states as fear. By listening to them, you can help them identify their emotions for deeper understanding. This level takes a lot of practice with being present and reflecting. Understand their history. This is an even deeper form of acknowledgment. You know your loved one's fears and openly state that you understand how a certain situation might be triggering due to their past history of abandonment. "Normalize" their fears. Such normalization is done by acknowledging the fact that others with your loved one's history could have fears of abandonment, so what they're feeling is completely understandable. Radical genuineness. As the deepest level of validation, radical genuineness involves sharing your loved one's fears as your own. It's just as important to prevent saying things that might invalidate your loved one's fears. Avoid unhelpful phrases, such as: "It's OK, just let it go." "Everything happens for a reason." "That didn't really happen to you." "Why are you making such a big deal out of nothing?" "Things could be a lot worse; you're lucky." Don't take the emotional bait A person with a fear of abandonment may use facial expressions, ambiguous statements, or vague body language to draw attention. Don't bite. When they tell you nothing is wrong, or they don't want to talk about it, take them at their word. Requesting that they open up can turn into a way to test you. Tell them how these behaviors make you feel There's no harm in honesty. When you're upset, clearly express what you mean and how their actions are making you feel. The honesty may be disarming enough that you can make progress. Helping a child with abandonment issues If you suspect your child has abandonment anxiety, it's important to get them help as early as possible so they can develop secure relationships. Talk with your child's doctor about your options. These strategies may be helpful with children: Seek professional help. For some children, talking to a parent or teacher may be uncomfortable. A professional may be less threatening. Encourage kids to express their feelings. Children sometimes fear their emotions may upset their parents. Be a blank slate to your child's feelings. Let them bring up everything they feel while you acknowledge it all. Offer validation. Instead of seeking a solution for their worries or fears, offer confirmation of their feelings. Tell them simply that it's OK to feel how they do. 0 seconds of 0 seconds Recovery Treatment for this type of anxiety can be very successful. It requires commitment and self-care to feel more confident in relationships — but it can be done. For many people with these issues, worries may linger. A therapist can teach you how to cope with these thoughts when they pop up. They may also encourage you to return to therapy if the thoughts and anxieties become problematic again. What's the outlook? Many individuals with abandonment issues may not recognize how destructive their behaviors are. They may purposefully endanger relationships as a way of avoiding hurt. These behaviors can lead to long-term relationship problems in personal and professional settings. Treatment for abandonment issues focuses on helping people understand the underlying factors that lead to the behavior. Treatment can also teach coping mechanisms to help manage these anxieties in the future. This can lead to normal, healthy relationships. Last medically reviewed on May 7, 2020 (Healthline)

handyman/handywoman

a man or woman skilled in various odd jobs and other small tasks

claptrap

absurd or nonsensical talk or ideas

abandonment issues

What to know about abandonment issues Medically reviewed by Danielle Wade, LCSW — By Zawn Villines — Updated on September 8, 2022 Symptoms Impact Causes Diagnosis Treatment How to help Management Seeking help Outlook Summary "Abandonment issues" is an informal term that describes a strong fear of losing loved ones or of them leaving a relationship. It is a form of anxiety that can affect relationships throughout life. "Abandonment issues" is not a distinct diagnosis. As such, it can refer to many things. Fear of abandonment can come from an anxious attachment style or early childhood trauma. It is also a feature of some mental health conditions, such as borderline personality disorder (BPD). Keep reading to learn more about abandonment issues in both adults and children, including the signs, causes, and treatment options. Signs and symptoms of abandonment issues Fear of abandonment is not a distinct mental health condition. Instead, it is a type of anxiety that can manifest itself in different ways. For example, some people who fear abandonment may feel generally insecure in relationships and need frequent reassurance from their partner. This is known as an anxious attachment style. Attachment styles are the ways in which people form relationships. People develop an attachment style as they grow upTrusted Source. People with an anxious attachment style may: worry that friends or partners will leave them constantly look for signs that others do not really like them need frequent reassurance that others love them always try to please others, even at their own expense give too much in relationships, or have a lack of boundaries stay in unhealthy relationships due to a fear of being alone Intense fear of abandonment can also be a feature of personality disorders, such as BPD and dependent personality disorder (DPD). These conditions have their own set of symptoms. Signs of abandonment issues in children In children, some degree of worry about caregivers leaving them is developmentally typical. This is known as separation anxiety. Separation anxiety is a part of child development in infants and very young children. It typically begins between 6-12 monthsTrusted Source and peaks at around 3 years old. Signs include: being reluctant to leave their caregiver crying or having tantrums when a caregiver leaves the child somewhere feeling anxious about going to day care or school A child may continue to experience separation anxiety for much of early childhood. This is especially the case in new or unfamiliar settings, such as on the first day of school. This separation anxiety does not necessarily mean they will have abandonment issues as adults. However, children who develop an anxious attachment style may go on to experience insecurity in other relationships, too. Sometimes, children develop an intense form of separation anxiety that doctors classify as a disorder. What abandonment issues do to a person How fear of abandonment affects a person can depend on the cause. However, this anxiety typically makes forming healthy and secure relationships with others more challengingTrusted Source. A person may: Have anxiety: Both children and adults with fear of abandonment may feel chronically anxious, especially if they feel a relationship is about to end. Experience relationship challenges: Anxiety about abandonment can alter a person's perceptions of their relationship, causing them to see problems where none exist. They may be sensitive to any sign of rejection or find it difficult to trust that their partner will not leave. This can result in clingy behavior, which may impact the relationship. Communicate poorly: People with abandonment issues may develop harmful communication techniques to ease their anxiety. For example, they may engage in attention-seeking behavior to get the love they feel they might lose. Engage in harmful behavior: People with a fear of abandonment can sometimes try to prevent their partner from leaving them through manipulative or even abusive behavior. For example, a person may try to prevent someone from socializing with others. This is a form of coercive control. Causes of abandonment issues The causes of a fear of abandonment are complex. For some people, a clear life event triggered the fear. For others, it may be a combination of factors. Some examples include: Abandonment: Adults sometimes fear abandonment because they experienced it as children. This may have happened with a parent, foster parent, or another caregiver. Neglect or abuse: Mistreatment from caregivers and behaviors that a child finds scary can be traumatic or cause anxiety, making it difficult to form healthy attachments. This may affect their future relationships. Early trauma or abuse is also a risk factorTrusted Source for BPD. Family instability: A parent or caregiver who is not consistently affectionate or present may create anxiety in a child. This inconsistency could be intentional or unintentional. Diagnosing a fear of abandonment A fear of abandonment is a symptom rather than a diagnosis. As a result, psychologists do not diagnose it. However, they may identify a fear of abandonment as part of a wider pattern or as one symptom that could indicate a mental health condition. A psychologist may ask a person questions to see if their symptoms match the criteria in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5). Clinicians use this manual to diagnose mental health conditions. Treatment for abandonment issues A person does not need a mental health diagnosis to get help. If fear of abandonment significantly affects a person's life or relationships, they may benefit from professional support. Talk therapy may help. During therapy, a person can explore their experiences of abandonment and potentially identify the cause of their anxiety. Certain therapy models may be more helpful for certain types of abandonment fears. For example, cognitive behavioral therapy may help with separation anxiety, while dialectical behavior therapy may helpTrusted Source with BPD. A therapist can help individuals build self-esteem to feel more capable or lovable. They may also teach someone about establishing healthy boundaries and communicating effectively with partners. Children with intense fears of abandonment can work with a child psychologist to address it. They may do this through play therapy, art therapy, or family therapy. How to help someone with abandonment issues Supporting a person with a fear of abandonment can be challenging. They may perceive efforts to talk about the problem as criticism or worry that it means their partner will leave. As a result, it is important to approach conversations on this topic with patience and empathy. When discussing someone else's fear of abandonment, try to: Offer plenty of reassurance. Focus on them and how their fears are affecting their happiness. Express concern and love. Discuss what might help, if they are open to that discussion. Remain calm and consistent throughout the conversation. It may be helpful to avoid the term "abandonment issues." This term can have a negative connotation and reinforce the idea that something is wrong with the person. To avoid triggering anxiety, do not: blame or criticize the person for their fear demand they change without offering support give them ultimatums, such as threatening to leave if they do not seek help Supporting children Children with a fear of abandonment may benefit from: consistent reassurance and attention from caregivers compassion and kindness a regular daily routine, as this can make life more predictable and reassuring regular check-ins that allow them to talk about their feelings Remember that challenging behavior is often an expression of emotional turmoil. A caregiver may want to consult a child psychologist if their child experiences severe anxiety or does not gain confidence. Managing a fear of abandonment Individuals with abandonment issues will need to regularly manage their emotions to ensure the well-being of themselves and their relationships. Practice noticing anxious or self-critical thoughts when they arise. Counter these thoughts with self-compassion. Practice self-care by getting enough sleep, drinking enough water, and reducing unnecessary stress. Build a good support network, staying in regular contact with friends and family. Try activities that help build confidence outside of relationships, such as creative hobbies or sports. When to seek help Anyone who feels that abandonment issues negatively affect their mental health or relationships can seek support from a therapist. This may involve individual therapy, couple therapy, or family therapy. People with a history of trauma or loss may also wish to speak with a mental health professional to address these issues, even if they do not seem directly related. If a child shows signs of significant separation anxiety, a person may want to consult a pediatrician or child psychologist. Outlook Abandonment issues can describe a range of things. As a result, there is no consensus on the outlook for people who fear abandonment. It depends on what is causing the fear. For example, a person with an anxious attachment style may be able to build self-esteem through therapy. This can help ensure they no longer feel as anxious about being alone. The prognosis for a condition such as BPD depends on the person's ability to access treatment. Many peopleTrusted Source experience remission of symptoms, but this can take time and commitment. Summary Abandonment issues are a form of anxiety that occurs when an individual has a strong fear of losing loved ones. People with abandonment issues can have difficulties in relationships. They may exhibit symptoms such as codependency, clinginess, or manipulative behavior. Therapy may help the person experiencing abandonment issues get to the root of their problems. With support, both adults and children with a fear of abandonment can enjoy healthy relationships and good quality of life. (Medical News Today)

social anxiety 2

fear of not making a good impression on others

philandering

(of a man) readily or frequently enter into casual sexual relationships with women.

What should I know about Stability and Instability in the American and British Worlds during the 17 and 18th centuries?

The Act of Union was an act passed by English and Scottish parliaments to unite England and Scotland as one to create Great Britain. • The British economy was changing on both sides of the Atlantic, and lots of people were getting rich from the plantations. • Native American tribes sought alliances with the Europeans in order to fight against other tribes. • There was a lot of tension as colonists feared Indian raids. • The Salem Witch Trials were trials held for men and women accused of being witches and making a pact with the devil. This went on from 1692 to 1693. Some of the accused were executed. It all started with the reverend's daughter and her cousin throwing fits in his home. The town doctor thought the fits were a result of witchcraft. The girls accused the family's Indian slave of bewitching them. Others came forward with similar stories. • The tension and uncertainty that was prevalent in colonial life was a contributing factor to the Salem Witch Trials. • After dozens were put on trial and 20 people were executed, there was a weakening of Puritan authority. • Cotton Mather was a Puritan clergyman and scientific observer who supported the use of vaccinations in 1721. • Mercantilism is an economic system that allows for the government to intervene in the economy for the purpose of increasing national wealth. Advocates for mercantilism thought there were only a finite amount of resources. The problem with mercantilism was that it focused too much on the the ownership of things rather than the trade of them. English colonists were vexed by England's enforcement of mercantilism, and this led them to make illegal trades with other European nations like the Dutch. • Capitalism's an economic system where trade can be seen as a source of wealth rather than as an exchange of goods themselves; as a result, this kind of wealth can get larger as trade expands. • The Triangle Trade was a multilateral system of trade between multiple continents that developed in the 1700s. It was a route in which African slaves were sent through to the West Indies and mainland North America while goods and other resources were shipped between the West Indies and North America and Britain. • The First Great Awakening was a significant religious revival in Colonies that colonists were brought up in by the preaching of Solomon Stoddard and Jonathan Edwards. It was expanded by the English evangelical minister George Whitfield. Religious revival swept all across Northern American colonies in the late 1730s. One thing all of these preacher's sermons had in common was an emphasis on emotion rather than logic. These sermons led to the growth of Baptist and Methodist churches. The Awakening transformed higher education in America, which at that time was closely connected to the churches. • King William's War was a conflict started by King Louis XlV in response to William and Mary coming to the throne in 1689. The battles of the war had devastating consequences for Northern American Colonies when American Indians decided to make an alliance with France, and this is a probable cause to the mass hysteria experienced in Salem. • Queen Anne's War began over a want for the Spanish throne. It began in 1701 and lasted until 1713. The name was so forth based upon the ruling monarch at the time. It was fought between France, Britain, and Spain. There were many battles held in Florida and the Carolinas between the French and British, and various Indian tribes took both sides. • Deerfield was the name of a town destroyed by Canadian-based Mohawks in 1704. Fifty colonists were killed, and perhaps seventy or more were taken captive. • The Tuscarora tribe: a Native American tribe that resisted the expansion of white settlements. • The Yamasee were a native tribe that South Carolina authorities made an alliance with to fight against the Tuscarora. • The War of Jenkins' Ear was a war fought between England and Spain over whether or not Spain had the right to search for smuggled items on British ships. It started in 1739. The war was mostly fought in the Caribbean. The British won the war. • Britain and France fought a war called the War of the Austrian Succession in 1739. • Benjamin Franklin can be considered an American icon. He was sort of an arbiter for disputes between England and its colonies. (AP US Notes)

abortion

The deliberate termination of a pregnancy by killing the unborn child

How do you overcome trust issues in a relationship?

How to Overcome Trust Issues in a Relationship Co-authored by Kelli Miller, LCSW, MSW Last Updated: September 14, 2022 References Approved Download Article Do you feel like you can't trust your partner or that your partner doesn't trust you? Not having trust in a relationship can lead to major problems and might even end your relationship. An easy way to build trust is to relate to your partner differently. Communicate more and be willing to be open with each other. Feeling insecure can lead to trust issues, so build your self-esteem and do things that you enjoy on your own. If you struggle to trust your partner due to past hurts, consider getting therapy and working through these problems. Part 1 Part 1 of 3: Improving Your Communication 1 Back away from monitoring their activities. It might be difficult to create space for your partner. If you're used to going through your partner's things or asking loads of questions when they go out, learn to cut back on these practices. While it can be scary, it shows that you're willing to trust your partner and not over-involve yourself in their life.[1] Practice giving trust before suspicion. Give your partner trust first and see how it feels. Let your partner know you are choosing to trust them instead of being suspicious. Remember that if you're monitoring your partner, it means that you're already suspicious of them. You might misinterpret anything that you find. 2 Talk openly with your partner. Clearly talking things over with your partner can help you overcome trust issues. Being able to clearly communicate without feeling like either of you are hiding something can increase communication and build trust. If there are situations that worry you, state your concerns and why they bother you.[2] Let your partner respond and hear them out.[3] For example, instead of worrying what your partner is doing when they go out, have a talk before they leave and get an idea for where they are going and what they are doing. Get in the habit of having these talks without pressing them for information. When talking to your partner, be calm and friendly. If you accuse or blame them of things, they may become defensive. If you appear mad or upset, they may not want to talk. 3 Keep from blaming each other. Blame only makes things worse when trust is shaky. If your partner feels mistrust in you or you trust your partner less, be cautious to not blame them. Instead, be receptive to what they say and hear them out. Ask questions instead of making accusations.[4] There will be times when you think something is fishy. On such occasions, it's worth changing your approach and finding out more details. For example, if worried about your partner's secretive texting, say, "I find it odd that you're so secretive when you text. Can you tell me what's up?" This works better than, "I don't trust you and think you're hiding something from me." 4 See a couples' counselor. Trust issues can ruin a relationship quickly. If you and your partner are committed to the relationship and want help navigating your trust issues, a couples' counselor can help.[5] The person can help you and your partner talk through your difficulties and find new ways to relate to one another. Your counselor will support you to make changes to the way you interact together and begin to rebuild your trust.[6] Look for a counselor who works with couples specifically and who will see you and your partner together. You can find a couples' therapist by calling your insurance provider or local mental health clinic. Part 2 Part 2 of 3: Working Through Insecurities 1 Build your self-esteem. If you feel insecure in yourself, you may feel unworthy of your partner or scared they will find someone better than you. Recognize that these are your own insecurities and may have nothing to do with your partner. Raise your self-esteem by acknowledging your strengths, doing things that make you feel good about yourself, and replacing negative self-talk with positive self-talk.[7] For example, if your inner dialog tends to tell you how awkward you are or how embarrassed you should be, replace it with things that make you feel good about yourself, such as, "Even if I didn't explain myself well, I still tried and did a better job communicating." If your self-esteem issues are interfering with your relationship, you may want to seek help from a licensed therapist on your own. They can help build your self-esteem, which may strengthen your relationship. 2 Explore your interests and hobbies. Develop yourself as an individual, not just as a partner in a relationship. Having interests and hobbies can also provide an outlet for stress. Find an activity that makes you feel good that you enjoy. Try to engage in your hobby at least once a week.[8] If you don't know where to start, try volunteering. You can meet new people and know you're making a difference in your community.[9] You can try and pick up a new sport, do yoga, paint, dance, hike, or create music. 3 Find support with friends and family. Talk about the jealousy or trust problems you experience and gain some perspective with a trusted friend or family member. If you need some help or advice, go to someone you trust to talk it out. Even if they cannot help you, they can still listen.[10] Spend time with your friends and family outside of your relationship. Make time for meals, nights out, and activities with people you care about. 4 Manage your emotions in a healthy way. If you struggle to manage anxiety or jealousy in your relationship, learn to cope with these emotions without lashing out or hurting your partner. If you feel stressed, try taking some deep breaths before accusing your partner or feeling distrustful in them. This can help calm your body and your mind.[11] If you struggle to process your emotions, try journaling, listening to music, or taking a walk. Part 3 Part 3 of 3: Moving Past Your Own Hurt 1 Recognize your past hurt. Perhaps you were hurt in a past relationship or in your family, which now affects your ability to trust your current partner. While your experiences are valid, recognize that your partner is not the person who hurt you. If you struggle to trust due to past relationships, it's worth acknowledging your experience and examining how it affects your current relationship.[12] Your partner may even have hurt you or betrayed your trust in the past. If trust was broken in the past, forgive it and move on if you wish to continue the relationship. For example, if your last partner cheated on you, it makes sense that you would be extra careful this time around. Remember, however, that your current partner has not cheated on you. 2 Identity the current problems around trust. Take a moment and think about the specific problems you experience with trust. Pinpoint the behaviors or situations that make you feel uncomfortable. Ask yourself if your partner acts suspicious, has lied to you in the past, or has been unfaithful in any way.[13] If your partner hasn't been suspicious or unfaithful yet you still worry, recognize that your insecurity is what likely drives the distrust. If your partner has been unfaithful (or you've been unfaithful), ask yourself if you can let go and move on with the relationship. 3 Trust yourself. You might struggle to trust yourself if you've made bad decisions in the past with your relationships. Be willing to tolerate intense emotions and not do something reckless (like cheat) or take it out on your partner. Forgive yourself for your past mistakes and allow yourself to move on.[14] Recognize that you've made mistakes or have been hurt in the past, yet you were able to learn from those experiences. Accept the lessons and move past the hurt by forgiving yourself. 4 Talk to a therapist on your own. Perhaps you were abused as a child or deeply hurt in a past relationship. If you're struggling to work past previous issues that contribute to your ability to trust, consider seeing a therapist to help you. A therapist can help you work through your feelings and heal from your pain. You don't have to do everything on your own.[15] Find a therapist by calling your insurance provider or local mental health clinic. You can also get a recommendation from a physician or friend. (Wikihow)

What should I know about the O.J. Simpson trial?

O.J. Simpson trial law case Actions By The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica O.J. Simpson trial, criminal trial of former college and professional gridiron football star O.J. Simpson, who was acquitted in 1995 of the murder of his ex-wife Nicole Brown Simpson and her friend Ronald Goldman. It was one of the most notorious criminal trials in American history. On the night of June 12, 1994, Simpson's ex-wife and Goldman were stabbed to death outside her condominium in Los Angeles, and Simpson quickly became the prime suspect. Rather than surrender to police after being notified of impending charges, on June 17 Simpson hid in the back of a sport-utility vehicle driven by his friend A.C. Cowlings. After being told that Simpson had a gun to his own head, law-enforcement officers followed the vehicle at low speeds for more than an hour. The attempted "escape" was televised live nationally—seen by an estimated 95 million viewers—and hundreds of Simpson's fans lined the streets in support of him. It ended at Simpson's home in Brentwood, California, where he was placed under arrest and taken into police custody. Simpson was formally arraigned on July 22, 1994, entering a plea of not guilty. The trial began on January 24, 1995, with Lance Ito as the presiding judge. The Los Angeles district attorney's office, led by Marcia Clark and Christopher Darden, emphasized the domestic violence that had occurred prior to and after the Simpsons' 1992 divorce as a motive for the murders. The attorneys representing Simpson, known as the "Dream Team," included F. Lee Bailey, Robert Blasier, Shawn Chapman Holley, Robert Shapiro, and Alan Dershowitz; Johnnie Cochran later became the defense team's lead attorney. The Simpson defense was based largely on the grounds that evidence had been mishandled and that many members of the Los Angeles police department were racist, particularly Mark Fuhrman, a detective who allegedly found a bloody leather glove at Simpson's home. The defense team argued that the glove could not have been Simpson's, because it appeared too small for his hand when he tried it on in the courtroom. In addition to the glove, the defense claimed that other important evidence had been planted by the police to frame Simpson. During the trial, which lasted more than eight months, some 150 witnesses testified, though Simpson did not take the stand. Many cable television networks devoted long stretches of time to speculation about the case and to public opinion of it. Belief in Simpson's innocence or guilt was divided largely along racial lines, with a majority of African Americans in support of Simpson and most white Americans believing in his guilt. Millions watched the television proceedings of the trial throughout the day, and the major figures involved in the case became instant celebrities. On October 2, 1995, the jury finally began deliberating and reached a verdict in less than four hours. Ito, however, delayed the announcement until the following day. On October 3 Simpson was found not guilty of the murders of Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald Goldman. After the verdict, polls of public opinion continued to break down along racial lines. Whites were largely dismayed by the jury's decision, whereas the majority of African Americans supported it, seeing Simpson's acquittal as a victory in a legal system that systematically discriminated against blacks. Although Simpson was acquitted in the criminal case, he was also sued by the victims' families for wrongful death, and the civil trial began in October 1996. Less than four months later, that jury found him responsible for the deaths of Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald Goldman and awarded their families $33.5 million in damages. (Britannica Encyclopedia)

What should I know about Ye?

Kanye West, legal name Ye, (born June 8, 1977, Atlanta, Georgia, U.S.), American producer, rapper, and fashion designer who parlayed his production success in the late 1990s and early 2000s into a career as a popular, critically acclaimed solo artist. West, the child of a photographer and former Black Panther father and a college professor mother, grew up in Chicago and attended Chicago State University for one year before dropping out to pursue a career in music. Early on he demonstrated his considerable abilities as a producer, contributing to Jermaine Dupri's album Life in 1472 (1998) before relocating to the New York City area, where he made his name with his production work for Roc-A-Fella Records, especially on rapper Jay-Z's album Blueprint (2001). West's skillful use of accelerated sample-based beats soon made him much in demand as a producer, but he struggled to be allowed to make his own recordings (partly because of the perception that his middle-class background denied him credibility as a rapper). When he finally released his debut solo album, The College Dropout (2004), it was massively successful: sales soared, and critics gushed over its sonic sophistication and clever wordplay, which blended humour, faith, insight, and political awareness on songs such as "Through the Wire" and the gospel-choir-backed "Jesus Walks." The latter cut won a Grammy Award for best rap song in 2005, and West also picked up awards that year for best rap album and best rhythm-and-blues song (as one of the songwriters of Alicia Keys's "You Don't Know My Name"). Abetted by his flamboyant personality, West quickly rose to stardom. His second album, Late Registration (2005), repeated the commercial success of his first—with a number of hit singles, including "Diamonds from Sierra Leone" and "Gold Digger"—and earned West three more Grammy Awards. He also gained attention for his widely quoted assertion that the federal government's slow response to the Hurricane Katrina disaster in New Orleans in 2005 demonstrated that U.S. Pres. George W. Bush "doesn't care about black people"—a comment that Bush later characterized as one of the worst moments of his presidency. As his career as a performer took off, West continued to work as a producer, with credits including songs by such high-profile artists as Nas, Mariah Carey, and Beyoncé. He also founded the record label GOOD Music. His third release, Graduation (2007), produced the hit singles "Good Life" and "Stronger" and garnered him four more Grammy Awards. In 2008 West released 808s and Heartbreak, an album that dwelled on feelings of personal loss and regret. Its sound differed radically from his previous releases, as West chose to sing (with the assistance of a vocal production tool called Auto-Tune) rather than rap his lyrics. West spent much of late 2009 rehabilitating his image. He had rushed the stage at the MTV Video Music Awards, preempting Taylor Swift's acceptance speech for best female video, to declare that "Beyoncé had one of the best videos of all time." Video footage of the incident quickly went viral on the Internet, and West found himself vilified in the media. A series of apologies, some of them appearing as a stream-of-consciousness narrative on West's Twitter feed, soon followed. The brashness that caused him such trouble in 2009 fueled a triumphant return to music the following year, with My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy, a monumentally complex exploration of the nature of success and celebrity. With potent rhymes that were in equal parts boastful and self-effacing, instrumentation that ranged from tribal drums to soaring orchestral accompaniment, and a list of guest performers that included Jay-Z, Rihanna, Kid Cudi, and Chris Rock, the album represented some of West's most ambitious work, and it was rewarded with a trio of Grammys. He followed it with Watch the Throne (2011), a Billboard chart-topping collaboration with Jay-Z that featured the Grammy-winning singles "Otis," "*****s in Paris," and "No Church in the Wild." In 2012 West presented Cruel Summer, a compilation album featuring him and some of the artists signed to his GOOD Music label. A year later, on Yeezus (2013), West continued to explore the dark corners of his psyche, at times filtering his observations through the provocative lens of racial politics, as on "New Slaves." In contrast to the extravagance of his previous solo efforts, the album found him rapping over jagged minimalist arrangements evocative of house and industrial music and embellished with spare samples of soul and dancehall vocalists. Its most successful single was "Bound 2," in part because of its racy music video featuring West and his then girlfriend, the reality-television star Kim Kardashian. (The couple, who were frequently in the public eye, were married in 2014. In 2021 it was announced that they were divorcing.) In February 2015 West, in conjunction with German apparel company Adidas, unveiled the first "season," or collection, of his long-awaited fashion line, YEEZY. YEEZY Season 1 featured men's and women's streetwear, including oversized sweaters, military- and surplus-inspired jackets, sneakers, boots, and more. West's fashion work continued leading up to the release of his eighth studio album, The Life of Pablo (2016); in fact, he debuted tracks from the album at his showcase of YEEZY Season 3 at Madison Square Garden in New York. The gospel-tinged album further demonstrated West's inventiveness as a producer, but critics found it disjointed. In addition, the work itself was somewhat overshadowed by the unconventional circumstances of its release; after making an initial version of the album available online, West continued to tinker with it in the studio, calling it a "living breathing changing creative expression." The tour supporting the album was abruptly canceled in November 2016, and West was briefly hospitalized. West's fifth fashion collection, YEEZY Season 5, was released at New York Fashion Week in February 2017. West was uncharacteristically quiet for several months before provocatively reemerging on social media in April 2018. He notably defended a statement he had made in a televised interview suggesting that enslaved African Americans had cooperated in their enslavement. Later that year he released the chaotic and unsettling ye, on which he declared that he is bipolar. Kids See Ghosts, a collaboration with rapper Kid Cudi, followed shortly thereafter. Like ye, it focused on mental health but to much better effect; intense and spooky, the album was widely viewed as more interesting and rewarding than West's solo effort. His next release, Jesus Is King, was a gospel album that reflected his recommitment to Christianity; it later won the Grammy for best contemporary Christian music album. During this time West remained involved in fashion, and YEEZY Season 6 and Season 7 were released in 2018 and 2019, respectively, though neither was shown at New York Fashion Week. In July 2020, less than four months before the election, West announced that he was running for president as a member of the Birthday Party. He did little campaigning, but he released a platform that notably called for reforming the police and legal system, reducing student debt, and having prayer in schools. Republican Pres. Donald Trump and his followers supported West's candidacy, believing that he could lure some voters away from the Democratic nominee, Joe Biden, in what was expected to be an incredibly close election. However, West ultimately garnered only 0.04 percent of the national vote, not enough to have any effect on the outcome. In 2021 his 10th studio album, Donda, was released, featuring collaborations with such artists as JAY-Z and The Weeknd. Later that year Kanye West officially changed his name to Ye. While not a stranger to controversy, West faced particular backlash for objectionable behaviour in 2022. During his YEEZY show at Paris Fashion Week in October, he and his models wore shirts emblazoned with "White Lives Matter." Shortly thereafter West made a series of comments that were widely seen as anti-Semitic. Notably, he posted on Twitter that he was preparing to "go death con 3 On JEWISH PEOPLE." Many interpreted the tweet as a reference to defcon, a U.S. military readiness system. This and other comments resulted in Instagram and Twitter locking his accounts and removing content. West subsequently announced that he planned on acquiring Parler, a conservative social media platform. During this time a number of companies, including Adidas, ended their endorsement deals with West. (Encyclopedia Britannica)

body language

nonverbal communication through conscious or unconscious gestures, facial expressions, behaviors, and posture.

How long were people thinking about an American revolution?

Former president John Adams wrote to another former president, Thomas Jefferson, that "[t]he Revolution was in the minds of the people, and this was effected from 1760 to 1775." Adams wrote this subsequent to the American Revolution. • Many British North Americans were thinking of a revolution between the years 1760 and 1775. • Loyalists was a name given to individuals who supported Great Britain and opposed the American form of independence. It's probable that African slaves were loyalists. Other slaves may have seen this as a chance to gain freedom and equality. • Many of the British colonists had read John Locke's work concerning his advocacy for the Glorious Revolution in 1689. Some of the colonists began to believe that they themselves had the right to create a legislature which they could remove or alter. • Impressment was a British policy that forcibly enlisted sailors into the navy. This angered a lot of people living in port towns, and there were a lot of riots. People could also have been kidnapped to become sailors for the British navy. • Samuel Adams was a successful brewer who defended rioters that chased a governor out of town because of the impressment going on there. He helped form the Committee of correspondences. • Colonial resistance grew because the British government tried to impose new taxes to pay off debts from the French and Indian War. Each act implemented—the sugar and currency acts of 1764, the Stamp Act of 1765, the Townshend Act of 1767, and the Tea Act of 1773-led to a spiraling series of encounters. • The Sugar Act of 1764 allowed for taxes on various items like rum and molasses, which are both made from sugar. • The Stamp Act taxed all legal and commercial documents (or materials made from paper), creating an immediate hardship for businesses and building resentment in a multitude of ports where people depended on those businesses for jobs. There was a stronger resistance to the Stamp Act in 1765. • Virtual representation was the idea that the British Parliament virtually represented the colonists by speaking for all instead of just the district they're from. • Parliamentary Sovereignty is the political idea that the legislative body of a certain country like England has supreme authority over all government institutions. • Both virtual representation and parliamentary sovereignty were concepts that enraged the colonists, and it led to a bigger void between Great Britain and the colonies. • The Sons of Liberty were secret organizations in the colonies formed to oppose the Stamp Act. From 1765 until the end of the American Revolution, members spoke, wrote, and took direct action against British measures, especially the Stamp tax and tax on tea. • The Declaratory Act of 1766 repealed the Stamp Act but allowed for parliament to legislate for the colonies in "all cases whatsoever." • George Grenville was prime minister of Great Britain who taxed the American colonies. • No taxation without representation is a phrase that became a rallying cry for many colonists who deemed the new British taxes to be unfair. The colonists felt that they weren't being represented in Parliament; they used this as a protest cry because they were angry about all of the taxes. • The Townshend Act puts an indirect tax on quotidian items like paper, paint, lead, glass, and tea. • The Tea Act of 1773 condoned the British East India Company to ship tea to the colonies without having to pay normally required duties, making it cheaper than most smuggled tea. • Patrick Henry was a member of the Continental Congress and a renowned orator. He's famous for saying "give me liberty, or give me death." • The Boston Massacre happened in March 1770. It supposedly starts with people throwing projectiles at redcoats, who then fired back upon the people. Five American citizens were killed, and this stirs an even greater Hatred toward the British army. • The Boston Tea Party was formed in 1773. It's considered to be the most famous act of resistance in America. A shipment of tea would come in on a ship called the Dartmouth, but none of the colonists had let those on the ship unload it. Men would dress up as Mohawk Indians and dump the tea into the Boston Harbor at nighttime. The actions of the Boston Tea Party would fuel anti-British sentiment in other colonies. • The Intolerable Acts were formed in 1774. It allowed for Quebec to go to British Canada and not to the colonies. • The First Continental Congress was a meeting of delegates from most of the colonies held in Philadelphia in 1774 in response to the British efforts to tax the colonies. The First continental congress met in Philadelphia in 1774. It's an association formed from a general boycott. (AP US Notes)

Habeus corpus

The legal protection that prohibits the imprisonment of a subject without demonstrated cause. It's a legal principle that requires aurthorities to show reasons why a person should be held in custody and to provide a speedy trial.

What should I know about Hurricane Katrina?

Hurricane Katrina was a tropical cyclone that struck the southeastern United States in late August 2005. The hurricane and its aftermath claimed more than 1,800 lives, and it ranked as the costliest natural disaster in U.S. history.

lunar month

name for the period of time that the moon takes to orbit the earth

What happened after Lincoln's assassination?

Subsequent to the assassination of President Lincoln, the rebuilding of the country after the Civil War would be in other hands. • After Lincoln dies, VP Andrew Johnson becomes president in 1865. • Last battles of the Civil War take place in Cameron County, Texas, in 1865. • "Juneteenth" Emancipation was announced in Texas in 1865. • Radical Republicans—often called in Congress simply "the radicals"—were a shifting group of Republicans. congressman, who favored abolishing slavery and advocated full rights for former slaves in the South. They were determined that the North's victory in the Civil War meant that the country should give formerly enslaved people not only their freedom but also the right to vote and to hold office and should provide land to those who had previously worked other people's land as their slaves. • The Freedman's Bureau's an agency established by Congress in March 1865 to provide social, educational, and economic services as well as advice and protection to former slaves. The idea for this bureau was proposed by Lincoln. It would last a long time and do more than Lincoln ever imagined. • The post-Civil War era is often described as including 3 distinct time periods. The 1st period is referred to as Presidential Reconstruction in 1865-1866, when President Johnson sought to return states to their prewar status with only the institution of slavery being abolished. The next period is known as the more radical Congressional Reconstruction (sometimes Radical Reconstruction), which began when Congress began to challenge Johnson in 1867 and generally continued through the end of Grant's 2 terms in 1877. The last period, known as "Redemption" (by its defenders but not by those who lost rights in the process), began with the election of Rutherford B. Hayes in November 1876 and involved the withdrawal of federal troops from the South as well as the return of white-only governments. That last period culminated in the 1890s with the virtual disenfranchisement of all Blacks in the South. Although this chronology might be deemed too simplistic, it does provide a useful framework for helping one understand what went on in these periods. • Johnson announces plans for Presidential Reconstruction in 1865. • Black Codes were laws passed by states and municipalities denying many rights of citizenship to free blacks and to control black labor, mobility, and employment. They took inspiration from the slave codes. • In many states, Black codes either made it illegal for an African American to own a gun or taxed guns at high rates. New urban police forces were designed to "keep good order and discipline amongst the negro population." Police patrols not only enforced the law but also often terrorized blacks, especially those who refused to sign long-term labor contracts with former slave masters. Any former slave who ran away from a labor contract could be either arrested and returned to the plantation holding that contract or sentenced to a chain gang to pay off the fine for running away. Arrests of unemployed blacks for vagrancy or other minor infractions resulted in long prison terms at forced labor that looked very much like slavery. African Americans in Louisiana noted how similar the incarceration and labor contracts were to slavery and how similar the new police were to the old slave patrols. • The 13th Amendment was ratified in 1865. • The Ku Klux Klan was one of several white vigilante groups that terrorized black people and Republican sympathizers in the South during the Reconstruction era, founded by Confederate veterans in 1866. • The White League was a paramilitary group dedicated to southern white supremacy. • Illinois Senator Lyman Trumbull proposes a far-reaching Civil Rights Act of 1866 that defined all persons born in the US (except Indians) as citizens, permanently ending the Dred Scott distinctions between whites and blacks. Although the bill was silent on the issue of voting, given that many of the citizens it referred to—women and children, for example—couldn't vote, it explicitly guaranteed rights to make contracts, bring lawsuits, and have the equal benefit of the laws without regard to race. It also authorized federal authorities to prosecute violations in federal courts, a significant provision since Southern state courts were quickly reverting to their white-dominated ways. This bill may have been seen as radical a year or 2 earlier, but in 1866, they were seen as moderate proposals from a moderate senator, and everyone expected smooth sailing. • The Civil Rights Act was passed over Johnson's veto in 1866. • In January 1867, Congress quickly passed a law—over presidential veto—giving black males in the District of Columbia the right to vote. They passed the Reconstruction Act of 1867, which declared all Southern state governments—already recognized by Johnson—to be inoperative and divided the former Confederate states into 5 military districts, ordering the military to oversee the writing of new constitutions that would guarantee universal male suffrage. Only after these new constitutions were in place, and after a state had ratified the 14th Amendment, would Congress admit its representatives to Congress. • Union leagues were Republican Party organizations led by African Americans across the South. These became important organizing devices after 1865. The leagues offered opportunities to gain experience in the political process or, as one former slave said, "We just went there, and we talked a little, made speeches on one question and another." Former slaves became political leaders. By 1867, James H. Jones, the former "body servant" to Jefferson Davis, was a featured speaker at Republican meetings across the South. • Some in congress began to consider removing Johnson in early 1867, but the majority focused on passing laws that they hoped would keep Reconstruction moving in spite of the president. One law required all presidential orders to the military to pass through the army chief, General Grant, before going to commanders in the field. Grant was known to side with congress, and this strategy seemed like an important safeguard. Congress also passed the tenure of Office Act, which said that any person whose appointment required the Senate's consent, namely, members of the cabinet and ambassadors, could be replaced only when the Senate approved a successor. The goal of the act was to ensure that Secretary of War Stanton, who had been appointed by Lincoln and who took a tough stance on Reconstruction, stayed in office. When Johnson fired Stanton, Congress accused Johnson of violating the tenure of Office Act, and this set him up to be impeached. • Both houses of Congress passed articles of impeachment against President Andrew Johnson in 1868. He's acquitted by 1 vote in the Senate. • Johnson would never again run for president. • The 14th Amendment was ratified in 1868. This amendment granted citizenship and equal civil and legal rights to African Americans and slaves who had been emancipated after the Civil War. • Ulysses S. Grant was inaugurated as 18th president of the United States in 1869. • The 15th Amendment was ratified in 1870. This amendment granted African Americans the right to vote. • As powerful as the language of the 15th Amendment is, it lacked some wording that many had wanted to include. The radicals had wanted the amendment to state that neither the right to vote nor the right to hold office could be abridged. But others feared that several states, including California with its large Chinese population, might reject the amendment if the right of nonwhite people to hold office was included. Many also had wanted to prohibit the many tricks that some Southern governments were already using to limit the black vote, including literacy tests that could be manipulated to exclude whoever the test giver wanted excluded or tests related to property or education. Supporters of the amendment, however, worried that they would lose too much Northern support if they excluded such clauses. Massachusetts and Connecticut used literacy tests to limit voting by foreign-born citizens, while Pennsylvania and Rhode Island had property or tax qualifications for voting, and no one wanted to risk losing the support of those states. As a result, important safeguards weren't excluded. • In January 1870, the Mississippi state legislature elected Hiram R. Revels, an African American pastor, to the US Senate. Revels was the first African American ever elected to the Senate. The legislature that elected Revels included 36 blacks and 73 whites—hardly a black-dominated body but overwhelmingly one dominated by Republicans committed to black voting rights. He was elected, ironically, to fill Jefferson Davis's former seat, left vacant since Davis departed in 1861. • Sherman's Special Field Order No. 15 provided for 40-acre parcels of land for black families, which was to be taken from the plantations of owners in active rebellion on the Sea Islands and coastal areas in Georgia and, later, in South Carolina (once his army got there). Sherman also offered army mules that were no longer needed. Thus, "forty acres and a mule" became the symbol of freedom to many, and by June 1865, forty thousand newly freed people were settled on "Sherman land" in the former Confederacy. As head of the Freedmen's Bureau, General O.O. Howard expanded Sherman's original South Carolina plan, instructing his agents to "set aside" forty-acre tracts for individual freedmen. Blacks across the South quickly began farming their own plots. The plan was initially revoked by President Johnson. • Having spent their lives in unpaid labor, few slaves had any resources to buy land, even when it was being sold very cheaply in the aftermath of the war. • During the Johnson-dominated Reconstruction, Southern landowners not only reclaimed their lands but also ensured that the passage of vagrancy laws made it a crime to be without a job, which meant former slaves had to take whatever was offered or risk being jailed. Some landowners agreed to hire only their own former slaves, making it extremely difficult for newly free people to bargain for wages or move to better opportunities in a system that white courts backed up with the threat of long prison sentences for unemployment. • Sharecropping was a labor system that evolved during and after Reconstruction whereby landowners furnished laborers with a house, farm animals, tools, and advanced credit in exchange for a share of the laborers' crop. • Scalawag was a disparaging term for Southern whites who supported the Southern Republican Party during Reconstruction. This was a diverse lot of people. • Northern whites who came to the South were called carpetbaggers because, Southerners said, they could carry everything they owned in a single carpet suitcase. Resentful, Southerners claimed that carpetbaggers had come South to get rich. • The First Enforcement Act was passed by Congress in 1870 to make the denial of the right to vote because of race through force, fraud, bribery, or intimidation a federal crime. • The US Department of Justice was created to enforce Reconstruction laws in 1870. • The Ku Klux Klan Act was passed by Congress in 1871 to make conspiracies to deprive citizens of the right to vote a punishable federal offense. • In October 1871, president Grant proclaimed nine counties of South Carolina to be in a "condition of lawlessness" and sent federal troops to restore order and arrest several hundred klan leaders, some of whom ended up in federal prison. In addition, perhaps 2000 Klan members left the state. 700 leaders of the Klan were also arrested in Mississippi and more in North Carolina. By the end of 1872, the Klan, as an organization, was deemed to be destroyed for many decades. • US Army troops seize Louisiana state house, return Republican legislature in 1872. • Massacre at Colfax, Louisiana, happened in 1873. • The Supreme Court decision in the Slaughterhouse Cases limits the reach of the 14th Amendment in 1873. • Blanche K. Bruce was a former slave who was sent by Mississippi to the Senate in 1874. He attended Oberlin College and established himself as a planter in Mississippi in 1868. Unlike Revels, he worked his way up the political ladder, serving as the sergeant-at-arms of the Mississippi state senate, assessor and sheriff of Bolivar County, and a member of the Board of Levee Commissioners of the Mississippi River. Navigation on the Mississippi was a major concern of his during his US Senate tenure, as was opposition to Chinese exclusion. Bruce was the last African American to serve in the Senate until Edward Brooke was elected from Massachusetts in 1966. • Grant ordered 5000 troops to New Orleans to return to the Republican Governor in 1874. • The Civil Rights Act of 1875 happened. It was later rendered unconstitutional by the Supreme Court. • United States v. Cruikshank happened in 1876. William J. "Bill" Cruikshank was a white participant in the attack on Colfax, Louisiana, in 1873. He was indicted on federal charges for violating the civil rights of blacks who were killed in the attack. But 3 years later, the Supreme Court ruled that the charges were unconstitutional. Chief Justice Morrison R. Waite wrote that protecting the rights of individual citizens was a state, not a federal, duty. Cruikshank took away one of the federal government's most important enforcement powers—the right to bring federal charges against those who attacked the rights of African Americans. • Rutherford B. Hayes was inaugurated as president in 1877. • After the removal of federal troops in the South, conditions began to drastically worsen for southern Blacks. • Reconstruction slowly ended in 1877. • Jim Crow Segregation was a series of segregation laws that became widespread in the south during the 1890s, named for a minstrel show character portrayed satirically by white actors in blackface. Jim Crow Segregation developed at a rapid pace. • Plessy V. Ferguson was a Court case where the Supreme Court decided that "separate but equal" facilities were acceptable under the US Constitution. By the time that decision was made, the high hopes of Reconstruction were a dim memory and most Americans—white and black—were living in a very different world. (AP US Notes)

What should I know about Facebook?

Facebook is an American online social network service that is part of the company Meta Platforms. Facebook was founded in 2004 by Mark Zuckerberg, Eduardo Saverin, Dustin Moskovitz, and Chris Hughes, all of whom were students at Harvard University. Facebook became the largest social network in the world, with nearly three billion users as of 2021, and about half that number were using Facebook every day. The company's headquarters are in Menlo Park, California. Access to Facebook is free of charge, and the company earns most of its money from advertisements on the website. New users can create profiles, upload photos, join a preexisting group, and start new groups. The site has many components, including Timeline, a space on each user's profile page where users can post their content and friends can post messages; Status, which enables users to alert friends to their current location or situation; and News Feed, which informs users of changes to their friends' profiles and status. Users can chat with each other and send each other private messages. Users can signal their approval of content on Facebook with the Like button, a feature that also appears on many other websites. Other services that are part of Meta Platforms are Instagram, a photo- and video-sharing social network; Messenger, an instant-messaging application; and WhatsApp, a text-message and VoIP service. The attractiveness of Facebook stems in part from cofounder Zuckerberg's insistence from the very beginning that members be transparent about who they are; users are forbidden from adopting false identities. The company's management argued that transparency is necessary for forming personal relationships, sharing ideas and information, and building up society as a whole. It also noted that the bottom-up, peer-to-peer connectivity among Facebook users makes it easier for businesses to connect their products with consumers. The company has a complicated early history. It began at Harvard University in 2003 as Facemash, an online service for students to judge the attractiveness of their fellow students. Because the primary developer, Zuckerberg, violated university policy in acquiring resources for the service, it was shut down after two days. Despite its mayflylike existence, 450 people (who voted 22,000 times) flocked to Facemash. That success prompted Zuckerberg to register the URL http://www.thefacebook.com in January 2004. He then created a new social network at that address with fellow students Saverin, Moskovitz, and Hughes. The social network TheFacebook.com launched in February 2004. Harvard students who signed up for the service could post photographs of themselves and personal information about their lives, such as their class schedules and clubs they belonged to. Its popularity increased, and soon students from other prestigious schools, such as Yale and Stanford universities, were allowed to join. By June 2004 more than 250,000 students from 34 schools had signed up, and that same year major corporations such as the credit card company MasterCard started paying for exposure on the site. In September 2004 TheFacebook added the Wall to a member's online profile. This widely used feature let a user's friends post information on their Wall and became a key element in the social aspect of the network. By the end of 2004, TheFacebook had reached one million active users. However, the company still trailed the then-leading online social network, Myspace, which boasted five million members. The year 2005 proved to be pivotal for the company. It became simply Facebook and introduced the idea of "tagging" people in photos that were posted to the site. With tags, people identified themselves and others in images that could be seen by other Facebook friends. Facebook allowed users to upload an unlimited number of photos. In 2005 high-school students and students at universities outside the United States were allowed to join the service. By year's end it had six million monthly active users. In 2006 Facebook opened its membership beyond students to anyone over the age of 13. As Zuckerberg had predicted, advertisers were able to create new and effective customer relationships. For example, that year, household product manufacturer Procter & Gamble attracted 14,000 people to a promotional effort by "expressing affinity" with a teeth-whitening product. This kind of direct consumer engagement on such a large scale had not been possible before Facebook, and more companies began using the social network for marketing and advertising. Privacy remains an ongoing problem for Facebook. It first became a serious issue for the company in 2006, when it introduced News Feed, which consisted of every change that a user's friends had made to their pages. After an outcry from users, Facebook swiftly implemented privacy controls in which users could control what content appeared in News Feed. In 2007 Facebook launched a short-lived service called Beacon that let members' friends see what products they had purchased from participating companies. It failed because members felt that it encroached on their privacy. Indeed, a survey of consumers in 2010 put Facebook in the bottom 5 percent of companies in customer satisfaction largely because of privacy concerns, and the company continues to be criticized for the complexity of its user privacy controls and for the frequent changes it makes to them. In 2008 Facebook surpassed Myspace as the most-visited social media website. With the introduction of Live Feed, the company also took a competitive swing at the growing popularity of Twitter, a social network that runs a live feed of news service-like posts from members whom a user follows. Similar to Twitter's ongoing stream of user posts, Live Feed pushed posts from friends automatically to a member's homepage. (Live Feed has since been incorporated into News Feed.). Facebook has become a powerful tool for political movements, beginning with the U.S. presidential election of 2008, when more than 1,000 Facebook groups were formed in support of either Democratic candidate Barack Obama or Republican candidate John McCain. In Colombia the service was used to rally hundreds of thousands in protests against the antigovernment FARC guerrilla rebellion. In Egypt, activists protesting the government of Pres. Hosni Mubarak during the uprising of 2011 often organized themselves by forming groups on Facebook. Facebook encourages third-party software developers to use the service. In 2006 it released its application programming interface (API) so that programmers could write software that Facebook members could use directly through the service. By 2009 developers generated about $500 million in revenue for themselves through Facebook. The company also earns revenues from developers through payments for virtual or digital products sold through third-party applications. By 2011 payments from one such company, Zynga Inc., an online game developer, accounted for 12 percent of the company's revenues. In February 2012 Facebook filed to become a public company. Its initial public offering (IPO) in May raised $16 billion, giving it a market value of $102.4 billion. By contrast, the largest IPO of an Internet company to date was that of the search-engine company Google Inc., which had raised $1.9 billion when it went public in 2004. By the end of the first day of the stock's trading, Zuckerberg's holdings were estimated at more than $19 billion. In October 2021 Facebook announced that it was changing the name of its parent company to Meta Platforms. The name change reflected an emphasis on the "metaverse," in which users would interact in virtual reality environments.

What are some good meals for dinner?

10 Simple Dinner Ideas for Healthy Eating in Real Life By Jillian Kubala, MS, RD on June 30, 2021 — Medically reviewed by Adrienne Seitz, MS, RD, LDN, Nutrition You may think that preparing healthy, delicious dinners at home is a complicated process, but I'm here to tell you that it doesn't have to be. Even though I love food and enjoy cooking, I like to keep it simple when it comes to mealtime. This means choosing recipes that are easy to follow and don't involve complicated cooking techniques or seemingly never-ending steps. Here are 10 of my go-to simple dinner recipes that can help you get a healthy meal on the table quickly. grain bowls with fresh veggies and egg Share on Pinterest 1. Stuffed sweet potatoes Sweet potatoes are loaded with beneficial nutrients like beta carotene, vitamin C, potassium, and fiber (1Trusted Source). Plus, they're delicious and pair well with just about anything. This makes them the perfect base on which to build a filling meal. At my house, we prepare stuffed sweet potatoes at least once a week. I roast a whole sweet potato, then stuff it with ingredients like sautéed veggies, beans, chicken, and cheese. This meal is super versatile, and you can choose from a variety of flavor combinations. You can try out one of the simple recipes below or wing it and simply pile your favorite ingredients onto a roasted sweet potato. Chicken Pesto Stuffed Sweet Potatoes Taco Stuffed Sweet Potatoes Vegetarian Stuffed Sweet Potatoes Mediterranean Baked Sweet Potatoes 2. Grain bowls Grain bowls are a hit in my kitchen. My husband and I love how simple and adaptable grain bowls are and frequently prepare this dinner when we're craving a flavorful yet easy-to-prepare meal. I follow a gluten-free diet, so we use gluten-free grains like quinoa and brown rice. However, you can use any grain you want for grain bowls, including farro, millet, and barley. Grains provide an important source of fiber and other nutrients like magnesium. Studies have found that diets rich in grains are linked to a lower risk of several health conditions, including colon cancer, heart disease, and type 2 diabetes (2Trusted Source). To prepare a grain bowl, top a serving of cooked grains with cooked or raw veggies and a protein source like chicken, fried or hard-boiled eggs, grilled shrimp, or salmon. Then top it with a store-bought or homemade dressing, or keep it simple with a drizzle of olive oil and lemon juice. For example, this Green Goddess Buddha Bowl uses an irresistible combination of brown rice, roasted broccoli, sugar snap peas, avocado, hard-boiled eggs, toasted pumpkin seeds, and a creamy yogurt-based sauce. Here are a few more grain bowl recipes that make a perfect dinner option for nights when you're short on time: Thai Chicken Buddha Bowls Salmon Grain Bowls with Lemon Tahini Sauce Sweet Potato & Chickpea Buddha Bowl 3. Veggie loaded frittatas When you have chickens like I do, eggs make their way into more than just breakfast meals. We regularly use eggs as the protein source for quick and tasty dinners, including frittatas. Eggs have you covered when it comes to healthy fat and protein, so all you need to do is add a variety of your favorite veggies to cover your fiber needs. Some of my favorite vegetables to use in frittatas include asparagus, spinach, sweet potatoes, zucchini, onions, broccoli florets, mushrooms, and tomatoes. You can also add in ingredients like cheese, herbs, spices, or pesto to give your frittata extra flavor. You can even use leftovers like salmon, shredded chicken, and potatoes in your frittata. I like to serve frittata with some sliced avocado or fresh fruit. It's a filling meal that you can enjoy at any time of the day or night. Frittatas are super simple to make, and you can whip them up in under an hour. Here are a few tasty and easy frittata recipes: Spring Vegetable Frittata Cheesy Chicken Pepper Broccoli Frittata Wild Mushroom Frittata with Cheddar, Green Onions, and Peas 4. Dinner salad A large, filling salad is one of my go-to dinners, especially when I'm not feeling up to putting time into a meal. The problem with most salads is that they're not well composed, and you end up feeling hungry again just a short while after finishing your meal. The key to making a hearty dinner salad is making sure that you include plenty of protein, healthy fats, and fiber. Start with a base of your favorite greens, such as spinach, mixed greens, arugula, kale, or romaine. Add a few more veggies, such as peppers, cucumbers, carrots, broccoli, or red onions, to your greens to bump up the fiber content. Then choose a protein source like grilled chicken, shrimp, salmon, or hard-boiled eggs. Adding a fiber-rich carb source, such as beans or roasted sweet potatoes, will bump the fullness factor even higher. Top your creation with roasted sunflower or pumpkin seeds for a crunchy texture, then drizzle it with a healthy dressing like olive oil and balsamic vinegar, or follow this recipe for Homemade Green Goddess Dressing. Here are a few more dinner salad ideas: Chicken Shawarma Salad with Tahini Dressing Superfood Salmon Salad Crunchy Asian Chopped Salad 5. Loaded brown rice pasta Most everyone loves a good pasta dish, but most pasta dishes don't contain the necessary ingredients, such as protein and fiber, to keep you feeling satisfied (3Trusted Source). Fortunately, using a few simple tips can help you create a filling and nutritious pasta dinner in no time. First, choose your pasta. I am a big fan of Tinkyada brown rice pasta, but you can use any pasta you like. You can also use zucchini noodles in place of pasta if you're following a lower carb dietary pattern. Next, pick a source of protein. I like to use chicken breast or ground chicken or, if I want plant-based protein, I will add chickpeas. Next, choose your veggies. I love a classic combo of spinach and broccoli, but almost any vegetable will work. Lastly, pick a sauce, such as pesto, marinara, or olive oil. Here are a few recipes to try out the next time you're craving a pasta dish: Broccoli Pesto Chicken Pasta Roasted Vegetable Chickpea Pasta Salad Zucchini Noodles with Mini Chicken Feta and Spinach Meatballs 6. One-pot soups Few meals are more satisfying than a hearty, hot bowl of soup. Fortunately, soup can be simple to prepare and makes a perfect choice for meal prep, as you can make large portions easily. I like making soups that require only one pot because this means less time cleaning up. I make my soups on the stovetop, but you can make any of the following recipes in an Instant Pot to save time. Creamy Yellow Split Pea Soup Curry Chicken Soup Lentil, Kale, and Quinoa Stew 7. Curry Curry is a smart choice for a quick, filling dinner because it's versatile, easy to make, and family-friendly. Plus, eating curry regularly may help improve your health by reducing heart disease risk factors, including high triglyceride and blood sugar levels (4Trusted Source, 5Trusted Source). I like whipping up a warming chickpea and sweet potato curry during the winter months and serving it over rice or quinoa. Many curry recipes take 30 minutes or less to prepare, including these simple curry dishes: Quick and Simple Thai Chickpea Curry Easy 1-Pan Salmon Red Curry 30-Minute Thai Chicken Curry 8. Burgers Burgers are a great choice for families because they're simple to make and sure to please even the pickiest of taste buds. Even though beef burgers are a popular choice, you can make burgers out of just about any protein source, including ground chicken, salmon, tuna, and lentils. My husband makes a delicious chicken burger, and I like to serve it with a large salad and roasted sweet potato fries. You can serve your burgers on a hearty whole grain bun, in a lettuce wrap, or on top of a bed of greens to suit your dietary needs. Here are a few burger recipes that are super simple to prepare: Chickpea Pizza Burgers Spinach Feta Salmon Burgers Seriously Good Sweet Potato Cheddar Barbecue Chicken Burgers 9. Whole roasted chicken whole roasted chicken in a pan Share on Pinterest Even though roasting a whole chicken may take some time, it couldn't be any simpler. Check out this guide on how to roast a perfect chicken. When I roast whole chickens, I stuff the bottom of the roasting pan with potato wedges, onions, and carrot chunks so the veggies cook along with the chicken. When your chicken is done roasting, let it rest for 15 minutes before carving it. You can use that time to make a quick salad like the ones listed below: Easy Tomato Avocado Salad Favorite Green Salad with Apples, Cranberries, and Pepitas Sun-Dried Tomato Salad with Olives and Feta 10. Sheet pan meals If you're not a fan of cleaning dishes, this idea is for you. Most recipes require you to use several pots, pans, and bowls. However, sheet pan meals allow you to pile all of your ingredients onto a single sheet pan to cook, which saves you time in the kitchen. Check out these mouthwatering sheet pan meals: Sheet Pan Harissa Chicken with Chickpeas and Sweet Potatoes Sheet Pan Lemon Brown Butter Salmon with Parmesan Asparagus Sheet Pan Chicken Fajitas Vegetarian Mediterranean Sheet Pan Dinner The bottom line Preparing a healthy and satisfying dinner doesn't have to involve complicated recipes and hours in the kitchen. The recipes listed above are not only nutritious but also simple to prepare. Try one of the recipes above the next time you're drawing a blank at dinner time. Just one thing Try this today: If you're unsure about what to make for dinner, don't panic! First, take a look in your fridge and pantry to see what ingredients you have to work with. Next, create a balanced meal by choosing the following: a protein source a nonstarchy vegetable a carb source a healthy fat For example, pair baked chicken breasts with broccoli sautéed in olive oil and garlic. Add a baked potato, and you've created a healthy, balanced meal. Many people feel overwhelmed when it comes to mealtime, especially those new to cooking. Keeping it simple is a good tip to help you stay calm in the kitchen. (Healthline)

What should know about interactions between Native Americans and the US government?

Native Americans were deemed to have fought on both sides in the Civil War and sometimes used the country's division to expand their territory, leading to both the North and the South to divert troops from other battles. The Civil War also changed the lives of many American Indians. For a lot of whites, Indian matters existed only on the margin of their attention during the war. Once the Civil War ended, whites' relationships with Indians, especially on the Great Plains, took on greater significance. As many Americans, whites and some blacks, began to look for more land in the aftermath of the war, they ran into newly empowered Native Americans. • John Butterfield opened the overland stage route in 1858. • The Comanches were arguably the most powerful tribe on the western frontier. They could be deemed as having an empire that was equal in size and power to the US or the Republic of Mexico. For the Comanches, the Civil War could be seen as a great gift. The US Army, the Texas Rangers, and other whites who had been harassing them for decades were called to fight against each other on distant battlefields. The Comanches probably welcomed their absence. • By the late 1850s, the Comanches seemed to be in decline. Working with Texas Rangers and with smaller tribes who had been Comanche victims, the US Army began to gain the upper hand in Texas. In battles during 1858, over 100 Comanche warriors, including chiefs, were killed, and a large number of women and children taken prisoner. Some Comanches were ready to seek peace. The Penateka Comanches, who'd split from the larger tribe, gave up warefare and settled on a Texas reservation just before the Civil War. • The Civil War and, later, Reconstruction opened up new opportunities for the remaining Comanches. The War diverted troops from Texas distant battlefields, and as early as 1863, Comanche raiding parties began to move back into parts of Texas they had left in the 1850s, stealing horses and cattle. When Texas joined the Confederacy, Comanches developed a brisk trade selling stolen Texas cattle to Union Army agents in New Mexico. With the coming of peace in 1865, the US Army demilitarized any forces in Texas that had fought for the Confederacy in the Civil War, including the feared Texas Rangers. While US Army troops were stationed in Houston, San Antonio, and along the border with Mexico, the area of West Texas, with several million cattle wandering on huge range lands, was lightly protected. The Comanches saw their opportunity. They expanded their rich trade with prosperous New Mexicans who came to be known as the comancheros because of the trade. From the mid-1860s into the early 1870s, great annual trade gatherings took place where comancheros, often backed by investors from the eastern US, traded salt, hard bread, flour, sugar, tobacco, blankets, and knives as well as the ever-in-demand latest-issue revolvers and rifles in exchange for cattle that the Comanches had recently acquired in Texas. The Comanches also traded in people—Mexican and Indian captives, especially women, who were in great demand as brides in New Mexico. While these trading gatherings integrated the Comanches into US markets, the stolen cattle and the continued trade in humans were sources of serious tension between the Comanches and the governments of the US and the Republic of Texas. • The Medicine Lodge Creek Treaty was an 1867 treaty between the Comanches and the US Army in which the Comanches agreed to settle on a reservation. The US delegation there was led by William T. Sherman. • The Navajo were a warlike tribe that dominated large swaths of New Mexico, Colorado, and Kansas. The Union army ended their rule and that of the Mescalero Apaches, too. In August 1862, Union brigadier General James H. Carleton arrived in New Mexico in command of California volunteers, but when he learned that Confederates in the region had already been defeated, he ordered his troops to attack the Apaches and Navajo instead. In early 1863, the army invaded Apache lands and confined some 400 Apaches at a new reservation at Bosque Redondo in central New Mexico. Carleton then appointed Kit Carson to lead an attack on the much larger Navajo tribe of some 10000 people. Carson had been reported to have said to the Navajos, "Go to Bosque Redondo, or we will pursue and destroy you. We will not make peace with you on any other terms." Carson kept his word, marching into Canyon de Chelly, the sacred Navajo heartland, attacking Navajo encampments as well as destroying orchards, crops, and livestock. By the spring of 1864, some 6000 Navajos had surrendered rather than die of starvation. US troops pursued other resistors, and eventually 8000 Navajos were forced on the "Long walk," 300 mile south to a strange way of life at Bosque Redondo. A majority of the Navajos and Mescalero Apaches were confined there during the Civil War. • The Bosque Redondo was considered a complete failure. The Mescalero Apaches deemed the Navajos to be their "inveterate enemies," and the 2 tribes had no interest in cooperating. The arid land couldn't support thousands of families, even if they did turn to farming. The Comanches saw the confined reservation as an opportunity to attack old enemies. After the Civil War, a congressional peace commission visited Bosque Redondo and realized that the government had created a disaster. A new Mescalero Apaches reservation in central New Mexico was established by executive order in 1873 and expanded in 1883. On June 1st, 1868, the government, signed a new treaty with the Navajos that allowed them to return to a reservation in their own homelands. Navajo leaders negotiated several expansions of their reservation between 1868 and 1886 so it covered a large part of New Mexico and Arizona up to the 4 corners area with Colorado and Utah. They also managed to avoid the division of the reservation into individual allotments that destroyed tribal ways for other tribes. The Navajo Nation kept their promise to stop raiding and re-created much of their old ways, living on lands they considered sacred and making a living by herding sheep, goats, and horses. The tribe grew from 10000 in 1864 to 30000 in 1900, a rather unusual experience for American Indians. • The Nez Perce seemed to be a deeply divided tribe that lived a long time in Oregon and Idaho. They lived in relative peace, but as white settlement grew in the Snake River's fertile Wallowa Valley, pressure came to force them and their leader, Chief Joseph, onto the Idaho reservation. They resisted, but by 1877, the Nez Perce believed they could no longer live unmolested in the Wallowa Valley. They began a long retreat to preserve their independence, a retreat that turned into a well-chronicled but tragic journey. Initially, the Nez Perce moved east across the Bitterroot Mountains into Montana, hoping to cross into Canada. All along the way, the US Army pursued them. Finally, when they were less than 40 miles from Canada, the army caught up. A few escaped across the border, but the majority, led by Chief Joseph, surrendered. Most of those who made the long journey with Chief Joseph ended up on a reservation in Indian Territory, although some, including Chief Joseph, were allowed to return to the Pacific Northwest but never to their ancestral lands. • The Sioux were a tribe that were deemed to be the largest group in the northern Great Plains. They fought fierce battles with the US Army. Teton and Santee Sioux had been embroiled with US settlers throughout the 1860s, but the largest battles of the 1870s were with the powerful Lakota Sioux. • In December 1866, the Lakota attacked and killed US troops. Rather than risk further fighting, the government sought peace with the Lakota as well as their Cheyenne and Arapaho allies. In the 1868 Treaty of Fort Laramie, the Lakota Sioux, led by Red Cloud, promised to avoid war, and the army agreed to abandon 3 provocatively placed forts. (An earlier Fort Laramie Treaty of 1851 was negotiated simply to keep peace between the tribes and give the US Army and settlers rights-of-way across the plains to California and Oregon). Although the 1868 Fort Laramie Treaty could be seen as a victory for the Sioux, one faction, led by Sitting Bull, derided the treaty, reservation life, and the government annuities that were promised. Indeed, the treaty that Sitting Bull criticized did not protect the Lakota or the other tribes involved. • Less than a decade after the treaty was signed, when gold was discovered in the Black Hills and miners and settlers descended on the region, the government ordered the Lakota to leave winter camps and settle near the federal government's Indian agency headquarters. The Lakota resisted. The Great Sioux War of 1876-1877 had begun. • General George Armstrong Custer led a battalion of troops in an attack on the Sioux who were refusing to move. At the Little Bighorn River on June 25th, 1876, Custer and his troops were surrounded by a much larger force of Sioux and Cheyennes. None of the army troops survived. It was perhaps the most famous Indian victory, but that success was soon followed by defeat. • Less than a month after the Little Bighorn battle, General Philip Sheridan led a huge force that attacked and defeated the Sioux. The government then broke up the Great Sioux Reserve in the Black Hills of Dakota Territory, creating six much smaller reservations: Standing Rock, Cheyenne River, Lower Brule, Crow Creek, Pine Ridge, and Rosebud, while giving some of the best land, now declared "surplus," to white settlers and miners. • The defeats of 1876-1877, along with the destruction of the great Buffalo herds, led to an era of depression, disease, and poverty for the Sioux. A little more than a decade later, in 1890, a religious awakening that could be seen among other tribes appeared among the Sioux. A spiritual leader, Wovoka, initiated the Ghost Dance movement, promising a return of the buffalo and the disappearance of white people if only the Sioux would take up the dance and return to their ancient ways, freeing themselves of dependence on white culture. The rise of the Ghost Dance frightened the white community, and the army was sent to Pine Ridge Reservation to investigate. • A band of Sioux under the leadership of Big Foot left the reservation while the Ghost Dance continued, and US troops went after them. When Big Foot and his band were caught, they returned to Pine Ridge without a fight. The next day, however, Big Foot and his followers were asked to surrender themselves as prisoners. It's reported that Ghost leaders convinced them to make a stand. It turned out to be a fatal move. Gunfire erupted on the reservation and between 100 and 200 (some estimate as high as 300) Indians were killed. This would later be known as the Wounded Knee Massacre. Armed resistance in the West ended at Wounded Knee. The Sioux faced a bleak future after 1890, and it was decades before they made some of the same adjustments as the Navajos and Comanches. • After the Civil War, the pressure for space for white settlement subsequent to the nation's rapid expansion greatly intensified and US Army units were now available for service in the West. Among these units were segregated African American units that came to be known as Buffalo Soldiers because their white commanders thought their hair was like that of the Buffalo. Even though most military units were demobilized after the war, there were more than sufficient numbers of soldiers—white and black—to provide a formidable fighting force in the West. • Congress passed the Homestead Act in 1862 in order to provide 160 acres of land free to anyone who would live on the plot and farm it for five years. It would be passed to help encourage white settlement on federal land. • Settlers may have wanted to go west because urbanization in the East and Midwest created disease and made land costly. There were also rumors of gold out west. Former slaves might also want to go west to avoid Jim Crow Laws. • When Grant became president in 1869, he initiated a new Indian policy that became known as Grant's Peace Policy. This was his effort to end the Plains Indian Wars by creating a series of reservations on which tribes could maintain their traditional ways. Grant's thinking was shaped by the bloodshed he had witnessed in the Civil War and by his identification with the emancipation of slaves. • The Dawes Act was an 1887 law terminating tribal ownership of most reservation land and allocating some parcels to individual Indians while the remainder was opened for white settlement. It was named after Senator Henry L. Dawes. • The Dawes Act can be deemed to have a lot of negative provisions. Indian culture was tribal and communal, and hunting was a major activity, but the Dawes Act pushed Indians to be farmers and to join an individualistic culture that many found to be quite alien. Beyond that, the most immediate impact of the act was that, after each family on a reservation was allotted 160 acres, all "surplus" land could then be sold by the government to whites families. Later, after the 25 year waiting period, Indian families sold their land, giving them a profit but alienating them from their tribe. A few tribes, the Navajos and the Senecas, were able to avoid implementation of the Dawes Act and retain communal ownership of their reservations. But for many, the act was an economic and cultural disaster. • Carlisle Indian School was a boarding school for Native American children opened in Carlisle, Pennsylvania to teach western customs and separate Indian children from tribal culture. • Indian students are deemed to have resisted the goal of the boarding schools, though such resistance was harshly punished. Francis La Flesche, an Omaha who attended a Presbyterian mission school in the 1860s, reported that he and his friends spoke English during the day, but at night when the missionaries were gone, they continued to tell each other the Omaha stories and speak the Omaha language. The Impact of the Transcontinental Railroad • The transcontinental railroad was the first railroad to span the whole US, allowing travel from the East to the West. With it, the Union Pacific rail line from California connected to the Central Pacific line out of Chicago and points East. The dream of a transcontinental railroad gained widespread support probably during the 1850s. • When the Pacific Railway Act passed in 1862, it allowed for 128 million acres to be given to major railroad companies to build transcontinental railroads. • The California-based Central Pacific started building East from San Francisco and Sacramento, while the Union Pacific started building west across the Great Plains from terminals in Kansas, Nebraska, and Missouri, all of which were already connected to the East Coast by existing rail lines. • The federal government provided a four-hundred-foot right of way, federal loans, and major land grants to the 2 railroads. The right of way was a grant of the federal lands along the whole length of the railroads and constituted a government subsidy without which the transcontinental railroad could not have been built. • Construction moved very slowly during the Civil War—workers and supplies were needed everywhere—but the coming of peace in 1865 brought a rush to complete the work. • The hard physical labor of actually laying track was done mostly by Irish workers on the Union Pacific and by Chinese laborers on the California-based Central Pacific. Those starting in the East were sometimes able to lay track at the rate of 4 rails per minute, covering 500 miles and reaching Cheyenne, Wyoming, by November 1867. Those starting in California had a far more difficult task of crossing the Sierra Nevada Mountains. They had to build snow sheds and blast through solid rock to make their way. Finally, in the spring of 1869, the lines connected, and the nation was knit together as never before. • By the early 1890s, 4 major lines reached across the country, connecting to a large network of midwestern and eastern rail lines. The major cities within California, Oregon, and Washington were connected by their own lines. All of the country's large cities, and most of the medium-sized ones, were connected by rail. A city without a rail link was doomed to wither since the railroads made it possible for farmers to get their products to market much faster and cheaper than ever before while also making non farm goods available to isolated rural people, if they lived near a rail line. • The new markets that were open as a result of railroads changed the US as much as the movement of people, especially settlers, was facilitated by the rail lines. In a few decades after the Civil War, vast tracts of western lands that had been home to Indian tribes and buffalo became home to white settlers from the east coast and Europe who produced wheat and corn, mined silver and gold, and managed livestock and who shipped all of those products to world markets via the railroads—sometimes creating new prosperity and sometimes shipping so much that prices collapsed and markets fell. All of this development happened at great cost, of course, to the Indians whose land had been, but often also to settlers who lived isolated and marginalized and who increasingly blamed the large railroad corporations for their plight. • Technological changes helped extend the railroads. George Westinghouse's invention of an air brake system in 1873 made trains safer and the rides smoother as it became possible to stop all of the cars of a train at once rather than needing to coordinate the work of a brakeman on each car. • Transportation was improved significantly because of railroads. By the 1870s, a person could travel across the US in 10 days and, if one could afford it, do so in the comfort of a Pullman sleeping car. • Time zones were created as a result of the construction of railroads. • What had once been isolated regional economies quickly became part of a national commercial network because of railroads. The cost of moving food and other goods dropped dramatically at docks where ocean-going steamships carried food, lumber, and other materials from the west coast, the US was connected to a Pacific market of international trade and commerce that would create work for many—from lumberjacks in Oregon and Washington to miners in Idaho or the Dakotas to wheat farmers across the Midwest—creating wealth for a few and linking the nation's economy to the rise and fall of world markets. The Transformation of the West • The defeat of Indian tribes and the Homestead Act, along with extraordinary changes in time, speed, and transportation brought on by the railroads, transformed the American West. Land that had been part of Mexico in the 1840s and that people from the east coast only wanted to get across in the 1850s became the site of vast new ranches, settled farms, and rapidly expanding towns. By the 1880s and 1890s, a new region was becoming part of the nation's cultural, economic, and political networks. • Not all settlers in the American West got along with each other. Cattle ranchers depended on vast wide-open spaces to feed and move their herds. Farmers seeking to establish 160-acre homesteads depended on barbed wire to fence off their land, and keep cattle in or out. Older residents of what had been the northern parts of Mexico had relied on sometimes vague property lines and depended on communal grazing lands, while the newly arriving Americans wanted precise lines and built fences across the land that had once been held in common. Settlers seeking to establish farms or build towns depended on law and order, while others—outlaws and gunfighters—may have thought that the best way to make 1's fortune was to take it from others. As these groups battled for control, they soon came to create political organization if not always social order. • Cowboys were typically young and poor men of various backgrounds who'd spent many months following herds of cattle. They would have to watch the cattle 12-15 hours daily. Most of a cowboy's life was hard, lonely work. • "Cow towns" develop in areas where cowboys sell steers (Wichita, Abilene, Dodge City, Cheyenne, etc.). Cowtowns started to decline in the 1880s with the rise of ranching and the invention of barbed wire. • The Longbranch Saloon and the Dodge House Hotel, both in Dodge City, Kansas, hosted many cowboys who were looking for a celebration. Prostitution prospered in these areas. Prostitution was often the only way to survive and, sometimes, a route to independence. • As the demands for beef increased and cowboys brought more cattle into the railroad towns, developments in rail transport made the cattle industry more profitable. • In 1882, Gustavus Swift created a new fleet of refrigerated railroad cars. Beef spoiled or took on an odd and unappetizing look in earlier refrigerator cars when it was packed in ice. Swift kept the ice separate and above the beef so the beef stayed cold without touching ice. • Chicago's Union Stock Yards was where cattle and other livestock animals were taken to be killed and shipped off as meat. • Mexicano was a name given to people of Mexican descent in New Mexico. They preferred to be called this for a certain amount of time. • The White Caps were a secret organization that would cut fences in order to open up the range again. • Police power rested with the Texas Rangers, who were seen by the Latino community as simply the force of the Anglo community. The Texas Rangers saw their opponents as outlaws. • Those who challenged the Rangers may have been deemed by the Mexican American Community as heroes. • Those who began creating new lives, new homesteads, and businesses in the West came from widely varying backgrounds. They included people of different faiths, Americans from eastern regions of the US, immigrants from Europe and Mexico, former slaves, and Indians, among others. • Joseph Fish, a Mormon, lived upstream from Salt Lake City in the village of Parowan, Utah, where he worked as a miller and a tanner as well as farmed, exchanged work with neighbors, pulled sagebrush, built fences, and harvested wheat and oats to make his living. • Boom Towns are places where miners can go and excavate for resources. • Wyatt Earp was a lawman and gunfighter who was hired by the local elite to protect a town called Tombstone, Arizona. He and his brothers fought against an outlaw group of ex-confederate cattle rustlers led by the Clanton Brothers and McLaury families. • Billy the Kid was an outlaw who was reported to have killed 10 people in his short and violent life. He was 21 when he died. His legend grew far beyond his life as the whole publishing industry came to thrive on the retelling and expansion of his exploits. • Stories of gunfighters like Billy the Kid and Wyatt Earp became legends of the American West, but the person who did the most to create the legend of the Wild West was a former army scout named William Cody who created a highly successful show called Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show in the 1880s. Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show was everything eastern crowds wanted it to be. It included scenes from Indian battles, Indian dancing, stagecoach robberies, and always the shooting prowess of Annie Oakley, who epitomized the "good" frontier women of wholesome character who could outshoot any man. In the 1880s, Sitting Bull himself traveled with the show, giving it an "authentic" aura for many who were anxious to see the leader who had defeated Custer in 1876. • The Wild West Show was deemed a long way from any true representation of the West. Although the Indians performed amazing feats of horseback riding, they nearly always ended up fulfilling stereotypical images in the minds of their white audiences. Similarly, while the true cowboys were an ethnically diverse lot—White, Mexican, Indian, and African American—all of Cody's cowboys were white. Annie Oakley, who was an amazing shot with a rifle, lived in Ohio and never traveled farther west except on tour with the show. Indians almost never had battles with the cowboys that Cody portrayed; Indians fought with the army, and cowboys tried avoiding those battles. However, Indians facing desperate poverty on the reservations found work in the shows, which brought needed income, and they were allowed to dance the traditional dances in the shows that were banned by federal authorities on the reservations. • Cody's shows were performed all across the US and in Europe, twice before Queen Victoria, and one of his riders performed in Outer Mongolia. When the show declined in popularity, Cody reinvented himself once again as an advisor to the new Hollywood studios—as did Wyatt Earp— on "realistic" ways to portray the old West in the new medium that was sweeping the nation. In the process, an image of the Wild West was formed that still persists to this day. (AP US Notes)

What are the parallels between JFK and Lincoln?

• The parallels between JFK and Abraham Lincoln are astounding: Lincoln was first elected in 1860, Kennedy in 1960. Both were assassinated on a Friday, in the presence of their wives. Their Vice Presidents were both southerners who had the last name Johnson and served in the Senate. Andrew Johnson was born in 1808, Lyndon B. Johnson was born 1908. Lincoln was elected to Congress in 1846, while Kennedy was elected to the House in 1946. Both men suffered the death of children while in office. The assassin Booth shot inside a theater and fled into a storage facility, while the assassin Oswald shot from a storage facility and fled into a theater.

Who was Abraham Lincoln?

[President of The United States at the time, began his political career at 25 years of age.] Abraham Lincoln BY HISTORY.COM EDITORS Abraham Lincoln, a self-taught lawyer, legislator and vocal opponent of slavery, was elected 16th president of the United States in November 1860, shortly before the outbreak of the Civil War. Lincoln proved to be a shrewd military strategist and a savvy leader: His Emancipation Proclamation paved the way for slavery's abolition, while his Gettysburg Address stands as one of the most famous pieces of oratory in American history. In April 1865, with the Union on the brink of victory, Abraham Lincoln was assassinated by Confederate sympathizer John Wilkes Booth. Lincoln's assassination made him a martyr to the cause of liberty, and he is widely regarded as one of the greatest presidents in U.S. history. Abraham Lincoln's Childhood and Early Life Lincoln was born on February 12, 1809, to Nancy and Thomas Lincoln in a one-room log cabin in Hardin County, Kentucky. His family moved to southern Indiana in 1816. Lincoln's formal schooling was limited to three brief periods in local schools, as he had to work constantly to support his family. In 1830, his family moved to Macon County in southern Illinois, and Lincoln got a job working on a river flatboat hauling freight down the Mississippi River to New Orleans. After settling in the town of New Salem, Illinois, where he worked as a shopkeeper and a postmaster, Lincoln became involved in local politics as a supporter of the Whig Party, winning election to the Illinois state legislature in 1834. Like his Whig heroes Henry Clay and Daniel Webster, Lincoln opposed the spread of slavery to the territories, and had a grand vision of the expanding United States, with a focus on commerce and cities rather than agriculture. Did you know? The war years were difficult for Abraham Lincoln and his family. After his young son Willie died of typhoid fever in 1862, the emotionally fragile Mary Lincoln, widely unpopular for her frivolity and spendthrift ways, held seances in the White House in the hopes of communicating with him, earning her even more derision. Lincoln taught himself law, passing the bar examination in 1836. The following year, he moved to the newly named state capital of Springfield. For the next few years, he worked there as a lawyer and served clients ranging from individual residents of small towns to national railroad lines. He met Mary Todd, a well-to-do Kentucky belle with many suitors (including Lincoln's future political rival, Stephen Douglas), and they married in 1842. The Lincolns went on to have four children together, though only one would live into adulthood: Robert Todd Lincoln (1843-1926), Edward Baker Lincoln (1846-1850), William Wallace Lincoln (1850-1862) and Thomas "Tad" Lincoln (1853-1871). Abraham Lincoln Enters Politics Lincoln won election to the U.S. House of Representatives in 1846 and began serving his term the following year. As a congressman, Lincoln was unpopular with many Illinois voters for his strong stance against the Mexican-American War. Promising not to seek reelection, he returned to Springfield in 1849. Events conspired to push him back into national politics, however: Douglas, a leading Democrat in Congress, had pushed through the passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Act (1854), which declared that the voters of each territory, rather than the federal government, had the right to decide whether the territory should be slave or free. On October 16, 1854, Lincoln went before a large crowd in Peoria to debate the merits of the Kansas-Nebraska Act with Douglas, denouncing slavery and its extension and calling the institution a violation of the most basic tenets of the Declaration of Independence. With the Whig Party in ruins, Lincoln joined the new Republican Party-formed largely in opposition to slavery's extension into the territories-in 1856 and ran for the Senate again that year (he had campaigned unsuccessfully for the seat in 1855 as well). In June, Lincoln delivered his now-famous "house divided" speech, in which he quoted from the Gospels to illustrate his belief that "this government cannot endure, permanently, half slave and half free." Lincoln then squared off against Douglas in a series of famous debates; though he lost the Senate election, Lincoln's performance made his reputation nationally. Abraham Lincoln's 1860 Presidential Campaign Lincoln's profile rose even higher in early 1860 after he delivered another rousing speech at New York City's Cooper Union. That May, Republicans chose Lincoln as their candidate for president, passing over Senator William H. Seward of New York and other powerful contenders in favor of the rangy Illinois lawyer with only one undistinguished congressional term under his belt. In the general election, Lincoln again faced Douglas, who represented the northern Democrats; southern Democrats had nominated John C. Breckenridge of Kentucky, while John Bell ran for the brand new Constitutional Union Party. With Breckenridge and Bell splitting the vote in the South, Lincoln won most of the North and carried the Electoral College to win the White House. He built an exceptionally strong cabinet composed of many of his political rivals, including Seward, Salmon P. Chase, Edward Bates and Edwin M. Stanton. Abraham Lincoln and the Civil War After years of sectional tensions, the election of an antislavery northerner as the 16th president of the United States drove many southerners over the brink. By the time Lincoln was inaugurated as 16th U.S. president in March 1861, seven southern states had seceded from the Union and formed the Confederate States of America. Lincoln ordered a fleet of Union ships to supply the federal Fort Sumter in South Carolina in April. The Confederates fired on both the fort and the Union fleet, beginning the Civil War. Hopes for a quick Union victory were dashed by defeat in the Battle of Bull Run (Manassas), and Lincoln called for 500,000 more troops as both sides prepared for a long conflict. While the Confederate leader Jefferson Davis was a West Point graduate, Mexican War hero and former secretary of war, Lincoln had only a brief and undistinguished period of service in the Black Hawk War (1832) to his credit. He surprised many when he proved to be a capable wartime leader, learning quickly about strategy and tactics in the early years of the Civil War, and about choosing the ablest commanders. General George McClellan, though beloved by his troops, continually frustrated Lincoln with his reluctance to advance, and when McClellan failed to pursue Robert E. Lee's retreating Confederate Army in the aftermath of the Union victory at Antietam in September 1862, Lincoln removed him from command. During the war, Lincoln drew criticism for suspending some civil liberties, including the right of habeas corpus, but he considered such measures necessary to win the war. Emancipation Proclamation and Gettysburg Address Shortly after the Battle of Antietam (Sharpsburg), Lincoln issued a preliminary Emancipation Proclamation, which took effect on January 1, 1863, and freed all of the enslaved people in the rebellious states not under federal control, but left those in the border states (loyal to the Union) in bondage. Though Lincoln once maintained that his "paramount object in this struggle is to save the Union, and is not either to save or destroy slavery," he nonetheless came to regard emancipation as one of his greatest achievements and would argue for the passage of a constitutional amendment outlawing slavery (eventually passed as the 13th Amendment after his death in 1865). Two important Union victories in July 1863-at Vicksburg, Mississippi, and at the Battle of Gettysburg in Pennsylvania-finally turned the tide of the war. General George Meade missed the opportunity to deliver a final blow against Lee's army at Gettysburg, and Lincoln would turn by early 1864 to the victor at Vicksburg, Ulysses S. Grant, as supreme commander of the Union forces. In November 1863, Lincoln delivered a brief speech (just 272 words) at the dedication ceremony for the new national cemetery at Gettysburg. Published widely, the Gettysburg Address eloquently expressed the war's purpose, harking back to the Founding Fathers, the Declaration of Independence and the pursuit of human equality. It became the most famous speech of Lincoln's presidency, and one of the most widely quoted speeches in history. Abraham Lincoln Wins 1864 Presidential Election In 1864, Lincoln faced a tough reelection battle against the Democratic nominee, the former Union General George McClellan, but Union victories in battle (especially General William T. Sherman's capture of Atlanta in September) swung many votes the president's way. In his second inaugural address, delivered on March 4, 1865, Lincoln addressed the need to reconstruct the South and rebuild the Union: "With malice toward none; with charity for all." As Sherman marched triumphantly northward through the Carolinas after staging his March to the Sea from Atlanta, Lee surrendered to Grant at Appomattox Court House, Virginia, on April 9. Union victory was near, and Lincoln gave a speech on the White House lawn on April 11, urging his audience to welcome the southern states back into the fold. Tragically, Lincoln would not live to help carry out his vision of Reconstruction. Abraham Lincoln's Assassination On the night of April 14, 1865, the actor and Confederate sympathizer John Wilkes Booth slipped into the president's box at Ford's Theatre in Washington, D.C., and shot him point-blank in the back of the head. Lincoln was carried to a boardinghouse across the street from the theater, but he never regained consciousness, and died in the early morning hours of April 15, 1865. Lincoln's assassination made him a national martyr. On April 21, 1865, a train carrying his coffin left Washington, D.C. on its way to Springfield, Illinois, where he would be buried on May 4. Abraham Lincoln's funeral train traveled through 180 cities and seven states so mourners could pay homage to the fallen president. Today, Lincoln's birthday—alongside the birthday of George Washington—is honored on President's Day, which falls on the third Monday of February. Abraham Lincoln Quotes "Nothing valuable can be lost by taking time." "I want it said of me by those who knew me best, that I always plucked a thistle and planted a flower where I thought a flower would grow." "I am rather inclined to silence, and whether that be wise or not, it is at least more unusual nowadays to find a man who can hold his tongue than to find one who cannot." "I am exceedingly anxious that this Union, the Constitution, and the liberties of the people shall be perpetuated in accordance with the original idea for which that struggle was made, and I shall be most happy indeed if I shall be a humble instrument in the hands of the Almighty, and of this, his almost chosen people, for perpetuating the object of that great struggle." "This is essentially a People's contest. On the side of the Union, it is a struggle for maintaining in the world, that form, and substance of government, whose leading object is, to elevate the condition of men -- to lift artificial weights from all shoulders -- to clear the paths of laudable pursuit for all -- to afford all, an unfettered start, and a fair chance, in the race of life." "Fourscore and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal." "This nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom — and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth." (History Channel)

Who was Johnnie Cochran?

Johnnie L. Cochran, Jr. American lawyer Actions By The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica Last Updated: Sep 28, 2022 Edit History Table of Contents Johnnie L. Cochran, Jr., (born Oct. 2, 1937, Shreveport, La., U.S.—died March 29, 2005, Los Angeles, Calif.), American trial lawyer who gained international prominence with his skillful and controversial defense of O.J. Simpson, a football player and celebrity who was charged with a double murder in 1994. In 1949 Cochran's family moved from Louisiana to California, where he later became one of only two dozen African American students at Los Angeles High School. He graduated from the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA) in 1959 and later earned a law degree from Loyola Law School (1962). After working for two years as a prosecutor for the city of Los Angeles, Cochran pursued a private career. His clients included celebrities such as Michael Jackson and Tupac Shakur as well as minority victims of police brutality. Cochran first gained national recognition in 1994 when he joined the legal team defending Simpson, who was accused of killing his ex-wife, Nicole Brown Simpson, and her friend Ronald Goldman. In the high-profile trial, Cochran demonstrated his skill at connecting with jurors and putting the prosecution and police on the defensive. His trial strategies included a demonstration of the sloppy practices and outright incompetence of the Los Angeles Police Department. Ultimately, the legal team won an acquittal for Simpson (in 1995) by suggesting that the police department was racist and that the former football star had been framed. At the beginning of the 21st century, Cochran oversaw 10 law firms throughout the country. He took on the role of chairman of the Upper Manhattan Empowerment Zone, a publicly funded agency that sought economic development for the neighbourhoods of Harlem, Washington Heights, and Inwood. Known for his philanthropy, Cochran established the Johnnie L. Cochran, Sr., scholarship for African American men at UCLA. His memoir, Journey to Justice, was published in 1996. (Encyclopedia Britannica)

social anxiety

the fear people experience while doubting that they'll be able to create a desired impression

memento mori

Latin language a reminder of human mortality sometimes signified by a skull

What really is asexuality?

What Is Asexual? Written by WebMD Editorial Contributors Medically Reviewed by Dan Brennan, MD on June 27, 2021 Asexual is the lack of sexual attraction to others, or a low interest in sexual activity. Some people consider asexuality to be their sexual orientation, and others describe it as an absence of sexual orientation. Asexual can also be an umbrella term that includes a wide spectrum of asexual sub-identities, such as demisexual, grey-A, queerplatonic, and many others. Asexual people may identify as cisgender, non-binary, transgender, or any other gender. It is common for asexual people to have romantic (but not sexual) attractions to others. They may identify as hetero-, homo-, bi-, or pan-romantic. Others are aromantic — that is, they feel no romantic attraction to other people. Other Names for Asexual Some asexual people prefer the term "ace." yths and Misconceptions about Asexuality Asexuality does not mean celibacy. People who practice celibacy abstain from sex, but not necessarily because they are not sexually attracted to others. Some choose to remain celibate for religious or personal beliefs. Asexuality, on the other hand, is an orientation and is not a choice. Some asexual people actually do have sex. There are many reasons why they might decide to, but two common ones are to please their romantic partner or to have children. Many asexual people have romantic feelings for other people, go on dates, and have long and short-term romantic relationships. They don't generally have an aversion to sex or depictions of sex — they simply don't feel sexual attraction. A person does not become asexual because they have been rejected sexually. This is a harmful, persistent myth. Some people realize they are asexual after one or more sexual experiences. Others know it from an early age. Asexuality is not a mental disorder, and people don't become asexual because they have been sexually abused. Like anyone else, an asexual orientation is not exclusively determined by a person's history. Although these factors can shape part of a person's identity, sexuality is not a choice. How Asexuality Works in Relationships Asexual people can have romantic relationships with others. A person's asexuality may affect the relationship, or it may not be a factor at all. It's important for people to discuss their boundaries when it comes to asexuality. If you're in a relationship with an asexual person, respect their preferences around sex. Some asexual people may be comfortable with some amount of physical or even sexual contact, while others are not. Communication is key. Helping Your Loved Ones Understand Asexuality While you don't have to come out to your loved ones (or anyone else) as asexual, some asexual people find it to be helpful or cathartic. You can explain your asexuality in a detailed way that describes your unique orientation or stick to the general idea of non-sexual attraction. It's always up to you to decide who to come out to, but it's never ok to out someone else, including a romantic partner. If your partner prefers to keep this part of their life private, honor their decision. In many cases, asexuality is unlikely to come up in conversation, but it might be helpful to decide how you would respond if a loved one asked you about your orientation. (WebMD)

What should I know about rebellions in North America?

Rebellions Break Out • King Philip's War begins in Massachusetts in 1675. King Philip's war was a violent conflict that broke out between Wampanoags, Narragansetts, and other Indian peoples against English settlers. • John Sassamon was a Christian Indian who told Governor Winslow about how Metacom was getting ready to attack English settlers. • The Pequot War started in New England in 1637. It was a conflict between English settlers and Pequout Indians over control of land and trade in eastern Connecticut. Four hundred Pequots were killed and their village was destroyed. • Bacon's Rebellion began in Virginia in 1676. An immigrant named Nathaniel Bacon leads a militia to make war against Indian villages and the governor. • The Pueblo Revolt began in New Mexico in 1680. This revolt erupted as a result of the native tribes being treated poorly by Spanish Catholics and having to endure hard labor. • Don Diego de Vargas was appointed as the new governor of New Mexico in 1690. He allowed for Pueblos to retain Christianity and their own tribal religion. (AP US notes)

What should I know about conflicts in the new south?

Conflict in the New South • The term "New South" referred to an ideology developed by some elite Southerners that declared an end to the nostalgia for slavery and plantation life and a beginning for the economic development of the South while protecting the growing racial segregation of the region from any Northern interference. • The Pre-Civil War South had been dominated by agriculture. In the New South, sawmills, factories, mines, and railroads were being built, and old wooden buildings were being replaced with new brick ones in many towns. Optimism seemed to be growing, though not everyone was celebrating. The decline in the price of cotton was devastating farmers, and for most African Americans, segregation and exclusion made life almost unbearable. Nevertheless, for a fortunate subset of white Southerners, the years between 1875 and 1900 were a time for optimism. • Before the Civil War, the South had fewer miles of railroad track than the North. Catching up on railroad construction was a key element in defining the New South. The new railroads brought all sorts of investment change. The investment in building railroads—much of it Northern or European money—brought work to many Southerners, not only those who did the actual work of laying track but also those supporting them. As one Mississippi resident noted, "The women and children were busy producing vegetable crops, chickens, eggs, milk and butter, and the men were butchering and delivering fresh meat and other supplies to the men working on the railroad." Once the new lines were in place, there were also jobs working on the railroads. The work was dangerous and injuries were common, but the pay was better than anything many Southerners had seen. • The rapid changes in the South made some uneasy. The movement of Southerners—white and black—in search of jobs and economic opportunities created a sense of dislocation. • A Texas veteran wrote to the legislature, asking them to be sure that "the sons of Confederates and the public generally" remember the "Lost Cause." Another ex-confederate, Wade Hampton, insisted, "I believe now, as always, that the South was right." For veterans like Hampton and others and for Southern widows of those who had died in the war, the memory of the "Lost Cause" as a glorious time and a righteous fight made the pain of a sometimes lonely and often economically challenging present more bearable. • Southern writers produced romantic stories of the "Lost Cause" of the Civil War and the days of slavery that preceded it. Thomas Nelson Page, of a prominent Virginia family, created the "plantation school" of writing, recounting tales of a chivalrous past. Page also started the tradition of the wise and loyal slave, who, Page told his white readers, longed for the days before the war when everyone had a secure place in a well-ordered society. The most famous author of the plantation school, Joel Chandler Harris, created the fictional elderly black man Uncle Remus, and his animal alter-ego Brer Rabbit. The Uncle Remus stories, first published in the Atlanta Constitution in 1879 and then as a popular book, portrayed the Old South as a romantic and happy place. • Across the South, trains were rigidly segregated a decade before the 1896 US Supreme Court's 7-to-1 decision in the Plessy v. Ferguson case declared that "separate but equal" transportation—and, by implication, other matters—did not violate the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment to the US Constitution. • "Grandfather clauses" were clauses instituted by states that declared anyone whose grandfather had been a voter was exempt from other restrictions, a privilege no descendants of slaves could claim. • The ultimate horror of lynching became widespread. Individual African Americans, typically young men, were singled out, often accused with little or no evidence of raping a white woman, and hung in a public spectacle. The issue was rarely an actual rape but, more often, a young black man's failure to observe the customs of stepping out of the way for a white person to pass, a black man's challenging the payment of a landowner at the sharecroppers settle, or a black man asserting his political rights. Lynching was a way to strike terror into the black community while asserting and celebrating white dominance. • In 1900, the New South was quickly becoming a region governed exclusively by white voters and white elected officials and would remain so until the black civil rights movement of the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s transformed the region and the nation. • Ida B. Wells-Barnett (1862-1931) was an African American national spokesperson who challenged lynching. Between 1889 and 1918, 386 lynchings took place in Georgia, 373 in Mississippi, and similar numbers in several other states. Wells-Barnett argued that the rape charge, which was often used as an excuse for lynching a black man, was a "thread-bare lie" and a cover for punishing any black who challenged the rules of segregation. In response to her writing, a white mob destroyed her printing press at her Memphis Free Press, but throughout her life, she continued to write, publish, and organize legal challenges to segregation and especially the violence of lynchings. • In the face of the harsh reality of segregation and exclusion, Booker T. Washington (1856-1915), perhaps the nation's best-known African American leader, argued that it was time to adjust to segregation rather than challenge the laws and customs excluding blacks. In 1895, Washington urged blacks to create an economic foundation for themselves, offering what came to be known as the Atlanta Compromise—that African Americans would accept segregation in return for being able to develop economically. In the midst of the harsh realities of the 1890s, Washington's course of action seemed the only realistic option. • Not all African Americans agreed with Washington, and a young African American scholar, W.E.B. Du Bois (1868-1963), became his harshest critic. Du Bois criticized compromises and wrote that "the problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color line." He described the kind of "double consciousness" or "twoness" that African Americans were forced to develop in a country that proclaimed liberty but excluded them by law and custom. • In 1905, Du Bois joined other African American leaders meeting at Niagara Falls—in a hotel on the Canadian side because no hotel on the American side would give them rooms—to begin a campaign for "every single right that belongs to a free-born American, political, civil, and social" without compromise. The Niagara Movement that emerged from the conference fought for an end to segregation and for full equality for African Americans. • The Niagara Movement was an African American group organized in 1905 to promote racial integration, civil and political rights, and equal access to economic opportunity; the movement helped organize the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). • The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) was an interracial organization founded in 1910 dedicated to restoring African American political and social rights. The organization was founded by Du Bois and other reformers. The NAACP was created to fight for full enforcement of the 14th and 15th Amendments; bring public exposure and legal challenges to the mostly unpunished wave of lynchings that were happening in all parts of the country; and begin what would be a rather long, slow legal process of court challenges to the "separate but equal" laws that provided a legal foundation for black exclusion. The Politics of Conflict-From Populist Movement to Populist Party • In the 1870s and 1880s, American farmers were living very difficult lives. The work was backbreaking. They had no time for much of an education and far too little time for family or community life. The economic cycles seemed structured against them. While new forms of mechanization allowed them to increase production significantly, the increased production often resulted in lower prices for their products so that they seemed to be no better off while struggling to pay for the new machinery. The rapid increase in agricultural production, facilitated by new fertilizers and new mechanization, significantly increased farm output across the country. In just six years, from 1899 to 1905, American food production increased by almost 40 percent. For consumers, this new level of output meant far greater choice and lower prices. For farmers, it meant only a viscous cycle in which the more they produced, the less they were paid for it. In addition to dealing with that dynamic, other situations such as a glut of wheat in Russia or overproduction of cotton in Egypt or some other issue left them in a pattern of debt. Even in good times, it seemed that the railroads and middlemen in New York or New Orleans or London or Paristook the profits that they produced. Perhaps most galling to many farmers was the sense that the rapid changes happening in the rest of the country seemed to be leaving them behind. It's not accidental that the derogatory word "hayseed" entered the nation's vocabulary at the time. Urban America saw itself as up to date and modern, but the very consumers who benefited from increased farm production saw farmers, living in isolated rural areas, as backward and out of date. Moreover, the new technologies that enabled rapid communication let these farmers know just what others in the country thought of them. Jefferson's agrarian ideal seemed like part of a very dim past. • By the beginning of the 1880s, many farmers were deeply in debt to the banks on which they depended for their mortgages and for loans to obtain equipment and supplies for the planting year. Railroads that might give a break to John D. Rockefeller's Standard Oil kept raising the rates to haul farm products to market. By the time farmers paid off their loans and paid to get the wheat, corn, and other farm products to market, they had little, if any, money left. Eventually, farmers started to do something to change their circumstances. Nelson Dunning of the Farmers' Alliance wrote, "Nothing could withstand their power, if the farmers of America would organize," particularly, as he believed, in ways the Standard Oil Company had done. In the Farmers' Alliance and eventually in their own political party, farmers, who had indeed been observing what the Rockefellers and Carnegies were doing, tried to create their own power base. • The Grange, or the Patrons of Husbandry, was a national organization of farmers formed after the Civil War to promote the rights and dignity of farmers. • The Agricultural Wheel was an organization of farmers, begun in Arkansas in 1882. More militant than the Grange, it sought to advance farmers' economic status. • The Farmers' Alliance was a broad mass movement in the rural South and West during the late 1800s, encompassing several organizations and demanding economic and political reforms; it helped create the populist party. • The Colored Farmers' National Alliance and Cooperative Union was an organization of Southern black farmers formed in Texas in 1886 in response to the Southern Farmers' Alliance, which didn't accept black people as members. It also helped launch the Populist party. • The subtreasury system was a proposal for a unit of the U.S. Treasury Department (or "subtreasury") to own warehouses that would store farmers' crops until prices rose. • The People's Party, usually known as the Populist Party, was a major third party of the 1890s formed to fight for for the rights of working people. It's members were called populists. • The People's Party grew dramatically. The Colored Farmers' Alliance and smaller groups like the Farmers' Mutual Benefit also joined. The widespread assumption was that when the People's Party, now a multiracial coalition of farmers, labor, and women's groups, held their national convention in Omaha, Nebraska, in July 1892, they would nominate Leonidas Polk for president. The Omaha Convention adopted a platform that called for inflation of the money supply (to help farmers pay their debts), government regulation of railroads, and election reform. However, just a month before the convention met, Polk suddenly died. The People's Party nominated James B. Weaver of Iowa, a former Union general. Weaver won over a million votes in the 1892 presidential election that ultimately returned Cleveland to the White House. Not since the late 1850s, when the Republican Party seemed to come out of nowhere, had the nation witnessed anything like the phenomenal growth of the Populists, as the members of the People's Party quickly came to be known. Populist candidates won the governor's office in Colorado and Arkansas in the 1892 elections. Populists elected Marion Cannon to Congress from southern California as well as congressmen from Colorado, Kansas, Nebraska, and North Carolina. • As the Populists approached the 1896 presidential elections, the Republican and Democratic Parties were keeping a worried eye on them and, at the same time, borrowing parts of their message. Perhaps no one borrowed more from the Populists than the young former congressman from Nebraska, William Jennings Bryan. Bryan was a Democrat, not a Populist, but his views on many issues, most of all his advocacy for the unlimited coinage of silver, were the same as those of the Populists and anathema to leaders of the Democratic Party, including president Cleveland who wasn't seeking reelection but who wanted a successor more like himself. Nevertheless, Bryan worked tirelessly for the Democratic nomination, courting as many "silver" delegates to the party's 1896 convention in Chicago as possible. • The Populists never recovered from their loss in 1896. Those who had supported Bryan and the alliance with the Democratic Party blamed those who did not. Populists who hadn't wanted to compromise blamed those who'd "sold out" and supported a Democrat. African Americans, whose votes had been essential to Populist victories in many close contests, were deeply disillusioned at how quickly Populist leaders like Tom Watson turned into arch segregationists after 1897. Worker Protest and the Rise of Organized Labor • The Great Railroad Strike of 1877 began spontaneously in Baltimore, Maryland, and Martinsburg, West Virginia, on July 16th and 17th, 1877, after the management of several railroads announced a wage cut. At Camden Junction, 2 miles from Baltimore, a fireman simply refused to keep the train moving. Soon others joined, and before long, all traffic on the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad had come to a halt. The management then fired the strikers. In response, others joined the strike, and by July 19th, rail workers prevented all freight from leaving Pittsburgh. Now mostly forgotten, the strikes inspired some Americans, frightened others, and for decades shaped people's responses to the country's rapid growth and industrialization. • The strike was marked by widespread violence. A large crowd of strikers and their supporters in Baltimore attacked state militia troops who then fired on the crowd, killing 11 people. In Pittsburgh, a huge crowd hurled insults and rocks at a militia unit who then started shooting, killing 20. The crowd vented its fury on the Pennsylvania Railroad, burning everything in sight. By July 22, some 39 Pennsylvania Railroad buildings, 104 engines, and more than 1200 freight cars had been destroyed. As news of the violence spread, strikes took place all along the major rail lines from New York and New Jersey to Indiana and Illinois. Black and white workers went out on strike together. In St. Louis, Missouri, a weeklong general strike led workers to take control of the city. Workers went on strike as far away as Kansas City and San Francisco. • The Knights of Labor was the name of a labor union that included skilled and unskilled workers irrespective of race or gender; founded in 1869. Terence V. Powderly was the head, or Grand Master Workman, of the Knights of Labor in the 1870s and 1880s. The Knights of Labor quickly emerged to become the country's largest and most powerful labor union subsequent to the 1877 strike. • The American Federation of Labor was a labor organization formed in 1886 as a federation of smaller elite craft unions. Samuel Gompers of the Cigar Makers Union was elected as its president and, except for 1 year, served as president of the A.F. of L. until his death in 1924, by which time the union had grown to 3 million members, by far the strongest labor union in the US. • Haymarket was the name given to the strike, rally, and bombing that took place around Haymarket Square in Chicago in May 1886 as well as to the subsequent executions of four leaders of the incident. The Haymarket may be deemed to have brought to light the harsh working conditions that laborers had to endure in their jobs and the violence that erupted as a result of protesting. • The 1892 Homestead Strike took place at Andrew Carnegie's plant at Homestead, Pennsylvania. When workers at Carnegie's Homestead steel mill went on strike, Carnegie left his top lieutenant, Henry Clay Frick, in charge while he remained in Scotland. Frick sent Pinkerton agents to break up the strike, and a violent conflict emerged between the agents and workers. There were casualties on both sides. • The Panic of 1893 occurs. • Coxey's Army was a protest march of unemployed workers, led by businessman Jacob Coxey, demanding a public works highway program and guaranteed jobs during the depression of the 1890s. • George Pullman produced railway cars. • The socialist party was a new political party that was organized after the defeat of the railroad strikes in the 1890s. It nominated candidates for president in 1904 and many following elections, and although they lost, it won some lesser offices. • United Mines Workers of America was a new union organized in 1890 to bring together mine workers in the eastern half of the US in 1 organization that eventually became a national union. • Industrial workers of the world (Wobblies) were organized in 1905 to bring together the nation's workers in "one big union" to fight for a radically different economic system that favored workers over owners. • The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire was a fire that killed 146 workers and that later led to new factory inspection and safety laws. • The Bread and Roses Strike was a spontaneous strike of workers in the mills of Lawrence, Massachusetts, in 1912. • The Ludlow Massacre occurred at a coal strike in Ludlow, Colorado, in 1914 in which at least 39 people, including 11 children were killed. (AP US Notes)

Social Anxiety Disorder (Social Phobia) 3

an intense fear of being humiliated or embarrassed in social situations

Why might I have trust issues?

Why You May Have Trust Issues and How to Overcome Them By Kendra Cherry Published on January 18, 2022 Medically reviewed by Daniel B. Block, MD Trust is a critical part of any relationship.1 Without trust—especially trust between two romantic partners—it is difficult to have a healthy, long-lasting relationship. People who have experienced some type of betrayal, such as unfaithfulness in a relationship, may develop trust issues that can interfere with future relationships. Trust issues can manifest in a variety of ways. For example, a person who finds it difficult to trust may not believe what other people say. They may feel suspicious of what others want from them and may question other people's intentions and motivations. It makes it incredibly difficult to develop an intimate, close connection with another person. This article discusses trust issues including the signs that you might have problems with trust and what causes a lack of faith in other people. It also covers some of the steps that you can take to overcome problems with trust. Why Trust Issues Are Harmful Trust has a number of benefits that are important for the health of your relationships as well as your own emotional well-being. Trust allows you to: Be vulnerable Be yourself Feel safe and secure Focus on positivity Increase closeness and intimacy Minimize conflict Trust is important in relationships because it allows you the opportunity to relax, be yourself, and depend on another person. It provides you with the safety and security you need to turn to another person for comfort, reassurance, assistance, and affection. Signs of Trust Issues What Is Trust? Trust is the belief that another person is honest and reliable. It is a feeling that you can depend on that person because they offer safety and security. Trust has been described as a firm belief in the ability, strength, reliability, and truth of someone or something.1 There are a number of different behaviors that might indicate that you or your partner have a problem with trusting others. Some of these include: Always assuming the worst: Your trust issues could also lead you to assume the worst about people around you even when they have proven themselves trustworthy in the past. For example, when someone offers to help you, you wonder if they are expecting something from you later on. Suspiciousness: Trust issues can make you feel suspicious about other people's intentions, even if there is little to indicate that their actions are suspect. You might feel like others are trying to harm you or deceive you. Self-sabotage: Trust issues often lead to self-sabotage. For example, you might engage in behaviors that interfere with your relationship because you assume it's better to end things now rather than end up being disappointed later. Unhealthy relationships: People with trust issues almost always struggle to build healthy, long-lasting relationships. It's normal for trust to take a while to develop within romantic relationships but people without trust may never experience this type of connection. Lack of forgiveness: When trust is an issue, it is difficult—if not impossible—to move on after a betrayal of trust has occurred. This inability to forgive and forget can affect your entire life; not just your interactions with others. It can lead to feelings of guilt, shame, bitterness, and regret. Distancing yourself: In many cases, a lack of trust may lead people to build a wall between themselves and other people. You avoid relationships altogether because you fear betrayal or disappointment. Focusing on the negative: No matter the situation, you always focus on what you expect will go wrong. You tend to notice other people's flaws, weaknesses, or mistakes rather than focusing on their positive qualities.3 When trust interferes with your ability to form healthy, stable relationships, it can also leave you feeling isolated, lonely, and misunderstood. Types of Trust Issues Trust problems don't just affect your romantic relationships. They can create conflicts and poor communication in any type of relationship, whether it is with your friends, co-workers, or other family members. Some common types of relationships that can be affected by trust issues include: Romantic relationships: People with trust issues often struggle to rely on or believe in their romantic partners. This can lead to a range of problems in relationships including trust-related infidelity, unwillingness to commit, and difficulty apologizing when trust has been broken. Friendships: Just as people have trust issues within romantic relationships, they might also struggle with trusting their friends. Difficulty trusting friendship peers might stem from a fear of disappointment or betrayal. Being let down by people in the past can make it hard to open yourself up to trusting friends again in the future. Workplace relationships: There are many reasons why someone might not trust co-workers. They might be concerned that their co-workers are conspiring against them or just assume that trusting co-workers is not that important. Generalized trust refers to the belief in whether or not most other people can be trusted.4 It can affect a person's ability to trust people, groups, organizations, and governments. Research suggests that this generalized trust is influenced by a variety of forces including culture, social interaction experiences throughout life, and media influences.5 Recap Problems with trust can take a toll in many different areas of your life. It can make your romantic relationships more fraught, interfere with your ability to maintain friendships, and contribute to conflicts in the workplace. What Causes Trust Issues? A 2018 study found that a tendency to be trusting is influenced by genetic factors. Distrust, on the other hand, is not linked to genetics and is primarily associated with socialization factors, including family dynamics and influences.6 People often have trust issues because they have been betrayed in the past. Early childhood experiences, in particular, often play a major role in shaping your ability to trust the people around you.7 Psychologist Erik Erikson developed a theory of development that suggested that the earliest years of life were all about learning whether the people around you could be trusted with your care and safety. Whether you learned this trust or mistrust, he suggested, played a foundational role in future development. This means that trust issues could stem from any number of sources including: Betrayal in a relationship: Infidelity is incredibly hurtful and can lead to trust issues in future relationships. Parental conflicts: If children witness trust problems within their family, they may fear that the same thing will happen to them in future romantic relationships in adulthood. Social rejection: Being rejected by peers during childhood or adolescence may also make it difficult to trust other people. This type of trust issue can be exacerbated when the person being rejected is unable to determine why they are being excluded. Repeated rejections can make these trust issues that much more difficult to overcome. Negative life experiences: People who have experienced trauma—especially while growing up—are likely to develop trust issues in adulthood. These trust issues could manifest in many different ways including difficulty trusting friends or romantic partners, fear of trust-related betrayal, or difficulty forgiving people for breaking their trust. Attachment styles: Experts also suggest that your attachment style, or your characteristic pattern of behavior in a relationship, also plays a role in how you respond to trust in relationships. People with a secure attachment style may be more likely to trust others and forgive mistakes. Those with insecure attachment styles, on the other hand, struggle more with trust and are more likely to experience jealousy and anxiety in relationships.8 Having one or more of these types of trust problems does not necessarily mean that you have a problem with trust but it may indicate that you need to address these issues if they are causing you pain or preventing you from forming and maintaining interpersonal relationships. Recap Trust issues are often connected to negative experiences in the past. Being let down or betrayed by people who you trusted-whether it was a friend, partner, parent, or other trusted figure or institution-can interfere with your ability to believe in others. How to Overcome Trust Issues While it can be a challenging emotional undertaking, it is possible to overcome problems with trust. Here are a few trust-building strategies you can use: Build Trust Slowly It is important to trust people enough to allow them into your life and—in some cases—to forgive them for mistakes. Taking your time with it can sometimes help. If you find yourself trying to trust too quickly (and perhaps, too intensely), then it may be time to pull back and work up to that level of trust again. Talk About Your Trust Issues While you don't need to provide every detail about what happened to you in the past, being open about why you struggle with trust can help others understand you better. By communicating with your partner, they can be more aware of how their actions might be interpreted. Distinguish Between Trust and Control People with trust issues often feel a need for control. This can sometimes manifest as mistrusting behavior. You might feel like you are being betrayed or taken advantage of if you don't have complete control over every situation. However, this will only hurt your relationships in the long run. Learning how much control you should yield in a given situation is key to building trust with other people. Make Trust a Priority Trusting others can be difficult but trust-building is an essential part of any relationship, romantic or otherwise. Make trust a priority in your life—even if it's challenging to do. Be Trustworthy If you try to build trust with someone else, you have to be willing to trust them first. This means being open about your feelings, opinions, thoughts, and limits. It also means being understanding when the person breaks that trust because everyone makes mistakes. Learning how to balance these two ideas will help establish healthy interpersonal relationships that are based on trust. Consider Therapy Therapy can also be helpful for overcoming trust issues. The therapeutic alliance that you form with your therapist can be a powerful tool in learning how to trust other people. By working with an experienced mental health professional, you can learn more about why you struggle with trust and learn new coping skills that will help you start to rebuild trust in your relationships. Learn to Trust Yourself One of the best ways to practice trust is to trust yourself. This doesn't mean you should never question yourself or your choices. It just means that you should build a stronger self-awareness that can help guide your judgments and interactions with others. Practicing mindfulness is one strategy that can be helpful. When you utilize mindfulness, you are able to become more aware of how you are feeling in the present moment without worrying about the past and future. Recap There are many things that you can do to overcome trust issues. Starting slow, communicating your needs, trying therapy, and learning to trust yourself can help. A Word From Verywell Having trust issues can be difficult—but trust-building is an essential part of any relationship, romantic or otherwise. Make trust a priority in your life—even if it's challenging to do. If you try to build trust with someone else, you have to trust yourself first. This means being open about your feelings, opinions, thoughts, and limits. It also means being understanding when the other person makes mistakes. Learning how to balance these two ideas will help establish healthy interpersonal relationships that are based on trust, respect, and care. 8 Sources By Kendra Cherry Kendra Cherry, MS, is an author and educational consultant focused on helping students learn about psychology. (Verywellmind)

What should I know about the Protestant reformation?

A young German monk named Martin Luther is considered to being the one that ignites the Protestant Reformation. He posts his 95 theses on a door of a church in Wittenberg. Luther's theses questioned how the Catholic Church were running things across Europe. This caused a split called the Protestant reformation, and this will factor into the formations of political and cultural spheres of the United States. • nation-states were independent nations that would govern the world. It's basically a country. • The Peace of Augsburg and the treaty of Westphalia were agreements created to end the long conflicts between Catholics and Protestants. It brought an end to horrible religious bloodshed. (AP US Notes)

What's the best relationship advice?

What was the best relationship advice you ever got? 1. You're over them once you forget to check their social media profiles. 2. When choosing a partner, go for their values and beliefs, not the glitter. 3. Have a life together and a life apart when you are in a relationship. 4. Toxic people don't change themselves, thy just change victims. 5. A good person doesn't always equal good relationship. 6. Old relationship patterns won't create new relationship results. 7. What people require from a partner isn't someone perfect but someone who understands their imperfections. Posted by Alex Ferman (Quora)

social anxiety disorder

intense fear of social situations, leading to avoidance of such

What should I know about the Iraq war?

The Iraq War, also called the Second Persian Gulf War, (2003-11), conflict in Iraq that consisted of two phases. The first of these was a brief, conventionally fought war in March-April 2003, in which a combined force of troops from the United States and Great Britain (with smaller contingents from several other countries) invaded Iraq and rapidly defeated Iraqi military and paramilitary forces. It was followed by a longer second phase in which a U.S.-led occupation of Iraq was opposed by an insurgency. After violence began to decline in 2007, the United States gradually reduced its military presence in Iraq, formally completing its withdrawal in December 2011. President Bush and his advisors built much of their case for making this war on the idea that Iraq, under dictator Saddam Hussein, possessed or was in the process of building weapons of mass destruction.

What should I know about PC (political correctness) culture?

political correctness (PC), term used to refer to language that seems intended to give the least amount of offense, especially when describing groups identified by external markers such as race, gender, culture, or sexual orientation. The concept has been discussed, disputed, criticized, and satirized by commentators from across the political spectrum. The term has often been used derisively to ridicule the notion that altering language usage can change the public's perceptions and beliefs as well as influence outcomes. The term first appeared in Marxist-Leninist vocabulary following the Russian Revolution of 1917. At that time it was used to describe adherence to the policies and principles of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (that is, the party line). During the late 1970s and early 1980s the term began to be used wittily by liberal politicians to refer to the extremism of some left-wing issues, particularly regarding what was perceived as an emphasis on rhetoric over content. In the early 1990s the term was used by conservatives to question and oppose what they perceived as the rise of liberal left-wing curriculum and teaching methods on university and college campuses in the United States. By the late 1990s the usage of the term had again decreased, and it was most frequently employed by comedians and others to lampoon political language. At times it was also used by the left to scoff at conservative political themes. Linguistically, the practice of what is called "political correctness" seems to be rooted in a desire to eliminate exclusion of various identity groups based on language usage. According to the Sapir-Whorf, or Whorfian, hypothesis, our perception of reality is determined by our thought processes, which are influenced by the language we use. In this way language shapes our reality and tells us how to think about and respond to that reality. Language also reveals and promotes our biases. Therefore, according to the hypothesis, using sexist language promotes sexism and using racial language promotes racism. Those who are most strongly opposed to so-called "political correctness" view it as censorship and a curtailment of freedom of speech that places limits on debates in the public arena. They contend that such language boundaries inevitably lead to self-censorship and restrictions on behaviour. They further believe that political correctness perceives offensive language where none exists. Others believe that "political correctness" or "politically correct" has been used as an epithet to stop legitimate attempts to curb hate speech and minimize exclusionary speech practices. Ultimately, the ongoing discussion surrounding political correctness seems to centre on language, naming, and whose definitions are accepted. (Encyclopedia Britannica)

Social Anxiety Disorder (Social Phobia) 2

extreme, enduring, irrational fear and avoidance of social or performance situations

What should I know about the times right before the American Revolution?

The victory of the British in the French and Indian War would be a turning point in the face and politics of North America. Many conflicts would ensue as well. • Britain controlled most of North America east of the Mississippi River. • Many of the colonists who fought in this war grew to develop a sense of entitlement to their own destiny and patriotism. • Many of the countries that fought in this war were in debt afterwards. • The Proclamation line of 1763 was a royal proclamation of 1763 designed to protect Indian tribes by setting up a boundary at the peaks of the Appalachian mountains which no white settler was allowed to cross to create settlements. King George lll and his advisors wanted to maintain peace within North America, and they still wanted to honor their commitments to the Delaware and Iroquois tribes for all their help in the war. The proclamation was implemented to protect those tribes from white settlement in perpetuity. The proclamation also mandated that settlers who had already settled in any land west of the Appalachians were to leave. The settlers saw this proclamation as a betrayal of their rights. • The Paxton Boys were a group of farmers from Paxton, Pennsylvania, who tuned into vigilantes that wanted to get rid of Indians, whether they had been allied with the French or the British. In December 1763, the Paxton Boys attacked a Delaware village, killed 6 people, and burned the town. They also killed Indians who were in protective custody in the town of Lancaster. They also went to Philadelphia to try and round up any Delawares that were taking refuge there. Ben Franklin led a delegation to put an end to the rebellion before they arrived in Philadelphia, but white settlers would grow to have a hatred for Native Americans. • Pontiac's Rebellion goes on from 1763 to 1766. It was led by Pontiac of the Ottawas and Neolin of the Delawares. The rebellion was sparked by Pontiac, an Ottawa chief, who heeded Neolin's call for a movement to go back to former Indian lifestyles. He started a convention of native tribes near Detroit. He convinced other native tribes to take up his cause to "cleanse" themselves of white traditions in order to see to a restoration of their lands and power. They made attacks on various European forts. Pontiac signed a peace treaty with the British in 1766 after receiving a letter from the French saying they wouldn't come to his aid. • The threat of taxes from the British would lead to many other conflicts. (AP US Notes)

Operation Iraqi Freedom

Operation where U.S. troops invaded Iraq and Saddam's forces collapsed almost immediately. Baghdad fell, and Saddam and other Iraqi leaders went into hiding. In the months that followed Saddam and many of his supporters were captured

What should I know about early plantations and slave societies?

Bacon's Rebellion began in Virginia in 1676. An immigrant named Nathaniel Bacon leads a militia to make war against Indian villages and the governor. African slaves would lose their rights because of events like Bacon's Rebellion. White plantation owners feared the prospect of African slaves and poor whites coming together to revolt against them. They also wrote new slave laws that would gradually make slavery more permanent. African slaves were in high demand because plantation owners thought they would make for good workers, and there was a decline in indentured servants as a result of this. • Slave factories were quarters that slaves were kept in subsequent to arriving on the African coast. The slaves residing in these were only fed bread and water. • The Middle Passage was a transit for ships carrying slaves from Africa to the Americas. It was a horrifying experience for the slaves aboard on these ships. • Olaudah Equiano was a runaway slave who learned to read and write after escaping to the north. He wrote about his experiences as a slave. His writing would help create the antislavery movement. • The Stono Slave Rebellion of 1739 was an uprising of South Carolina slaves against Whites; inspired in part by Spanish officials who offered a promise of freedom to American slaves who desired to escape to Florida. Some sixty slaves lead by a man named Cato burned buildings and killed whites who got in their way of gaining freedom. They were eventually stopped by a South Carolina militia. This revolt terrorized slave masters throughout the British colonies. • Francisco Menéndez was a former Carolina slave who escaped to Florida. He received praise for helping defend St. Augustine from an English attack. • Mose was a Spanish settlement that the Spanish governor put Menéndez in charge of. (AP US notes)

What are some signs of abandonment?

Abandonment Issues: Symptoms and Signs Written by WebMD Editorial Contributors Medically Reviewed by Dan Brennan, MD on November 20, 2020 What Are Abandonment Issues? Abandonment issues stem from a fear of loneliness, which can be a phobia or a form of anxiety. These issues can affect your relationships and often stem from a childhood loss. Other factors that turn loss into abandonment issues include environmental and medical factors, genetics, and brain chemistry. Early childhood experiences are the biggest contributor to developing abandonment issues when you become an adult. The traumatic event might include the loss of a parent by divorce or death or not getting enough physical or emotional care as a child. Emotional abandonment occurs when parents: Do not let their children express themselves emotionally Ridicule their children Put too much pressure on their children to be "perfect" Treat their children like their peers Abandonment issues happen when a parent or caregiver does not provide the child with consistent warm or attentive interactions, leaving them feeling chronic stress and fear. The experiences that happen during a child's development will often continue into adulthood. This is why abandonment issues become more prevalent as you get older and can affect your relationships. Types of Abandonment Issues Abandonment issues can present themselves in three insecure attachment styles. These are: Avoidant Attachment Style People who follow this style don't allow anyone to get close to them. You may feel like you can't open up or trust others, making you appear distant, private, or withdrawn. Anxious Attachment Style People with this type of attachment style cope by developing intensely close and dependent relationships with others. You may feel anxious about separating yourself from your partner and tend to be emotionally reactive. It may be easy to see conflicts as a concern that your partner may leave, which makes you act out of fear. Disorganized Attachment Style People with this attachment style have difficulty remaining intimate and close but can also be inconsistent. You may feel anxious about being in a relationship or want to avoid the closeness. This attachment style may come with other potential disorders. Signs of Abandonment Issues Abandonment issues don't always come from childhood trauma. They can also develop after losing an intimate partner to divorce or death. Either through adult or childhood abandonment, these issues can negatively impact healthy relationships. A fear of abandonment presents itself in people who seem like "people pleasers" or need continuous reassurance that they are loved. There is also a consistent anxiety that occurs with abandonment issues. Common signs of abandonment issues include: Giving too much or being overly eager to please Jealousy in your relationship or of others Trouble trusting your partner's intentions Feeling insecure about your relationship Having difficulty in feeling intimate emotionally Needing to control or be controlled by your partner Settling in unsatisfactory relationships It is not uncommon for you to want your partners to treat you the same way as you were treated as a child. Treating Abandonment Issues When treating abandonment issues, the first step is understanding what triggers you and learning to withdraw when these triggers come up. You should also try to get more comfortable with having conversations about your fears in a calm and respectful manner. It may help to do this with a partner, family member, or close friend. It may be difficult at first, but you will find it gets easier with time. here are two primary treatments for abandonment issues: Therapy In therapy, you will be able to explore the root cause of your fears and identify negative thought patterns. Your therapist will help you replace them with healthy, more realistic thoughts. Your relationship with your therapist can also give you the sense of having a secure relationship. Working with them, you can learn to establish healthy boundaries in your relationships and help avoid behaviors that hinder healthy relationships. Self-care Practicing self-care can help you make sure your emotional needs are met. This can improve friendships and relationships. Doing self-care like journaling, taking walks, and other things you enjoy can help fulfill you and improve your contributions to your partner, friends, or children. Support and Resources Abandonment issues can develop because of many emotional and environmental factors. If you are experiencing fear of abandonment in your relationships, it may be helpful to see a counselor. A counselor will be able to talk to you about how you're feeling and develop a treatment plan. (WebMD)

Can a Solar Eclipse Really Blind You?

Can a Solar Eclipse Really Blind You? By Stephanie Pappas published August 10, 2017 People across the United States will have the chance to see a total solar eclipse on Aug. 21, the first time the spectacle was viewable from the continental U.S. since 1979. While it may be tempting to brush off warnings about looking up at this eclipse bare-eyed, don't: The light of an eclipse really can damage your eyes — though warnings of total blindness may be overstated. The condition is called solar retinopathy, and it occurs when bright light from the sun floods the retina on the back of the eyeball. The retina is home to the light-sensing cells that make vision possible. When they're over-stimulated by sunlight, they release a flood of communication chemicals that can damage the retina. This damage is often painless, so people don't realize what they're doing to their vision. Solar retinopathy can be caused by staring at the sun (regardless of its phase), but few people can stand to look directly at our nearest star for very long without pain. It does happen occasionally — medical journals record cases in which people high on drugs have stared at the sun for long periods of time, causing serious damage. Adherents of sun-worshipping religious sects are also victims. In 1988, for example, Italian ophthalmologists treated 66 people for solar retinopathy after a sun-staring ritual. But during an eclipse, more people are at risk. With the sun almost covered, it's comfortable to stare, and protective reflexes like blinking and pupil contraction are a lot less likely to kick in than on a normal day. Even pets are vulnerable to eye damage from looking at an eclipse, though they don't tend to look directly at the sun. Even so, if they're with you during your eclipse outing, your furry friends should wear protective glasses as well. Damaged eyes Early observers of astronomy sometimes found out about solar retinopathy the hard way. Thomas Harriot, who observed sunspots in 1610 but did not publish his discovery, wrote in 1612 that after viewing the sun his "sight was dim for an hour." Oxford astronomer John Greaves was once quoted as saying that after sun observations, he saw afterimages that looked like a flock of crows in his vision. In the most famous case of all, Isaac Newton tried looking at the sun in a mirror, essentially blinding himself for three days and experiencing afterimages for months. Scientists don't have a good bead on the prevalence of eye damage after a solar eclipse. In one study, conducted in 1999 after a solar eclipse visible in Europe, 45 patients with possible solar retinopathy showed up at an eye clinic in Leicester in the United Kingdom after viewing the eclipse. Forty were confirmed to have some sort of damage or symptoms of damage; five of those had visible changes in their retina. Twenty of the patients reported eye pain, while another 20 reported problems with vision. Of the latter group, 12 reported that their sight had returned to normal seven months later, but four could still see the ghosts of the damage in their visual field, such as a crescent-shaped spot visible in dim light. [If the Sun Is 93 Million Miles Away, Why Can't We Look Directly at It?] "Our series demonstrates that, contrary to popular belief, the majority of people with eclipse retinopathy are not totally blinded," the researchers wrote in 2001 in the journal The Lancet. However, they warned, earlier post-eclipse studies had turned up more severe problems in patients, suggesting that widespread media warnings not to look at the eclipsing sun may have prevented more damage during recent eclipses. Safe eclipse viewing Research also suggests that while a lot of the damage may heal, some may be permanent. One 1995 study followed 58 patients who sustained eye damage after viewing a 1976 eclipse in Turkey. Healing occurred during the first month after the eclipse, the researchers reported in the journal Graefe's Archive for Clinical and Experimental Ophthalmology, but by 18 months, whatever damage remained was permanent up to 15 years later. So, while it might be tough to go totally blind by looking at an eclipse, doing so without proper protection could leave a long-lasting stain on your vision. The only safe way to view an eclipse, according to NASA, is to use specially designed sun filters, often available at telescope stores, or to wear No. 14 welder's glasses, available at welding specialty stores. Pinhole viewers — essentially a hole in a piece of cardboard or paper — can also be used to view the eclipse indirectly by casting a shadow of the sun on the ground or on a screen. [How to Build a Solar Eclipse Viewer: Photos] REMEMBER not to stare directly at the sun without protective eyewear during the Aug. 21 total solar eclipse. If you don't have certified eclipse viewers, you can also make a pinhole camera viewer that will allow you to see the eclipse without looking at the sun directly. Editor's Note: This article was first published in 2012 and updated for the Great American Solar Eclipse in 2017. Originally published on Live Science. Stephanie Pappas Stephanie Pappas Live Science Contributor Stephanie Pappas is a contributing writer for Live Science, covering topics ranging from geoscience to archaeology to the human brain and behavior. She was previously a senior writer for Live Science but is now a freelancer based in Denver, Colorado, and regularly contributes to Scientific American and The Monitor, the monthly magazine of the American Psychological Association. Stephanie received a bachelor's degree in psychology from the University of South Carolina and a graduate certificate in science communication from the University of California, Santa Cruz. (Live Science)

Who is OJ Simpson?

O.J. Simpson (1947-) UPDATED: JUN 12, 2020 | ORIGINAL: MAR 14, 2018 Former American football star O.J. Simpson was acquitted for the murders of his ex-wife and her friend following a high-profile 1995 criminal trial, dubbed the "Trial of the Century." Who Is O.J. Simpson? O.J. Simpson is a former NFL football star, actor, broadcaster and convicted armed robber and kidnapper known for being acquitted of the murders of Nicole Brown Simpson and her friend Ronald Goldman. Simpson was a college football superstar at USC, winning the Heisman Trophy in 1968. He later enjoyed a record-setting career in the NFL and tremendous popularity among his fans. Amid a moderately successful post-playing career as an actor and broadcaster, Simpson was charged with murder of his former wife and Goldman in 1994. He was acquitted in a high-profile criminal trial, though he was found liable for their deaths in civil court. In 2008, Simpson was sentenced to up to 33 years in prison in for kidnapping and armed robbery of two sports memorabilia dealers in a Las Vegas hotel room in 2007. Shortly after being granted parole, he was released from prison on October 1, 2017. Early Life Orenthal James Simpson was born on July 9, 1947, in San Francisco, California. His aunt gave him the name Orenthal — supposedly the name of a French actor she liked. At the age of 2, Simpson contracted rickets, leaving him pigeon-toed and bow-legged. He had to wear a pair of shoes connected by an iron bar for a few hours almost every day until he was 5 years old. Simpson's parents separated in 1952. Along with a brother and two sisters, he was raised by his mother in the rugged, largely Black Potrero Hill district of San Francisco. At age 13, he joined a gang called the Persian Warriors. One fight landed him at the San Francisco Youth Guidance Center for nearly a week in 1962. Simpson displayed immense promise on the gridiron for Galileo High School, though his poor grades initially impeded his chances of joining a major college football program. After overwhelming the competition at the City College of San Francisco, he was admitted to the University of Southern California as a halfback. Football Career Simpson first gained fame as a two-time All-American halfback for the USC Trojans, setting NCAA records and winning the Heisman Trophy in 1968. Simpson joined the professional Buffalo Bills in 1969 but did not excel until the offense was tailored to showcase his running. Nicknamed "The Juice," Simpson topped 1,000 yards rushing over five consecutive years (1972-76) and led the National Football League in that category four times. In 1973, he became the first NFL player to rush for more than 2,000 yards in a single season. The running back also established league records (since broken) with his 23 touchdowns in 1975, and 273 rushing yards against the Detroit Lions on Thanksgiving Day 1976. Acting and Commentating Work After retiring from professional football in 1979, Simpson moved on to a profitable career as a sportscaster and an actor. He had dabbled in acting while still an active athlete, notably playing a man framed for murder by the police in the 1974 film The Klansman. Simpson later appeared in The Naked Gun (1988) and its sequels, playing a dim-witted assistant detective, and regularly appeared in TV commercials for the Hertz rental-car company, where he was seen leaping over luggage and other obstacles in an effort to catch a flight. Additionally, he worked as a commentator for Monday Night Football and the NFL on NBC brand. Wives and Children Simpson was married twice and had five kids, four of whom are living. Simpson married Marguerite L. Whitley on June 24, 1967. They had three children together, Arnelle, Jason and Aaren. Daughter Aaren Lashone Simpson, who was born in 1977, died a month before her second birthday when she drowned in the family's swimming pool. Simpson and Marguerite divorced in 1979. While still married to his first wife, Simpson met waitress Nicole Brown, then just a teenager. Simpson and Brown married in 1985, the same year he was elected to the Pro Football Hall of Fame, and they had two children together, Justin and Sydney. Brown Simpson complained about her marriage to friends and family members, telling them that Simpson was physically abusive. Following a fight between the two at a 1989 New Year's Eve party, in which he allegedly threatened to kill her, the former football star pleaded no contest to spousal battery. He brushed off the incident in an interview with ESPN, noting "We had a fight. We were both guilty. No one was hurt. It was no big deal, and we got on with our life." She filed for divorce in 1992. Deaths of Brown Simpson and Goldman On June 12, 1994, the bodies of Brown Simpson and friend Goldman, were found stabbed to death outside of her condominium in Los Angeles' Brentwood area. Evidence led police to suspect Simpson of the murders. Bronco Chase Simpson was ordered to surrender by 11 a.m. on June 17 and instead vanished; he was tracked down later in the day when he made a call from his cell phone on the Santa Ana Freeway. The police pursued, leading to a nationally televised slow-speed chase of a white Ford Bronco belonging to ex-NFL player Al "A.C." Cowlings, who was at the wheel while Simpson was in the backseat. READ MORE: O.J. Simpson's Freeway Chase: What Happened to the White Ford Bronco Arrest and Plea Simpson finally surrendered voluntarily the evening of June 17 at his Brentwood mansion. Although he was found to be in possession of a gun, his passport, $9,000 in cash and a disguise, he insisted that he "wasn't running." Later, he pleaded "absolutely, positively, 100 percent not guilty" to the murder charges. Murder Trial Simpson's criminal trial for the murders, dubbed the "Trial of the Century," commenced with opening statements on January 24, 1995, and lasted until Simpson's acquittal on October 3, 1995. The jury in Simpson's criminal murder trial was sequestered for nearly nine months, longer than any jury had been to date in California history. 'Dream Team' Lawyers Simpson assembled a legal "dream team" of lawyers that reportedly cost him an estimated $50,000 a day, which Simpson reportedly paid for in part by selling football memorabilia. The dream team was headed by Johnnie Cochran along with Robert Kardashian, Robert Shapiro, Barry Scheck, Alan Dershowitz and F. Lee Bailey. Despite strong evidence against Simpson, the lawyers successfully raised doubts about the handling of the evidence. Acquittal Lead prosecutor Marcia Clark appeared to have a strong case against Simpson, as a glove matching the one found near the dead bodies surfaced on Simpson's property, while DNA testing connected him to the bloodstains left behind. However, Cochran famously dismissed the matching gloves in his closing statements, noting, "If it doesn't fit, you must acquit." On October 3, 1995, the jury found Simpson not guilty of either murder. It was one of the most-watched events in television history, with 150 million people tuning in to hear the verdict. Civil Trial Simpson was hauled back to court for a civil trial, and in February 1997 he was found liable for the wrongful deaths of Brown Simpson and Goldman. He was ordered to pay their families $33.5 million in damages. Simpson moved to Florida in 1999, in large part due to a state law that prevented his home from being seized to help cover the civil damages. He auctioned off memorabilia to raise money and harbored hopes of returning to show business, although he found himself back in the headlines after allegedly attacking another driver in a road-rage incident in December 2000. He was acquitted the following October.

What did others have to say about Ye's comments?

The former COO of Yeezy, who is Jewish, said 'don't judge' Ye over antisemitic remarks Jyoti Mann Oct 29, 2022, 12:25 PM The former COO of Yeezy, who is Jewish, spoke out in support of Ye after his antisemitic remarks. Udi Avshalom, who was COO for three years, said Ye "knows he's talking nonsense." He called for people to "chill" and not "judge" the rapper, whom he said would realize his error. The former chief operating officer of Yeezy, who is Jewish, has defended Ye, formerly known as Kanye West, following his antisemitic remarks, telling people to "chill" and to not "judge" him. Udi Avshalom, who worked for the Yeezy brand from 2017 until this month, reportedly wrote on Instagram that while he "loves" his former boss, he is also "upset at the same time." He claimed Ye "knows he's talking nonsense" but called for people to not judge him, as he would come to realize his error. The Daily Mail first reported his comments. Ye made antisemitic remarks on Twitter earlier this month. He said he would be "going death con 3 on Jewish people" but that he couldn't be antisemitic "because black people are actually Jew also." Avshalom said Ye "has trusted me for years, I am Jewish. We made history together. I helped build his brand for him. I pray for positive results. I hope he wakes up tomorrow in a better place, does what's right and get back to building culture." Avshalom told Insider via a LinkedIn message: "I am not defending him at all I say that clearly, he is wrong. I just see more love than hate between the Black and Jewish community and would hate this one person's opinion (which has serious mental episode) to ever ruin the progress we are trying to make as communities and as Americans. In no way do I defend any of his nonsense talk." Ye's Yeezy partnerships with Adidas, Balenciaga, and Gap have been dissolved this week following his remarks. Adidas expects to take a 250 million euro, or about $246 million, hit to profits this year by terminating its partnership with Yeezy. The German company, which has collaborated with Ye's apparel and sneakers since 2014, said it was cutting ties as it "does not tolerate antisemitism." Similarly, Gap representatives said the company was immediately removing Yeezy Gap from its physical and online stores. The retailer said racism and hate was "inexcusable" and not in line with its values. Ye said he lost $2 billion in a day after his offensive comments and related behavior. (Business Insider)

What should I know about additional colonies in North America?

Additional Colonies Are Added in North America • Henry Hudson was a Dutch explorer. His voyages throughout the Atlantic helped pave the way for the Netherlands to make claims to land in North America. • The Dutch West India Company was formed in 1621. Fort Orange (later Albany), New York, is a Dutch trading post built by the Dutch West India Company in 1624. • The Dutch colony's economy was based on fur. • New Amsterdam (later NYC) was a settlement on Manhattan Island that's also built by the Dutch in 1626. It's been rumored that Manhattan Island was purchased from local Indians for a very low price. Despite the efforts of Governor Peter Stuyvesant to maintain religious uniformity, New Amsterdam became a haven for multiple religions. They allowed Jews, Muslims, Quakers, and Catholics to reside there. New Amsterdam used to have the largest amount of African slaves in North America during the 1600s. The settlement was later captured by the English in 1664 and renamed New York. • Patroons were wealthy Dutch settlers who were given vast tracts of land along the Hudson River between New Amsterdam and Albany in return for bringing at least fifty immigrants to work the land. • William Penn was the proprietor of Pennsylvania, a colony that was also known for being a haven for religious dissenters. He was a member of a group of religious dissenters called the Quakers. The group he was a part of were called Quakers because they supposedly trembled-quaked-at the name of God. William Penn inherited a right to collect a debt from the king that was owed to Penn's family. He founded Philadelphia. Pennsylvania was generally a peaceful place while he was alive. Penn allowed for slavery within his colony. As early as 1684, two years after Philadelphia was founded, 150 African slaves were brought there. • The Charter of Liberties allowed for an established elected legislature. It also allowed for the 3 most southern colonies to create their own assemblies. • New Sweden was a short-lived colony that was settled by colonists from Sweden and Finland. • Barbados was a British Caribbean colony that did trade with the Carolina Colony. Many of the slaves in Barbados were fed rice from Carolina. • James Oglethorpe was the founder of the Georgia colony. He wanted to provide a haven for those who were poor. He excluded Catholics-who might be secretly loyal to Catholic Spain-and Africans, Freed or slave-since they might be tempted to run away from the colony. • Indentured servants were those who were contracted to serve for a period of 3-7 years in return for payment of passage into America. They'd work with slaves and other servants, and they'd sometimes intermarry. • Anthony Johnson was a slave sold in Jamestown in 1621. He worked for the Bennett Family in their fields, and after a decade of having worked hard, he was able to start a family and gained his freedom. He got a 250-acre farm that was worked by his indentured servants and one slave. The Johnson Family was considered to be a part of Virginia's landed gentry. (AP US Notes)

How do I go about asexuality?

Asexuality: The ascent of the 'invisible' sexual orientation Share using Email Share on Twitter Share on Facebook Share on Linkedin (Image credit: Courtesy of Marissa Manuel) marisa manuel By Jessica Klein 11th May 2021 Long in the shadows, asexuality is finally becoming increasingly visible. It could help young people find themselves and their identities, and change the way we think about sexuality. A As we head into 2022, Worklife is running our best, most insightful and most essential stories from 2021. When you're done with this article, check out our full list of the year's top stories. In a live video stream on 6 April, UK-based model and asexual activist Yasmin Benoit moderated a panel featuring participants from Belgium, Brazil, Vietnam, Pakistan, Nepal and Nigeria. All of them identify as somewhere on the asexual ("ace") and/or aromantic ("aro") spectrum. The panellists discussed their involvement in their respective countries' asexuality community, as part of an event honouring the first ever International Asexuality Day. Their experiences vary, from well supported to outright dangerous. In Belgium, Martine said she's found support and inclusivity from her government and the country's wider LGBTQ+ organisation; on the other end, Jan in Nigeria noted that laws "criminalise queer gatherings". But, regardless of global location, the issue of visibility was at the core of nearly all their responses. Indeed, asexuality - defined generally as not experiencing sexual attraction - has been called "the invisible orientation". It tends to be misunderstood and under-discussed; people may not believe someone can really be asexual, or they dismiss asexuality entirely. Common misconceptions about asexuality include that asexuality equates to celibacy (it doesn't), or that it's a choice (it's an orientation), says Michael Doré, a member of the global Asexual Visibility and Education Network's (AVEN) project team. Some also incorrectly believe that someone is only asexual if they never experience sexual attraction or have sex. But asexuality is a spectrum, where some may identify as demisexual, for example, meaning they don't experience sexual attraction until forming an emotional bond with someone. It's also not synonymous with aromanticism, which applies to those who don't experience romantic attraction. Despite confusion and dismissal, asexual voices have been getting louder and demanding recognition over the past decade. Individuals, activists and groups have begun telling their stories to larger audiences, and marching in Pride parades worldwide. Now, asexual activists' efforts lie in keeping up this work, and amplifying asexual voices outside Western, English-speaking countries, where the majority of asexual activism and stories have come from. As a result, along with the new international holiday, initiatives are popping up to take asexuality out of the shadows - making it easier for people to come out as asexual all over the world. 34-year-old Anahí Charles is the admin of an asexuality Facebook group in her home country of Mexico (Credit: Anahí Charles) 'It's not such a big deal as before' A limited awareness of asexuality has made it harder for past generations of young people around the world to realise their identities - even as recently as millennials. Anahí Charles, 34, who lives in Mexico, first began to learn she was different from her peers in middle school. While they all fawned over members of the US boy-band Backstreet Boys, Charles couldn't quite see the appeal. They looked "aesthetically nice", she says, but she couldn't grasp what it was that made her friends so crazy about them. It took Charles several years - well after this incident in her youth - to learn about the orienntation and find her place on the ace/aro spectrum. Without resources about asexuality, Charles says she was "in denial" about not experiencing sexual attraction to anyone. Even after she first learned about asexuality through a post on the Facebook page Have a Gay Day, in 2013, she still questioned whether something was "wrong" with her. Charles got medical examinations and hormone checks to try and figure it out. She was completely healthy. Her clean bill of health served as a catalyst for self-acceptance. She found more information about asexuality on Facebook, and realised just how much she related to it. A year later, she became the admin of an asexual Facebook group in Mexico. Similarly, in the US, Marisa Manuel, 28, struggled to name her orientation. She first heard the term "asexual" when she was in high school, but says she was "misinformed" about its meaning. "Someone told me it meant people who wanted to be alone," she recalls. "I like being around people." In college, she met someone who identified as ace, which prompted her to learn more about what it really meant. She realised how much she related to what she found, and has since embraced her identity wholly - she's gone on to write articles about identifying as ace as well as review books by ace authors. Although things are changing, asexuals and aromantics have historically faced challenges with visibility and recognition (Credit: Alamy) Fortunately, younger generations may now be set up to find out about asexuality sooner - and may also be more empowered to vocalise their identities. The number of resources and amount of representation has grown significantly since Charles and Manuel were growing up. Along with increasing information available writ large, people also readily identify as ace on social media platforms, and are keen to share details about their experiences with other users. 'Representation is a resource' Increased representation is key for enabling people to recognise and understand asexuality as well as normalise the orientation. "Representation is a resource," says Manuel. And although some resources have increased, representation - especially in mainstream media - isn't where it needs to be, she adds. However, there are other places visibility is increasing. People with bigger platforms, such as UK model Benoit, drag queen Venus Envy and Twitch streamer 5up, all talk openly about identifying as ace to their large fan bases on various social media channels. There's increased representation in literature, too; authors on the ace spectrum include Darcie Little Badger, Akemi Dawn Bowman and Maia Kobabe. Fictional characters also help, like Todd Chavez of Bojack Horseman, of whom Manuel has a plastic figurine. Manuel is trying to add to this growing pool of representation. Leading up to International Asexuality Day, she created AceChat, an Instagram account where she regularly shares stories by different people who identify as ace. It's garnered positive reception, and she keeps hearing from people who want to tell their stories. There are now about 100 people involved. Manuel says the next step is to expand AceChat's reach. People from France, Russia, Vietnam, the UK and Canada have already begun to reach out, and translators have also joined the effort. And translation can be critical, because some locations have smaller ace communities than others, meaning they often have fewer resources and less information available for people seeking to learn about asexuality in their language. We had even people from the LGBT community pitying us, saying, 'it sucks to be you'. But we didn't give up - Anahí Charles In Moscow, Daniel, 20, who is withholding his surname for saftey concerns, says the ace/aro community he's a part of only has about 50 members. "Not so many people know about terms like 'asexual'," he says, perhaps in part because of the country's intolerance of LGBTQ+ communities. Since so many ace stories and materials are in English, Daniel has been working to translate them into Russian. He's optimistic that asexuality will get more recognition in the coming years, even in his home country. 'We didn't give up' Along with ace communities' historical struggles to gain wider visibility, they've also had to work to be seen within LGBTQ groups. This may be surprising, since the asexuality identity is also often included when referencing queer communities (for instance, in the inclusion acronym 'LGBTQIA', in which 'A' stands for 'asexual'.) Charles, who's hosted asexual gatherings in Mexico City, experienced this first hand. She says her group first marched as a collective in Pride in 2015, but the larger LGBTQ community there hadn't quite accepted people identifying as ace with open arms. "We had even people from the LGBT community pitying us, saying, 'it sucks to be you'," she says. "But we didn't give up." Groups like Charles's and their subsequent educational initiatives have indeed helped move the needle. Charles says that when she returned to Pride with a larger group the next year, "we were better welcome because there was more information". "It wasn't like, look at the weirdos, they're marching again," she says. "It was like, look at the asexuals, they're marching again." In this push for acceptance, asexuality groups have been growing and thriving. One of the most prominent international asexuality groups is AVEN, founded in 2001 by US-based asexual activist David Jay. Michael Doré, who joined the organisation in 2009 in the UK, says AVEN came into existence with two main objectives: "building community and... legitimising asexuality as a sexual orientation". Its growing membership currently numbers 135,539, according to Doré. In the US, 28-year-old Marisa Manuel struggled to name her orientation, but has now embraced the asexual identity (Credit: Courtesy of Marisa Manuel) Now, opportunities to educate and raise visibility have stretched even further. AVEN, which recently celebrated its 20th anniversary, seized on the increase in virtual communications during the pandemic to strengthen its global connections. These international, virtual chats eventually turned to establishing a single day dedicated to celebrating asexuality all over the globe: International Asexuality Day (IAD). "We felt this day was needed," says Doré, who makes it clear that IAD is not owned by AVEN or any single organisation. "It's a genuinely international thing." The creation of the holiday not only establishes a yearly day of visibility, but also marks the flourishing of an intensive international effort to bring together an under-recognised community. It helps asexual individuals and groups in countries where information and representation is lacking gain access to resources. These days, says Doré, there's growing awareness of asexuality in countries across Asia - particularly India, he notes, where the Facebook group Indian Aces is thriving. New groups dedicated to asexuality have been popping up across Africa over the last few years as well, he adds. While this is a good sign for progress, people continue to misunderstand asexuality. Manuel says she wrote an article about asexual dating for the Huffington Post two years ago, and it was well received. However, when the article was recently re-shared, "there were so many more negative reactions", she says, in the piece's comments section. People called her confused, insisting that she was really looking for friends, not dates. "That made me realise that as far as we've come with representation and visibility, we're not there yet," she says. (BBC)

What should I know about asexuality?

What Does It Mean to Be Asexual? Medically reviewed by Francis Kuehnle, MSN, RN-BC — By Sian Ferguson and Crystal Raypole — Updated on November 17, 2021 Facts Myths Relationships Underlying 'cause' Signs to consider How to tell others Takeaway Asexuality, defined Someone who is asexual experiences little to no sexual attraction. Sexual attraction, in basic terms, means you find a specific person sexually appealing and want to have sex with them. Asexual people, who might use the term "ace" or "aces" for short, typically don't experience sexual attraction or want to pursue sexual relationships with other people. That said, being asexual means different things to different people. Some people might only experience sexual attraction in very limited circumstances. For example, someone who is demisexual — which some say falls under the asexual umbrella — experiences sexual attraction only when they experience a deep connection. To put it another way, they might only feel sexually attracted to people in the context of a loving romantic relationship. Some people might not experience any sexual attraction and still choose to have a sexual relationship. To put it simply, everyone has a different experience with being asexual, and there's no single way to be asexual. Some people don't experience sexual attraction at all Asexual people who don't experience any sexual attraction can still experience other forms of attraction. Aside from sexual attraction, you can also experience: Romantic attraction: desiring a romantic relationship with someone Aesthetic attraction: being attracted to someone based on how they look Sensual or physical attraction: wanting to touch, hold, or cuddle someone Platonic attraction: wanting to be friends with someone Emotional attraction: wanting an emotional connection with someone It's possible for asexual people to experience all these forms of attraction, plus plenty of others. You'll find a whopping 37 terms to describe different types of attraction here. Facts about asexuality Wondering exactly what it means to be asexual? Here are the basics. Asexual people can have a sex drive and experience sexual desire There's a difference between libido, sexual desire, and sexual attraction. Libido. Also known as your "sex drive," libido involves wanting to have sex and experience sexual pleasure and sexual release. For some people, it might feel a little like wanting to scratch an itch. Sexual desire. This refers to the desire to have sex, whether it's for pleasure, a personal connection, conception, or something else. Sexual attraction. This involves finding someone sexually appealing and wanting to have sex with them. Plenty of people who aren't asexual have a low libido and may not desire sex. Similarly, many asexual people still have a libido and might experience sexual desire. Asexual people might still masturbate or have sex. After all, sexuality doesn't always mean someone doesn't enjoy sex. It just means they don't experience sexual attraction. An asexual person might want to have sex for plenty of reasons, including: to satisfy their libido to conceive children to make their partner happy to experience the physical pleasure of sex to show and receive affection for the sensual pleasure of sex, including touching and cuddling Of course, some asexual people have little to no sex drive or sexual desire — and that's also OK since asexuality means different things to different people. Many asexual people desire and have romantic relationships An asexual person might not experience sexual attraction, but they could certainly experience romantic attraction. An asexual person could be romantically attracted to people of the same gender, people of another gender, or people of multiple genders. Many asexual people want — and have — romantic relationships. They might build these romantic relationships with other asexual people, or with people who aren't asexual. Asexual people may engage in sexual intimacy with partners As mentioned, some asexual people do have sex, because sexual desire differs from sexual attraction. In other words, you might not look at someone and feel the need to have sex with them, but you might still want to have sex on occasion. Every asexual person is different. Some might feel repulsed by sex, some might feel nonchalant about it, and some might enjoy it. Sexuality is a spectrum Many people view sexuality as a spectrum. Asexuality can be a spectrum too, with some people experiencing no sexual attraction, others experiencing a little sexual attraction, and others experiencing a lot of sexual attraction. Graysexual people rarely experience sexual attraction, or they experience it at a very low intensity. As the Asexual Visibility & Education Network (AVEN) explains, many people recognize graysexuality as a midpoint between sexuality and asexuality. Sexual attraction and desire aren't the same as romantic attraction and desire Wanting to have sex with someone is different from wanting a romantic relationship with them. Similarly, it's important to remember that just as sexual attraction differs from romantic attraction, sexual desire also differs from romantic desire. You can desire a romantic relationship without also desiring sex and vice versa. Some people prefer nonromantic relationships Some asexual people have no interest in romantic relationships. As asexual people experience little to no sexual attraction, aromantic people experience little to no romantic attraction. Some — but not all — asexual people are aromantic. Queerplatonic, a word that originated in the asexual and aromantic communities, offers one way to describe nonromantic relationships. According to AVEN, a queerplatonic relationship is a very close relationship. Though it doesn't involve romance, people in a queerplatonic relationship are just as committed as those in a romantic relationship. Anybody can have a queerplatonic relationship, no matter their sexual or romantic orientation. Some find their capacity for attraction or desire shifts over time Many people consider their identity somewhat fluid. One day, they might feel like they're asexual because they experience little or no sexual attraction. Weeks or months later, they might feel a shift and find they experience sexual attraction more often. Similarly, someone might identify with the term heterosexual or bisexual, then later realize they're asexual. This doesn't mean they were wrong or confused before. It also doesn't mean sexual orientation is a "phase" or something you'll grow out of. Your capacity for attraction isn't set in stone Some people find their attraction to others changes over time. This is completely healthy. Just because an asexual person felt sexual attraction before doesn't erase their identity now. If you experienced sexual attraction in the past but no longer do, your asexual identity is still valid. The same goes for people who no longer identify with the term asexual. You might be asexual and later come to realize you experience sexual attraction often. This doesn't mean you were never really asexual. Your orientation could simply have changed over time. Myths and misconceptions Now, let's clear up a few of the myths around asexuality. It means celibacy or abstinence Many people falsely believe asexuality is the same thing as celibacy or abstinence. Abstinence is about deciding not to have sex. This is usually temporary. Someone may choose to abstain from sex: until they get married during a difficult period in their life Celibacy is about deciding to abstain from sex, and possibly marriage, for a longer period of time. Many people make a lifelong commitment to celibacy for religious, cultural, or personal reasons. One key difference lies in the fact that abstinence and celibacy represent choices. Asexuality does not. What's more, asexual people might not actually abstain from sex at all — and people who choose celibacy or abstinence can certainly experience sexual attraction. It's a medical condition Many people think there is something "wrong" with asexual people. The world seems to assume that everyone feels sexual attraction. As a result, asexual people might worry there's something wrong with them if they don't feel that same attraction. But asexuality isn't a medical concern or something that needs to be fixed. It should go without saying, but being asexual isn't the same thing as experiencing: fear of intimacy loss of libido sexual repression sexual aversion sexual dysfunction Anyone can develop one or more of these conditions, regardless of their sexual orientation. It only happens because someone can't find the right partner Some well-meaning people may assume asexual people will feel sexual attraction when they meet the "right" person — but that's not how asexuality works. It's not a matter of finding love or romance. As a matter of fact, many asexual people desire romantic relationships — and many asexual people have happy healthy romantic relationships. Romance doesn't have to involve sex, just as sex doesn't require romance. How asexuality works in relationships A romantic relationship where one partner is asexual and the other isn't can absolutely work — with plenty of honest communication. Not much different from any other healthy relationship, right? If you're asexual, you'll want to talk to your partner about the types of sexual activity you're open to (if any) plus any other boundaries you have around sex. Maybe you and your partner both want a long-term romantic relationship, but your partner has a much higher sex drive. You might try an open relationship, where your partner has other sexual partners but maintains an emotional commitment to you. What's most important is that both partners express their needs honestly and recognize that while sexual attraction can shift over time, it may not. So, it generally won't help to assume an asexual partner will suddenly experience sexual attraction. Keep in mind, too, that it's OK (and very healthy) to have a high sex drive and want to have sex often. Sometimes, people simply aren't compatible. If your partner is asexual and doesn't want to have sex, but they aren't willing to consider an open relationship, you might want to consider whether the relationship meets your needs (which are entirely valid, too). Is there an underlying 'cause'? As with homosexuality or bisexuality, there's no underlying "cause" of asexuality. It's just the way someone is. Asexuality isn't genetic, the result of trauma, or caused by anything else. That said, if you experience any distress as a result of your orientation, or you feel uncertain about your orientation or what your lack of sexual attraction might mean, talking to a compassionate, LGBTQIA+ affirming therapist can help. How do I know if I'm asexual? Although you can't take a specific test to figure out whether you're asexual or not, you can ask yourself a few key questions to evaluate your desires and consider whether they align with common asexual characteristics. Some questions to consider: What does sexual attraction mean to me? Do I experience sexual attraction? How do I feel about the concept of sex? Do I feel like I should have interest in sex only because others expect it? Is sex important to me? Do I see attractive people and feel the need to have sex with them? How do I enjoy showing affection? Does sex factor in? These questions don't have any "right" or "wrong" answers, but they can help you think about your sexuality. Helping your loved ones understand asexuality If you realize you're asexual, you might wonder how to explain your orientation to the people in your life, particularly those who may be less familiar with the term. You can always start by explaining that asexuality is an orientation, just like being gay, queer, or pansexual. Some people have an attraction to people of one gender, others to people of many genders, and some don't experience sexual attraction at all. Family or friends might worry asexuality means you'll never have a loving relationship, so you can also reassure them that you won't be lonely — you can and do experience the desire for friendship and other close bonds. It can also help to keep in mind you don't have to explain yourself to anyone if you don't want to. Your romantic and sexual desires (or lack thereof) are your business. That said, many people find that being open about their sexuality helps them live more authentically. Of course, you'll definitely want to share your orientation with someone you have a romantic interest in. Get more tips on dating as an asexual person here. Need to talk? Reach a trained, compassionate counselor at The Trevor Project, a nonprofit organization dedicated to supporting LGBTQIA+ teens and young adults. Get support 24/7, 365 days a year, by: calling 1-866-488-7386 texting START to 678-678 chatting online Counselors can listen, offer support and information, and help connect you with additional resources. The bottom line Maybe you experience a little sexual attraction or none at all. The way you define your sexuality, orientation, and identity is your choice, and only you get to decide what asexual means to you. Ultimately, you can always choose the identifier(s) you're most comfortable with for yourself. If you decide not to use any labels to describe yourself, that's OK, too! Want to learn more? Read up about asexuality and chat with members of the asexual community online at the: AVEN forum Asexuality subreddit Asexuality Archive Sian Ferguson Sian Ferguson is a freelance health and cannabis writer based in Cape Town, South Africa. She's passionate about empowering readers to take care of their mental and physical health through science-based, empathetically delivered information. (Healthline)

What should I know about social anxiety disorder?

Social Anxiety Disorder: More Than Just Shyness Cover image for Social Anxiety: More Than Just Shyness Download PDF Download ePub Order a free hardcopy En español Are you afraid of being judged by others? Are you self-conscious in everyday social situations? Do you avoid meeting new people due to fear or anxiety? If you have been feeling this way for at least 6 months and these feelings make it hard for you to do everyday tasks—such as talking to people at work or school—you may have social anxiety disorder. Social anxiety disorder is an intense, persistent fear of being watched and judged by others. This fear can affect work, school, and other daily activities. It can even make it hard to make and keep friends. The good news is social anxiety disorder is treatable. Learn more about the symptoms of social anxiety disorder and how to find help. What is social anxiety disorder? Social anxiety disorder is a common type of anxiety disorder. A person with social anxiety disorder feels symptoms of anxiety or fear in situations where they may be scrutinized, evaluated, or judged by others, such as speaking in public, meeting new people, dating, being on a job interview, answering a question in class, or having to talk to a cashier in a store. Doing everyday things, such as eating or drinking in front of others or using a public restroom, also may cause anxiety or fear due to concerns about being humiliated, judged, and rejected. The fear that people with social anxiety disorder have in social situations is so intense that they feel it is beyond their control. For some people, this fear may get in the way of going to work, attending school, or doing everyday things. Other people may be able to accomplish these activities but experience a great deal of fear or anxiety when they do. People with social anxiety disorder may worry about engaging in social situations for weeks before they happen. Sometimes, they end up avoiding places or events that cause distress or generate feelings of embarrassment. Some people with the disorder do not have anxiety related to social interactions but have it during performances instead. They feel symptoms of anxiety in situations such as giving a speech, competing in a sports game, or playing a musical instrument on stage. Social anxiety disorder usually starts during late childhood and may resemble extreme shyness or avoidance of situations or social interactions. It occurs more frequently in females than in males, and this gender difference is more pronounced in adolescents and young adults. Without treatment, social anxiety disorder can last for many years, or even a lifetime. What are the signs and symptoms of social anxiety disorder? When having to perform in front of or be around others, people with social anxiety disorder may: Blush, sweat, or tremble. Have a rapid heart rate. Feel their "mind going blank," or feel sick to their stomach. Have a rigid body posture, or speak with an overly soft voice. Find it difficult to make eye contact, be around people they don't know, or talk to people in social situations, even when they want to. Feel self-consciousness or fear that people will judge them negatively. Avoid places where there are other people. What causes social anxiety disorder? Risk for social anxiety disorder may run in families, but no one knows for sure why some family members have it while others don't. Researchers have found that several parts of the brain are involved in fear and anxiety and that genetics influences how these areas function. By studying how the brain and body interact in people with social anxiety disorder, researchers may be able to create more targeted treatments. In addition, researchers are looking at the ways stress and environmental factors play a role in the disorder. How is social anxiety disorder treated? If you're concerned you may have symptoms of social anxiety disorder, talk to a health care provider. After discussing your history, a health care provider may conduct a physical exam to ensure that an unrelated physical problem is not causing your symptoms. A health care provider may refer you to a mental health professional, such as a psychiatrist, psychologist, or clinical social worker. The first step to effective treatment is to get a diagnosis, usually from a mental health professional. Social anxiety disorder is generally treated with psychotherapy (sometimes called "talk therapy"), medication, or both. Speak with a health care provider about the best treatment for you. Psychotherapy Cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT), a research-supported type of psychotherapy, is commonly used to treat social anxiety disorder. CBT teaches you different ways of thinking, behaving, and reacting to situations to help you feel less anxious and fearful. CBT also can help you learn and practice social skills, which is very important for treating social anxiety disorder. CBT has been well studied and is the gold standard for psychotherapy. Exposure therapy is a CBT method that focuses on progressively confronting the fears underlying an anxiety disorder to help you engage in activities you have been avoiding. Exposure therapy is sometimes used along with relaxation exercises. CBT delivered in a group therapy format also can offer unique benefits for social anxiety disorder. Another treatment option for social anxiety disorder is acceptance and commitment therapy (ACT). ACT takes a different approach than CBT to negative thoughts and uses strategies such as mindfulness and goal setting to reduce your discomfort and anxiety. Compared to CBT, ACT is a newer form of psychotherapy treatment, so less data are available on its effectiveness. However, different therapies work for different types of people, so it can be helpful to discuss what form of therapy may be right for you with a mental health professional. For more information on psychotherapy, visit the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) psychotherapies webpage. Medication Health care providers may prescribe medication to treat social anxiety disorder. Different types of medication can be effective in treating this disorder, including: Antidepressants, such as selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs) and serotonin-norepinephrine reuptake inhibitors (SNRIs) Beta-blockers Anti-anxiety medications, such as benzodiazepines SSRI and SNRI antidepressants are commonly used to treat depression, but they also can help treat the symptoms of social anxiety disorder. They may take several weeks to start working. Antidepressants may also cause side effects, such as headaches, nausea, or difficulty sleeping. These side effects are usually not severe, especially if the dose starts off low and is increased slowly over time. Talk to your health care provider about any side effects that you may experience. Beta-blockers can help control some of the physical symptoms of social anxiety disorder, such as rapid heart rate, sweating, and tremors. Beta-blockers are commonly the medication of choice for the "performance anxiety" type of social anxiety disorder. Benzodiazepines, which are anti-anxiety sedative medications, are powerful and begin working right away to reduce anxious feelings. These medications can be very effective in rapidly decreasing anxiety, but some people build up a tolerance to them and need higher and higher doses to get the same effect. Some people even become dependent on them. Therefore, a health care provider may prescribe them only for brief periods of time if you need them. Both psychotherapy and medication can take some time to work. Many people try more than one medication before finding the best one for them. A health care provider can work with you to find the best medication, dose, and duration of treatment for you. People with social anxiety disorder usually obtain the best results with a combination of medication and CBT or other psychotherapies. For basic information about these and other mental health medications, visit NIMH's Mental Health Medications webpage. Visit the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) website for the latest warnings, patient medication guides, and information on newly approved medications. Support Groups Many people with social anxiety find support groups helpful. In a group of people who all have social anxiety disorder, you can receive unbiased, honest feedback about how others in the group see you. This way, you can learn that your thoughts about judgment and rejection are not true or are distorted. You also can learn how others with social anxiety disorder approach and overcome the fear of social situations. Support groups are available both in person and online. However, any advice you receive from a support group member should be used cautiously and does not replace treatment recommendations from a health care provider. Both psychotherapy and medication can take some time to work. A healthy lifestyle also can help combat anxiety. Make sure to get enough sleep and exercise, eat a healthy diet, and turn to family and friends who you trust for support. To learn more ways to take care of your mental health, visit NIMH's Caring for Your Mental Health webpage. How can I support myself and others with social anxiety disorder? Educate Yourself A good way to help yourself or a loved one who may be struggling with social anxiety disorder is to seek information. Research the warning signs, learn about treatment options, and keep up to date with current research. Communicate If you are experiencing social anxiety disorder symptoms, have an honest conversation about how you're feeling with someone you trust. If you think that a friend or family member may be struggling with social anxiety disorder, set aside a time to talk with them to express your concern and reassure them of your support. Know When to Seek Help If your anxiety, or the anxiety of a loved one, starts to cause problems in everyday life—such as avoiding social situations at school, at work, or with friends and family—it's time to seek professional help. Talk to a health care provider about your mental health. Are there clinical trials studying social anxiety disorder? NIMH supports a wide range of research, including clinical trials that look at new ways to prevent, detect, or treat diseases and conditions—including social anxiety disorder. Although individuals may benefit from being part of a clinical trial, participants should be aware that the primary purpose of a clinical trial is to gain new scientific knowledge so that others may be better helped in the future. Researchers at NIMH and around the country conduct clinical trials with patients and healthy volunteers. Talk to a health care provider about clinical trials, their benefits and risks, and whether one is right for you. For more information, visit NIMH's clinical trials webpage. Finding Help Behavioral Health Treatment Services Locator This online resource, provided by the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA), helps you locate mental health treatment facilities and programs. Find a facility in your state by searching SAMHSA's online Behavioral Health Treatment Services Locator. For additional resources, visit NIMH's Help for Mental Illnesses webpage. Talking to a Health Care Provider About Your Mental Health Communicating well with a health care provider can improve your care and help you both make good choices about your health. Find tips to help prepare for and get the most out of your visit at Taking Control of Your Mental Health: Tips for Talking With Your Health Care Provider. For additional resources, including questions to ask a provider, visit the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality website. If you or someone you know is in immediate distress or is thinking about hurting themselves, call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline toll-free at 1-800-273-TALK (8255). You also can text the Crisis Text Line (HELLO to 741741) or use the Lifeline Chat on the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline website. Reprints This publication is in the public domain and may be reproduced or copied without permission from NIMH. We encourage you to reproduce and use NIMH publications in your efforts to improve public health. If you do use our materials, we request that you cite the National Institute of Mental Health. To learn more about using NIMH publications, please contact the NIMH Information Resource Center at 1-866‑615‑6464, email [email protected], or refer to NIMH's reprint guidelines. For More Information MedlinePlus (National Library of Medicine) (en español) ClinicalTrials.gov (en español) U.S. DEPARTMENT OF HEALTH AND HUMAN SERVICES National Institutes of Health NIH Publication No. 22-MH-8083 Revised 2022 (NIH)

What was happening in American history prior to 1865?

Adam Smith wrote the wealth of nations in 1776. This book introduces the concept of capitalism. • New Hampshire and Virginia ratified the constitution. • Washington and Adams were inaugurated as president and Vice President on April 30th, 1789. • James Madison promises to add a bill of rights to the constitution. The Bill of rights are the first ten amendments. They were passed by Congress in 1789. They were ratified by 3/4 of the state's legislatures in 1791. They were supposed to be a part of the original document. The Bill of rights opposes a lot of the constitution. It would help give more power to the states. Many saw that the exclusion of the Bill of Rights from the constitution would give the federal government a lot of power. • The Tenth Amendment limits the powers of the national government. Antifederalists like this because they were worried about it affecting the institution of slavery. • The Washington Administration issued a formal proclamation of neutrality in the spring of 1792 after word of the European conflicts like the French Revolution reached Philadelphia. • The Constitution is considered to have replaced a weaker government—one that followed the articles of confederation—to a stronger one. • Alexander Hamilton was a New Yorker who was chosen by Washington to be secretary of treasury. Alexander Hamilton laid the foundation of the nation's economic system. Alexander Hamilton loved British models of government. He suggested to Washington during his presidency that he establish a court similar to that of King George lll. • Alexander Hamilton helped create a report on Public Credit. It was considered as a pressing issue in virtually everyone's view. He had until January to prepare it. This report would lay the foundation for economic development in this new nation. • Hamilton wanted the federal government to pay off the Revolutionary War debt of each state. Government officials had taken up on his suggestion. • A split on economic policy would lead to the creation of the Federalist Party and Democratic-Republican Party (known at first as Antifederalists). Both of these groups would dominate politics for the next decade. • Federalists were those who believed that congress should have the power to tax so it could raise its own funds and not be in the position of relying on other states to compensate. The Federalists were led by Alexander Hamilton. A notable federalist is James Madison. Federalists are supporters of the constitution. Some notable federalists are Alexander Hamilton and James Madison. • Federalists wanted to maintain a commercial and industrial economy. Republicans wanted an economy based on agriculture. Federalists wanted to create a strong permanent army. Republicans thought a strong permanent army would give them too much power. • Hamilton was responsible for making the government financially solvent. • Democratic-Republicans considered themselves as the true defenders of the nation's republic. • Thomas Jefferson did not like some of if not a lot of the ideas of Alexander Hamilton. He suggested a more egalitarian approach for creating a government. Those who supported the Democratic Republic Party were southern plantation owners. • The constitution gave the new government power to set and collect taxes. • The need for a tax law was urgent: each day that congress delayed, thousands of dollars went uncollected. • The Bank of the United States was the first federal bank, chartered in 1781. It issued currency for the country and stabilized the economy. • In December 1790, Hamilton submitted another report to Congress that called for creating a bank of the United States that was modeled on the Bank of England. Hamilton's fondness for British models was one reason that many Americans didn't trust him. But Hamilton didn't want to be a part of Britain. He wanted to use their economic model to help build the new nation that he hoped would become as powerful as Britain. • First bank of the United States was chartered in 1791. • White settlers were so fed up with the lack of protection by the Federal Government from native tribes that there were talks of creating a separate western nation. Between 1785 and 1788, John Sever led settlers in North Carolina—now the state of Tennessee—to form a state called the Republic of Franklin. • Some of the precedents that Washington set as president were serving two terms, going on tours, choosing his own cabinet, executive privilege, being able to lead the army (federal authority), not having a close relationship with the Vice President, etc. • The Whiskey Rebellion was caused by Hamilton's efforts to raise taxes. The Whiskey Rebellion goes on from 1793 to 1794. Washington and Hamilton help lead troops in this rebellion. • Washington pardons the rebels. • Arthur St. Claire was a representative of the US Government on the western frontier. Congress ordered him to end all Indian title to the lands between the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers. He lacked the resources to do the job. • Washington assigned Anthony Wayne as major general of the US Army. • The battles between the US Military and a confederation of tribes that were fought between 1785 and 1795 were sometimes referred to as the Northwest Indian War, or Little Turtle's War, in recognition of the Miami leader, Little Turtle, in the early defeats of the US forces. • Western Indian Confederacy was defeated at Battle of Fallen Timbers in 1794. • Treaty of Greenville was a treaty agreed to in 1795 in which Native Americans in the Northwest Territory were forced to cede most of the present states of Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, and Wisconsin to the United States. This ends the Indian Wars on the Ohio frontier. This treaty ends major hostilities between Indians and Whites in the future states of Ohio and Indiana. • The Citizen Genet Affair was the efforts of Edmond-Charles Genet, French Ambassador of the United States, to stir up military support for France and the French Revolution among Americans, leading to long term anti-French sentiment. • Chief Justice John Jay was sent to London to negotiate with Great Britain in order to avoid war. • Jay's Treaty was negotiated with Britain in 1794 in which the United States would make major concessions to avert a war over British seizure of American ships. This upsets a lot of people. • Pinckney's Treaty with Spain was in 1795. It's a treaty that sets the border between the United States and Spanish Florida. • John Adams was elected as president in 1796. • France's relationship with the US weakens. • Quasi-War is an undeclared war with France that begins in 1797. • The XYZ Affair happened in 1798. It was a diplomatic incident in which Americans were outraged by the demand of the French for a bribe as a condition for negotiating with American diplomats that they disliked. • The United States were still engaged in the quasi war in 1798 and 1799. • The United States began a trade embargo against France. • Congress creates the marine corps along with the navy and armed merchant ships so that they could attack French ships near the US coast or in the Caribbean. • The chaos of war led Congress to pass a series of 3 acts called the alien and sedition acts in 1798. These acts made it harder for new immigrants to vote and made it a crime to criticize the president or congress. These acts would eventually damage Adams' reputation even though he did not request any of them. These acts made Jefferson and the Democratic Republic Party angry. • Virginia and Kentucky Resolutions declare Alien and Sedition Acts unconstitutional. They were written by Thomas Jefferson and James Madison. • John Fries was the leader of a nonviolent rebellion against federal war taxes in Pennsylvania in 1799. He had been sentenced to death for treason. He was pardoned by Adams. These actions are considered to have cost Adams dearly, particularly amongst his own federalists. • Adams considers the choice for peace against war his crowning achievement. • It was rumored that Hamilton tried to engineer Charles Pinckney to becoming president. • The processes for selecting a president and Vice President were considered to be convoluted. • Aaron Burr was considered to be the man to deliver New York's votes. Few politicians trusted Burr. • Gabriel Prosser was a slave on a Virginia plantation not far from the state capital in Richmond. He wanted to kill all the whites except for Abolitionists. Some abolitionists were the French, Methodists, and Quakers. He planned for a slave uprising. A terrible storm scattered the slave army. Monroe sent a state militia to stop the uprising. The prospect of a slave uprising terrified southern states. • Presidential candidates campaigned openly in 1800. • The election of 1800 came down to Jefferson and Burr as the final candidates for the presidency. They both had 73 votes each. Hamilton dissuaded the Federalists from voting for Burr because he distrusted him. • Jefferson wins the election of 1800. Chapter 8 notes • Jefferson called his election the "Revolution of 1800." • Thomas Jefferson can be known as someone who sets a new tone for the federal government. • Republicanism is a complex, changing body of ideas, values, and assumptions that developed in the United States in the late 1790s and early 1800s around Thomas Jefferson's and James Madison's political organizing and their campaigns for presidency. American republicanism was a new way for citizens to relate to one another, emphasizing equality and independence far more than the class separation, deference, and dependence that had marked Great Britain, British North America, and the new United States. • Jefferson's desire for a small government came into conflict with pirates of the so-called Barbary states of North Africa that were capturing European and American ships. They would keep sailors hostages unless they were paid. Morocco and Algiers captured American ships in 1784 and 1785. Crews were enslaved. By the 1790s, the Washington and Adams administrations were paying huge tributes to avoid such troubles: by 1800, the tributes totaled $1.25 million. Jefferson didn't like this and he wanted to make a change. He allowed for the US to go to battle with these pirates. This was a risky move considering the US army may not have been as strong as it would have liked while facing the pirates. The US wins. The United States no longer paid these tributes. • A tariff is a tax on imported goods into any nation. Jefferson kept the tariff but banished all international taxes. • The Judiciary Act of 1801 was an act repealed by the Jefferson majority in Congress which had expanded the number of federal judges and which John Adams had signed just before leaving office. • 'Midnight Judges' was a name given by the Jeffersonian Democratic-Republicans to the judges who were appointed by the outgoing Federalist president John Adams at the end of his term. They were given this name because of the hour at which the president would appoint them. Following Jefferson's views, Congress wanted fewer federal judges, and they especially disliked the midnight judges. Congressional leaders and the president virtually dared the Supreme Court, particularly Chief Justice Marshall, a Federalist whom Adams had appointed, to declare Congress's actions as unconstitutional. Chief John Marshall waited for the right time to declare something unconstitutional. William Marbury was chosen by Adams to be a justice of the peace for the District of Columbia. But Adams left office before Marbury's commission was delivered, and Jefferson and his Secretary of State, James Madison, refused to deliver it. This was Marshall's chance to gain an advantage. • Marbury v. Madison was a US Supreme Court decision made in 1803 that created the precedent of judicial review by ruling part of the Judiciary Act of 1789 as unconstitutional. It was a complex decision with far-reaching consequences. Marshall began by saying that Jefferson had, indeed, been irresponsible in failing to deliver the commission. Even though Jefferson won and Marbury didn't get the job, Marshall also made a point of saying that the Court had the authority to declare an act of Congress unconstitutional. This is considered to be the first time that the Court asserted this power of judicial review. • Judicial review is a power implied in the Constitution that gives Federal courts the right to review and determine the constitutionality of acts passed by congress and state legislatures. • Sally Hemings was one of Thomas Jefferson's slaves. It was rumored that she and the president were having a sexual relationship. The president didn't say anything about this. With the advent of DNA testing in the late 1990s, it has been established as highly likely that the children of Sally Hemings, four of whom survived into adulthood and were set free, were also the children of Thomas Jefferson. Although this is not without debate, this conclusion is the consensus of many historians who have studied Jefferson's life. • "Wall of Separation between church and state" was a phrase coined by Thomas Jefferson to make clear his belief that the First Amendment to the Constitution guaranteed the notion that governments should not interfere with the work of churches, and churches should not interfere with, or expect support from, the government. This phrase became part of the American lexicon. Some have pointed out that the wall of separation" is merely a phrase coined by one president and is not part of the constitution or the law of the land. I guess they're right. But Jefferson was expressing an aspect of his republican ideals. It's believed that more and more Americans started to think that politics and religion should stay as far away from each other as possible. People who wanted to be treated equally with everyone else, no matter what they're wealth or family; who wanted to be free to curse, drink, and fight without the law's intrusion; and who wanted to be left alone on their own farms also wanted to be able to pursue their religious beliefs as they chose. • "Religious establishment" was the name given to a state church or to the creation of an established church that might play a role in, and expect support and loyalty from, all citizens. • Direct government support for churches disappeared in the early 1800s, but the importance of religion didn't seem to. The ideals of individual freedom in all areas of life generated an amazing growth in religious organizations and ideas in the same era. • Church attendance dropped during and after the Revolution. Many of the elite, like Jefferson, were deists. Deists are those who have a religious orientation that rejects divine revelation and holds that the workings of nature alone reveal God's design for the universe. They saw God as, at most, a distant force in human affairs; many working people ignored religious matters altogether. • The Second Great Awakening was a series of religious revivals in the first half of the 1800s characterized by great emotionalism in large public meetings. This commenced during Jefferson's presidency when Americans were participating in an outpouring of Protestant evangelical Christianity. This religious revival paralleled and, indeed, exceeded the Great Awakening of the 1740s that transformed American Christianity. Although major developments of the Second Great Awakening occurred largely in the 1820s and 1830s, the movement began in the late 1790s and the early 1800s. • John Wesley was a Protestant minister whose preachings emphasized the notion that free individuals should be able to make their own decisions. This appealed to the beliefs previously held in Jeffersonian America. • Denmark Vesey was a free black Sunday school teacher who led a slave revolt in Charleston, South Carolina, in 1822. • Nat Turner would lead the largest slave revolt before the Civil War in 1831. Slave owners grew afraid of how religion was affecting the slaves. • Richard Allen was born a slave in Delaware. He converted to Methodism and bought his way into freedom. He became a preacher who organized the Bethel Church in Philadelphia in 1794 that would eventually become the African Methodist Episcopal Church. • Southern governments wanted to block the growth of independent black churches. In the North, free blacks were able to become Church members. They were able to exercise leadership and form their own ideas while worshiping among themselves. • Religious freedom was deemed important for small minorities at the time like Catholics and Jews. The freedom to form their own religious organizations, free of government control and often free of full authority by their own senior leaders, was important to Catholics and Jews in Jeffersonian America. • The Louisiana purchase happened in 1803. • The Louisiana purchase is known for giving the US large amounts of land holdings that France claimed along the west side of the Mississippi River beginning in New Orleans and extending through the heart of North America to the Canadian border. This purchase almost doubled the amount of land that the US had originally at the time. This probably made some American individuals feel pretty powerful. • Some could have seen the Louisiana purchase as unconstitutional because nowhere did the constitution seem to mention that the government was able to make these kinds of deals. Some Federalists opposed this purchase because the influence they maintained in the federalist region of New England would be diminished once the US got larger. • Most Americans, even most of the Federalists, were enthusiastic about the purchase. • Jefferson wants a scientific expedition to be conducted on the new expanses of land that the US acquires. • Lewis and Clark's expedition goes from 1804 to 1806. It was supported by Jefferson and Congress. • Meriwether Lewis was the president's private secretary. William Clark was an army officer. Lewis and Clark's expedition would become one of American history's most celebrated exploits. • The Corps of Discovery was the name given to the team that Lewis and Clark organized for the expedition into the lands of the Louisiana purchase and the Oregon lands extending to the West Coast. It comprised of soldiers, civilian woodsmen, boatmen, interpreters, and Clark's slave York. They started preparing for the trip during the winter of 1803-1804 in St. Louis on the West Bank of the Mississippi River. They began their journey up the Missouri River and into the heart of the Louisiana territory. • Sacagawea was a Shoshone who was critical to the success of the Corps' expedition. She and French trapper Toussaint Charbonneau would be guides for the expedition. She began as a cook laundress for the Corps while she carried her baby on her back, but she quickly used her knowledge of the countryside to find food and translate with some of the tribes they met. Sacagawea is considered to be an American legend. • Zebulon Pike was the leader of another expedition that Jefferson sends into the west. • Jefferson's actions concerning the protection of the US on the seas are deemed to have hurt the country economically. • British impressment was a procedure of seizing and recruiting British or American sailors into the British navy. This was viewed as a direct threat to American freedom and to the economic survival of the United States. This was one of the major issues that sparked the Revolution and the War of 1812. Between 1803 and 1812, three thousand to six thousand Americans were pressed into service on British warships against their will, many of whom never returned. • The US was considered to be too weak for a big fight with the British because of the cutbacks Jefferson authorized in the navy and army that Adams had previously built up. Jefferson urges the embargo act to be passed because of this problem of impressment. • Congress passed the embargo act in 1807 that prohibits American ships from leaving for any foreign port. • The Non-Intercourse Act was an act passed by Congress in 1809 to modify the Embargo Act by allowing trade with all foreign countries except for Britain and France so as to extend US commerce in the rest of the world. It was passed just days before Jefferson left office. • Tensions mount between the Indians and US. A new generation of Indians are known to be less willing to live with what they saw as unfair treatment from the Americans. • Tenskwatawa, or the prophet, and his half-brother, the military leader Tecumseh, frighten white settlers and seriously challenge the small US Army. Many assumed that these brothers were aided by the British. After their losses from the Treaty of Greenville in 1795, many Shawnees came to believe that their sorry state was due to displeasing Waashaa Monetoo, the Good Spirit, who, their traditions said, had re-created the world after its destruction by a flood. In the early 1800s, a spiritual leader, Tenskwatawa, told the tribes that their dependence on white culture was the source of the Good Spirit's unhappiness. After 200 years of coexistence, tribes like the Shawnee's had become dependent on European muskets, wore cotton clothing, cooked in European cookware, and even lived in European-style houses. The prophet promised that, if his people would renounce European ways and goods, they could renew their culture and drive the whites out of their country. He's known for starting the settlement at what is now West Lafayette, Indiana, called Prophetstown, where Shawnees and other tribes gathered for spiritual renewal. While the prophet proposed a revival of Native American religion in opposition to white expansion, Tecumseh prepared a diverse Indian military alliance for war. • William Henry Harrison was the governor of Indiana territory. Tecumseh met with him to establish a peace agreement in August 1810. The meeting didn't go that well. While Tecumseh was away seeking Cherokee allies, Harrison leads an army of a thousand US troops to attack the Shawnee encampment at Prophetstown. The village there is burned to the ground. War follows after. • War Hawks were members of Congress, mostly from the South and West, who aggressively pushed for a war against Britain. They thought that war was a key to territorial expansion. They were confident that if the US went to war with Britain, French inhabitants of Canada would revolt, allowing the US to seize Canada. They also wanted to attack the Spanish colonies in Florida to claim more territory for the US. They thought that if Britain and Spain were out of the picture, they could deal with the Indian frontier. • Madison asks Congress to declare war against Britain. They do. • The War of 1812 begins in 1812 and ends a few years later in 1815. This war is deemed to have a large impact on the US. The War of 1812 is considered to have resolved issues limiting US development for decades, and its conclusion launched a new period of growth for the country. It was the last war ever fought between the US and Great Britain, and it would eventually bring peace between the two nations. It was also the last war where Indian tribes were allied with one nation against another. • The US attacks Canada. These attacks are considered to be disasters. The US Army was deemed too weak because of Jefferson's and Madison's commitments to a small government and modest taxes. • Oliver Hazard Perry was a naval commander who led ships in an American naval victory on Lake Eerie. He was considered at the time as the country's new hero. • American victories on the Great Lakes and Battle of the Thames in October 1813. Tecumseh was killed in the battle of Thames. The death of Tecumseh proves to be a disaster for the Indian coalition he started. The alliance falls apart, and the Ohio and Indiana territory is open now to white settlement. The War of 1812 is viewed as a disaster for Indians living east of the Mississippi. • British troops raided Washington and burned the capitol and the White House in August 1814. Neither building was rebuilt until after the war was over. • The Star-Bangled Banner was written by Francis Scott Key after he watches British and American troops battle it out at Fort McHenry. He was inspired to write the song while in British custody after seeing an American flag waving through the fog and smoke. • Jackson achieves victory over a Creek and Cherokee alliance at the Battle of Horseshoe Bend in March 1814. Nearly a thousand Indian fighters died and 2 thousand more in subsequent battles. • American and British delegations meet in Ghent, Belgium. • The Treaty of Ghent was signed in December 1814 (ratified in 1815) between the US and Britain that ended the War of 1812. I guess you could call this a stalemate between Great Britain and the US. • The Hartford Convention was a meeting held in December 1814 by Federalist delegates from the New England states to protest the continuation of the War of 1812. The war had devastated the New England colony, which was dependent on international shipping. In protest, New England governors ordered their state militias to serve only within the borders of their own states. The Hartford Convention was convened to demand peace and to consider New England's secession from the Union if peace did not come quickly. The Federalists were seen as traitors because of what they said prior to the Battle of New Orleans. • US victory at Battle of New Orleans. The US troops were led by Andrew Jackson. Jackson would be seen as an American hero after winning this battle. Americans think they won the war before hearing news of the Treaty of Ghent came out. This battle helped convince the British to really consider honoring the terms of the treaty. This also helped create American nationalism. • The United States was virtually bankrupt as a result of the war. • The Rush Bagot Treaty demilitarized the Great Lakes between the US and Canada. • Anglo-American Convention sets the border between the US and Canada and includes an agreement for temporary joint ownership of the Oregon Territory in 1818. • The US starts to become a more confident nation subsequent to the War of 1812. • Monroe sends Jackson to suppress the Seminoles that were harassing white settlers between 1817 and 1818. They couldn't find many Seminoles, who were adept at hiding in swamps and marshes, but they burned their villages and crops to the ground. They also seized Spanish forts. Once they found a Creek and Seminoles, many of them were killed. None of this is deemed to have caused an uproar in the US or Europe. • The Adams-Onís Treaty was an 1819 treaty between the US and Spain that allowed for Spain to cede Florida to the United States in exchange for $5 million. • The Monroe Doctrine was a declaration made by James Monroe in 1823 to declare that the Western Hemisphere was to be closed off from further European colonization and that the United States would not allow European interference in the internal affairs of independent nations anywhere in the Americas. This was considered to be a bold announcement. Chapter 9 notes • The Market Revolution was a time of much change. • Slave labor is considered to have played a key role in cotton production. Growing, processing, and shipping cotton was key to the economic development of the US in the decades after the War of 1812. Cotton was considered as the center of economic life in the US and around the world. • Cotton is known to have transformed many Americans' lives. The rapid growth of cotton production changed the lives of more Americans, whether or not they were directly involved in cotton production, than any other development between 1800 and the Civil War. It changed the nation's physical, commercial, and political landscape. Cotton remained as a major industry up until the 1930s. • Picking cotton was when Workers had to take the seed out of cotton by hand before it could be spun into thread. It would probably take a slave a whole day just to get through 1 pound of cotton. • Eli Whitney patented the cotton gin in 1794. A cotton gin separates cotton from its seeds. This invention made cotton easy and cheap to produce. • Slavery, which was decreasing prior to the invention of the cotton gin, became a demand right after. • The Black belt was a cotton-growing region that developed in the early 1800s, stretching from Georgia through Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana, named for its rich black soil. The greatest cotton production was in this area. It had soil that was considered to be perfect for growing cotton. • Cotton planters had access to more and more land in the growing nation, an economic nation that supported them, and perhaps most important, a virtually unlimited pool of very cheap labor because of American slavery. • Probably during the 1790s, Europeans came to prefer cotton clothing to the wool or linen that clothed them for generations. Cotton was cooler and more comfortable than wool, and it was getting cheaper. • Samuel Slater was an Englishman who's known for having brought the textile industry to America. He re-created the mechanical spinning in mills in RI Richard Arkwright made. • 9% of the world's cotton came from the US. • The lives of African slaves would be transformed by the introduction of cotton, and white owners would see them as more valuable. • Many slaves were forced from their homes to move to the interior states. • Black-American families were broken apart by white auctioneers. • More than a 1/3 of all slave children were sold from their parents. • Coffles was the name given to organized groups of slaves that walked west. Coffles of 20 to 50 slaves, sometimes more, trudging west became a common sight of southern life. Walking 15 to 20 miles a day, it could take the slaves 2 months to go from Virginia to the Mississippi valley, often longer when rain flooded streams and turned roads into mud. In later years, more slaves were transported by ship to New Orleans, which became the largest slave-trading center in the United States by the 1820s. • The NY legislature authorized construction of the Erie Canal in 1817. • Lowell, MA, was laid out as a new mill town in 1823 by partners Patrick T. Jackson and Nathan Appleton, the founders of the Boston manufacturing company. This place can be considered as a major place for American manufacturing. There were water-powered mills or factories there that would turn cotton into cloth. Similar operations would spring up in other places in the US. The creation of Lowell as an industrial city would allow for the American Revolution to commence. Lowell's mills were also known for hiring young single women to work in their mills. Working conditions at these mills were hard. Women workers had protests. • While cotton is considered to be the prime factor in the growth of the US economy after 1815, it was not the only one. Technology was one as well. • Improvements in internal transportation became essential for the country's commercial development. • DeWitt Clinton was the mayor of New York who ran for governor in 1816 with a promise to build a canal using state funds. The canal that Clinton proposed avoided the hard-to-navigate Mohawk River and Lake Ontario (using the lake would have lowered construction costs but risked diverting trade to Canada). He proposed that a canal be built along an old Mohawk Indian trading route that ran from the Hudson Valley directly to Buffalo on Lake Erie. Such a canal would give farmers along its route a link to markets and would connect all of New York State to Ohio and eventually to the Mississippi River. It's what would make NYC the commercial capital of the nation. • Martin Van Buren was a Vice President for Andrew Jackson and an eventual president. He did not like Clinton's ideas at first for building until he realized its benefits. He's known as the prime architect of Jackson's campaign. • Robert Fulton built the first commercially successful steamboat, the Clermont, in 1807. His invention revolutionized water transportation because it significantly cut the travel time from NY to Albany. Within 2 decades, New York Harbor and adjacent areas had become a hive of steamboat activity for both freight and passengers, and many steamboat lines competed for the trade. Steamboats also transformed trade on the Mississippi River. Farmers didn't have to fight against the current while going up the River. Steamboats made for easy and fast travel. • The National Road was a gravel road that starts in Cumberland, MY, and goes to Vandalia, IL. It went across the Appalachian Mountains and led into the interior of the US. It was built by congress using funds from the sale of government lands in Ohio. • Although the Erie Canal was without question the most important canal in the nation, a huge network of canals, dirt and gravel roads, and later, railroads, connected inland areas to ocean ports and world markets. • News spread faster because of an increased speed in travel. • The Telegraph revolutionized forms of fast communication. • In the early years of the Republic, many Americans harbored deep distrust of large business enterprises. • The Era of Good Feelings was a period from 1817 to 1823 in which the decline of the Federalists enabled the Democratic-Republicans to govern in a spirit of seemingly nonpartisan harmony. This happened during Monroe's two terms as president. It was called the Era of a Good Feelings because of a lack of rancor in Monroe's virtually unanimous election and reelection during a time when the Federalist Party almost disappeared. • Dartmouth V. Woodward was an 1819 decision from the Marshall Court ruling that the New Hampshire legislature couldn't change Dartmouth College into a state college because it violated the original charter. • McCullough vs. Maryland was another important 1819 decision. congress had chartered the 2nd bank of the US at the end of the War of 1812 to stabilize the nation's finances. But the bank was not popular with many. In response to the opposition to the bank and to charges of irregularities in the bank's Maryland branch, the state of Maryland imposed a tax on the bank as a way to drive it out of business, or at least out of Maryland. The court said that Maryland couldn't do that. The Supreme Court declared in this case that states could not interfere with the workings of the Federal government and specifically could not tax any of its activities. • Many may have felt that John Marshall's actions while serving as a justice made both the Constitution and the rights of people stronger. • The court ruled in Gibbons V. Ogden that the state of NY did not have a right to give Aaron Ogden, a partner of Robert Fulton, a monopoly to ferry service in New York Harbor since the harbor connected NY and NJ and thus involved interstate commerce, which only congress could control. • The court ruled in Worcester V. Georgia that the state of Georgia could not regulate private dealings by US citizens within territory controlled by the Cherokee tribe since Cherokees had sovereign rights, subject only to the authority of the Federal Government. • The Tallmadage Amendment was introduced by congressman James Tallmadge, Jr., of NY to prohibit the introduction of new slaves and gradually free those who were already there. This creates a crisis that causes southern representatives and senators to attack the amendment and its author. • Henry Clay was the speaker of the House of Representatives. He's known as the great compromiser because he helped president Monroe design the Missouri compromise. He and John Quincy Adams would be known for being apart of a corrupt bargain according to Andrew Jackson. • The Missouri Compromise was made by congress in 1820 that admitted Missouri to the Union as a slave state and Maine as a free state as well as prohibited slavery in the rest of the Louisiana purchase territory above 36 30 north latitude. Many Northerners opposed the compromise, • The Erie Canal was completed in 1825. It linked the Hudson River with the Great Lakes and gave farmers all along its route new ways to be part of a global economic system of trade. • With the development of the trans-Atlantic cotton trade and the opening of the Erie Canal, New York City grew rapidly in its commercial success. However, especially in hard times, the city was also plagued with areas of squalid poverty. Many New Yorkers lived in the most difficult conditions, especially in the notorious crime-filled Five Points neighborhood of Lower Manhattan. • Andrew Jackson's known as a hero for the common man. • The American System was a program of government subsidies to improve roads and canals and to foster economic growth and protect domestic manufacturers from foreign competition. • The Whig Party was a political party that began to take shape in support of the Adams-Clay American System and was first known as the National Republicans, but became the Whig Party in the 1830s in opposition to the Jacksonian Democrats. • The Democratic Party was a political party that followed the ideas of Jefferson and Jackson and favored states' rights and a limited role for the federal government, especially in economic affairs (very different from the modern Democratic Party). • Tariff of Abominations happened in 1828. Andrew Jackson was also elected as president that same year. • Andrew Jackson forced the Cherokees, Chickasaws, Choctaws, and Creeks off of their ancestral lands in Georgia, Alabama, and Mississippi, opening the land to white settlement and cotton production. • Railroads replaced poorly constructed roads in the 1840s. Chapter 10 notes • The Tariff of Abominations was a revised federal tariff (or tax on imports) that lowered tax on cotton products but raised it on many of the products made in the mid-Atlantic states. This infuriated rural interests, especially southern plantation owners, who saw the cost for everything they needed go up while no protection was provided for the price of goods—most of all, raw cotton—that they produced and sold on the international market. The 1828 tariff came to be known as the Tariff of Abominations because it was so uneven and obviously unfair in the industries and regions it protected, but it passed Congress and set the stage for a confusing presidency and the crises that followed. Planters in South Carolina saw the tariff as a terrible hardship and an unfair use of Federal power. • The era during which Jackson led the country was known as the Age of Jackson. • Politics dominated the thinking of many Americans during the Age of Jackson. • Andrew Jackson was inaugurated as president in March 1829. This was considered to be a somber affair because Jackson was still mourning the death of his wife who died the previous December. He attacked John Quincy Adams for his attacks that Jackson believed hastened his wife's death, and he didn't even attend his own inaugural ball. • When Jackson arrived at the Whitehouse, a festive crowd overran the place, stood on furniture, broke China, and had to be lured outside with bowls of spiked punch. • One of Jackson's main missions that shaped his agenda as president was to acquire more land for white settlers. He's known for forcing Indian tribes to move west of the Mississippi River. He also opposed the Bank of the United States. • The Spoils System was a way of selecting people for government jobs based on the idea that "To the victor belongs the spoils." This is something that Jackson believed in. • Jackson wants to abolish the electoral college. • Martin Van Buren is known as the architect of Jackson's campaign. He became the Secretary of State. • The "kitchen cabinet" was a name given to a group of informal advisors that Jackson had surrounded himself with. The group comprised of longtime friends and advisors who worked closely with the president, particularly to accomplish his most cherished goals. • Andrew Jackson vetoed more congressional bills than all of his predecessors combined. He made it clear that Congress would have to reckon with him. • Nullification was a constitutional doctrine holding that a state has a legal right to declare a national law null and void within its borders. Many southern leaders had insisted to Jackson that their states had the right to nullification. Jackson was a slaveholder and a defender of slavery, but if slaveholders threatened national unity, he wanted to make it clear that they would have to deal with him. • Jackson was a hero to some and an evil genius to others. Historians consider him to be one of the most complex American leaders, expanding the roles of poor and working-class Whites in the political process and of the presidency in American life while reducing the rights of Indians, slaves, federal employees, bankers, and indeed anyone who disagreed with him. • "Indian Removal" was Jackson's policy of forcing the Cherokee Nation and other tribes to move to the reservations in distant Oklahoma, or Indian Territory as it was called. Some Americans saw this as a great achievement. For the tribes caught in Jackson's web, the policy led to war within the tribes, terrible losses, resistance, resignation, and reinvention. Their white supporters, though passionate, were ineffective against Jackson. • The Five Civilized Tribes was the name given to the group that comprised the Cherokees, Chickasaws, Choctaws, Creeks, and Seminoles. They had for generations lived in the region known as the Old Southwest—Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi—as well as in Arkansas and Florida. These tribes had traded and fought with Spanish, French, and English settlers and had sold or ceded much of their land, but based on treaties with the US government, they still owned huge tracts of land in the heart of the cotton-growing south. These tribes had established treaty agreements with the United States in the late 1700s or early 1800s, lived in peace with their neighbors, and adopted more of the ways of the whites than most other Native Americans. • Sequoyah was a Cherokee Warrior who had an admiration for the European style of communication and farming. He took it upon himself to invent an eighty-six-character alphabet that represented the syllables of spoken Cherokee. He did this for the Choctaw language. Sequoyah was intrigued with the way reading seemed to give the Whites power. • Congress passed the Indian Removal Act in 1830 to provide funds for removing and resettling eastern Indians in the West. It granted the president the authority to use force if necessary and resulted in the involuntary transfer of thousands of Native Americans to new homes in Oklahoma. • Georgia wanted to take the lead in seizing Indian land. In 1824, Governor George Troup announced that he was ending treaty rights for the Cherokee and Creek tribes. When President John Quincy Adams opposed him, citing the tribes' treaties with the US government, Troup and his successor, John Forsyth, campaigned for Jackson in 1828. In December 1828, the Georgia legislature declared that, starting in June 1830, Georgia state laws would extend to all parts of the Cherokee Republic despite Federal treaty agreements to the contrary. White Georgians then began moving onto Cherokee lands, and Jackson withdrew US troops who had been protecting the Cherokees. It was in this context that Jackson addressed congress, advocating an Indian Removal Act to "protect" the Cherokees from Georgia laws. The president gave the tribes what seemed like a choice: "voluntarily" move west to new lands where their independence would be honored or choose to stay where they were. But if they chose to stay, they would be subject to the laws of Georgia, laws that said Indians could not vote, own property, testify against a white person in court, or obtain credit. It was not much of a choice, as Jackson said himself in private. • The commencement of the Indian Removal Act would lead to the creation of the Bureau of Indian Affairs. • The land that the government offered to the tribes they were displacing was completely unfamiliar to them. Most people thought of it simply as a desert where farming would be virtually impossible. Indian territory, which eventually became the state of Oklahoma, was a portion of the Louisiana purchase just north of Texas. The land was not empty, though the government tended to treat it that way. Some of the plain tribes—the Wichitas, Kiowas, Kiowa Apaches, and especially Osages—had lived there for generations. Some tribes from the Ohio-Illinois area—Shawnees, Delawares (Lenapes), Miamis, Kickapoos, Sacs, and Fox—had been relocated to that territory after various defeats by the US Army. In addition, there were a few white settlers and some slaves and former slaves seeking refuge in the region. Nevertheless, under Jackson's plan, the government was now offering a large part of the territory to the Cherokees and others of the Five Civilized Tribes. • Cherokee, Creek, Chickasaw, Choctaw, and Seminole leaders had long feared such a move, and many Whites now rallied to their side. In Congress and the national press, Indian Removal became a major fight. • Catherine Beecher was a reformer associated with many causes who organized women to defend Indian rights and flooded Congress with petitions. Missionaries campaigned against the bill so vigorously that Georgia sentenced two of them to prison at hard labor for refusing to abandon the Indians. • In the Senate, Theodore Frelinghuysen of New Jersey, long a supporter of Protestant missionaries, led the opposition to the Indian Removal Bill. Frelinghuysen insisted that the government was bound by its treaties and that, if need be, should use the US Army to force Georgia to retract its claims to Indian lands. Henry Clay, who had not previously spoken in favor of Indian rights, joined the antiremoval forces. In the end, the removal bill passed the Senate 28-19, but passed the House by only a 102-98 vote. • Cherokee Nation v. Georgia (1831) and Worcester v. Georgia (1832) were 2 cases where the US Supreme Court, under Chief Justice John Marshall, ruled that the Cherokees were a "domestic dependent nation and could not be forced by the state of Georgia to give up land that the treaty rights agreed to by the US had given them. Jackson simply ignored the court. Jackson is alleged to have said, "John Marshall has made his decision, now let him enforce it." • Indian Removal was a disaster for the Five Civilized Tribes. The government had seized their homes and offered in return land that was thousands of miles away and completely foreign to them. Moreover, the tribes were divided about how to respond. • The so-called Second Creek War happened in Alabama in 1836 when Creeks showed resistance to being moved and were expelled by Federal Troops on orders of the Secretary of State. The Cherokees suffered high mortality rates subsequent to the conflict. • Among the Cherokees, a civil conflict broke out about how to respond to the demand that they move to Oklahoma. Principal chief John Ross and most of the Cherokees were determined to fight for their lands. A minority, some of whom were among the rising middle class and slaveholders within the tribe, decided a compromise was better than forced expulsion. John Ridge and Elias Boudinot, publisher of the Cherokee Phoenix, signed the Treaty of New Echota in 1835 to give the US land in Georgia in exchange for land in Oklahoma and $5 million. • Martin Van Buren was determined to enforce his predecessor's policy. • The Trail of Tears was the forced march of the remaining Cherokee Indians, along with US Army guards guiding them, from the detention centers they stayed in on their homelands in Georgia to the Indian Territory in the West; thousands of Cherokees died along the way because of the harsh conditions they were traveling in during the winter of 1838-1839. The Cherokees never had enough food, blankets, or warm clothing, and as they moved in large groups, disease and exposure took a terrible toll. Perhaps a quarter to a third of the marchers died. • The Seminoles of the Florida territory had no intention of moving off of their lands. They disappeared into the swamps which they were adept at hiding in, and when soldiers tried to force them out, they were annihilated. From that point on a conflict would ensue between the US and Seminoles that became known as the Second Seminole War. The war wasn't resolved until 1842. Fewer Seminoles than members of any other tribe ever moved to Oklahoma. • The Black Hawk War ensued in 1832 when a chief named Black Hawk led 1000 to 2000 Sac and Fox people back across the Mississippi River, close to their old homelands. They were moving to escape from hostile Sioux groups on the Great Plains and Iowa territory. The Illinois governor took the tribes' move into Illinois as an attack, called out the militia, and asked for federal troops. In Black Hawk's war, federal and state troops on the east side of the Mississippi and Sioux on the west virtually annihilated the Fox and Sac tribes, to the delight of the whites who were happy to see these tribes out of their way. • Around 46000 Indians were removed during the Jackson Administration, and subsequent administrations removed as many more. • The Cherokees and other tribes tend to disappear from the history books after the trail of tears. But the Cherokees, Choctaws, and Creeks were resilient people. They reestablished their communities and culture on the inhospitable and alien lands they were displaced in, and they succeeded. As the last Cherokees arrived in Indian territory in 1839, the tribe adopted a new constitution and established Tahlequah as their capital. In 1844, they began publishing the newspaper Cherokee Advocate in both English and Cherokee. They also set up a school system with elementary schools as well as higher education institutes and seminaries to prepare teachers—European and Cherokee—for their schools. • The Second Bank of the United States was a bank chartered by Congress in 1816 with extensive regulatory powers over currency and credit. Jackson vetoes recharter of Second Bank of the United States in 1832. He disagreed about the government's role in the national economy. • Many of Jackson's supporters disagreed with him about the bank. The country was prospering, credit was solid, and the soundness of the currency, despite Jackson's words, seemed secure. • Nicholas Biddle was the bank's president who had helped with ending the hard times after the Panic of 1819. • The Democratic Republicans start to call themselves Democrats. The opposition to Jackson, who were known as National Republicans, started to call themselves the Whig Party. They nominated Henry Clay for president. • Congress didn't override Jackson's veto after he got elected again. • Jackson orders his treasury secretary to remove federal deposits from the bank and place them in 23 state banks that his opponents called "pet" banks. This move was meant to destroy the Second Bank of the United States. • Roger B. Taney was Jackson's treasury secretary who undermined the bank by paying government bills with its funds from its accounts. He also didn't deposit new federal revenue in the bank. Instead, the government's income went to the state banks. It was a mortal blow. The Federal Government's account slowly shrunk to zero and the Second Bank of the United States was dead, though it took a few years to die. • John C. Calhoun was John Quincy Adams' Vice President when he was elected in 1824. He was also a Vice President and an opponent of Jackson. • The 12th amendment states that each elector must cast distinct votes for president and Vice President, instead of 2 votes for just the president. If no candidate received a majority, the House chooses from the top 3 candidates. The 12th Amendment was passed to try and correct what happened in the presidential election of 1800. • John C. Calhoun was a nationalist who favored internal improvements as much as Henry Clay and John Quincy Adams. He and Jackson were at odds on many occasions. • Many believed that Peggy Eaton, the wife of John Eaton, Jackson's Secretary of war, had been a widow because her husband committed suicide after finding out she was having an affair with Eaton. Jackson, who had been deeply hurt by the attacks on his marriage, defended the Eatons. • Nullification crisis begins to ensue within the country. • Many of the leaders in South Carolina, Calhoun's home state, were becoming very fearful of the federal government, and South Carolina was developing the strongest anti-federal stance in the Union. The South Carolina Radicals, as they were called, dominated state government. • A reason that public opinion in South Carolina supported nullification of the tariff of abominations was because it hurt them economically. Sellers there were worried that an increase in prices of goods would decrease the amount of buyers they'd get. • Robert Hayne was a Senator of South Carolina who supported the rights of South Carolina in nullifying federal law and, if unsatisfied, to secede from the union if Congress ever made a move against slavery. • Danial Webster was a Senator for Massachusetts who pleaded for a strong federal union that no states should be allowed to undermine. • South Carolina legislature nullifies federal tariffs in 1832. They threaten secession from the US if they can't do that. Jackson's furious. • Congress passes compromise tariff in 1833. Henry Clay had crafted this based on Adam's proposals and gave the president the authority to put down the rebellion. • Wiser heads in South Carolina decided to compromise. The state convention reconvened and declared victory based on the new Clay tariff. For spite, they also nullified the congressional vote of new military authority, which they called the "Force Bill," but that action was considered to be meaningless since South Carolina was no longer resisting federal authority. • Jackson is deemed to have won the nullification battle, but it was an incomplete victory. He made it clear, in words and actions, which Abraham Lincoln would use as precedent, that no state could nullify federal law and that the US Government would use force to assert its authority. He was treated as a hero in many parts of the country and even given an honorary degree by Harvard University. Even so, neither Calhoun nor the South Carolina legislature admitted defeat. • Nullification debate ended in 1833. • Many Americans at the time had strong opinions about Andrew Jackson. They might love him or hate him, but they paid attention to what he did. However, politics were deemed to have been far from the only interest of most people. Religion was one as well. • The Second Great Awakening was garnering new strength in the Jacksonian Era. • Charles G. Finney was a lawyer who started preaching in churches in upstate New York. He left his job at his law practice to become a preacher. In July 1824, he was ordained as a Presbyterian minister in spite of his lack of formal training. In 1826, the spirit of revivalism hit upstate New York, and in 1830, Finney led the largest religious revival ever to be seen in Rochester, New York. Finney is known for not seeking an emotional catharsis from his congregants but, like an attorney, tried to argue his case logically using wit and wisdom. Nevertheless, in his preaching, the religious orthodoxy that dominated Congregational and Presbyterian churches gave way to a more egalitarian spirit that fit with the era. Finney called people to change their lives, not necessarily to agree with specific creeds. Because of his preaching, hundreds, then thousands, took religion more seriously, joined churches, participated in reform movements, and changed New York and American society. • By the late 1830s, the area along the Erie Canal where Finney preached had become known as "the burned-over district" because of the fires of religious enthusiasm that permeated throughout that region. • Finney was far from the only revivalist in New York. However, he gave the New York revivals a distinct tone—different not only from the emotionalism of frontier revivals but also from the staid life of many established churches. • Finney thought conversion meant that one needed to show one's new faith in ethical behavior, and no ethical behavior seemed more important to him than opposing slavery. Upstate New York's churches sent revivalist preachers all throughout the country to preach for the abolition of slavery. Many northerners will also begin to express sentiments for anti-slavery. • Lyman Beecher is considered to be one of the main leaders of the Second Great Awakening. He was a minister who had been a staunch supporter for the Congregational churches in Connecticut. Once the Connecticut churches lost their support, however, Beecher embraced a new situation and supported revivals and voluntary associations for moral reform as a far better approach than any state support for religion. As a second great awakening grew, a series of voluntary societies or interdenominational organizations that Beecher helped launch also grew in influence. These societies were not owned by any religious bodies but, rather, depended on the voluntary contributions of members of several different religious bodies. They represented a new form of cooperation in the service of a larger goal to change the culture of the US. • In the early 1830s, Lyman Beecher became president of Lane Theological Seminary in Cincinnati. It was in this place that he helped prepare future ministers, strengthen religious colleges, and place Protestant pastors in hundreds of midwestern churches. He also helped create the public school system of Ohio and supported schools and teachers across the Midwest. The goal of all this activity was to strengthen the moral sway of congregational-Presbyterian Protestantism against the individualism of Jacksonian Democrats, Catholics, and other more individualistic Protestants. For Beecher, separation of church and state meant that specific denominations would not yield political power, but Protestant reformers would provide the leadership in a culture in which the churches, voluntary societies, and public schools would reinforce the common beliefs and practices that would shape all aspects of American life. • Theodore Dwight Weld was a close lieutenant of Finney who encouraged women to be active in their religious communities. • Where New England churches had urged women to keep silent except at home, the new generation of revivalists welcomed them as prayer leaders and preachers. • The Second Great Awakening led to crusades for political, moral, and social reforms among many Protestant groups and inspired the growth of utopian communities. • Lyman Beecher also advocated for the opposition to alcohol. He called for "the banishment of ardent spirits from the list of lawful objects of commerce." Many, including members of Congress, took the pledge to stop drinking. • Dorothea Dix was a reformer in the treatment of the mentally ill. She expressed her concerns for how the mentally ill were being treated very much like prisoners, and she advocated for reforms. She talked to the Massachusetts legislature to bring attention to the conditions that mentally ill individuals were facing while in prison. The result, beginning in Massachusetts, was that a system of state hospitals for those deemed insane would replace the earlier prisons. • The religious enthusiasm of the early 1800s also inspired untraditional ways of thinking about religious matters. The amount of space in a country as large as America allowed people to develop their own communities relatively undisturbed, and the American emphasis on liberty, even the liberty to be eccentric, made the US fertile ground for radical experiments and utopian religious communities. Some of these religious experiments were short lived. Others lasted for generations. A few, most of all the Mormons, have continued to the present. • Ann Lee was the founder of the United Society of Believers in Christ's Second Appearing, or the Shakers. She was also known as Mother Ann Lee. She believed that she was a reincarnation of Jesus Christ. She gathered a few supporters in England and came to America in 1774. Lee was convinced that she was receiving a special revelation from God that human sexuality was the basis of all sin and celibacy was the only way to live a godly life. • There were Shaker communities in New York and New England. • John Humphrey Noyes was the founder and spiritual guide of the Oneida Community. He believed that repentance from sin wasn't good enough, that people should simply stop sinning, and that all Christians could achieve a state "in which all the affections of the heart are given to God, and in which there is no sin." He gathered a small community in Putney, Vermont, he expanded his definition of Christian perfectionism to include what he called a "complex marriage," an arrangement in which monogamy was replaced with many sexual companions. Noyes argued that sexual pleasure was a gift from God and that Christianity demanded the sharing of that gift without any exclusive or jealous reservations. Vermont authorities, however, took a dim view to these sexual practices, and Noyes and his followers moved to Oneida, New York, where the community thrived for decades, supported ultimately by producing and selling silverware. Oneida eventually fell victim to Victorian morality and to its dependence on Noyes as its single charismatic leader. • Robert Owen is the founder of the New Harmony Community. After making a fortune in London, Robert Owen establishes a model factory town at New Lanark, Scotland, in which he sought to put the spirit of universal welfare into practice. In the early 1820s, Owen decided to relocate his utopian vision of a community designed to benefit all of its members and establish it in the US. In early 1825, 900 people arrived at New Harmony, Indiana, where Owen had purchased land. But New Harmony had failed within a year. The community could not attract enough skilled workers to make it economically successful. There was tension between those who ran New Harmony and the rest of the community. As one disaffected resident recalled, the "aristocrats" quarreled, and the fields went to ruin. Owen lost most of his fortune, which he had invested in New Harmony, but returned to England to continue to advocate his version of social reform. • Joseph Smith founded the Church of Jesus Christ of the Latter-Day Saints in 1830. He was as much a product of New York's burned-over district as Charles G. Finney. The Church of Jesus Christ of the Latter-Day Saints is seen to be the most successful community to have spawned during the Second Great Awakening. • Joseph Smith was born in 1805 and moved with his family to a farm in New York at the age of 11. In 1827, word spread along the Erie Canal that Smith had found a treasure that would unlock the Indian history of the area. He had, he said, found golden plates and magical stones known as Urim and Thummim with which to read and translate what was written on the plates by an ancient-historian named Mormon. He published the result, the Book of Mormon, in 1830. With that book, a uniquely American religious tradition was born, one that its followers believed represented a rebirth of true Christianity. Smith, however, did much more than publish a new book; he organized a community. Within a month of the book's publication, the first Mormon community began to form in Palmyra, New York, the place where Smith moved to with his family when he was 11. Smith was its leader. Some responded with hostility to his efforts, even tarring and feathering Smith at 1 point. But converts seeking religious truth poured in, a temple was built, and the community grew. In response to the hostility, Smith and the Mormon community moved to Missouri and then, in the late 1830s, to Nauvoo, IL, which became the largest and fastest-growing city in Illinois because of Mormonism. The city's 15 thousand residents became a virtually autonomous state, and their militia was recognized by state law. But Smith's political involvements and religious teachings, especially his suggestion that all members participate in marriages involving 1 husband and multiple wives, brought renewed hostility. On June 27th, 1844, a mob killed Smith and his brother Hyrum. Brigham Young took over as the new leader of the Mormons in 1847. He leads them on a cross-continent trek to the shores of the Great Salt Lake in what is now Utah. Salt lake was then on the northern edge of the Republic of Mexico, which was soon to be annexed by the US. There, far from any governmental authority, they set up settlements in a tight, church-regulated community. They also embraced Smith's revelation that a man could take as many wives as he could support. • Ralph Waldo Emerson began "Divinity School Address" in 1838. In 1838, far from Salt Lake City or the revivals of New York, Emerson gave a speech at Harvard Divinity School in Cambridge, Massachusetts, that had as much impact as any other revival sermon. Emerson had been ordained as a Unitarian minister but had resigned when he came to believe that the Lord's supper and public prayer were barriers to direct experience of the divine. The focus on passionate direct experience of the world and of the divine would become the core of the Transcendentalist movement. In the Divinity School Address," Emerson told an audience of future Unitarian ministers that too often in formal worship, "[t]he soul is not preached." And, he said, "The true preacher can be known by this, that he deals out to the people of his life,—life passed through the fire of thought." Emerson's call to preach "throbs of desire and hope" rather than formal theology offended most of his audience and he was never invited back to the Divinity School, but the speech represented a new approach to religious life that was developing in America in the 1830s. • Brook Farm was a utopian community founded in West Roxbury, Massachusetts, where the residents sought to support themselves through manual labor. Women and men shared work equally, and an effort was made at true gender equity. But few of the residents actually knew much about farming, and the farm did not prosper. The community disbanded in 1847. • Emerson's writings and the Transcendentalist movement he helped launch reflected an impatience with " old ways" and a desire for direct and immediate experience of the divine that continued to impact American religious life. • Catharine Beecher published the Essay on the Education of Female Teachers in 1835 to argue that women were better equipped than men to be teachers, and she wanted to educate them for the work. She saw teaching as an extension of motherhood. • Emma Trillard had founded Troy Female Seminary in 1821 in upstate New York to prepare women to be teachers. • William Holmes Mcguffrey wrote a school book that became the text of American morality. The first McGuffrey's Reader is published in 1836. The McGuffrey's reader offered lessons in reading and public speaking designed to create a unified, literate, and patriotic society. They would not only teach morality but also sought to create a common American pattern of speaking that would replace regional dialects. It contained stories of American history and ethical instructions. More of these would be published and used in public schools. • Horace Mann was a whig political leader who helped launch a new and more tightly organized school system in Massachusetts—a system that came to serve as a model for much of the nation. He was elected as secretary of the Massachusetts Board of Education In 1837. • First daguerreotypes-forerunners of modern photography in 1839. • The Hudson River School was a new generation of artists emerging in the 1820s and 1830s that set out to show the rural American landscape to the nation and the world. Focusing mostly on New York's Hudson River Valley, they painted representational, but also idealized, pictures that showed the light, color, and natural beauty of the countryside. Chapter 12 notes • In the 1830s, 1840s, and 1850s, the US became increasingly divided as immigrants and native-born Americans flocked to industrial cities of the North, while in the South, cotton-generated wealth created a life of ease for a few based on the misery for the many. • Immigration and the nation's expanding borders increased the population of the US in the 1830s, 1840s, and 1850s. A nation of fewer than 13 million people in 1830 included 17 million people in 1840 and 23 million inhabitants in 1850. • The California Gold Rush and growing US industrialization beckoned with new opportunities that made immigrants from all over want to come to America. • Many immigrants were faced with hunger and oppression and a prospect for a better future, and this was the reason why many wanted to come to America. The US could be seen as a place that allowed for political, social, religious, and economic freedoms. • In 1840, the US included 1.8 million square miles. Less than 10 years later, the country included almost 3 million square miles. Some of the land was acquired through the war with Mexico, and the lands they got were sparsely populated. • Many young people in China were fascinated by the stories that they may have heard from across the Pacific. • Before 1840, only a few hundred Chinese were living in the US. But afterwards in the 1840s and 1850s, Chinese immigrants came to California and also to the then-independent Kingdom of Hawaii because of a push from China and also a pull from the US and Hawaii. Those years were hard in China, especially in Guandong province where most immigrants originated. Under Chinese law, it was illegal for anyone to leave China, but in desperate times, thousands did anyways. California was one of many destinations. • One reason that many immigrants were leaving China had to do with the huge population growth within the country. It had grown from some 200 million in 1762 to 421 million in 1846. With this huge population, land became scarce, rents soared, and many peasants couldn't maintain their meager land holdings. For all its ancient expertise in rice cultivation, China simply did not have enough land to grow since it had 421 million inhabitants. Beginning in 1810, there were terrible famines in China, with some of the worst coming in the 1840s. In those decades, 45 million Chinese may have starved to death. Under such conditions, a fresh start in a new place—temporary or permanent—seemed ideal and many immigrated to the US as well as to many parts of Latin America. • Many Chinese laborers left their homes and families in China to do temporary work in the US in order to support their families back home. • Americans in Hawaii and California may have seen Chinese laborers as a key to solving a shortage of workers to toil on sugar plantations on Maui or to clear and cultivate land in California. At first, Chinese immigrants were warmly welcomed in California. Then they became subjected to criticism and racism. • When there was deemed to be a shortage in gold, many Chinese laborers went to work on the railroads. • The Great Potato famine was a potato blight that caused mass starvation and immigration to the Americas from Ireland. The Great Potato Famine of Ireland goes on from 1845 to 1850. • The Irish who came to the US as a result of the Great Famine of the late 1840s were not the first Irish to come to America, but they came from a part of Ireland different from their predecessors and for different reasons. Most Irish who'd come before or immediately after the Revolution were Irish Protestants, mainly Presbyterian whose ancestors had emigrated to Northern Ireland from Scotland. The Protestant Irish, who became known as the Scots Irish, settled in all the colonies, but especially after the failure of an Irish rebellion of 1798 against the British, more Irish immigrants, both Catholic and Protestant, arrived. • The roots of the Great Famine of 1845-1850 go deep in Irish history—anchored in a rapidly growing population of poor people; in policies that made most people almost totally dependent on a single, easy-to-raise crop rather than a diversified agriculture; and in British policies that forced Irish Catholics to labor for Protestant landowners. But its immediate cause was a plant fungus of unknown sources that devastated potatoes. A potato disease, which had already affected parts of Europe, came to Ireland with surprising rapidity. August 1845 was unusually wet with heavy rains, and the early spread of the disease left potatoes blighted and mildewed and inedible. In 1846, the blight struck with full force, and up to 90% of the fall potato crop was lost. The result was widespread starvation. Potato crops continued to be blighted each year through 1850, and cholera struck in 1848 and 1849. Out of a total Irish population of approximately 8 million, more than 1 million people died from starvation in the 5 years of the Great Famine. During the decade that followed the start of the famine, over 2 million people left Ireland, most of them for the US. • Irish immigrants were soon to be seen as hard workers who were willing to do jobs that no one else would probably want to do. This made other Americans upset. (Z

What should I know about Abraham Lincoln? Part 2

Finally Lincoln looked to the West for a top general. He admired the Vicksburg Campaign of Ulysses S. Grant in Mississippi. Nine days after the Vicksburg surrender (which occurred on July 4, 1863), he sent Grant a "grateful acknowledgment for the almost inestimable service" he had done the country. Lincoln sent also an admission of his own error. He said he had expected Grant to bypass Vicksburg and go on down the Mississippi, instead of crossing the river and turning back to approach Vicksburg from the rear. "I feared it was a mistake," he wrote in his letter of congratulations. "I now wish to make the personal acknowledgment that you were right, and I was wrong." Abraham Lincoln Abraham Lincoln In March 1864 Lincoln promoted Grant to lieutenant general and gave him command of all the federal armies. At last Lincoln had found a man who, with such able subordinates as William T. Sherman, Philip Sheridan, and George H. Thomas, could put into effect those parts of Lincoln's concept of a large-scale, coordinated offensive that still remained to be carried out. Grant was only a member, though an important one, of a top-command arrangement that Lincoln eventually had devised. Overseeing everything was Lincoln himself, the commander in chief. Taking the responsibility for men and supplies was Secretary of War Stanton. Serving as a presidential adviser and as a liaison with military men was Halleck, the chief of staff. And directing all the armies, while accompanying Meade's Army of the Potomac, was Grant, the general in chief. Thus Lincoln pioneered in the creation of a high command, an organization for amassing all the energies and resources of a people in the grand strategy of total war. He combined statecraft and the overall direction of armies with an effectiveness that increased year by year. His achievement is all the more remarkable in view of his lack of training and experience in the art of warfare. This lack may have been an advantage as well as a handicap. Unhampered by outworn military dogma, Lincoln could all the better apply his practical insight and common sense—some would say his military genius—to the winning of the Civil War. There can be no doubt of Lincoln's deep and sincere devotion to the cause of personal freedom. Before his election to the presidency he had spoken often and eloquently on the subject. In 1854, for example, he said he hated the Douglas attitude of indifference toward the possible spread of slavery to new areas. "I hate it because of the monstrous injustice of slavery itself," he declared. "I hate it because it deprives our republican example of its just influence in the world; enables the enemies of free institutions with plausibility to taunt us as hypocrites...." In 1855, writing to his friend Joshua Speed, he recalled a steamboat trip the two had taken on the Ohio River 14 years earlier. "You may remember, as I well do," he said, "that from Louisville [Kentucky] to the mouth of the Ohio there were, on board, ten or a dozen slaves, shackled together with irons. That sight was a continual torment to me; and I see something like it every time I touch the Ohio, or any other slave-border." Yet, as president, Lincoln was at first reluctant to adopt an abolitionist policy. There were several reasons for his hesitancy. He had been elected on a platform pledging no interference with slavery within the states, and in any case he doubted the constitutionality of federal action under the circumstances. He was concerned about the possible difficulties of incorporating nearly four million African Americans, once they had been freed, into the nation's social and political life. Above all, he felt that he must keep the border slaveholding states in the Union, and he feared that an abolitionist program might impel them, in particular his native Kentucky, toward the Confederacy. So he held back while others went ahead. When General John C. Frémont and General David Hunter, within their respective military departments, proclaimed freedom for the enslaved people of disloyal masters, Lincoln revoked the proclamations. When Congress passed confiscation acts in 1861 and 1862, he refrained from a full enforcement of the provisions authorizing him to seize enslaved property. And when Horace Greeley in the New York Tribune appealed to him to enforce these laws, Lincoln patiently replied (August 22, 1862): My paramount object in this struggle is to save the Union, and is not either to save or to destroy slavery. If I could save the Union without freeing any slave I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing all the slaves I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing some and leaving others alone, I would also do that. Meanwhile, in response to the rising antislavery sentiment, Lincoln came forth with an emancipation plan of his own. According to his proposal, the enslaved were to be freed by state action, the slaveholders were to be compensated, the federal government was to share the financial burden, the emancipation process was to be gradual, and the freedmen were to be colonized abroad. Congress indicated its willingness to vote the necessary funds for the Lincoln plan, but none of the border slaveholding states were willing to launch it, and in any case few Black American leaders desired to see their people sent abroad. Emancipation Proclamation Emancipation Proclamation While still hoping for the eventual success of his gradual plan, Lincoln took quite a different step by issuing his preliminary (September 22, 1862) and his final (January 1, 1863) Emancipation Proclamation. This famous decree, which he justified as an exercise of the president's war powers, applied only to those parts of the country actually under Confederate control, not to the loyal enslaving states nor to the federally occupied areas of the Confederacy. Directly or indirectly the proclamation brought freedom during the war to fewer than 200,000 enslaved persons. Yet it had great significance as a symbol. It indicated that the Lincoln government had added freedom to reunion as a war aim, and it attracted liberal opinion in England and Europe to increased support of the Union cause. Lincoln himself doubted the constitutionality of his step, except as a temporary war measure. After the war, the enslaved people freed by the proclamation would have risked re-enslavement had nothing else been done to confirm their liberty. But something else was done: the Thirteenth Amendment was added to the Constitution, and Lincoln played a large part in bringing about this change in the fundamental law. Through the chairman of the Republican National Committee he urged the party to include a plank for such an amendment in its platform of 1864. The plank, as adopted, stated that slavery was the cause of the rebellion, that the president's proclamation had aimed "a death blow at this gigantic evil," and that a constitutional amendment was necessary to "terminate and forever prohibit" it. When Lincoln was reelected on this platform and the Republican majority in Congress was increased, he was justified in feeling, as he apparently did, that he had a mandate from the people for the Thirteenth Amendment. The newly chosen Congress, with its overwhelming Republican majority, was not to meet until after the lame duck session of the old Congress during the winter of 1864-65. Lincoln did not wait. Using his resources of patronage and persuasion upon certain of the Democrats, he managed to get the necessary two-thirds vote before the session's end. He rejoiced as the amendment went out to the states for ratification, and he rejoiced again and again as his own Illinois led off and other states followed one by one in acting favourably upon it. (He did not live to rejoice in its ultimate adoption.) Lincoln deserves his reputation as the Great Emancipator. His claim to that honour, if it rests uncertainly upon his famous proclamation, has a sound basis in the support he gave to the antislavery amendment. It is well founded also in his greatness as the war leader who carried the nation safely through the four-year struggle that brought freedom in its train. And, finally, it is strengthened by the practical demonstrations he gave of respect for human worth and dignity, regardless of colour. During the last two years of his life he welcomed African Americans as visitors and friends in a way no president had done before. One of his friends was the distinguished formerly slaved Frederick Douglass, who once wrote: "In all my interviews with Mr. Lincoln I was impressed with his entire freedom from prejudice against the colored race." Wartime politics of Abraham Lincoln To win the war, President Lincoln had to have popular support. The reunion of North and South required, first of all, a certain degree of unity in the North. But the North contained various groups with special interests of their own. Lincoln faced the task of attracting to his administration the support of as many divergent groups and individuals as possible. Accordingly, he gave much of his time and attention to politics, which in one of its aspects is the art of attracting such support. Fortunately for the Union cause, he was a president with rare political skill. He had the knack of appealing to fellow politicians and talking to them in their own language. He had a talent for smoothing over personal differences and holding the loyalty of men antagonistic to one another. Inheriting the spoils system, he made good use of it, disposing of government jobs in such a way as to strengthen his administration and further its official aims. Discover more about Copperhead opposition to Abraham Lincoln during the U.S. presidential election of 1864 Discover more about Copperhead opposition to Abraham Lincoln during the U.S. presidential election of 1864See all videos for this article The opposition party remained alive and strong. Its membership included war Democrats and peace Democrats, often called "Copperheads," a few of whom collaborated with the enemy. Lincoln did what he could to cultivate the assistance of the war Democrats, as in securing from Congress the timely approval of the Thirteenth Amendment. So far as feasible, he conciliated the peace Democrats. He heeded the complaints of one of them, Governor Horatio Seymour of New York, in regard to the draft quota for that state. He commuted the prison sentence of another, Congressman Clement L. Vallandigham of Ohio, to banishment within the Confederate lines. In dealing with persons suspected of treasonable intent, Lincoln at times authorized his generals to make arbitrary arrests. He justified this action on the ground that he had to allow some temporary sacrifice of parts of the Constitution in order to maintain the Union and thus preserve the Constitution as a whole. He let his generals suspend several newspapers, but only for short periods, and he promptly revoked a military order suppressing the hostile Chicago Times. In a letter to one of his generals he expressed his policy thus: You will only arrest individuals and suppress assemblies or newspapers when they may be working palpable injury to the military in your charge, and in no other case will you interfere with the expression of opinion in any form or allow it to be interfered with violently by others. In this you have a discretion to exercise with great caution, calmness, and forbearance. Considering the dangers and provocations of the time, Lincoln was quite liberal in his treatment of political opponents and the opposition press. He was by no means the dictator critics often accused him of being. Nevertheless, his abrogating of civil liberties, especially his suspension of the privilege of the writ of habeas corpus, disturbed Democrats, Republicans, and even members of his own cabinet. In the opinion of a soldier from Massachusetts, the president, "without the people having any legal means to prevent it, is only prevented from exercising a Russian despotism by the fear he may have of shocking too much the sense of decency of the whole world." Even Lincoln's friend Orville Hickman Browning believed the arrests ordered by the president were "illegal and arbitrary, and did more harm than good, weakening instead of strengthening the government." Yet Lincoln defended his actions, arguing that the Constitution provided for the suspension of such liberties "in cases of Rebellion or Invasion, [when] the public Safety may require it." Moreover, posed Lincoln with rhetorical flare, "Must I shoot a simpleminded soldier boy who deserts" and "not touch a hair of a wilely agitator who induces him to desert?" Within his own party, Lincoln confronted factional divisions and personal rivalries that caused him as much trouble as did the activities of the Democrats. True, he and most of his fellow partisans agreed fairly well upon their principal economic aims. With his approval, the Republicans enacted into law the essentials of the program he had advocated from his early Whig days—a protective tariff; a national banking system; and federal aid for internal improvements, in particular for the construction of a railroad to the Pacific Coast. The Republicans disagreed among themselves, however, on many matters regarding the conduct and purposes of the war. Two main factions arose: the "Radicals" and the "Conservatives." Lincoln himself inclined in spirit toward the Conservatives, but he had friends among the Radicals as well, and he strove to maintain his leadership over both. In appointing his cabinet, he chose his several rivals for the 1860 nomination and, all together, gave representation to every important party group. Wisely he included the outstanding Conservative, Seward, and the outstanding Radical, Salmon P. Chase. Cleverly he overcame cabinet crises and kept these two opposites among his official advisers until Chase's resignation in 1864. Lincoln had to deal with even more serious factional uprisings in Congress. The big issue was the "reconstruction" of the South. The seceded states of Louisiana, Arkansas, and Tennessee having been largely recovered by the federal armies, Lincoln late in 1863 proposed his "ten percent plan," according to which new state governments might be formed when 10 percent of the qualified voters had taken an oath of future loyalty to the United States. The Radicals rejected Lincoln's proposal as too lenient, and they carried through Congress the Wade-Davis Bill, which would have permitted the remaking and readmission of states only after a majority had taken the loyalty oath. When Lincoln pocket-vetoed that bill, its authors published a "manifesto" denouncing him. Lincoln was already the candidate of the "Union" (that is, the Republican) party for reelection to the presidency, and the Wade-Davis manifesto signalized a movement within the party to displace him as the party's nominee. He waited quietly and patiently for the movement to collapse, but even after it had done so, the party remained badly divided. A rival Republican candidate, John C. Frémont, nominated much earlier by a splinter group, was still in the field. Leading Radicals promised to procure Frémont's withdrawal if Lincoln would obtain the resignation of his conservative postmaster general, Montgomery Blair. Eventually Frémont withdrew and Blair resigned. The party was reunited in time for the election of 1864. In 1864, as in 1860, Lincoln was the chief strategist of his own electoral campaign. He took a hand in the management of the Republican Speakers' Bureau, advised state committees on campaign tactics, hired and fired government employees to strengthen party support, and did his best to enable as many soldiers and sailors as possible to vote. Most of the citizens in uniform voted Republican. He was reelected with a large popular majority (55 percent) over his Democratic opponent, General George B. McClellan. In 1864 the Democratic platform called for an armistice and a peace conference, and prominent Republicans as well as Democrats demanded that Lincoln heed Confederate peace offers, irregular and illusory though they were. In a public letter, he stated his own conditions: Any proposition which embraces the restoration of peace, the integrity of the whole Union, and the abandonment of slavery, and which comes by and with an authority that can control the armies now at war against the United states will be received and considered by the Executive government of the United States, and will be met by liberal terms on other substantial and collateral points. When Conservatives protested to him against the implication that the war must go on to free the enslaved, even after reunion had been won, he explained, "To me it seems plain that saying reunion and abandonment of slavery would be considered, if offered, is not saying that nothing else or less would be considered, if offered." After his reelection, in his annual message to Congress, he said, "In stating a single condition of peace, I mean simply to say that the war will cease on the part of the government, whenever it shall have ceased on the part of those who began it." On February 3, 1865, he met personally with Confederate commissioners on a steamship in Hampton Roads, Virginia. He promised to be liberal with pardons if the South would quit the war, but he insisted on reunion as a precondition for any peace arrangement. In his Second Inaugural Address he embodied the spirit of his policy in the famous words "with malice toward none; with charity for all." His terms satisfied neither the Confederate leaders nor the Radical Republicans, and so no peace was possible until the final defeat of the Confederacy. Postwar policy of Abraham Lincoln The Union Christmas Dinner The Union Christmas Dinner At the end of the war, Lincoln's policy for the defeated South was not clear in all its details, though he continued to believe that the main object should be to restore the "seceded States, so-called," to their "proper practical relation" with the Union as soon as possible. He possessed no fixed and uniform program for the region as a whole. As he said in the last public speech of his life (April 11, 1865), "so great peculiarities" pertained to each of the states, and "such important and sudden changes" occurred from time to time, and "so new and unprecedented" was the whole problem that "no exclusive and inflexible plan" could "safely be prescribed." With respect to states like Louisiana and Tennessee, he continued to urge acceptance of new governments set up under his 10 percent plan during the war. With respect to states like Virginia and North Carolina, he seemed willing to use the old rebel governments temporarily as a means of transition from war to peace. He was on record as opposing the appointment of "strangers" (carpetbaggers) to govern the South. He hoped that the Southerners themselves, in forming new state governments, would find some way by which whites and Blacks "could gradually live themselves out of their old relation to each other, and both come out better prepared for the new." A program of education for the freedmen, he thought, was essential to preparing them for their new status. He also suggested that the vote be given immediately to some African Americans—"as, for instance, the very intelligent, and especially those who have fought gallantly in our ranks." On the question of reconstruction, however, Lincoln and the extremists of his own party stood even farther apart in early 1865 than a year before. Some of the Radicals were beginning to demand a period of military occupation for the South, the confiscation of planter estates and their division among the freedmen, and the transfer of political power from the planters to the formerly enslaved. In April 1865 Lincoln began to modify his own stand in some respects and thus to narrow the gap between himself and the Radicals. He recalled the permission he had given for the assembling of the rebel legislature of Virginia, and he approved in principle—or at least did not disapprove—Stanton's scheme for the military occupation of Southern states. After the cabinet meeting of April 14, Attorney General James Speed inferred that Lincoln was moving toward the radical position. "He never seemed so near our views," Speed believed. What Lincoln's reconstruction policy would have been, if he had lived to complete his second term, can only be guessed at. Travel back to the night of Abraham Lincoln's assassination days after the end of the Civil War Travel back to the night of Abraham Lincoln's assassination days after the end of the Civil WarSee all videos for this article assassination of Abraham Lincoln assassination of Abraham Lincoln On the evening of April 14, 1865, 26-year-old John Wilkes Booth—a rabid advocate of slavery with ties to the South and the flamboyant son of one of the most distinguished theatrical families of the 19th century—shot Lincoln as he sat in Ford's Theatre in Washington. Early the next morning Lincoln died. Reputation and character of Abraham Lincoln "Now he belongs to the ages," Stanton is supposed to have said as Lincoln took his last breath. Many thought of Lincoln as a martyr. The assassination had occurred on Good Friday, and on the following Sunday, memorable as "Black Easter," hundreds of speakers found a sermon in the event. Some of them saw more than mere chance in the fact that assassination day was also crucifixion day. One declared, "Jesus Christ died for the world; Abraham Lincoln died for his country." Thus the posthumous growth of his reputation was influenced by the timing and circumstances of his death, which won for him a kind of sainthood. Among the many who remembered Lincoln from personal acquaintance, one was sure he had known him more intimately than any of the rest and influenced the world's conception of him more than all the others put together. That one was his former law partner William Herndon. When Lincoln died, Herndon began a new career as Lincoln authority, collecting reminiscences wherever he could find them and adding his own store of memories. Although admiring Lincoln, he objected to the trend toward sanctifying him. He saw, as the main feature of Lincoln's life, the far more than ordinary rise of a self-made man, a rise from the lowest depths to the greatest heights—"from a stagnant, putrid pool, like the gas which, set on fire by its own energy and self-combustible nature, rises in jets, blazing, clear, and bright." To emphasize this point, Herndon gave his most eager attention to evidences of the dismal and sordid in Lincoln's background. An extremely significant event in Lincoln's development, as Herndon viewed it, was a "romance of much reality" with Ann Rutledge. Lincoln loved no one but Rutledge and, after her death, never ceased to grieve for her. His memory of her both saddened and inspired him. As for his wife, Mary Todd Lincoln, she married him out of spite, then devoted herself to making him miserable. So Herndon would have it, and after him countless biographers, novelists, and playwrights elaborated upon his views, which persist as accepted knowledge about Lincoln despite their refutation by historical scholarship. Lincoln has become a myth as well as a man. The Lincoln of legend has grown into a protean god who can assume a shape to please almost anyone. He is Old Abe and at the same time a natural gentleman. He is Honest Abe and yet a being of superhuman shrewdness and cunning. He is also Father Abraham, the wielder of authority, the support of the weak; and he is an equal, a neighbour, and a friend. But there is a malevolent Lincoln as well, and to many Southerners from the time of the Civil War and to some conservative critics today, Lincoln is the wicked slayer of liberty and states' rights and the father of the all-controlling national state. Lincoln's reputation began to grow while he was still alive. In the midst of the Civil War, for instance, the Washington Chronicle found a resemblance between him and George Washington in their "sure judgment," "perfect balance of thoroughly sound faculties," and "great calmness of temper, great firmness of purpose, supreme moral principle, and intense patriotism." The Buffalo Express referred to his "remarkable moderation and freedom from passionate bitterness," and then added, "We do not believe that Washington himself was less indifferent to the exercise of power for power's sake." An English newspaper, the Liverpool Post, suggested that "no leader in a great contest ever stood so little chance of being the subject of hero worship as Abraham Lincoln," if one were to judge only by the way he looked. His long arms and legs, his grotesque figure, made him too easy to caricature and ridicule. "Yet," this newspaper concluded, "a worshiper of human heroes might possibly travel a great deal farther and fare much worse for an idol than selecting this same lanky American." His inner qualities—his faithfulness, honesty, resolution, insight, humour, and courage—would "go a long way to make up a hero," whatever the man's personal appearance. Lincoln's best ideas and finest phrases were considered and written and rewritten with meticulous revisions. Some resulted from a slow gestation of thought and phrase through many years. One of his recurring themes—probably his central theme—was the promise and the problem of self-government. As early as 1838, speaking to the Young Men's Lyceum of Springfield on "The Perpetuation of Our Political Institutions," he recalled the devotion of his Revolutionary forefathers to the cause and went on to say: Their ambition aspired to display before an admiring world, a practical demonstration of the truth of a proposition, which had hitherto been considered, at best no better, than problematical; namely, the capability of a people to govern themselves. Again and again he returned to this idea, especially after the coming of the Civil War, and he steadily improved his phrasing. In his first message to Congress after the fall of Fort Sumter, he declared that the issue between North and South involved more than the future of the United States. It presents to the whole family of man, the question, whether a constitutional republic, or a democracy—a government of the people, by the same people—can, or cannot, maintain its territorial integrity, against its own domestic foes. Gettysburg Battlefield dedication Gettysburg Battlefield dedication Lincoln, Abraham: Gettysburg Address Lincoln, Abraham: Gettysburg Address Discover the meaning and purpose of the Gettysburg Address delivered by President Abraham Lincoln Discover the meaning and purpose of the Gettysburg Address delivered by President Abraham LincolnSee all videos for this article And finally at Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, he made the culminating, supreme statement, concluding with the words: ...that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion—that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain—that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom—and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth. (Encyclopedia Britannica)

go postal

to become very crazed or angry and do something violent, especially as a result of stress.

How might I know he/she is the one?

How did you know he /she was "the one"? A girl texted my boyfriend. At that time our relationship had just begun. After only one month of being officially together, we both moved to different cities because of college. 15 hours by car separated us. We could see each other only when the flight ticket wasn't too expensive. So we started a long distance relationship. Back to this girl (let's call her Sarah) , she was a freshman too and they were attending the same medicine school. My boyfriend is extremely friendly so he immediately got along with everybody; he made the soccer team and he integrated very well. The girl in question texted him: "Hey, it's me Sarah. It's impossible not to notice you. You seem very laid-back. And a feast for the eyes, if you know what I mean ;). Let me know if you would like to hang out just the two of us sometimes" Only months later, around Christmas 2018, I casually saw the conversation and so I read it. His reply was: "I think I've already mentioned to you that I've a girlfriend" "You did but I'm good at keeping secrets ;) " "I appreciate you had the guts to text me, but seriously don't waste your time on me. I love and respect my girlfriend, and myself, way too much to ruin everything. Have a nice day, Sarah!" And that, ladies and gentlemen, was the moment I realized he was the one. Posted by Kiara Bay (Quora)

What should I know about the War of Independence?

The Second continental congress meets in Philadelphia in 1775. • Patriots were those who supported the cause for independence. • Paul Revere was an American patriot during the American Revolution. He helped lead the Boston Tea Party. He and William Dawes became renowned for riding through the night to warn the colonial militia that the British were making their way across Back Bay. Revere was arrested by British troops before he could let the militia know. But Dawes woke Sam Adams and John Hancock with the hanging lanterns in the steeple of Boston's North Church. • The very first shot fired in the skirmish at Lexington is referred to by the phrase "the shot heard round the world." • The Battle of Concord was the next battle right after the battle of Lexington. This was the first conflict that the Americans had won against the British. • The Battle of Bunker Hill is considered to be the very first battle of the American Revolutionary War. It fueled colonists' desires for independence, and it gave precedence to writing the Declaration of Independence. • The Second Continental Congress was another meeting of delegates from all the colonies that convened in May 1774. They all declared independence, adopted the articles of confederation, and conducted the Revolutionary War. They also called for the creation of the continental army that would eventually be led by none other than George Washington. • The Prohibitory Act is put in place in late 1775 to cut off trade between England and the colonies. • Thomas Paine's Common Sense was written in 1776. He makes two points with this pamphlet: that monarchism is bad and that people should declare independence. This affects the mindsets of many colonists. • Thomas Jefferson was designated to be the writer of the Declaration of independence. The Declaration of Independence was written on July 2nd, 1776. The Declaration of Independence states three basic ideas: (1) God made all men equal and gave them the rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness; (2) the main business of government is to protect these rights; (3) if a government tries to withhold these rights, the people are free to revolt and to set up a new government. In writing the declaration, Jefferson drew heavily on the political theories that English philosopher John Locke had outlined in his book On Civil Government. Jefferson began the document by proclaiming a set of natural rights held by all and the responsibility of the government to protect those rights. He then cited specific ways in which King George III had violated the colonists' rights, which formed their justification for seeking independence. • The American Revolution would begin subsequent to the colonies declaring their independence. • Americans win a decisive victory at Saratoga in 1777. This was a turning point for the colonial cause. The world was able to see the Americans go up against a powerful British army and win, and this made countries like Spain and France want to make an alliance with them. • The Treaty of Alliance was a document showing that France was allied with the United States during the Revolutionary War. • Valley Forge is a place in Pennsylvania where Washington and his men garrison during a difficult winter. It's where Washington would spy on the British forces located in Philadelphia. • Lord Cornwallis surrendered to George Washington and the allied French forces in 1781 at the Battle of Yorktown. • The Treaty of Paris was signed in 1783. This treaty would officially end The American Revolutionary War. (AP US Notes)

What do people underestimate often?

What do people underestimate often? You spend 5+ hours on an essay and get an 85%. Your friend gets a 100%. "Well, he is naturally gifted." You lose 10 pounds in a month. Your friend, 20. "Well, he has a higher metabolism." What does this mean? It means that he/she has outdone you. Though many people may think, oh, they got a higher score because they are naturally gifted, and I actually worked my ass off. But in reality, think of the time, effort, and patience spent into what they want to succeed in. It always looks easy when someone else is doing it. Hard work beats talent People often underestimate how hard other people work. Posted by Jeremy Zhao (Quora)

What should I know about the world before 1492?

Before the arrival of Europeans, native populations in North America developed a wide variety of social, political, and economic structures based in part on interactions with the environment and each other. • There's been much debate as to how the first Americans initially arrived at the content of North America. Some have suggested that they walked across a stretch of land that emerged during the Ice Age when the sea level lowered some 12000 years ago. Following large game animals, these Asian immigrants gradually spread through North and South America, reaching the tip of South America by 9,000 BCE. • As native-populations migrated and settled across the vast expanse of North America over time, they developed distinct and increasingly complex societies by adapting to and transforming their diverse environments. • The spread of maize (corn) cultivation from present-day Mexico northward into the present-day American Southwest and beyond supported economic development, settlement, advanced irrigation, and social diversification among societies. • Societies responded to the aridity of the Great Basin and the grasslands of the western Great Plains by developing largely mobile lifestyles. • In the Northeast, the Mississippi River Valley, and along the Atlantic seaboard some societies developed mixed agricultural and hunter-gatherer economies that favored the development of permanent villages. • Societies in the Northwest and present-day California supported themselves by hunting and gathering, and in some areas developed settled communities were supported by the resources of the ocean. • The Incas, Mayas, and Aztecs were perhaps the most advanced of the 2,000 separate cultures that developed in the New World. • The Anasazi, in what's now Arizona and New Mexico, built cliff-dwellings, roads, and canals. • Mississippi Valley tribes developed a farming culture around 800 BCE. They built large earthen pyramids and established trading networks throughout much of North America. • Eastern Woodland Indians occupied the land east of the Mississippi River in small, self-governing clans. • Plains Indians developed a nomadic lifestyle, following Buffalo herds across the American plains. • The arrival of the Europeans greatly affected Indian cultures. (History notes for AP US)

When did the first calendar appear?

Around 3100 BC in Mesopotamia, dividing a year into 12 lunar months, each consisting of 29 or 30 days. This time tracking system enabled people to celebrate significant events each year.

How do I understand body language?

Understanding Body Language and Facial Expressions By Kendra Cherry Updated on September 08, 2022 Medically reviewed by Steven Gans, MD From our facial expressions to our body movements, the things we don't say can convey volumes of information. What Is Body Language? Body language refers to the nonverbal signals that we use to communicate. These nonverbal signals make up a huge part of daily communication. In fact, body language may account for between 60% to 65% of all communication.1 So, why is body language important? Body language can help us understand others and ourselves. It provides us with information about how people may be feeling in a given situation. We can also use body language to express emotions or intentions.2 Understanding body language is important, but it is also essential to pay attention to other cues such as context. In many cases, you should look at signals as a group rather than focus on a single action. This article discusses the roles played by body language in communication, as well as body language examples and the meaning behind them—so you know what to look for when you're trying to interpret nonverbal actions. Think for a moment about how much a person is able to convey with just a facial expression. A smile can indicate approval or happiness. A frown can signal disapproval or unhappiness. In some cases, our facial expressions may reveal our true feelings about a particular situation. While you say that you are feeling fine, the look on your face may tell people otherwise. Just a few examples of emotions that can be expressed via facial expressions include: Happiness Sadness Anger Surprise Disgust Fear Confusion Excitement Desire Contempt The expression on a person's face can even help determine if we trust or believe what the individual is saying. There are many interesting findings about body language in psychology research. One study found that the most trustworthy facial expression involved a slight raise of the eyebrows and a slight smile. This expression, the researchers suggested, conveys both friendliness and confidence.3 Facial expressions are also among the most universal forms of body language. The expressions used to convey fear, anger, sadness, and happiness are similar throughout the world. Researcher Paul Ekman has found support for the universality of a variety of facial expressions tied to particular emotions including joy, anger, fear, surprise, and sadness.4 Research even suggests that we make judgments about people's intelligence based upon their faces and expressions. One study found that individuals who had narrower faces and more prominent noses were more likely to be perceived as intelligent. People with smiling, joyful expression were also judged as being more intelligent than those with angry expressions.5 The eyes are frequently referred to as the "windows to the soul" since they are capable of revealing a great deal about what a person is feeling or thinking. As you engage in conversation with another person, taking note of eye movements is a natural and important part of the communication process. Some common things you may notice include whether people are making direct eye contact or averting their gaze, how much they are blinking, or if their pupils are dilated. The best way to read someone's body language is to pay attention. Look out for any of the following eye signals. Eye Gaze When a person looks directly into your eyes while having a conversation, it indicates that they are interested and paying attention. However, prolonged eye contact can feel threatening. On the other hand, breaking eye contact and frequently looking away might indicate that the person is distracted, uncomfortable, or trying to conceal his or her real feelings.6 Blinking Blinking is natural, but you should also pay attention to whether a person is blinking too much or too little. People often blink more rapidly when they are feeling distressed or uncomfortable. Infrequent blinking may indicate that a person is intentionally trying to control his or her eye movements.7 For example, a poker player might blink less frequently because he is purposely trying to appear unexcited about the hand he was dealt. Pupil Size Pupil size can be a very subtle nonverbal communication signal. While light levels in the environment control pupil dilation, sometimes emotions can also cause small changes in pupil size. For example, you may have heard the phrase "bedroom eyes" used to describe the look someone gives when they are attracted to another person. Highly dilated eyes, for example, can indicate that a person is interested or even aroused. The Mouth Mouth expressions and movements can also be essential in reading body language. For example, chewing on the bottom lip may indicate that the individual is experiencing feelings of worry, fear, or insecurity. Covering the mouth may be an effort to be polite if the person is yawning or coughing, but it may also be an attempt to cover up a frown of disapproval. Smiling is perhaps one of the greatest body language signals, but smiles can also be interpreted in many ways. A smile may be genuine, or it may be used to express false happiness, sarcasm, or even cynicism.9 When evaluating body language, pay attention to the following mouth and lip signals: Pursed lips. Tightening the lips might be an indicator of distaste, disapproval, or distrust. Lip biting. People sometimes bite their lips when they are worried, anxious, or stressed. Covering the mouth. When people want to hide an emotional reaction, they might cover their mouths in order to avoid displaying smiles or smirks. Turned up or down. Slight changes in the mouth can also be subtle indicators of what a person is feeling. When the mouth is slightly turned up, it might mean that the person is feeling happy or optimistic. On the other hand, a slightly down-turned mouth can be an indicator of sadness, disapproval, or even an outright grimace. Gestures Gestures can be some of the most direct and obvious body language signals. Waving, pointing, and using the fingers to indicate numerical amounts are all very common and easy to understand gestures. Some gestures may be cultural, however, so giving a thumbs-up or a peace sign in another country might have a completely different meaning than it does in the United States. The following examples are just a few common gestures and their possible meanings: A clenched fist can indicate anger in some situations or solidarity in others. A thumbs up and thumbs down are often used as gestures of approval and disapproval.10 The "okay" gesture, made by touching together the thumb and index finger in a circle while extending the other three fingers can be used to mean "okay" or "all right."10 In some parts of Europe, however, the same signal is used to imply you are nothing. In some South American countries, the symbol is actually a vulgar gesture. The V sign, created by lifting the index and middle finger and separating them to create a V-shape, means peace or victory in some countries. In the United Kingdom and Australia, the symbol takes on an offensive meaning when the back of the hand is facing outward. The Arms and legs The arms and legs can also be useful in conveying nonverbal information. Crossing the arms can indicate defensiveness. Crossing legs away from another person may indicate dislike or discomfort with that individual. Other subtle signals such as expanding the arms widely may be an attempt to seem larger or more commanding, while keeping the arms close to the body may be an effort to minimize oneself or withdraw from attention. When you are evaluating body language, pay attention to some of the following signals that the arms and legs may convey:1 Crossed arms might indicate that a person feels defensive, self-protective, or closed-off.1 Standing with hands placed on the hips can be an indication that a person is ready and in control, or it can also possibly be a sign of aggressiveness. Clasping the hands behind the back might indicate that a person is feeling bored, anxious, or even angry. Rapidly tapping fingers or fidgeting can be a sign that a person is bored, impatient, or frustrated. Crossed legs can indicate that a person is feeling closed-off or in need of privacy. Posture How we hold our bodies can also serve as an important part of body language. The term posture refers to how we hold our bodies as well as the overall physical form of an individual. Posture can convey a wealth of information about how a person is feeling as well as hints about personality characteristics, such as whether a person is confident, open, or submissive. Sitting up straight, for example, may indicate that a person is focused and paying attention to what's going on. Sitting with the body hunched forward, on the other hand, can imply that the person is bored or indifferent. When you are trying to read body language, try to notice some of the signals that a person's posture can send. Open posture involves keeping the trunk of the body open and exposed. This type of posture indicates friendliness, openness, and willingness. Closed posture involves hiding the trunk of the body often by hunching forward and keeping the arms and legs crossed. This type of posture can be an indicator of hostility, unfriendliness, and anxiety. Personal space Have you ever heard someone refer to their need for personal space? Have you ever started to feel uncomfortable when someone stands just a little too close to you? The term proxemics, coined by anthropologist Edward T. Hall, refers to the distance between people as they interact. Just as body movements and facial expressions can communicate a great deal of nonverbal information, so can the physical space between individuals. Hall described four levels of social distance that occur in different situations.12 Intimate Distance: 6 to 18 inches This level of physical distance often indicates a closer relationship or greater comfort between individuals. It usually occurs during intimate contact such as hugging, whispering, or touching. Personal Distance: 1.5 to 4 feet Physical distance at this level usually occurs between people who are family members or close friends. The closer the people can comfortably stand while interacting can be an indicator of the level of intimacy in their relationship. Social Distance: 4 to 12 feet. This level of physical distance is often used with individuals who are acquaintances. With someone you know fairly well, such as a co-worker you see several times a week, you might feel more comfortable interacting at a closer distance. In cases where you do not know the other person well, such as a postal delivery driver you only see once a month, a distance of 10 to 12 feet may feel more comfortable. Public Distance: 12 to 25 feet Physical distance at this level is often used in public speaking situations. Talking in front of a class full of students or giving a presentation at work are good examples of such situations. It is also important to note that the level of personal distance that individuals need to feel comfortable can vary from culture to culture. One oft-cited example is the difference between people from Latin cultures and those from North America. People from Latin countries tend to feel more comfortable standing closer to one another as they interact, while those from North America need more personal distance. Roles of Nonverbal Communication Body language plays many roles in social interactions. It can help facilitate the following: Earning trust: Engaging in eye contact, nodding your head while listening, and even unconsciously mirroring another person's body language are all signals that you and someone else are bonding.2 Emphasizing a point: The tone of voice you use and the way you engage listeners with your hand and arm gestures, or by how you take up space, are all ways that affect how your message comes across.13 Revealing truths: When someone's body language doesn't match what they're saying, we might intuitively pick up on the fact that they are withholding information, or perhaps not being honest about how they feel. Tuning in to your own needs: Our own body language can reveal a lot about how we're feeling. For instance, are you in a slumped posture, clenching your jaw and/or pursing your lips? This may be a signal that the environment you're currently in is triggering you in some way. Your body might be telling you that you're feeling unsafe, stressed, or any number of emotions.14 Remember, though, that your assumptions about what someone else's body language means may not always be accurate. What Does Body Language Tell You About a Person? Body language can tell you when someone feels anxious, angry, excited, or any emotion. It may also suggest personality traits (i.e., whether someone is shy or outgoing). But, body language can be misleading. It is subject to a person's mood, energy level, and circumstances. While in some cases, a lack of eye contact indicates untrustworthiness, for instance, it doesn't mean you automatically can't trust someone who isn't looking at you in the eyes. It could be they are distracted and thinking about something else. Or, again, it could be a cultural difference at play. How to Improve Your Nonverbal Communication The first step in improving your nonverbal communication is to pay attention. Try to see if you can pick up on other people's physical cues as well as your own. Maybe when someone is telling you a story, you tend to look at the floor. In order to show them you're paying attention, you might try making eye contact instead, and even showing a slight smile, to show you're open and engaged.15 Using body language with intention is all about finding balance. For instance, when shaking someone's hand before a job interview, holding it somewhat firmly can signal professionalism.16 But, gripping it too aggressively might cause the other person pain or discomfort. Be sure to consider how other people might feel. In addition, continue to develop emotional intelligence. The more in touch you are with how you feel, the easier it often is to sense how others are receiving you. You'll be able to tell when someone is open and receptive, or, on the other hand, if they are closed-off and need some space. If we want to feel a certain way, we can use our body language to our advantage. For example, research found that people who maintained an upright seated posture while dealing with stress had higher levels of self-esteem and more positive moods compared to people who had slumped posture.17 Of course, it's verbal and nonverbal communication—as well as the context of a situation—that often paints a full picture. There isn't always a one-size-fits-all solution for what nonverbal cues are appropriate. However, by staying present and being respectful, you'll be well on your way to understanding how to use body language effectively. A Word From Verywell Understanding body language can go a long way toward helping you better communicate with others and interpreting what others might be trying to convey. While it may be tempting to pick apart signals one by one, it's important to look at these nonverbal signals in relation to verbal communication, other nonverbal signals, and the situation. You can also learn more about how to improve your nonverbal communication to become better at letting people know what you are feeling—without even saying a word. By Kendra Cherry Kendra Cherry, MS, is an author and educational consultant focused on helping students learn about psychology. (Verywellmind)

What should I understand about the fear of abandonment?

Understanding Fear of Abandonment By Lisa Fritscher Updated on June 15, 2020 Medically reviewed by Steven Gans, MD Table of Contents Why It Happens Signs Effects Coping Strategies A fear of abandonment is a complex phenomenon that can stem from a variety of developmental experiences, including loss or trauma.1 This fear has been studied from a variety of perspectives. Theories behind why fear of abandonment occurs include interruptions in the normal development of certain cognitive and emotional capacities, challenges with past relationships, and other problematic social and life experiences.1 Although it is not an official phobia, the fear of abandonment is arguably one of the most common and most damaging fears of all. People with the fear of abandonment may tend to display behaviors and thought patterns that affect their relationships. Ultimately, maladaptive coping with this fear can result in the abandonment they dread becoming a reality. Consequently, this fear can be devastating. Understanding fear of abandonment is the first step toward resolving it. Why It Happens Our behaviors and actions in current relationships are all thought to be the result of old fears and learned concepts that take place in childhood. There are many theories that attempt to understand the fear of abandonment. Object Constancy In object relations theory, an offshoot of Freudian analysis, an "object" in one's mind is either a person, a part of a person, or something that somehow symbolizes one or the other. Object constancy is the concept that even when we are not in the physical presence of that person, our experience of them does not fundamentally change. This is related to the idea of "object permanence" first studied by the developmental psychologist Jean Piaget. Infants learn that objects continue to exist even when they are not experienced directly. Object constancy generally develops before the age of 3. As children grow and mature, the periods of separation lengthen and are often generated by the child as he, say, goes to school or spends the weekend at a friend's house. A child with good object constancy understands that important relationships are not damaged by time apart. Object constancy may be interrupted by traumatic events. Death or divorce are common causes, but even situations that seem relatively unimportant to the adults involved may affect developing this critical understanding. For example, children with parents in the military, those whose parents have little time to spend with them, and those with neglectful parents may also be at risk for interrupted object constancy. Archetypes and Mythology Mythology is filled with stories of abandoned or rejected lovers, primarily women who dedicate their entire selves to their partners only to be left behind when the lover goes off to conquer the world. Some psychologists, such as Carl Jung, argue that these myths and legends have become part of our collective unconscious. At some primal level, we have internalized certain archetypes and stories and made them part of our shared worldview. We each have a personal myth as well—one that is not shared with others but resides deep within the core of our beings. According to Jung, this personal myth is made up of our interpretations of the collective unconscious through the filters of our own experiences. From this perspective, the fear of abandonment is connected to these universal myths but varies in severity according to our own personal memories. Prior Experiences By the time we are adults, most of us have been through some significant changes—a death of a loved one, a friend moving away, a relationship ending, a transition from high school to college to marriage and parenthood. Although most of us adapt to changing circumstances, it is not uncommon to get stuck somewhere in the process of you grieving what once was. If you have been through a sudden and traumatic abandonment, such as losing someone to violence or tragedy, you may be at increased risk for developing this fear. Signs of a Fear of Abandonment Millions of people struggle with fear. In fact, nearly 10% of people in the U.S. have some sort of phobia.2 When it comes to relationships, the resulting behaviors from fear of abandonment can potentially include: Attach quickly—even to unavailable partners or relationships Fail to fully commit and have had very few long-term relationships Move on quickly just to ensure that you don't get too attached Aim to please Engage in unwanted sex (this is common in women)3 Stay in relationships no matter how unhealthy they are Struggle with being hard to please and nitpicky Have difficulty experiencing emotional intimacy Feel insecure and unworthy of love Find it hard to trust people Are often jealous of everyone you meet Experience intense feelings of separation anxiety Have feelings of general anxiety and depression Tend to overthink things and work hard to figure out hidden meanings Are hypersensitive to criticism Contain repressed anger and control issues Engage in self-blame frequently Effect on Relationships The fear of abandonment is highly personalized. Some people are solely afraid of losing a romantic partner. Others fear abandonment in other relationships. To better explain how individuals with a fear of abandonment may navigate a relationship, here is an example of how a typical relationship may start and evolve. This example is especially true for romantic relationships, but there are many similarities in close friendships as well. Getting-to-Know-One-Another At this point, you feel relatively safe. You are not yet emotionally invested in the other person. So you continue to live your life while enjoying time with your chosen person. Honeymoon Phase This phase occurs when you make the choice to commit. You are willing to overlook possible red or yellow flags because you just get along so well. You start spending a great deal of time with the other person; and you always enjoy yourself. You start to feel secure. Real Relationship The honeymoon phase cannot last forever. No matter how well two people get along, real life always intervenes. People get sick, have family problems, start working difficult hours, worry about money, and need time to get things done. Although this is a very normal and positive step in a relationship, it can be terrifying for those with a fear of abandonment who may see it as a sign that the other person is pulling away. If you have this fear, you are probably battling with yourself and trying very hard not to express your worries for fear of appearing clingy. The Slight People are human. They have moods and things on their minds. Regardless of how much they care for someone else, they cannot and should not be expected to always have that person at the forefront of their minds. Especially once the honeymoon period is over, it is inevitable that a seeming slight will occur. This often takes the form of an unanswered text message, an unreturned phone call, or a request for a few days of alone time. The Reaction For those with a fear of abandonment, this is a turning point. If you have this fear, you are probably completely convinced that the slight is a sign that your partner no longer loves you. What happens next is almost entirely determined by the fear of abandonment, its severity, and the sufferer's preferred coping style. Some people handle this by becoming clingy and demanding, insisting that their partner prove them love by jumping through hoops. Others run away, rejecting their partners before they are rejected. Still, others feel that the slight is their fault and attempt to transform themselves into the "perfect partner" in a quest to keep the other person from leaving. In reality, the slight is most likely not a slight at all. Simply put, sometimes people just do things that their partners do not understand. In a healthy relationship, the partner may recognize the situation for what it is—a normal reaction that has little or nothing to do with the relationship. Or they may feel upset by it, but address it with either a calm discussion or a brief argument. Either way, a single perceived slight does not become a dominating influence on the partner's feelings. Partner's Point of View From your partner's point of view, your sudden personality shift seems to come from out of left field. If your partner does not suffer from a fear of abandonment, they probably do not have the slightest idea as to why their previously confident, laid-back partner is suddenly acting clingy and demanding, smothering them with attention, or pulling away altogether. Similar to phobias, it's impossible to simply talk or reason someone out of a fear of abandonment. No matter how many times your partner tries to reassure you, it will simply not be enough. Eventually, your behavior patterns and inconsolable reactions could drive your partner away, leading to the very conclusion that you fear most. Coping Strategies If your fear is mild and well-controlled, you may be able to handle it simply by becoming educated about your tendencies and learning new behavior strategies. For most people, though, the fear of abandonment is rooted in deep-seated issues that are difficult to unravel alone. Professional assistance is often required to work through this fear and truly change your thoughts and behaviors. Although treating the fear itself is critical, it is also essential to build a feeling of belonging. Rather than focusing all of your energy and devotion on a single partner, focus on building a community. No one person can solve all of our problems or meet all of our needs. But a solid group of several close friends can each play an important role in our lives. Many people with a fear of abandonment state that they never felt like they had a "tribe" or a "pack" when they were growing up. For whatever reasons, they always felt "other" or disconnected from those around them. But the good news is that it's never too late. Whatever your current stage of life, it is important to surround yourself with other like-minded individuals. Make a list of your current hobbies, passions, and dreams. Then find others who share your interests. While it is true that not everyone who shares an interest will become a close friend, hobbies and dreams are an excellent stepping stone toward building a solid support network. Working on your passions also helps build self-confidence and the belief that you are strong enough to cope with whatever life throws your way. 3 Sources By Lisa Fritscher Lisa Fritscher is a freelance writer and editor with a deep interest in phobias and other mental health topics. (Verywellmind)

What should I know about 9/11?

The September 11 attacks, also called 9/11 attacks, series of airline hijackings and suicide attacks committed in 2001 by 19 militants associated with the Islamic extremist group al-Qaeda against targets in the United States, the deadliest terrorist attacks on American soil in U.S. history. The attacks against New York City and Washington, D.C., caused extensive death and destruction and triggered an enormous U.S. effort to combat terrorism. Some 2,750 people were killed in New York, 184 at the Pentagon, and 40 in Pennsylvania (where one of the hijacked planes crashed after the passengers attempted to retake the plane); all 19 terrorists died (see Researcher's Note: September 11 attacks). Police and fire departments in New York were especially hard-hit: hundreds had rushed to the scene of the attacks, and more than 400 police officers and firefighters were killed. (Google doc notes)

9/11

A series of coordinated suicide attacks by al-Qaeda upon the United States on September 11, 2001. They were terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon. It led to a focus on eliminating terrorism.

What should I know about OJ Simpson?

O.J. Simpson American football player O.J. Simpson, in full Orenthal James Simpson, (born July 9, 1947, San Francisco, California, U.S.), American collegiate and professional gridiron football player who was a premier running back known for his speed and elusiveness. His trial on murder charges in 1995 was one of the most celebrated criminal trials in American history. Simpson played football at Galileo High School in San Francisco, first as a tackle and then as a fullback. He attended San Francisco City College (1965-66) to achieve a scholastic record that allowed him to play at the University of Southern California (USC), where he set team records for yards gained by rushing: 1967, 1,415 yards; 1968, 1,709 yards. He was named All-American (1967-68), played in two Rose Bowl games, and won the Heisman Trophy as the best collegiate player of the season (1968). At USC he was also a member of a world-record-setting 440-yard relay team. Simpson, who was often called "Juice" because of his energetic runs and because his initials could stand for "orange juice," was the number one draft choice of the American Football League (AFL) Buffalo Bills in 1969. The following year the AFL merged with the National Football League (NFL). The Bills were members of the American Football Conference (AFC) of the NFL when Simpson set a single-season record for yards gained rushing (2,003) in 1973. The Bills were never a contending team during his stay, but he was a great box-office draw. Injuries to his knees prompted the Bills to trade him in 1978 to the San Francisco 49ers, but he retired after the 1979 season. His 1975 record of most touchdowns scored in a season (23) stood until 1983, and his 1973 season rushing record for most yards gained lasted until 1984, when it was broken by Eric Dickerson. Simpson led the AFC in rushing yardage four times (1972-73, 1975-76). His career total yards gained (11,236) was second in the all-time rankings at the time of his retirement. He was inducted into the Pro Football Hall of Fame in 1985. After retiring from football, Simpson became a film and television actor and sports commentator. On June 12, 1994, his ex-wife Nicole Brown Simpson and her friend Ronald Goldman were stabbed to death outside her home in Los Angeles. Simpson was arrested and charged with the two murders on June 17; he pleaded not guilty and hired a team of prominent lawyers to handle his defense. His lengthy nationally televised trial became the focus of unprecedented media scrutiny. A jury acquitted Simpson of the murder charges on October 3, 1995. In a separate civil trial decision in 1997, he was found liable for the deaths of his ex-wife and Goldman and was ordered to pay $33.5 million in damages to the families. Simpson later collaborated (with Pablo F. Fenjves) on If I Did It, in which he hypothesized about how he would have committed the murders. Public outrage prevented its initial publication in 2006, but a bankruptcy court subsequently awarded the book's rights to the Goldman family, who released the work in 2007. Later that year, Simpson was arrested after he and several other men entered a Las Vegas hotel room and took memorabilia items that Simpson claimed had been stolen from him. The incident resulted in Simpson being charged with a number of crimes, including armed robbery and kidnapping. On October 3, 2008, a jury found him guilty of all charges. He was later sentenced to a minimum of nine years in prison, with a possible maximum sentence of 33 years. Simpson was granted parole in 2017. (Britannica Encyclopedia)

twaddle

trivial or foolish speech or writing; nonsense

pretense

an attempt to make something that is not the case appear true

Iraq War

A war fought to end Sadaam Hussein's influence in Iraq and disarm them of WMD's. It was a war in which the US successfully took down a dominating dictator and is currently helping them "get back on their feet". This conflict consisted of two phases. an invasion force led by the United States and a phase of fighting, in which an insurgency emerged to oppose coallition forces.

social anxiety disorder 3

intense fear of negative evaluation in social situations

What events happened leading up to, during, and after the Civil War?

The Lecompton Constitution for Kansas was decisively rejected by Congress in 1858. • The Mason-Dixon Line was a border surveyed by Charles Mason and Jeremiah Dixon between 1763 and 1767 that settled the border between the then colonies of Pennsylvania and Maryland and came to be seen as the dividing line between the North and South. • John Brown's raid on Harpers Ferry federal arsenal happened in 1859. He and most of his men were captured and charged with insurrection and treason against the state of Virginia. The jury took less than an hour to find them all guilty, and they were sentenced to hang on December 2nd, 1859. Brown's calm words and actions while awaiting his sentence showed him to be a hero of the antislavery cause, which is how many Northerners were beginning to see him. • Democratic Party split into Northern and Southern halves in 1860. • Abraham Lincoln wins the 1860 election with all Northern votes. • As some had predicted, Lincoln's election provided Southern secessionists with just the rationale they needed. Many southerners, including moderates, were furious about Lincoln's elections. They saw the breadth of a Northern support for a committed free-soil candidate as one more effort to exclude slavery from the territories. They also saw it as part of a larger pattern that included Northern failure to enforce the Fugitive Slave Act and Northern support for John Brown. The Charleston Courier editorialized that Lincoln's election meant it was time for "a Southern Confederacy," something "desired by all true hearted Southerners." • The Crittenden Compromise was a last-ditch effort at a compromise to amend the Constitution to protect slavery in states where it existed. Lincoln refuses to even consider the compromise. • Many Northerners will feel the need to fight against the Union dissolving. • South Carolina seceded from the Union in 1860. • More Southern states secede—total of 7 by February 1st, 1861. • The Confederate States of America was founded in 1861. • Lincoln was inaugurated as president in 1861. • Fort Sumter was a new federal installation guarding the harbor at Charleston, South Carolina, and it was a place where conflict was most likely to begin. The fort was seen as a dramatic symbol of federal authority in the heart of the confederacy. An eighty-man garrison commanded by Major Robert Anderson, a former slaveholder from Kentucky whose decades in the army made him a devoted supporter of federal authority, was in the fort. Soon after a vote to secede from the Union in December 1860, South Carolina authorities demanded that outgoing president Buchanan remove the federal garrison and hand the fort over to them. When their demands weren't met, Southerners fired on the supply ship—but not the fort—and the ship turned back. By the time Lincoln came to office in March, Anderson was running low on supplies and knew he would have to either surrender or evacuate soon. On April 6th, after some hesitation, the new president announced that he was sending a supply ship with food and medicine, but not arms, to the fort. Southerners continued to fire almost nonstop on the fort, and the fort's defenders fired back on occasion. On April 13th, out of food and ammunition, Major Anderson surrendered. Anderson and the remaining troops were allowed to leave, and they set sail for New York where they were greeted as heroes, but the Confederates now had gotten a hold of the fort. The Confederates had won the battle, but they had fired on an American flag, which means they would be going to war with the North. Chapter 14 notes • While a candidate for the Republican presidential nomination, Lincoln had given a speech at Cooper Union in February 1860 called the Cooper Union address in which he said that, while he had no interest in interfering with slavery where it existed, he would do everything he could to block the spread of slavery everywhere else. • South Carolina, Georgia, Florida, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, and Texas secede from the Union. Later Virginia, North Carolina, Tennessee, and Arkansas secede as well. • Confederate States of America is founded in 1861. • Jefferson Davis becomes the president of the Confederacy. • Lincoln is inaugurated as president in 1861. • Fort Sumter was a new federal installation guarding the harbor at Charleston, South Carolina, and it was a place where conflict was most likely to begin. The fort was seen as a dramatic symbol of federal authority in the heart of the confederacy. An eighty-man garrison commanded by Major Robert Anderson, a former slaveholder from Kentucky whose decades in the army made him a devoted supporter of federal authority, was in the fort. Soon after a vote to secede from the Union in December 1860, South Carolina authorities demanded that outgoing president Buchanan remove the federal garrison and hand the fort over to them. When their demands weren't met, Southerners fired on the supply ship—but not the fort—and the ship turned back. By the time Lincoln came to office in March, Anderson was running low on supplies and knew he would have to either surrender or evacuate soon. On April 6th, after some hesitation, the new president announced that he was sending a supply ship with food and medicine, but not arms, to the fort. Southerners continued to fire almost nonstop on the fort, and the fort's defenders fired back on occasion. On April 13th, out of food and ammunition, Major Anderson surrendered. Anderson and the remaining troops were allowed to leave, and they set sail for New York where they were greeted as heroes, but the Confederates now had gotten a hold of the fort. The Confederates had won the battle, but they had fired on an American flag, which meant they would be open to war with the North. • No serious battles occurred for the next 2 months. • The Confederates only had to fight a defensive war to protect their territory. They didn't need to win victories in the North, only protect their lands to win what they wanted. The North, however, needed to defeat the Confederate Army to reunite the nation. • As the war began, the commander of the Union Army was the aging hero of the war with Mexico, General Winfield Scott. He proposed what became known as the Anaconda Plan to blockade the South by sea, take control of the Mississippi River, and slowly squeeze the Confederacy into submission-as an anaconda snake squeezes its victims. Scott wanted to end the war without a full-scale invasion of the South, which he thought would be too bloody and lead to generations of hatred no matter what the outcome. But many Northerners believed that the North needed to defeat the Confederates on Confederate turf. • The first serious battle of the Civil War takes place on July 21, 1861. Many Northerners expected a short skirmish and then a march to Richmond. At Lincoln's prodding, Genreral McDowell, with 18,000 troops, advanced from Washington across the Potomac River into Virginia. The army was accompanied by Northern reporters, members of congress, and others who thought it would be the 1 time they would see a battle. Confederate commander Pierre Beauregard was alerted to the Union army's movement by Confederate spies in Washington. The armies met at a small town called Manassas, Virginia, on Bull Run Creek. (Northerners called it the First Battle of Bull Run, southerners the Battle of Manassas). Union troops, tired from the long march to Washington, started to surround the Confederate forces, but the Confederates held their ground. In an afternoon charge, Confederates let out a frightening scream that came to be known as the rebel yell. Many Northerners commented on how unnerving the rebel yell could be. The Union troops began to flee, merging with panic-stricken civilians who ran back to the relative safety of Washington, DC. Confederates win the First Battle of Bull Run. The battle gives Confederates great, perhaps even dangerously high, levels of confidence. • Lincoln responded to the loss at Bull Run by calling for more 1 million new volunteers. He fired several Union generals, including the unlucky McDowell, reorganized the army on the Maryland-Virginia line as the Army of the Potomac-which would remain the prime Union Army throughout the war—and appointed George B. McClellan to command it. He tightened federal control in Washington and Maryland. In addition, he reorganized federal troops in the west as a separate army, with orders to proceed down the Mississippi River and try to divide the Confederacy. The country was in for a long war. • Although some in the South were clamoring for Confederate troops to march north and defeat the "damn Yankees," Jefferson Davis believed that the key to Confederate victory was doing what George Washington had done in the Revolution: simply survive. In time, he hoped, Northern opinion would tire of war and foreign governments would recognize the South. • General McClellan was a first-rate organizer, and he trained the Union Army well. The Army of the Potomac became a strong fighting force. Nevertheless, McClellan was never quite ready to fight. In one meeting with Lincoln, the General made but 1 request, "Just don't let them hurry me, is all I ask." By October 1861, McClellan was in command of 120,000 soldiers. The Confederate Army in Virginia was about 45,000 strong, but McClellan was sure it included at least 150,000 soldiers. Considering the possibilities for terrible loss of life, McClellan's caution is understandable. For Lincoln, however, that kind of caution would only result in the end of the Union. The morale in both Northern and Southern troops was lowered. • The Confederate Army of Northern Virginia was considered to be the South's elite force, assigned to protect the capital of Richmond, Virginia, and the essential supply sources nearby. It was led for most of the war by General Robert E. Lee, and it fought in Virginia, Maryland, and Pennsylvania before surrendering at Appomattox Courthouse in April 1865. • The Peninsular Campaign of 1862 was a campaign McClellan began to take Richmond, Virginia, and end the war. He and his army was deemed to have moved slowly while attacking via a peninsula south of Richmond—hence the name—but never succeeded in his quest. • The Union has a strong navy. • The Monitor v. Merrimack sea battle happens in 1862. This conflict shows the battle of technology between the North and South. • While the Union navy won battles, General Grant led 40,000 troops in an attack on Corinth, Mississippi. Corinth was where the South's major north-South and east-west rail lines crossed, and Grant meant to disrupt the network. Before Grant's forces got to Corinth, however, Southern forces attacked the Union Army near Shiloh Church in Tennessee on April 6th. In 2 days of terrible fighting, Grant won, but at a high cost of killed or wounded troops—13,047 for the Union and 10,699 for the Confederates. The Union army wins Battle of Shiloh, Tennessee, in 1862. • Contrabands, also known as contraband of war, was the name Union generals gave to former slaves who escaped to the Union lines and worked in support of Union troops. The term was coined by General Benjamin F. Butler, who on May 23, 1861, had 3 slaves come to him at the Union-held fortress Monroe, Virginia, and asked for his protection. Butler put them to work. Word of Butler's decision spread rapidly, and soon many more slaves would go to Fortress Monroe, which some now called "freedom fort." Lincoln wasn't ready to set firm policy, but Butler's policy was "approved," and Fortress Monroe continued to be a haven for escaping slaves. • Colonization was a plan popular in the 1830s to create colonies in Africa to which former slaves might return. The plan was briefly considered by Abraham Lincoln, but it was never popular with slaves or former slaves themselves. • With or without authorization, some blacks began to fight in the Union army. In Indian territory (Oklahoma), blacks who lived with Creeks and Seminoles joined them in attacking other tribal members who had signed a treaty with the Confederates. Union officers in Kansas and on the coast of South Carolina began to recruit black troops. Secretary of War Edward M. Stanton approved the move, though he asked his officers to keep it quiet because it was "so much in advance of public opinion." But the government needed more soldiers, and many blacks wanted to fight—if the fighting was for their freedom. • Under the command of David G. Farragut, the Union navy captures New Orleans, the largest city in the South, in 1862. The city remains in Union hands for the duration of the war. • Confederate victory at the Second Battle of Bull Run in 1862 protects Richmond. This battle ended Northern hopes for an easy attack on the Confederate capital. • Union victory at Antietam in 1862. Lincoln was furious that McClellan didn't pursue the retreating Lee and his troops. It's considered to be one of the bloodiest battles of the Civil War and in US history. • The Emancipation Proclamation was a decree announced by President Abraham Lincoln formally issued on January 1, 1863, freeing slaves in all Confederate states still in rebellion. It didn't free a single slave when it was first issued. It didn't apply in areas loyal to the Union, including slave states, and though it technically freed all of the slaves in the Confederate areas, the government had no power as of yet in areas that weren't under Union control. However, the proclamation did resolve the issue of contraband slaves, made abolishing slavery a military goal, and fundamentally changed the Civil War. • Northern Democrats immediately attacked the proclamation. While the Democratic minority supported the war effort to save the Union, they opposed any widening of the war's goals. • Peace Democrats, also known as Copperheads, was a faction within the Democratic Party that advocated immediate peace with the Confederacy on terms that would allow it to leave the Union. In the November 1862 congressional elections, Peace Democrats attacked Republicans because, they said, the Emancipation Proclamation was widening the purpose of war and therefore making it longer and bloodier. • Any black soldier that was taken as a prisoner of war by the confederacy were returned to slavery. They fought anyways knowing there was danger ahead. • As reports of casualties began to circulate, support for the war dropped in both the North and the South. Even those supporting the war had second thoughts. It wasn't only the terrible toll from the battlefields, though it seemed nearly every family was touched by those losses, but also the war's effects on the home front, which had not been expected when it began. • Starvation spread in the South. Southern cities, including the capital of Richmond, Virginia, were wracked with bread riots. • Richmond Bread Riots happen in 1863. • At the start of the Civil War, the Union had significantly more industrial workers, factories, and miles of railroad tracks than the states of the Confederacy. All of these factors gave the Union a significant advantage in essential things such as the manufacture material and troop movements in a long war that was spread over most of the territory of the US. Although the Union has these things, it was not even close in meeting the sufficient requirements of a war economy. • The Internal Revenue Service was an agency created by Congress during the Civil War to collect federal taxes in support of the war effort. • Congress also created a federal income tax. Most people were exempt from the tax since income under $800 per year was not taxed, and only a minority made more than that. Finally, the federal government began issuing federal notes that were secured not by gold or silver but simply by the governemt's promise to redeem them. Congress not only authorized such banknotes, which came to be known as "greenbacks for their green ink, but also declared that they were legal tender, which meant that no one could refuse them as payment for goods or debts. The result was the creation of a solid monetary system that outlasted the war. • Although there was little fighting in the North, families saw sons march off to war and often received the terrible news that they were never coming home. Death on the scale of the Civil War had never been known before—and hasn't been known since—in the US. After major battles, newspapers and telegraph offices posted causality lists. Close comrades or hospital nurses caring for those who died wrote letters to their families, and the awful news changed life for those waiting at home. • New York City was a center of opposition to the war. Its large Irish Catholic population had little interest in fighting for the rights of African Americans. More free blacks, they thought, meant more competitors on the streets and docks of New York, and they didn't like it after the Emancipation Proclamation. While Northern support for the abolition of slavery was growing as the war progressed, especially among Union troops, Northern opinion was divided, and many still had little interest in freeing slaves. As word of the Emancipation Proclamation spread in 1862, anti black riots broke out in several cities, including Cincinnati where a strike by Irish dock workers was defeated with the use of black strike breakers. In Brooklyn, a mob attacked a tobacco factory where blacks were working. As opposition grew in the North to the war itself, especially expanding the war goals to include emancipation, voluntary enlistment in the army declined. In July 1863, the governor began to enforce a military draft, and the antiblack, anti-abolitionist, anti war fervor broke into violence. • Rich people could pay not to be drafted. • The New York City Draft Riot was a mostly Irish-immigrant protest against conscription in New York City that escalated into class and racial warfare. On July 13th, 1863, mobs attacked the draft offices and then turned on black neighborhoods, Republican newspapers, and government offices. Blacks were beaten, lynched, and shot. Before it was over, 105 people, most of them black, were killed. Only the arrival of federal troops on July 15th, fresh from the battle of Gettysburg, ended the violence. The NYC Draft Riot was one of the worst riots in American history up to that time. • A great battle took place at Chancellorsville between Union and Confederate troops. It was a major confederate victory once Stonewall Jackson led his troops around the end of the Union lines and making their enemies retreat. It came at a high cost though, as 10,000 Confederate were dead or wounded. Jackson was accidentally shot by his own troops during the battle and died a week later. A Union defeat meant there could be a major incursion north of the Mason-Dixon Line that threatened Washington, DC. • General Lee tries to invade the North at Gettysburg. The invasion doesn't go well, and Lee's army suffers many casualties and is demoralized while withdrawing to Virginia. The Confederate army would never again be a major presence in the North. Union victory at the Battle of Gettysburg in 1863 protects Washington, DC; Gettysburg address describes Union cause and the intentions of the American leaders during the Revolution. • Fall of Vicksburg happens in 1863. This was an important victory for the Union because they gained control of the entire Mississippi River, splitting the confederacy in half while securing an easy access into the interior of the Confederacy. • Elizabeth Blackwell was the first American woman M.D. who was also the organizer of the Sanitary commission to improve the medical services and treatment for sick and wounded Union soldiers during the course of the war. • Clara Barton helped create the American Red Cross, and she was a free-agent nurse. • Battle of the Wilderness happens in 1864. Lincoln placed Grant in charge of all US forces, and Grant led a bloody drive into Virginia. The first battle took place in deep woods (hence the Wilderness), and Grant—unlike previous Union generals—simply kept going. • General William T. Sherman leads 62 thousand troops on a march across the heart of the Confederacy. He led them into Georgia, defeating Confederate forces along the way. • The city of Atlanta is allowed to be evacuated and burned by Sherman. • Atlanta falls to Sherman's army in 1864. • Sherman's "March to the Sea" commences in 1864, taking Savannah on December 21st before running north and attacking Confederate forces in North and South Carolina. • Sherman's war tactics are deemed controversial. • Farragut wins Mobile, Alabama, in 1864. • All of these Union victories subsequent to the initiation of Sherman's March help Lincoln win the election. • Lincoln was reelected in 1864. • Andersonville was a location for a notorious southern prison camp. Many prisoners of war had died there. • Jefferson Davis and other leaders of the Confederate government moved out of Richmond. • The Union Army takes Richmond and puts out fires started by the confederacy. A lot of the city is in ruins. • Congress passes the 13th Amendment outlawing slavery in 1865. • Lee meets with Grant to surrender at Appomattox Courthouse in 1865. This signifies the end of the Civil War. • Lincoln's shot in 1865 at Ford's Theater by John Wilkes Booth. (AP US Notes)

Homesteaders

Settlers who acquired free land from the government

platonic

marked by the absence of romance or physical attraction

What impact did Christopher Columbus' journey have on the world?

Christopher Columbus was an Italian explorer who was commissioned by the king and queen of Spain to explore uncharted waters. He was trying to find a route west of Europe that would lead to the continent of Asia, and he would be in for a surprise when he'd discover the Americas. • Christopher Columbus and his ships came to the Bahamas in 1492, and he was greeted by the Tainos, a group of indigenous people living on the island that Columbus' ship arrived on. Despite being thrilled with the generosity of the natives, their gold & jewelry caught his attention. • Christopher Columbus had enslaved some of the Taino people. He wanted to teach them Spanish and convert them to Christianity if possible. • He founded an island he named Hispaniola (which is now modern day Haiti and the Dominican Republic). He built a fort and left his crew there to search for gold. When he returned in 1494, he found his whole crew killed off as a result of the Tainos rebelling against being taken as slaves. Many natives were killed for retribution, and the others became more unfriendly once they heard of what Europeans had done. Villages were being deserted, and there wasn't as much gold as was initially thought. He tried setting up a government on the island of Hispaniola. After many complaints about the way things were being run, Columbus was arrested and taken back to Spain in chains. He was never given back the right to govern. • Christopher Columbus was by no means the first explorer to discover the Americas. There's evidence to suggest that other expeditions were undertaken but were soon forgotten. The difference between Columbus and other explorers was that his voyage had a profound effect on the world of navigation, and it would help commence the Age of exploration. • In 1494, both Spain and Portugal agreed to the treaty of Tordesillas. The treaty of Tordesillas was a demarcation produced by the pope to separate Spanish and Portuguese territories in South America. The Portuguese got Brazil while Spain got all the rest of the countries in South America. • A young Italian merchant that went by the name Amerigo Vespucci was sent out by the king and queen to explore. He made a few voyages between 1497 and 1504, investigating the land mass and finding it much larger than was initially thought. He concluded that Europeans had found a new continent, and not a new route to Asia that Christopher Columbus claimed it to be. A German cartographer named Martin Waldseemüller created a map of the new world in 1507, and he named this continent America in honor of Amerigo Vesspuci's discoveries. • Nicolás de Ovando became the new governor of Hispaniola in 1502. He brought 2,500 Spanish settlers-families, not just male explorers-to create a permanent settlement on the island. Many Spanish explorers would marry native women and have children, creating new families of mixed ethnic heritage. Ovando was cruel to the Tainos, attacking them relentlessly and pitilessly. In response to a rebellion in Higüey, he ordered for six hundred to seven hundred captured Indians to be knifed to death and their corpses displayed. He commenced for a meeting of the caciques, or district chiefs, and when some eighty of them had been in the building, he locked them in while the building burnt to the ground, killing off the last of the independent chiefdoms in Hispaniola. • Juan Ponce de Leòn discovered San Juan, Puerto Rico in 1509. He was also the leader of a group of Europeans and Africans during an expedition in Florida. This is considered to be the 1st encounter of Europeans, Africans, and Natives in the Americas. Legend has it that he was looking for a "fountain of youth." He was wounded by a poisoned arrow and died soon thereafter. • Bartolomé de Las Casas began a fifty-two-year campaign to advocate for Indians' rights in 1514. • There were probably around a million natives who inhabited Hispaniola when they were discovered by Columbus in 1492. Only a thousand Tainos were left by the 1500s. • Alvar Núñez Cabeza de Veca was one of the few remaining survivors of the Nara vez expedition. He and a few others walked to Spanish territory. • Esteban was the name of a slave who walked with a few Spaniards to Spanish territory in Mexico. Making of the Columbian Exchange • The Silk Road was a trading route taken by traders that was created by Venetian trader Marco Polo in the late 1200s. Asian goods were sought for. • Vasco Núñez de Balboa reached the isthmus of Panama in 1513. He was also the first European to see the Pacific Ocean. • In 1519, Ferdinand Magellan and his crew began a voyage around the tip of South America. Magellan was killed, but his remaining crew became the 1st people to circumnavigate the globe once they arrived back at Spain in 1522. • European expansion into the Western Hemisphere generated intense social, religious, political, and economic competition and changes within European societies. • Contact amongst Europeans, Native Americans, and Africans resulted in the Columbian exchange and significant global, social, cultural, and political changes on both sides of the world. • After various journeys across the Atlantic Ocean that were taken by different explorers, all these voyages would lay the foundation for a multilateral system of trading routes called the Golden Triangle. Changes were being made, and what became known as the Columbian Exchange-an interchange of diseases, culture, plants, and animals between the old and new worlds-could be deemed as a reflection of these changes. • The Columbian Exchange brought new crops to Europe from the Americas, stimulating European population growth. It also brought new sources of mineral wealth, which facilitated the European shift from feudalism to capitalism. • Improvements in maritime technology and more organized methods for conducting international trade, such as joint-stock companies, helped drive changes to economies in Europe and the Americas. • The Colombian exchange and development of the Spanish Empire in the Western Hemisphere resulted in extensive demographic, economic, and social changes. Conquest of Aztec and Inca Empires • European nations' efforts to explore and conquer the New World stemmed from a search for new sources of wealth, economic and military competition, and a desire to spread Christianity. • Columbus and his successors had brought diseases with them from Europe, and thousands of natives died as a result of having no immunity. Some of these diseases were smallpox, measles, and others. The prevalence of diseases in the Americas made conquest easier. • Other than diseases, Native-Americans were faced with the threat of armed conquest. Hernan Cortes was a conquistador (this was a name given to the early Spanish conquerors of Mexico and Peru) who sailed from Cuba to Mexico with 600 soldiers in 1519. He conquered the Aztec capital of Tenochtitlán within two years, and he renamed it Mexico City. He was initially welcomed by the Aztec emperor Motzechuma (often written as Montezuma). After an exchange of gifts between the two parties, Hernan Cortes took the emperor as hostage but allowed for him to maintain a facade of rule. Cortes wanted to use the king as a puppet. The Aztecs turned on Cortes and he and his men fled the city in 1520. But with the help of other non-Aztecs who despised the Aztec because of the human sacrifices they demanded, a Spanish army regrouped and began a siege in the city. Montezuma was killed, probably stoned by his own people. Hernan Cortes completed his conquest in 1521. • A viceroy is a representative for a king in a foreign country. • New Spain was the new name given to the newly conquered countries in the Americas. • In 1532, Francisco Pizarro and a group of 168 Spanish soldiers capture the Inca Empire after defeating the Inca emperor and his army of eight-thousand soldiers. • Peru was considered by the Spanish to be an outlet for silver & gold. • The encomienda system was a system implemented by the Spanish Crown (which is a term used to describe the Spanish monarchy) that granted colonists the right to demand tribute and forced labor from the Indian inhabitants of a certain area. In the encomienda system, Spanish colonial colonies marshaled Native American labor to support plantation-based agriculture and extract precious metals and other resources. • European traders partnered with some West African groups who practiced slavery to forcibly extract enslaved laborers for the Americas. The Spanish imported enslaved Africans to labor in plantation agriculture and mining. • The Spanish developed a caste system that incorporated, and carefully defined the status of, the diverse population of Europeans, Africans, and Native Americans in their empire. • In their interactions, Europeans and Native Americans displayed different worldviews regarding issues such as religion, gender roles, family, land use, and power. Mutual misunderstandings between Europeans and a Native Americans often defined the early years of interaction and trade as each group sought to make sense of the other. Over time, Europeans and Native Americans adopted some useful aspects of each other's culture. As European encroachments on Native Americans' lands and demands on their labor increased, native peoples sought to defend and maintain their political sovereignty, economic prosperity, religious beliefs, and concepts of gender relations through diplomatic negotiations and military resistance. Extended contact with Native Americans and Africans fostered a debate among European religious and political leaders about how non-Europeans should be treated, as well as evolving religious, cultural, and racial justifications for the subjugation of Africans and Native Americans. (AP US Notes)

What should I know before watching The People v. O.J. Simpson tv show?

One of modern history's most gripping legal dramas will be reexamined when FX's miniseries The People v. O.J. Simpson: American Crime Story premieres on Tuesday. The show, starring Cuba Gooding Jr. as O.J. Simpson, is based on New Yorker writer Jeffrey Toobin's 1996 book The Run of His Life: The People v. O.J. Simpson and follows Simpson's 1994-5 murder trial through its sixteen months. It's the rare show for which viewers are tuning in not to find out what happens — most will already know — but rather to see a dramatic, Kardashian-laced retelling of the story. But, if you didn't follow the case closely — or if you weren't born when it happened — here's a reminder of what's in store. And fair warning: History doesn't really come with spoilers, but many of the details of the case are revealed below. The Accused Orenthal James Simpson made his mark with athletics while playing running back for the University of Southern California, winning the Heisman Trophy in 1968. O.J. — also known as "Juice" — was drafted by the Buffalo Bills, where he played for nine years before being traded to the San Francisco 49ers. After retiring from the NFL in 1979, Simpson also made a name for himself with small acting gigs and celebrity friends. In 1994, TIME reported that he attended Donald Trump's paparazzi-heavy wedding to Marla Maples. The Victims Nicole Brown Simpson and O.J., who were 12 years apart, met in 1977 and wed in 1985. The years they were married were peppered with domestic violence accusations and spousal abuse claims from Brown Simpson against her husband. O.J. was eventually sentenced to 120 hours of community service and two year's probation, fined $200 and ordered to give $500 to a domestic violence shelter for women. The sentencing prompted a statement from the couple, who had two children Sydney and Justin, together. "Our marriage is as strong as the day we were married, if not stronger," the 1989 statement said. They divorced in 1992. She and Ronald Goldman—a waiter at a nearby restaurant, who was reportedly bringing her a pair of glasses she'd left behind—were found dead on June 12, 1994. The White Bronco Police found bloodstains outside the driver-side door of Simpson's Ford Bronco and later ordered Simpson to turn himself in. On the day he was due to present himself, Robert Kardashian—a lawyer and friend of Simpson's—released what sounded like a suicide note from O.J., who wrote that he had "nothing to do" with the murder. It was about an hour later that a driver spotted a white Bronco on Interstate 405. It was not the same car in which the blood had been found, but O.J. was inside, being driven by Al Cowlings, a friend and teammate who owned the same car model. The low-speed chase ended in the driveway of Simpson's Brentwood home, where Simpson and Cowlings were taken into custody. Police found Simpson's passport and thousands of dollars in Al Cowlings' Bronco. The chase had been broadcast on live TV, making the Bronco into an icon of the trial: a collector named Michael Pulwer later purchased it for $75,000—more than twice its original value, according to ESPN—and it become fodder for pop-culture parodies. The Evidence According to prosecutor Marcia Clark, who said she must be "convinced 200% that a defendant is guilty" before trying a case, a conviction was a sure thing—but that turned out not to be the case. When prosecutors presented blood found at the crime scene, the defense—spearheaded by Robert Shapiro alongside Johnnie L. Cochran, Jr., who was well known for his work defending high profile clients—claimed it had been contaminated by police incompetence. There were also claims that the blood was planted by Mark Fuhrman, a detective who had a history of using racist terms. Prosecutors also presented a disturbing 911 call in which listeners could hear Nicole begging the police for help, as well as records found in a safety deposit box of hers, in which Nicole appeared to have kept track of abuse O.J. allegedly inflicted on her. The defense, however, argued that the log dated to the time of their divorce proceedings and was not relevant to the trial. A glove that was found at the crime scene was also presented after its mate was found on O.J.'s estate, with both victims' blood on it, but prosecutor Christopher Darden asked O.J. to try the glove on. It didn't fit, leading Cochran to say, "If it does not fit, you must acquit." The Racial Tension The O.J. Simpson trial took place at a time of heightened racial tensions—especially in Los Angeles just a few years after the 1991 beating of Rodney King—and those issues would prove pivotal to the trial as well as to response outside the courtroom. Fuhrman's alleged racism was part of the defense theory that O.J. might have been framed. By the time the trial drew to a close, it had come to be seen as a symptom of a divided America, and observers' views on the case were to many a litmus test for a much larger issue. TIME itself drew criticism for a darkened mugshot of Simpson that was featured on the cover shortly after the car chase. In response, then-editor James R. Gaines, wrote that, "First, it should be said (I wish it went without saying) that no racial implication was intended, by TIME or by the artist. One could argue that it is racist to say that blacker is more sinister, and some African Americans have taken that position in the course of this dispute, but that does not excuse insensitivity. To the extent that this caused offense to anyone, I deeply regret it." The Media Circus Judge Lance A. Ito was criticized for his decision to allow cameras in the courtroom during the trial. The coverage was so sensational that three of the top soap operas at the time lost more than 10% of their viewership in 1995, as audiences split for the real-life Simpson drama. In retrospect, the trial has gained another layer of media meaning: Robert Kardashian, who was on Simpson's legal team and died in 2003, was the former husband of Kris Jenner, of Keeping Up with the Kardashians fame. Jenner was close with Nicole Brown Simpson—they were supposed to have lunch the day after the murder—and gave her daughter Kendall Jenner the middle name Nicole, in memory of her late friend. The Verdict The jury found Simpson not guilty of murder in the first degree and second degree. A whopping 150 million viewers — 57% of the country — tuned in to watch the verdict at 10 a.m. on Oct. 3, 1995. Simpson was later ordered to pay $25 million in punitive damages to the families of Brown Simpson and Goldman after a civil case in 1997. The second verdict was featured on TIME's cover in February of 1997, but wasn't Simpson's last run in with the law. In December of 2008, he was found guilty of 10 charges related to a gunpoint robbery at a Las Vegas hotel. He's since been serving a sentence at the Lovelock Correctional Center in Nevada and will be up for parole in 2017. (TIME)

What should I know about the Boston marathon?

The Boston Marathon bombing of 2013 was a terrorist attack that took place a short distance from the finish line of the Boston Marathon on April 15, 2013. A pair of homemade bombs detonated in the crowd watching the race, killing 3 people and injuring more than 260. The marathon is traditionally held on Patriots' Day, a public holiday in Massachusetts that commemorates the American Revolutionary War Battles of Lexington and Concord. The festive atmosphere draws hundreds of thousands of spectators to the 26-mile 385-yard (42,195-metre) route from Hopkinton, Massachusetts, to Boston's Back Bay neighbourhood. More than 26,000 runners participated in the race in 2013, marking the 117th time that the world's oldest annual marathon had been contested. About five hours into the race, the first bomb exploded less than half a block from the finish line, on the north side of Boylston Street. Roughly 12 seconds later a second bomb exploded some 600 feet (180 metres) from the first. It too was planted on the north side of Boylston Street amid a crowd of onlookers. First responders reacted immediately, and a medical tent that had been erected to treat runners was turned into an emergency medical facility. Three bombing victims died of their injuries, and more than 100 of the seriously injured were transferred to area hospitals as local police and federal investigators surveyed a crime scene that covered 15 square blocks. In the days following the attacks, law-enforcement personnel solicited assistance from the public, asking for photographs or video footage that might prove relevant to their investigation. It was revealed that devices used in the attacks were household pressure cookers that had been packed with an explosive substance, nails, and ball bearings—the latter two elements acting as shrapnel when the bombs detonated. On April 18 the Federal Bureau of Investigation released images and video of two men identified as suspects in the attacks, including one photograph that showed one of the men placing a package at the location of the second explosion. Within hours the fatal shooting of a Massachusetts Institute of Technology campus police officer in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and the armed carjacking of a sport-utility vehicle in Boston's Allston neighbourhood spurred speculation about a possible connection between those crimes and the marathon bombing. Police pursued the stolen vehicle to the Boston suburb of Watertown, and an intense firefight ensued. Improvised explosive devices were thrown at the police, as many as 300 rounds were exchanged, and a police officer was shot and wounded. During the gun battle, 26-year-old Tamerlan Tsarnaev, identified as one of the two suspects in the bombing, was seriously wounded by explosives and multiple gunshots. He was apprehended by police, but he was further injured when the second suspect—his younger brother, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev—struck him with a car as he fled the scene. Tamerlan Tsarnaev was taken to a hospital and was pronounced dead in the early morning hours of April 19. With one suspect dead and the other on the run, police launched a massive house-to-house manhunt that covered the surrounding area. Much of Greater Boston came to an unprecedented standstill as officials requested that residents remain in their homes and that businesses not open. The "stay home" order was lifted at 6:00 PM on April 19, and a Watertown resident whose house was several blocks from the shoot-out went to his backyard to check on the boat that was parked there. He noticed that its protective tarp had come loose and, while adjusting it, he observed Dzhokhar Tsarnaev hiding in the boat. Police soon arrived, and after a short standoff Tsarnaev was taken into custody. On April 22 federal prosecutors charged him with having used a weapon of mass destruction in the marathon attacks. After a two-week trial, on April 8, 2015, Tsarnaev was found guilty on 30 counts in connection with the bombing; 17 of those charges carried the possibility of the death penalty. On May 15, 2015, Tsarnaev was sentenced to death. In the weeks and months that followed the bombing, investigators attempted to understand the two brothers' motives and determine whether they had ties to larger organized terrorist networks. Many also posed a question that was articulated by Pres. Barack Obama during an address to the nation; "Why did young men who grew up and studied here, as part of our communities and our country, resort to such violence?" Dzhokhar Tsarnaev had arrived in the United States with his parents in 2002, and Tamerlan joined them a year later. Prior to their immigration to the U.S., the ethnic Chechen family had lived in Kyrgyzstan and the Russian republic of Dagestan. The elder Tsarnaev was an aspiring boxer, and he had had some successes at the amateur level, but he began to exhibit signs of Islamic radicalization in 2009. In 2011, acting on a request from the Russian government, the FBI investigated Tamerlan but found no evidence of terrorist activity. The following year Tamerlan spent six months in Dagestan. Upon his return he created a channel on the Web site YouTube with links to a number of extremist videos and applied for U.S. citizenship. Dzhokhar, meanwhile, was a popular student at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth. When three of his friends learned of his role in the bombing, they gathered at his dormitory room and discovered a backpack that contained several fireworks that had been emptied of powder. The trio threw away the backpack and its contents (it was subsequently recovered), an action that led to their being charged with hindering or misleading investigators. One of the three, Azamat Tazhayakov, was found guilty of obstructing a terrorism investigation in July 2014. He faced a maximum sentence of 25 years in prison. Although there appeared to be no concrete links between the Tsarnaev brothers and any larger plots or terrorist groups, Dzhokhar revealed to investigators that he and his brother had obtained the plans for the bombs from Inspire, an online newsletter published by al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP). That led analysts who were following the investigation to conclude that the Tsarnaevs were "self-radicalized," having developed a personal militant ideology that drew from disparate sources without being directly connected to any of them. Investigators uncovered gruesome evidence of the violent nature of that ideology when Tamerlan was implicated in a triple homicide that took place in Waltham, Massachusetts, in September 2011. Ibragim Todashev, an associate of Tamerlan's, also confessed to his role in the Waltham murders before he was shot and killed during an interrogation by the FBI in May 2013.

Asexuality

the lack of sexual attraction of any kind; no interest in or desire for sex

Oedipus complex 3

(in Freudian theory) the complex of emotions aroused in a young child, typically around the age of four, by an unconscious sexual desire for the parent of the opposite sex and wish to exclude the parent of the same sex. (The term was originally applied to boys, the equivalent in girls being called the Electra complex .).

What happened when OJ Simpson was acquitted?

1995 October 03 O.J. Simpson acquitted At the end of a sensational trial, former football star O.J. Simpson is acquitted of the brutal 1994 double murder of his estranged wife, Nicole Brown Simpson, and her friend, Ronald Goldman. In the epic 252-day trial, Simpson's "dream team" of lawyers employed creative and controversial methods to convince jurors that Simpson's guilt had not been proved "beyond a reasonable doubt," thus surmounting what the prosecution called a "mountain of evidence" implicating him as the murderer. Orenthal James Simpson—a Heisman Trophy winner, star running back with the Buffalo Bills, and popular television personality—married Nicole Brown in 1985. He reportedly regularly abused his wife and in 1989 pleaded no contest to a charge of spousal battery. In 1992, she left him and filed for divorce. On the night of June 12, 1994, Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald Goldman were stabbed and slashed to death in the front yard of Mrs. Simpson's condominium in Brentwood, Los Angeles. By June 17, police had gathered enough evidence to charge O.J. Simpson with the murders. Simpson had no alibi for the time frame of the murders. Some 40 minutes after the murders were committed, a limousine driver sent to take Simpson to the airport saw a man in dark clothing hurrying up the drive of his Rockingham estate. A few minutes later, Simpson spoke to the driver though the gate phone and let him in. During the previous 25 minutes, the driver had repeatedly called the house and received no answer. A single leather glove found outside Simpson's home matched a glove found at the crime scene. In preliminary DNA tests, blood found on the glove was shown to have come from Simpson and the two victims. After his arrest, further DNA tests would confirm this finding. Simpson had a wound on his hand, and his blood was a DNA match to drops found at the Brentwood crime scene. Nicole Brown Simpson's blood was discovered on a pair of socks found at the Rockingham estate. Simpson had recently purchased a "Stiletto" knife of the type the coroner believed was used by the killer. Shoe prints in the blood at Brentwood matched Simpson's shoe size and later were shown to match a type of shoe he had owned. Neither the knife nor shoes were found by police. On June 17, a warrant was put out for Simpson's arrest, but he refused to surrender. Just before 7 p.m., police located him in a white Ford Bronco being driven by his friend, former teammate Al Cowlings. Cowlings refused to pull over and told police over his cellular phone that Simpson was suicidal and had a gun to his head. Police agreed not to stop the vehicle by force, and a low-speed chase ensued. Los Angeles news helicopters learned of the event unfolding on their freeways, and live television coverage began. As millions watched, the Bronco was escorted across Los Angeles by a phalanx of police cars. Just before 8 p.m., the dramatic journey ended when Cowlings pulled into the Rockingham estate. After an hour of tense negotiation, Simpson emerged from the vehicle and surrendered. In the vehicle was found a travel bag containing, among other things, Simpson's passport, a disguise kit consisting of a fake moustache and beard, and a revolver. Three days later, Simpson appeared before a judge and pleaded not guilty. Simpson's subsequent criminal trial was a sensational media event of unprecedented proportions. It was the longest trial ever held in California, and courtroom television cameras captured the carnival-like atmosphere of the proceedings. The prosecution's mountain of evidence was systemically called into doubt by Simpson's team of expensive attorneys, who made the dramatic case that their client was framed by unscrupulous and racist police officers. Citing the questionable character of detective Mark Fuhrman and alleged blunders in the police investigation, defense lawyers painted Simpson as yet another African American victim of the white judicial system. The jurors' reasonable doubt grew when the defense spent weeks attacking the damning DNA evidence, arguing in overly technical terms that delays and other anomalies in the gathering of evidence called the findings into question. Critics of the trial accused Judge Lance Ito of losing control of his courtroom. In polls, a majority of African Americans believed Simpson to be innocent of the crime, while white America was confident of his guilt. However, the jury—made up of nine African Americans, two whites, and one Hispanic American—was not so divided; they took just four hours of deliberation to reach the verdict of not guilty on both murder charges. On October 3, 1995, an estimated 140 million Americans listened in on radio or watched on television as the verdict was delivered. In February 1997, Simpson was found liable for several charges related to the murders in a civil trial and was forced to award $33.5 million in compensatory and punitive damages to the victims' families. However, with few assets remaining after his long and costly legal battle, he has avoided paying the damages. In 2007, Simpson ran into legal problems once again when he was arrested for breaking into a Las Vegas hotel room and taking sports memorabilia, which he claimed had been stolen from him, at gunpoint. On October 3, 2008, he was found guilty of 12 charges related to the incident, including armed robbery and kidnapping, and sentenced to 33 years in prison. He was released on parole on October 1, 2017. (History Channel)

What should I know about Indigo?

Indigo was a plant cultivated by Senegalese slaves in Louisiana. (AP US notes)

What if I sleep with my contact lenses on?

It is not safe to sleep while wearing contact lenses. According to experts, sleeping with contacts increases your risk for a corneal infection, which is an infection of the clear layer protecting the colored part of your eye. [you might also get red or irritated eyes]. (Sleep foundation)

What should I know about the founders of Chicago?

Louis Joliet and Father Jacques Marquette Find Chicagou. This area they found has good routes for water travel that was the most efficient mode of travel at the time. They helped put Chicago on the map. (AP US Notes)

What should I know about the deep water horizon oil spill?

The Deepwater Horizon oil spill, also called the Gulf of Mexico oil spill, is perhaps the largest marine oil spill in history, caused by an April 20, 2010, explosion on the Deepwater Horizon oil rig—located in the Gulf of Mexico, approximately 41 miles (66 km) off the coast of Louisiana—and its subsequent sinking on April 22.

How did technology change the nation in the late 1800s and early 1900s?

Technology Changes the Nation • Alexander Graham Bell was an inventor who patented the telephone in 1876. • When Bell returned to teaching, others organized the Bell Telephone Company. By 1880, there were 30,000 telephone subscribers. By 1900, the number had grown to 1.3 million, and by 1920, to 13 million. In four decades, Bell's experiment had become a necessity of modern life. For most Americans, the telephone replaced the telegraph, developed by Samuel F.B. Morse from earlier inventions in 1835. • Before Bell gained fame for his telephone, Thomas Edison was already on his way to being known as the greatest inventor of the era. He had almost 1000 patents to his name, thus becoming the "most" productive American inventor of all time. Edison's most important invention was the electric light bulb. In the 1870s, large meeting halls were lit by arc lamps, and gas lights were popular in many places. The rest of the nation—city as well as country—depended on kerosene lamps or candles when the sun went down. The electric lightbulb was deemed to have changed the country. • George Westinghouse and Nikola Tesla found that alternating current was a much more efficient way to transmit electricity than the direct current that Edison used. Edison was initially skeptical, but by the 1890s, alternating current produced at generating plants from New York to California was powering much of the nation. • Frank J. Sprague introduced the 1st electric streetcars in Richmond, Virginia, in 1888, and these cars, which were cheaper and cleaner and safer than horse-drawn or steam cars, caught on quickly. • The country was radically different because of Edison's work and that of other prolific inventors who gave the country elevators invented by Elisha G. Otis, machine tools from Pratt and Whitney, steam boilers from Babcock and Wilcox, newspaper Linotype compositors, and typewriters. A total of 440,000 patents issued between 1860 and 1890 transformed modern life. • In the 1890s, a number of independent manufacturers began experimenting with gasoline-powered vehicles, putting a gasoline engine on bicycles and carriages, which led to automobiles. By 1916, 1 million automobiles were produced in the US, which created massive change as work with horses declined and a new set of jobs in the automobile industry began and as more and more Americans experienced the freedom that an automobile gave them. • The key to the vastly expanded production of automobiles was not the vehicle itself, which seemed relatively simple, given other inventions that already existed. Rather, expanded production was possible only after a way was found to produce large numbers of cars at low cost. The person who revolutionized the production of automobiles was Henry Ford, a former machinist, who built his first automobile in 1896. His invention of the assembly line made possible the mass production of cars at reasonable costs. Ford took the idea of interchangeable parts, first developed for guns by Eli Whitney, and applied it to cars. Then he created a process whereby those parts could be assembled in a routinized fashion that greatly speeded production, thus lowering cost significantly. • Ford opened a plant for the production of the Model T Ford in Highland Park, Michigan, in 1910 and added a moving assembly line in 1913. Each worker was assigned 1 small task to be repeated over and over. Workers did their assigned tasks over and over. At the end of the process, a fully assembled Model T emerged from the assembly line. Ford paid his workers well. He had to. They found the work mind numbing, but valued the pay—high enough that they, too, could afford their own model T. He transformed an industry, bringing the cost of an automobile to within the reach of many Americans and spawning new industries from highway construction to automobile repairs. The success of the automobile dramatically expanded the nation's need for oil, now refined into gasoline to power the rapidly growing numbers of vehicles. • Wilbur and Orville Wright, 2 bicycle makers from Dayton, Ohio, were determined to develop a flying machine. On December 17th, 1903, on a deserted beach at Kitty Hawk, NC, their machine took off. By 1908, Orville Wright had a contract with the Army Signal Corps to conduct test flights at Fort Myer, VA. The Wright Brothers conducted test flights around the country, including LA and Chicago. Air travel did not transform the lives of most Americans as quickly as the automobile because it remained inefficient and dangerous for some time. Nevertheless, watching people actually leave the ground on machines confirmed for many that, in the realm of technology, anything seemed possible. Corporations and Monopolies • "Gilded Age" was a term applied to America in the late 1800s that refers to the shallow display and worship of wealth characteristic of the period. The term was coined by Mark Twain. • The Gilded Age is an era deemed to be dominated by laissez-faire business policies, political stalemate, and "forgettable" presidents. • The gap in wealth between different classes was deemed the worst during this time period. • Most of the country's earliest corporations had been for public benefit—building hospitals and universities—or for temporary partnerships for specific ventures. New corporate structures emerged during the Jacksonian era in response to larger, more expensive ventures to process cotton and manufacture other materials. After the Civil War, corporate structures achieved a level of size and power undreamed of by earlier generations. Managing the investments involved in the great new industries required a new kind of financing and new "middle management" jobs. In the absence of a federal bank—nothing had replaced the Bank of the United States after Jackson abolished it in the 1830s—private bankers played an increasingly important role. Post-Civil War corporations and banks made a few Americans extremely wealthy—richer than any American ever had been before. • The Panic of 1873 was a major economic downturn—launched when the country's leading financier, Jay Cooke, went bankrupt—during which thousands lost their jobs and from which the country took years to recover. The Stock Exchange closed for 10 days. Banks collapsed. Railroad construction stopped. By 1874, 500,000 people had lost their jobs, and breadlines were seen in NY and wherever railroad construction and the demand for steel rails, wooden ties, or products that moved by rail had been boosting the economy. The depression of 1873 demonstrated the boom-and-bust cycle of the new economy and the degree to which railroads and banking connected all parts of the nation's financial structure. • As the economy recovered after 1873, the man who was deemed to have profited most was already very rich—Cornelius Vanderbilt. After Robert Fulton invented the steamboat in 1807, Vanderbilt created a steamboat empire, first in New York Harbor, and then around the world. • In 1869, speculators led by Gould and Fisk teamed up to corner the nation's gold supply. First, they convinced President Grant to appoint Daniel Butterfield to the key treasury post overseeing the nation's gold supply. They then bribed Butterfield to join in their conspiracy. As they kept buying and hoarding gold, the price kept going up and up because of the demand they were creating. Grant discovered, or at least guessed, what Butterfield and the trio were up to, and he ordered the government to sell up to $4 million in gold, bringing the price back down. The trio sold their gold just before Grant issued his order. Although they no longer controlled the gold supply, they emerged very well-off. Many others who'd invested in gold were ruined, and what became known as "Black Friday" created a significant drag on the nation's economy. • Before the 1800s were over, however, a new generation of corporate leaders exceeded the most optimistic hopes of the Vanderbilts and their generation. Among them was John D. Rockefeller, who, though he did not discover any oil nor invent new ways to refine oil into kerosene or gasoline, did discover new ways to make money from oil, amassing more money than anyone had previously imagined possible. He created the Standard Oil Company, which came to have monopoly control of the sales of oil in the US, making Rockefeller an extraordinarily rich man as he drove competitors out of business. • Horizontal integration: the merger of competitors in the same industry. This method was used by Rockefeller to gain control over oil production. • If anything could symbolize the new industrial might that characterized the Gilded Age in the US, it was the production of steel at one of Carnegie's plants. • Andrew Carnegie can be best understood in the context of his early life before becoming one of the most successful businessmen and philanthropists of his time. He and his family came to America as poor Scottish immigrants, and young Carnegie found work as a bobbin boy at a cotton factory. He educated himself by reading and writing and going to night school, and he eventually got another job as a messenger in a telegraph office. The general superintendent of the Pennsylvania Railroad Company noticed Carnegie's talents and hired him. Carnegie was rising through the ranks, becoming a supervisor of a whole division. He was also making a lot more money. Later on he made a trip to England where he met Henry Bessemer, and Carnegie would utilize the Bessemer process at his mill to turn iron into steel. He would make millions of dollars off of this idea, and by the 1890s his company, Carnegie Steel, was the largest single company in the steel business. Near the the end of the century he sold his company to JP Morgan for $480,000,000 to become one of the world's richest ex-businessmen. • Vertical integration: the consolidation of numerous production functions, from the extraction of the raw materials to the distribution and marketing of the finished products, under the direction of one firm. This model was used by Carnegie when conducting business. • Free enterprise, as previous generations had known it, was quickly being replaced by corporations or trusts that had many employees who simply took orders while the trust dominated the market for its product, ending competition and setting prices that consumers large and small had no choice but to pay or do without the product. The owners of these trusts used their money to ensure they had enough political power to make sure that no government intervened to challenge their place in the economy. • As was true with Rockefeller's oil and Carnegie's steel, the trusts sometimes improved quality (due to careful management and attention to detail) and cut costs of products to the public. But it was also true that once a trust was firmly in control, it could raise prices at will and there seemed to be little that anyone could do. And trusts routinely imposed harsh working conditions and low wages on their employees, who didn't have the option of taking their skills to a competitor since there were none. • While Rockefeller and Carnegie were amassing their fortunes, another American was amassing the greatest economic power that the country had ever seen. Although never as personally wealthy as Rockefeller or Carnegie, John Pierpont Morgan was the banker that everyone, including the richest industrialists and often the US government, looked up to. In the financial chaos of the Civil War, Morgan launched J.P. Morgan & Company. During the war, Morgan made great profits. He once sold reconditioned army rifles back to the federal government at a considerable profit. Working with European banks, Morgan helped finance the transcontinental railroad in the US and the Suez Canal in the Middle East (both of which was completed in 1869). Using his skill and formidable resources, Morgan helped pick up the pieces of the American economy after the collapse of Jay Cooke and Company in 1873. • The Panic of 1893 was a national economic crisis set off by the collapse of two of the country's largest employers, the Philadelphia and Reading Railroad and the National Cordage Company. Following the failure of these two companies, a panic erupted on the stock market. The 1893 panic hit rich and poor. Lives of the Middle Class in the Gilded Age • During the Gilded Age, what came to be known as the middle class and middle-class values emerged in the US. More Americans than ever before achieved a level of comfort and social respectability that, while it was a long way from the wealth of the Rockefellers, Carnegies, and Morgans, was also a long way from the poverty of most rural America or those who worked in steel mills, on the railroads, or in the refineries. As Americans moved from farms to towns, some of the urban residents became comfortable professionals and managers and, in the process, created a set of norms for "middle-class respectability" that had not been known before. • Men and women grew more independent during this time period. • Suburbs were a new development in American life during the Gilded Age. It helped people living in semi-rural areas get to their jobs in the commercial centers of urban America. • The Gilded Age saw new levels of religious activity among white middle-class Protestants. Most of the middle class were, indeed, both white and Protestant, and they viewed themselves as living in a "Christian America," by which they meant a Protestant Christian one. Between 1860 and 1900, the major Protestant denominations—the Methodists, Baptists, Presbyterians, Congregationalists, and Episcopalians—tripled their memberships from 5 million to 16 million. Americans not only joined Protestant churches but also participated in nondenominational religious organizations, including the YMCA as well as Bible, mission, and social reform societies. The theology that was being preached changed with the times, becoming more individualistic and more optimistic. And no one represented the changes as much as the great revivalist of the era, Dwight L. Moody. Like many Americans of his generation—the same generation as Rockefeller, Carnegie, and Morgan—Moody grew up on a farm but moved to a city. When the Civil War began, Moody gave up his shoe business to work full-time for the YMCA. He led a Sunday School for poor immigrant children and supported the YMCA's social service missions. By 1875, Moody had an international reputation. He launched the Northfield and Mount Hermon Schools as well as a new Bible training school in Chicago in 1886 that eventually became the Moody Bible Institute. • Between 1876 and 1896, electoral politics reflected the interests of the era. While groups within the major parties and new political parties like the populists protested against the poverty and corruption that was part of the Gilded Age, the major parties, Republicans and Democrats alike, reflected the ideas and aspirations of the middle and upper classes. In a nation where a few were growing exorbitantly wealthy and a larger number were moving into new comforts, the leaders of the political parties had no interest in challenging the status quo. • Stalwarts was a name given to a faction of the Republican Party in the 1870s and 1880s who wanted the party to stay true to its earlier support for Reconstruction in the South and who were less connected to the emerging big-business interests than others. • Mugwumps were a reform faction of the Republican Party who supported Governor Grover Cleveland, the Democratic nominee, over the Republican James G. Blaine in the 1884 election. Blaine had a reputation for corruption whereas Garfield had a reputation for honesty. • "Waving the bloody shirt" was a tactic to remind everyone in the North that Republicans had won the Civil War while Democrats represented the states of the Confederacy. This tactic seemed to win a lot of elections for Republicans. Immigration • In the 75 years between 1815 and 1890, 15 million people immigrated to the US, the great majority from Northern Europe—Britain, Ireland, Germany, Scandinavia, Switzerland, and Holland. In the next 25 years, from 1890 until the start of WWI in 1914, around 15 million additional immigrants came to the US, and those immigrants came from new places—80% of them from Italy, Greece, Russia, the empire of Austria-Hungary, Romania, and the Ottoman Empire, and others from Japan, China, Korea, as well as Mexico and other parts of Latin America. With their arrival, they changed the makeup of the nation. What all these immigrants seemed to have in common was a "push-pull" experience in which various factors pushed them to leave their home countries and, at the same time, other factors pulled them to try a new life in the United States. • When Sadie Frowne described the desperate poverty of Poland or when the Lithuanian, Antanas Kaztausis, expressed his family's fear that he was about to be drafted into the Russian army, they were relating reasons that pushed hundreds of thousands of people to move not only from southern and eastern Europe—Italy, Greece, Poland, Russia—but also from China, Japan, and Korea to start new lives in the US. Most of those who emigrated from those countries to the US between 1890 and WWI did so in part because something, often grinding poverty and fear of persecution, pushed them to get out of places where they and their families had lived for many generations. • Pogroms were Government-encouraged attacks against Jewish citizens, property, and villages in tsarist Russia beginning in the 1880s, a primary reason for Russian Jewish migration to the US. • The Chinese Exclusion Act was a federal legislation that suspended Chinese immigration, limited the civil rights of resident Chinese, and forbade their naturalization. • When immigrants arrived in the US, they didn't always find what they had been expecting or hoping for. Italian immigrants may have often summed up their experience: Back in the old country, the young and naïve immigrants had been told that the streets of America were paved with gold. But when they got here, they discovered 3 important things: 1st, the streets weren't paved in gold; 2nd, they weren't paved at all; and 3rd, they were expected to pave them. Few immigrants didn't seem quite as naïve as the story implies, but Italian immigrants liked the image. • Once in the US, immigrants weren't always welcomed. Many native-born Americans may have distrusted what they saw as foreign cultures. But the jobs—though low level and low pay—were there and immigrants began working in the factories and in the booming urban sweatshops that were clothing the country and the world. • New York was the prime point of entry for immigrants from Europe. In 1892, the federal government built a new immigration center on Ellis Island in the harbor, which replaced the old one at Castle Garden at the tip of Manhattan. Ellis Island combined quarantine, customs, and reception. 12 million people came through Ellis Island before it closed in 1954. It could be an intimidating experience as clerks asked a battery of questions, trying to be sure that no physically or mentally ill people or troublemakers were allowed into the country. Nevertheless, only about 2% of those who arrived at Ellis Island were actually turned away because they either carried disease or seemed unlikely to be able to support themselves. • During this process at Ellis Island, the clerks often gave immigrants a new anglicized name. A Russian named Cooperstein could become Cooper, a Finn named Huttama became Hanson, or a Greek named Kiriapoulis became Campbell. • Most Asian immigrants came through the port of San Francisco. In 1910, the federal government created a processing center on Angel Island in San Francisco Bay that was designed to be a kind of West Coast Ellis Island. Over the next 30 years, 175,000 immigrants entered the US through Angel Island, the vast majority of them Chinese. • Although Angel Island might have been designed as a counterpart to Ellis Island, it was deemed a very different place. At both islands, immigrants faced frightening medical inspections and batteries of questions from federal immigration agents. But while most of those coming through Ellis Island usually left within a day, many on Angel Island were kept for weeks or months. • Melting pot was an often popular idea that somehow immigrants from other countries should quickly lose their culture and language and "melt" into being just like other Americans. • Sweatshops were small, poorly ventilated shops or apartments crammed with workers, often family members, who pieced together garments. • Ethnic enclaves (ghettoes) were/are places where cultures would reside ( EX: Little Italy, Greek Town, Polonia, Chinatown, etc.)

Iraq War (2003)

USA forces overthrew Saddam Hussein. President George W. Bush [supposedly] believed Saddam held weapons of mass destruction. The US invaded Iraq (2003) on the basis that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction...and wanted to do a regime change. There were massive anti-war demonstrations everywhere, even before the war started. The Iraq War would last until 2011. U.S invaded Iraq in search of WMD (weapons of mass destruction) and to overthrow Saddam. (AP US Notes)

Oedipus complex 2

a boy's sexual desires toward his mother and feelings of jealousy and hatred for the rival father

Oedipus complex

according to Freud, a boy's sexual desires toward his mother and feelings of jealousy and hatred for the rival father

under pretense

giving the appearance; pretending

Profiteer

make or seek to make an excessive or unfair profit, esp. illegally or in a black market: (as noun profiteering) : the profiteering of tabloid journalists.

What do people underestimate often?

You spend 5+ hours on an essay and get an 85%. Your friend gets a 100%. "Well, he is naturally gifted." You lose 10 pounds in a month. Your friend, 20. "Well, he has a higher metabolism." What does this mean? It means that he/she has outdone you. Though many people may think, oh, they got a higher score because they are naturally gifted, and I actually worked my ass off. But in reality, think of the time, effort, and patience spent into what they want to succeed in. It always looks easy when someone else is doing it. Hard work beats talent People often underestimate how hard other people work. Posted by Jeremy Zhao People often misunderstand the concept of hardwork. Sometimes they think they work hard enough already by putting all their energy to complete just one task but then they whine because there's a person who seem so relaxed but still achieve better than them. But hard work is a process. The achievers usually cultivate a habit. They don't work only if there's an immediate goal to achieve. So if there's a task they need to complete, it feels easy for them since they did it many times already, compared to people who only start to work by then. Posted by Destria Aryani Also, good workers are critical thinkers, so they make systems and use and tweak those systems to help solve a problem. They don't solve a task as if it's one unique thing, they do it as applying a general method. This means they can always solve these kinds of problems easily, whereas those without systems, but goals, do everything as a unique puzzle, and have to restart every time. They work hard once and spend way longer on it, get some tricks up their sleeves and keep that skill for as long as wanted. The others work less each time, but in total, they end up spending n times as long with n times as much energy and effort used. Hard workers work hard, and then they use knowledge from previous work and hard effort with systems to solve every new problem related to what they did easily. Posted by Mohamed Bin-Alfur An example of this that really irritated me was when I was forced to learn to write with my left hand, because my right hand has a long term injury which puts it in constant pain. I spent months writing badly and slowly and with loads of frustration with my left. It was really hard not to lose motivation. I dedicated my entire summer to learning this skill. Fast forward a few months, it's still not easy, but I'm able to take surprisingly legible notes in class. I meet up with a friend who asks how writing with my left hand is going. I show her some random page of notes, quite proud of my achievements and she says "That's really good, you must have been partly ambidextrous before". Slightly disheartened, but still trying to be nice I said "No, it was just a lot of hard work". Her reply: "No I don't believe that's possible. You definitely were partly ambidextrous before." Posted by Tam Risa (Quora)

Why does the OJ case matter?

The OJ case matters more than you think By Jennifer Keishin Armstrong 17th February 2016 The football star's murder trial is still changing what we see and hear on TV, and in culture at large, 20 years later. Jennifer Keishin Armstrong looks at its profound impact. crum of TV news crews envelops a gated mansion. A man with a distinctive salt-and-pepper coif fights his way through the crowd to the police officers standing watch. "OJ is expecting me," he tells one of the uniformed men. "I'm his friend, Robert Kardashian. I'm sure I'm on the list." The officer tells Kardashian there is no list - one wonders if he thinks this is just another exclusive party in the Brentwood neighbourhood of Los Angeles. Just then, Kardashian spots fellow lawyer Howard Weitzman. "Can you believe this?" Kardashian says to the other man as they embrace. "It's a circus here," Weitzman acknowledges. "I came as soon as I heard," Kardashian says. "Kris called me. She and Nicole were going to have lunch today." Just then, a black limo arrives, finally parting the crowd as the gates open before it. OJ Simpson is inside. The police make way for the car, but keep Kardashian and Weitzman from following it onto the estate. You've seen the effect of the OJ case if you've ever turned on a TV or streaming device This 1994 scene - based on real events and re-enacted in the first episode of FX's addictive new scripted series about the famous murder case, The People v OJ Simpson: American Crime Story - predicts much of TV history for the next two-decades-plus. So many threads unspool from this very moment: the rise of 24-hour news cycles trying to squeeze meaning out of even the most banal moments, reality TV, the public's appetite for gawking at the foibles of the rich and sort-of famous, a cultural obsession with true crime - and, of course, the hint at future Kardashian rule. Judge Lance Ito allowed cameras in the court - a choice widely derided - and Simpson would frequently stare into them, which some thought curried sympathy (Credit: Getty Images) The OJ Simpson murder case carried serious implications for a number of major issues: race relations, police treatment of African-Americans, domestic violence, and the effects of money on the justice system. But it also made Simpson a bigger star than his football and acting careers ever did - and irreparably changed the medium most responsible, television. You've seen its effects if you've ever watched cable news, a reality show, The Jinx, or Making a Murderer. At the time, we had no idea that every minute detail of a case could translate into ratings gold. We had no idea that wealthy 'real' housewives or the children of Simpson's lawyers could hold their own as TV stars. But we were about to find out. Squeezing OJ It's no wonder the Simpson case has had such an impact on the small screen: more than 150 million people in the US, or 57 percent of all Americans, tuned in to watch the 1995 not-guilty verdict. Those are ratings bound to change the way media executives thought. Entertainment Weekly noted at the time that viewers were skipping their typical scripted dramas to watch the trial instead: ratings for daytime soap operas and talk shows in the US declined rapidly when Judge Lance Ito made the fateful decision to allow cameras into the courtroom. Johnnie Cochran proved a master orator, with a unique ability to reframe issues - a skill infamously parodied as the 'Chewbacca defence' on South Park (Credit: Getty Images) It's particularly telling, too, that CNN and Court TV weren't the only ones broadcasting the trial: E! Entertainment Television, the future home of the Kardashian reality franchise, made its name by rolling live from the courthouse. CNN's daily ratings quintupled and E!'s quadrupled. Every one of the trial's major players became household names and indelible caricatures: among them prosecutors Marcia Clark and Christopher Darden (lampooned as recently as last year's Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt trial arc) as well as defense attorney Johnnie Cochran (whose showman persona translated almost instantly to Seinfeld's recurring character Jackie Chiles). Bruce Jenner muttered at the screen, "You got away with murder." The US cable channel Court TV was founded in 1991, three years before Simpson's arrest. The trial coverage also led to the approach best exemplified by Headline News' Nancy Grace, who rose to fame by personifying the concept of "trial by public opinion". The Bravo network, too, owes a debt to the Simpson trial for its inside look at the denizens of mid-sized mansions, which would eventually beget the channel's Real Housewives franchise. Simpson's lawyer Robert Kardashian is the father of Kim, Khloe and Kourtney Kardashian of reality TV fame - his ex-wife Kris married former Olympian Bruce Jenner (Credit: E!) Trial star Faye Resnick, who wrote a trashy tell-all memoir about her friendship with Nicole Brown Simpson, became the trial's crossover star with multiple appearances on The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills. (Her Simpson book was, in fact, the subject of a recent dinner-party confrontation on the show.) Resnick was the perfect prototype for what we now see as a reality star: the former model, occasional interior designer to the stars and ex-wife of a hotel renovator has, naturally, made multiple appearances on Keeping Up with the Kardashians as well. Bruce Jenner transitioned to Caitlyn Jenner in 2015 and starred in her own reality TV programme, I Am Cait, which helped raise awareness of transgender life (Credit: REX) Speaking of that now-famous family: Time magazine's coverage of the verdict included accounts of Kris Kardashian - Robert's ex-wife and, yes, truly the intended lunch partner of murder victim Nicole Brown Simpson - watching the court proceedings on TV with her then-new husband, former Olympian Bruce Jenner. The magazine even recounted Jenner muttering at the screen, "You got away with murder." Reading this in 2016 feels almost like watching a particularly juicy episode of Keeping Up With the Kardashians. Robert Kardashian pleaded for OJ to refrain from killing himself in "Kimmy's bedroom" The People v OJ Simpson can't stop itself from endless, obvious winks to this fact - from that reference to Kris's lunch plans with Nicole to Kris reprimanding daughters Khloe and Kourtney at Nicole's funeral to Robert's pleas for OJ to refrain from killing himself in "Kimmy's bedroom". Now the Kardashian sisters are moguls and models, while Kris is the international symbol for a pushy "momager" (she even filed documents to trademark the term). Meanwhile, their former stepfather has transitioned to Caitlyn Jenner and become an icon with her own much more socially significant reality show. Are you not entertained? But The People v OJ Simpson's connections to 2016 TV don't end there. In fact, the series feels particularly resonant coming on the heels of Netflix's hit documentary Making a Murderer. At times, that story - about the trial of a lower-class Wisconsin man named Steven Avery, who was exonerated of a sexual assault only to be convicted of a murder - felt like the inverse of Simpson's. Avery and his lawyers' attempts to prove his innocence were just as engrossing to watch as Simpson's trial; but their efforts seemed stymied by a lack of power and resources, while Simpson is often seen as the quintessential rich celebrity who could buy any trial outcome he wanted. The People v OJ Simpson: American Crime Story casts John Travolta as Robert Shapiro, David Schwimmer as Kardashian and Cuba Gooding Jr as Simpson (Credit: FX) Throughout the years the documentarians filmed Making a Murderer, few of the participants acted as if they were on television, presumably because they had no way of knowing how many people, if anyone, would see the footage. Netflix, after all, was just a mail-order version of a video shop at the time filming began. The lawyers, police, suspects, and witnesses probably didn't realise, at the time, that their television show would indeed rival Simpson's. The fact that Making a Murderer premiered within months of The People v OJ Simpson, however, isn't a coincidence. The Golden Age of TV Drama has given way to The Golden Age of True Crime, with audiences obsessing over Avery as well as The Jinx and NPR's Serial podcast. And The People v OJ underlines that cultural transformation perfectly - especially in the second episode. There's a scene where a TV producer orders his team to cut away from the NBA finals to live coverage of Simpson's infamous escape attempt in a white Ford Bronco. "OJ is news, entertainment, and sports," he says. He's contradicting what Los Angeles Superior Court Judge Mary Ann Murphy told a state task force investigating the effects of cameras in the courtroom in the wake of the Simpson verdict: "It is time for the judiciary to declare that we are not part of the entertainment industry." Alas, that producer was right; the judge was too late. And we have OJ Simpson to thank for that. If you would like to comment on this story or anything else you have seen on BBC Culture, head over to our Facebook page or message us on Twitter. (BBC)

What happened after the American Revolution?

The Treaty of Paris is a deal signed to commence the conclusion of the American Revolutionary War. • The native Americans lost their ally in Great Britain after the signing of the Treaty of Paris. • Democracy's a form of government in which power is vested in the people and exercised by them directly or indirectly through a system of representation. The experiment to create an independent nation as a Democracy didn't go so well at first... • The American Revolution is considered to have brought extensive change for people of all walks of life. • There were still many forms of inequality present in the American ecosystem subsequent to the Declaration of Independence. • The Articles of Confederation are considered to be a weak form of government. Congress couldn't levy taxes without the unanimous approval of all the states. Alexander Hamilton once wrote that "without certain revenues, a government can have no power." • The Continental Army were having issues with being in their barracks and not getting pensions. • The Newburgh Addresses were created to discuss the situation of not being paid by Congress, and they also brought up the prospect of a coup d'état. Washington was able to corral them from rebellion. • America was primarily a barter economy. • The taxes that were implemented in states led to outcries because a lot of colonists didn't have the cash to pay for it. A lot of the colonists were faced with the prospect of foreclosure. • The poor were very unhappy with their situation. There would be some violent rebellions because of a mutual feeling of unhappiness. • Shay's Rebellion was an armed movement of debt-ridden farmers in western Massachusetts during the winter of 1786-1787. It was named after Daniel Shays, one of its leaders. They objected to the state's effort to tax them to pay off the Revolutionary war debt. The rebellion's deemed to have symbolized the mutual discontent of Americans during an economic downturn. • Many Americans were struck with fear at the notion that America could erupt into anarchy. • The Riot Act was passed by legislature to prohibit people from gathering in order to incite rebellion. • Those who were in the rebellion were called regulators because they wanted to regulate the power of the new state governments. • The rebellion eventually stopped once the economy got better. • Much of the land Indian tribes were able to occupy because of the king's proclamation line were lost to white settlers. • The Northwest Ordinance of 1787 was a legislation passed by Congress under the articles of confederation that provided for public schools, authorized the sale of government land, and prohibited slavery in the Northwest lands. • Daniel Boone was an accomplished hunter, trapper, and soldier. He explores the trans-Appalachian territory that would be known as Kentucky in 1767 when it was still off-limits to white settlers. He created the "Wilderness Trail" in the Cumberland gap. He also created a settlement called Boonesborough. • Many settlers would travel the Wilderness Trail. • The Federal Congress saw the native Americans as a threat to the new United States, and vice versa. • Joseph Brant was the leader of the Mohawks. He and his tribe fought hard for the British during the American Revolution. The Mohawks, under the leadership of Joseph Brant, made a petition to British authorities in Quebec to grant them land. The British agree to this. • Many tribes never formally agreed to peace with the newly formed United States. There were lots of conflicts between the Indians and white settlers. • There are lots of examples of Indian resistance towards American expansion. • The Treaty of Fort Stanwix allowed for temporary peace along the New York border between some of the Iroquois and the US government. • Brant also goes to England to ask the king for financial aid as compensation for aiding the British during the war. He and other British hosts would develop a plan for Indian resistance in America. Brant starts to create a confederation of Indian tribes to resist the United States. • Benjamin Beneker was a freed slave who wrote to Thomas Jefferson, who was then George Washington's Secretary of State, a letter criticizing his belief that everyone should be endowed to "inalienable" rights. Slavery was still a thing in America at the time Beneker was writing this. • Many slaves and former slaves agreed that they want the words freedom and liberty to apply to them. • George Washington was inaugurated as president in 1789. He wrote in his will that all of his slaves should be freed after he and his wife, Martha, died. • Gradual emancipation was the slow process of the abolishment of slavery in northern states. • Abigail Adams is John Adams' wife. She writes to her husband to "remember the ladies" while he was a part of writing the Declaration of Independence. • Mary Wollstonecraft wrote A Vindication of the Rights of Woman in 1792. She advocates equality between men and women. • Judith Sargent Murray expands upon the ideas of Wollstonecraft. • Republican motherhood is the belief that women should have more rights and a better education so that they might support husbands and raise sons who would actively participate in the political affairs of society. It became a prevalent topic in public discussions. • Benjamin Rush was an advocate for Republican Motherhood. He founded the Young Ladies' Academy of Philadelphia in 1787. Creating a Government: Writing the US Constitution • Many Americans believed that the Articles of Convention were creating an imbalance. • There were economic rivalries going on between different states like Maryland and Virginia or New York and soon to be Vermont. • The Annapolis convention was formed in September 1786 in Maryland to discuss changing the Articles of Confederation. • The Constitutional convention in Philadelphia was formed in 1787. This is where the US constitution is drafted. • James Madison was the 4th president of the United States. He was a federalist and went to the constitutional convention as a delegate from Virginia. • Proportional representation is a way of selecting representatives in Congress based on the total population of a state, as opposed to having each state receive equal votes in Congress. There was much dispute over this in independence hall. • The Virginia plan was the first proposal put forward at the constitutional convention, which included two houses of congress, both elected by proportional representation, and a national executive and judiciary. It's considered to be the first outline of the constitution. Some thought this was good to have for maintaining a strong democratic government. Others wanted congress only to represent state governments. • The delegates showed support for Pennsylvania's Gouverneur Morris that "a national government ought to be established consisting of a supreme legislative, executive, and judiciary." This would be the outline for a new national government—one that included separation of powers between the congress, the executive branch, and the courts—had emerged quickly. • Separation of powers is considered a core aspect of the constitution by which different parts of the new national government would have their authority limited by the other parts. • Federalism is a system of government in which power is clearly divided between state governments and the national—or federal—government. Randolph, Morris, and Madison proposed federalism. • The New Jersey plan was a proposal of the New Jersey delegations to the constitutional convention by which both houses of Congress would be elected by states, with equal-size delegations for every state. • The Connecticut plan (or the Great Compromise) was a plan proposed for creating a national bicameral legislature in which all states would be equally represented in the Senate and proportionally represented in the House. • The Electoral College was proposed at the convention. The Electoral College is a system in which each state selects presidential electors according to the number of its senators and representatives in Congress by whatever method it prefers, and then these electors then select the president. This plan was proposed by James Madison. • 3/5 clause is another compromise from the US Constitutional convention by which slaves—though the term was never used—would be counted as 3/5 of a person for purposes of establishing a state's representation under the proportional representation plan. • It would take many days before the delegates would complete writing the constitution. • The convention decided that there should be a president who would serve a term of four year. It wasn't determined how many terms the president would be able to serve. • Federalists were those who believed the congress should have the power to tax so it could raise its own funds and not be in the position of relying on other states to compensate. The Federalists were led by Alexander Hamilton. A notable federalist is James Madison. Federalists are supporters of the constitution. Some notable federalists are Alexander Hamilton and James Madison. • Anti Federalists are those who opposed the ratification of the constitution. They support the bill of rights. The bill of rights is added to the constitution. • George Mason of Virginia proposed the Bill of Rights. • Bill of Rights are the first ten amendments of the US Constitution. They're deemed as a core part of the Constitution. Many saw that the exclusion of the Bill of Rights from the constitution would give the federal government a lot of power. • The Federalist Papers were 85 newspaper articles supporting the constitution. They were written by James Madison, Alexander Hamilton, and John Jay. (AP US Notes)

Abraham Lincoln

16th President of the United States 16th president of the United States; helped preserve the United States by leading the defeat of the secessionist Confederacy; an outspoken opponent of the expansion of slavery. He saved the Union during the Civil War and emancipated the slaves; was assassinated by Booth (1809-1865)

slumlord

A landlord who owns and profits from slum properties, often by charging excessive rents or neglecting maintenance and repairs. It is someone who owns buildings that are in very bad condition and charges people too much money to live in them. It's an unflattering term applied to a landlord who doesn't maintain the quality of the apartments and who is generally unscrupulous.

Iraq War, 2003-2011

A protracted armed conflict that began with 2003 invasion of this location by the US. US withdrew in 2011. The USA went to war with Saddam Hussein because Hussein kicked out UN weapons inspectors, he was building weapons of mass destruction, he didn't obey the no-fly zones limitations, he was a savage dictator.

What are some random facts to know?

Did you know that when a group of people laughs, each person instinctively looks at the person he or she feels closest to. The more happy you are, the more antibodies your body produces (up to fifty percent more). Learning a new language or playing an instrument stimulates the brain. A lot of spices come from India. According to a survey, 70% of individuals prefer classic songs because of the memories they associate with them. A dog's sense of smell is approximately 1000 times that of a human. When you start taking care of yourself you start to feel better, look better, and you start to attract better. It all starts within you. Barack Obama obtained an electoral victory following a triumphant grassroots campaign and successful use of social media such as Facebook and MySpace

9/11/2001

Attack on the twin towers and pentagon (also am almost the White House). Planes were hijacked by terrorists for destruction; blame pinned on Al Qaeda and Osama bin Laden, sought out in attempt to completely destroy terrorism

What should I know about colonization in North America?

Colonization in North America • John Cabot explored the coast of North America for England in 1497. • English exploration and settlement in North America during the 1500s was shaped by England's break with the a Catholic Church. King Henry Vlll's Desire to secure the annulment of his marriage to Catherine of Aragon led him to renounce papal authority. Under Henry's successor, Edward Vl, the English church became more Protestant in its beliefs and rituals. When Catherine's daughter Mary l came to the English throne, she returned the country to Catholicism. Her successor Elizabeth l reestablished Protestantism and sought religious consensus. During Elizabeth's long reign, England became a major Protestantism power in Europe and the world. Conflict between England and Spain brought English adventurers and privateers to the Americas. • Francis Drake was an explorer who sailed his ship along the Californian coast in 1579. He helped defeat the Spanish Armada, a Spanish invasion force led by Philip ll of Spain to conquer England. • Roanoke was the first English settlement in North America. It's located in what is now modern day Virginia. It became known as the "lost colony" because everyone who lived there disappeared without a trace. In 1584, Queen Elizabeth authorized Walter Raleigh to use his own funds to settle a permanent English colony in North America. At the time, England wanted to establish a base from which privateers like Drake could easily operate and profit financially. Raleigh's reconnaissance crew found Roanoke Island. They were warmly received by the Algonquian people, two of whom (Manteo and Wanchese) returned to England with the crew. Raleigh sent a hundred men back to Roanoke along with the two Algonquian emissaries. When the men landed, one of their ships ran aground, and most of the food they had brought was ruined. The Roanoke Indians were not happy about feeding the colonists, whom they began to suspect of trying to dominate them, and a battle broke out between them in 1586 in which the Roanoke chief, Wingina, was killed. Francis Drake came by during the spring to rest his men and get his ship refitted, and he found the remaining survivors. He agreed to take them back to England instead of refitting, and the colony was abandoned. Raleigh was not discouraged by this. He convinced English investors to create a new colony in a location on the Chesapeake Bay, which would have more navigable waters than the shallows around Roanoke. Colonists would be promised 500 acres per family, a huge estate for the times, though one might question England's authority to give away land claimed by the Algonquians. Some hundred people left to create this new colony, but events en route to the location landed them instead back at Roanoke, a,I'd the Algonquians who had fought their predecessors. Nevertheless, the colony was established, houses built, and settlers begin to live their lives in an isolated place. Virginia Dare was born and baptized in this in this colony-the first English child to be born in what is now the United States. The settlers had been left in what seemed like reasonably good shape with a promise that resupply ships would arrive the following spring. However, no ships were allowed to leave England in 1588 because of the threatened Spanish attack in the ongoing conflict between England and Spain. The government commandeered every ship to oppose the mighty Spanish Armada. There was also a really bad drought between 1587 and 1589, and this may have increased tensions with nearby American Indians who became much more reluctant to provide food when they faced their own shortages. When John White finally returned to Roanoke with the promised supplies in 1590, he found the colony abandoned. Whether the colonists were massacred or simply had melted into the surrounding Indian tribes is unknown. • St. Augustine was discovered in Florida. It's considered to be the oldest European city in the modern US. Early English Colonization in North America • In 1585, Richard Halkuyt the elder wrote a pamphlet in an effort to persuade Englishmen to create a new settlement in North America. This would lead to the eventual construction of the colony Jamestown. • King James l was a ruler of England who succeeded Queen Elizabeth l in 1603 (who died that year). He agreed to the subjection and conversion of Native Americans to Protestant Christianity since it could provide a rich profit and a military base for England against Catholic Spain. He also wanted to make peace with Spain. • Jamestown was a colony founded in 1607 in Virginia. It was created by the English as a joint stock company. It was named in honor of King James. • Joint stock companies are a type of financial institution that emerged in Europe during the 1500s. It allowed for a multitude of various investors to buy and sell shares of an enterprise. It allowed for the garnering of more resources than any one person might have, yet reduced risk for each individual involved. The joint stock company is the predecessor of the modern corporation with stock traded on Wall Street. Joint stock companies would serve as the model for English colonization efforts for a long time. • Many wanted to play a bigger role in the Americas after King James l put an end to piracy. If they weren't going to steal America's wealth from the Spanish on the seas, then they felt the need to find other ways to gain from contact with America. This led investors to create the Virginia Company, a London-based joint stock company that had many investors who pooled their resources, shared the risks, and hoped to to make a financial profit for investors. 105 men from the Virginia Company arrived in North America under the leadership of Christopher Newport, and they created the community Jamestown. • Things didn't really go well in Jamestown. The people there were living in unhealthy conditions, and this is deemed to be the cause of many deaths. They had chosen to live in land that didn't really have a good water supply-it was tidal. They also had a really bad winter, and only 35 out of the original 105 colonists survived after all sorts of bad events. • Tension starts to light between colonists and Native American tribes. English settlers begin to realize that the land they settled on was also settled by a confederation of Algonquian-speaking tribes of thirteen to fifteen thousand people. This confederation was led by Powhatan. • John Smith was an advocate for English colonization and one of the founders of Jamestown. While exploring the countryside, he was taken prisoner by the Algonquians and taken to Powhatan. According to what Smith said, he was about to be executed-he was laid on the ground with his head on a rock, and men with clubs stood all around him. Powhatan's daughter, Pocahontas, came to Smith's rescue by putting "his head in her arms, and laid her upon his to save him from death." Pocahontas was already known to Smith for being a negotiator with Jamestown. Smith was granted a reprieve by Powhatan. Many historians believe that the execution was a setup to convert John Smith into an Algonquian chief that would report to Powhatan. When Powhatan gave him an offer to join his tribe, Smith rejected it. • The "starving time" was a period of starvation and disease that almost wiped out the whole colony during the winter of 1609-1610. The surviving colonists abandoned Jamestown by burning it to the ground before sailing down the James River. The colony was later rebuilt. • Tobacco became big in Virginia. Virginians wanted money and to get out. • Opechancanough was Powhatan's brother and the new Leader of the tribe after Powhatan. He led an attack on English settlers that killed some 300 of the 1200 there were. • The shift from trade to tobacco production would affect the lives of thousands of African slaves that were brought to the Americas. • African slaves were sold in Jamestown in 1619. (AP US Notes)

What should I know about Lincoln Douglas debates?

The Republican Party nominated Abraham Lincoln to debate with Stephen A. Douglas for the US Senate. • Lincoln-Douglas debates started in 1858. • Late that summer, on August 21st, 1858, Democratic Senator Stephen Douglas met Lincoln in Ottawa, Illinois, for the first of seven debates they held across Illinois in that election season. Hundreds would attend these debates, and newspapers in every part of the country took their words to thousands of Americans. The debates were long and closely argued. Each sometimes spoke for 2 hours at a time. The speeches and the responses weren't sound bites, but carefully reasoned arguments that forced each leader to refine his views and the audience to follow them closely. • Lincoln loses the senatorial election but will meet Douglas again in 1860 [and win this time]. (AP US Notes)

What should I know about the Syrian War?

The Syrian Civil War started in March 2011 when Syria's government, led by Pres. Bashar al-Assad, faced an unprecedented challenge to its authority when pro-democracy protests erupted throughout the country. Protesters demanded an end to the authoritarian practices of the Assad regime, in place since Assad's father, Ḥafiz al-Assad, became president in 1971. The Syrian government used violence to suppress demonstrations, making extensive use of police, military, and paramilitary forces. Opposition militias began to form in 2011, and by 2012 the conflict had expanded into a full-fledged civil war. [The chaos of the war allowed ISIS, al Qaeda and other terror groups to seize more than 70% of Syria's territory.]. (Encyclopedia Britannica)

What should I know is about the global financial crisis?

The global financial crisis (GFC) refers to the period of extreme stress in global financial markets and banking systems between mid 2007 and early 2009. During the GFC, a downturn in the US housing market was a catalyst for a financial crisis that spread from the United States to the rest of the world through linkages in the global financial system. Many banks around the world incurred large losses and relied on government support to avoid bankruptcy. Millions of people lost their jobs as the major advanced economies experienced their deepest recessions since the Great Depression in the 1930s. Recovery from the crisis was also much slower than past recessions that were not associated with a financial crisis.

How do wounds heal?

Red blood cells [clump together and clot to] help create collagen, which are tough, white fibers that form the foundation for new tissue. The wound starts to fill in with new tissue, called granulation tissue. New skin begins to form over this tissue. As the wound heals, the edges pull inward and the wound gets smaller. (Medline Plus and John Hopkins Medicine[)

Why can't you stare into an eclipse?

Eye Safety During a Total Solar Eclipse young boy with viewing glasses on A boy wearing protective viewing glasses watches a partial solar eclipse from Arlington, Virginia, in 2014. Credits: NASA/Bill Ingalls It is never safe to look directly at the sun's rays - even if the sun is partly obscured. When watching a partial eclipse you must wear eclipse glasses at all times if you want to face the sun, or use an alternate indirect method. This also applies during a total eclipse up until the time when the sun is completely and totally blocked. During the short time when the moon completely obscures the sun - known as the period of totality - it is safe to look directly at the star, but it's crucial that you know when to take off and put back on your glasses. First and foremost: Check for local information on timing of when the total eclipse will begin and end. NASA's page of eclipse times is a good place to start. Second: The sun also provides important clues for when totality is about to start and end. 1) As the moon moves in front of the sun, there comes a time when there is a single bright spot left - a bright spot that, in combination with the atmosphere of the sun still visible around the moon, looks like a giant diamond ring. 2) As the moon continues to move, this bright spot may break up into several points of light that shine around the moon's edges. Known as Baily's Beads, these are light rays from the sun streaming through the valleys along the moon's horizon. Baily's Beads are very short-lived, and may not last long enough to be noticeable to all observers of the total solar eclipse. It is still not safe to look at the sun at this point! Only when these spots completely disappear can you safely look at the sun. 3) Once the Baily's Beads disappear and there is no longer any direct sunlight coming toward you, you may look at the total eclipse safely. But you must still be vigilant to make sure you protect your eyes again before the end of totality. The entire total eclipse may take only a minute or two in some locations. 4) As the moon continues to move across the face of the sun, you will begin to see brightening on the opposite side from where the diamond ring shone at the beginning. This is the lower atmosphere of the sun, beginning to peek out from behind the moon and it is your signal to stop looking directly at the eclipse. Make sure you have safety glasses back on - or are otherwise watching the eclipse through a safe, indirect method - before the first flash of sunlight appears around the edges of the moon. 5) Once your eyes are protected again, you may continue to watch the final stages of the eclipse as the end process mirrors the beginning: You will once again see Baily's Beads and then a diamond ring, before the entire sun is once again visible. (NASA)

What should I know about Oedipus complex?

Oedipus complex, in psychoanalytic theory, a desire for sexual involvement with the parent of the opposite sex and a concomitant sense of rivalry with the parent of the same sex; a crucial stage in the normal developmental process. Sigmund Freud introduced the concept in his Interpretation of Dreams (1899). The term derives from the Theban hero Oedipus of Greek legend, who unknowingly slew his father and married his mother; its female analogue, the Electra complex, is named for another mythological figure, who helped slay her mother. Freud attributed the Oedipus complex to children of about the ages three to five. He said the stage usually ended when the child identified with the parent of the same sex and repressed its sexual instincts. If previous relationships with the parents were relatively loving and nontraumatic, and if parental attitudes were neither excessively prohibitive nor excessively stimulating, the stage is passed through harmoniously. In the presence of trauma, however, there occurs an "infantile neurosis" that is an important forerunner of similar reactions during the child's adult life. The superego, the moral factor that dominates the conscious adult mind, also has its origin in the process of overcoming the Oedipus complex. Freud considered the reactions against the Oedipus complex the most important social achievements of the human mind. (Encyclopedia Britannica)

What should I know about England's Glorious Revolution and "the Rights go to Englishmen" 1689

The Glorious Revolution was a nonviolent revolt that occurred In England in 1688 when parliamentary leaders invited William de Orange, a Protestant, and his wife, Mary, the daughter of king James ll, to take over the English throne after King James ll was overthrown. This event gave Englishmen a sense of control over their destinies, and the news of the ousting of King James ll brought about more rebellions within the English colonies. English people also had to reanalyze how their system of government should function after overthrowing a king. • The Dominion of England was a region that comprised Plymouth, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Connecticut, Rhode Island, New York, and New Jersey. • Sir Edmund Andros was an appointed royal governor of the Dominion of New England. He was later arrested and sent back to England. • Divine right of kings was a belief that the king-or queen-was selected by God through birth in the royal family and that it was irreligious to question either a monarch's ability to serve or their decisions. There were a few that believed in this. • The European Enlightenment or the Age of Enlightenment was a continent-wide intellectual movement that began with a rejection of unquestioned authority of religious institutions and faith and substituted a belief in reason, rational self-interest, and the discoveries of science. • John Locke was an English philosopher who advocated for the natural rights of the governed. Natural rights are a political philosophy that declares people have an inherent right to freedom and life. • Jacob Leisler was a German immigrant who led a revolt of the bottom social order in New York. He was later arrested and executed for treason. Leisler's followers create a faction in New York politics. • Colonial societies experienced a shift towards Democracy as a result of England becoming a Protestant nation. (AP US Notes)

What is the healthiest meal to eat?

Scientists Create The Healthiest Meal Ever Dina Spector Jun 18, 2012, 12:24 PM The healthiest meal in the world is loaded with Omega-3 fish oils, muscle-building proteins and brain-boosting vitamins and minerals. The Daily Mail reports that scientists at the Leatherhead Food Research have whipped up a three-course meal that satisfies 222 health claims used in food marketing and advertising and were recently approved by the European Food Safety Authority to have scientific basis. Here's a look at the super-healthy meal: Fresh and smoked salmon terrine (good for brain and heart function) Mixed leaf salad with Extra Virgin Olive Oil dressing (for maintaining cholesterol) High-fiber multigrain bread roll Chicken casserole with lentils and mixed vegetables (good for iron absorption) Live yogurt-based blancmange topped with walnuts and a sugar-free caramel-flavored sauce (good for digestion and blood glucose control) The menu also includes charcoal tablets to reduce excessive gas and a mixed berry sports drinks that's packed with vitamins and electrolytes. The meal was originally conceived as the perfect airline meal, but can still be enjoyed at home. (Business Insider)

How should we rethink political correctness?

Rethinking Political Correctness by Robin J. Ely, Debra Meyerson, and Martin N. Davidson From the Magazine (September 2006) Summary. Legal and cultural changes over the past 40 years ushered unprecedented numbers of women and people of color into companies' professional ranks. Laws now protect these traditionally underrepresented groups from blatant forms of discrimination in hiring and promotion. Meanwhile, political correctness has reset the standards for civility and respect in people's day-to-day interactions. Despite this obvious progress, the authors' research has shown that political correctness is a double-edged sword. While it has helped many employees feel unlimited by their race, gender, or religion, the PC rule book can hinder people's ability to develop effective relationships across race, gender, and religious lines. Companies need to equip workers with skills—not rules—for building these relationships. The authors offer the following five principles for healthy resolution of the tensions that commonly arise over difference: Pause to short-circuit the emotion and reflect; connect with others, affirming the importance of relationships; question yourself to identify blind spots and discover what makes you defensive; get genuine support that helps you gain a broader perspective; and shift your mind-set from one that says, "You need to change," to one that asks, "What can I change?" When people treat their cultural differences—and related conflicts and tensions—as opportunities to gain a more accurate view of themselves, one another, and the situation, trust builds and relationships become stronger. Leaders should put aside the PC rule book and instead model and encourage risk taking in the service of building the organization's relational capacity. The benefits will reverberate through every dimension of the company's work. A white manager fears she will be perceived as racist if she gives critical feedback to her Latino subordinate. A black engineer passed over for promotion wonders whether his race has anything to do with it, but he's reluctant to raise this concern lest he be seen as "playing the race card." A woman associate who wants to make partner in an accounting firm resists seeking coaching on her leadership style; she worries that doing so would confirm the notion that women don't have what it takes to make partner. These types of events occur daily in politically correct (PC) cultures, where unspoken canons of propriety govern behavior in cross-cultural interactions—that is, interactions among people of different races, genders, religions, and other potentially charged social identity groups. We embrace the commitment to equity that underlies political correctness, and we applaud the shifts in norms wrought by that commitment. We are troubled, however, by the barriers that political correctness can pose to developing constructive, engaged relationships at work. In cultures regulated by political correctness, people feel judged and fear being blamed. They worry about how others view them as representatives of their social identity groups. They feel inhibited and afraid to address even the most banal issues directly. People draw private conclusions; untested, their conclusions become immutable. Resentments build, relationships fray, and performance suffers. Legal and cultural changes over the past 40 years ushered unprecedented numbers of women and people of color into companies' professional and managerial ranks. Overt prejudice and discrimination in the workplace, historically sanctioned by society, are far less acceptable today. Laws now protect traditionally underrepresented groups from blatant discrimination in hiring and promotion, and political correctness has reset the standards for civility and respect in people's day-to-day interactions. Despite this obvious progress, we believe that political correctness is a double-edged sword. While it has helped many traditionally underrepresented employees to experience their workplace as more inclusive, the PC rule book can hinder employees' ability to develop effective relationships across potentially divisive group differences. Companies need to equip workers with skills—not rules—for building these relationships. Our work suggests that high-quality relationships cannot be mandated. Sensitivity training and zero-tolerance policies at best impart some useful cultural knowledge or indicate that a company is serious about eliminating bias. At worst, such practices undermine relationships by reinforcing a restrictive and fearful atmosphere. Those to whom corrective actions are directed—men and whites, for example—walk on eggshells for fear of unwittingly transgressing the rules of political correctness. We have found that political correctness does not only pose problems for those in the "majority." When majority members cannot speak candidly, members of under-represented groups also suffer: "Minorities" can't discuss their concerns about fairness and fears about feeding into negative stereotypes, and that adds to an atmosphere in which people tiptoe around the issues and one another. These dynamics breed misunderstanding, conflict, and mistrust, corroding both managerial and team effectiveness. Constructive engagement of differences—and, therefore, effective leadership in culturally diverse contexts—requires majority and minority individuals to develop a mind-set and skills that all parties currently lack. This article proposes how managers and employees can engage with one another to reap the benefits cultural diversity has to offer. It represents our collective insights from research, teaching, and consulting over the past 15 years in the areas of race and gender relations, diversity, and organizational change. It also incorporates findings from our research with Learning as Leadership, a San Rafael, California-based leadership development organization, in whose seminars we have observed dozens of managers and executives grappling with unproductive behavior patterns and experimenting with new ones. Applying our insights about these processes to classic diversity-related dilemmas, we have developed the following principles to guide people seeking a healthy approach to the tensions that commonly arise over difference: Pause to short-circuit the emotion and reflect. Connect with others in ways that affirm the importance of relationships. Question yourself to help identify your blind spots and discover what makes you defensive. Get genuine support that doesn't necessarily validate your point of view but, rather, helps you gain a broader perspective. Shift your mind-set from "You need to change" to "What can I change?" These five principles require that all parties adopt a learning orientation in cross-cultural interactions. In this article, we spell out the challenges—and opportunities—of adopting such an orientation and offer some guidelines for leaders. First, though, let's explore the negative dynamics that result when open discussion is repressed and people fail to learn. Identity Abrasions Assaults to people's identities occur daily in most organizations: A white person confuses the names of two Asian-American coworkers; a black executive is addressed less formally than her white male counterparts; a woman's idea is misattributed to a male colleague. Repeated experiences of this kind can diminish people's sense of how much others value and respect them. Offense at a perceived slight may or may not be well-founded, but an attempt to discuss the possible insult risks, for example, the charge that one is overly sensitive. Such assaults occur on the flip side as well, as when members of majority groups are accused of being prejudiced or of treating others unfairly. Because they often have meant no harm, they tend to respond defensively, upset by any suggestion that their moral goodness is being questioned. These experiences produce what we call identity abrasions for people on both sides of the interaction. Identity abrasions cause people to burrow into their own camps, attend only to information that confirms their positions, and demonize the other side. The overall result is a number of negative dynamics, with costs both to individuals and to organizations. Below, we offer several classic examples; these and others throughout the article are real cases, but with the names changed. Divisiveness. While participating in a large meeting, Tom, a white vice president of manufacturing in a household appliances company, describes his ordeal with the union as akin to "oriental torture." The VP of HR passes him a note and tells him that his reference is offensive to some people in the room, so before he finishes his address, Tom apologizes for the insensitive remark. As the meeting is coming to a close, a white regional manager, who is married to a Japanese-American woman, openly voices his distress at the remark, though expresses his appreciation that the VP recognized his gaffe and apologized. The following day, everyone in the firm knows about the incident. Some people feel that the regional manager has inappropriately shamed Tom. Others feel that Tom's boss needs to call him onto the carpet for his insensitive remark. That evening, more employees gather to recount numerous similar incidents from the past. The next day, some staff members call for the company to create a forum for educating employees; others conclude that race is too hot to touch in any company forum and vow to assiduously avoid the topic. Self-doubt. Sophia, an African-American, is a newly appointed member of the board of a regional bank. In the first few meetings, she is relatively silent, but when the agenda during one meeting turns to her area of expertise, she joins the conversation confidently and with a well-informed point of view. The board chair interrupts while Sophia is talking, urging members to be brief so that they can get through the agenda. Sophia notes to herself that the chair never makes such comments when any of her white colleagues are speaking. She wonders, "Is he cutting me off because I'm a black woman?"—but she brushes off her worry. She thinks: "I can't go there. It takes too much out of me. I just need to move on." In subsequent meetings, she becomes increasingly reluctant to share her perspective; ultimately, she comes to dread the meetings because she feels marginal. She begins to wonder, "Do I have what it takes to be a fully contributing member of this board?" Overprotection and underdevelopment. Rob, a white partner at a management consultancy, has always been sensitive to the lack of diversity at his firm and would like to do his part to help women and other minorities succeed. He mentors Iris, a young Latina associate who is competent, energetic, and well liked but is not doing enough to generate business. In a promotions committee meeting, a number of partners voice concerns about Iris's prospects for promotion to partner. Rob thinks these concerns may have some merit but is reluctant to share them with Iris. He fears that hearing the feedback would convince her that the partnership is simply not ready to promote a woman of color. Uncomfortable with his ambivalence, he unconsciously distances himself from Iris, leaving her bewildered about what she's done to alienate him. Self-limiting behavior. Julie, an engineer, wants to prove to her overwhelmingly male colleagues that women are as good at engineering as men are. She consciously avoids being seen in gender-stereotypical ways: She doesn't sit next to other women in meetings, tries to solve problems on her own, avoids asking for help or clarification, shuns opportunities to mentor junior women, and makes sure her personal life is invisible at work. As a result, she isolates herself from potential sources of support, works harder and less efficiently than she needs to, develops skills more slowly, and contributes less to her firm than she otherwise might. Polarization. A friendship between coworkers—Scott, an American Christian, and Mahmoud, a Muslim émigré from Pakistan—abruptly falls apart after they discuss events in the news. Seconds after Scott makes what he naively intends to be a conciliatory comment, the two become engrossed in a passionate debate in which Scott finds himself arguing for positions that he doesn't even support. The exchange ends when Scott storms out of Mahmoud's office while Mahmoud shouts after him. From then on, communication between them is minimal. Suspicion and withdrawal. Bill, a black associate in a consulting firm, consistently receives mediocre ratings from his white clients. He wonders whether these ratings reflect a racial bias and raises the issue with his white boss. She balks, insisting that their clients are not biased. Bill is not convinced. He searches for evidence to bolster his claim, but the evidence is ambiguous, so he does not share it. He feels increasingly angry, resentful, and hopeless about his prospects at the firm. In his next review, his boss tells him she is concerned about his "bad attitude." In each of these cases, people's judgments—and their fears of others' judgments—drive the negative dynamic. When we feel judged, it cuts to the core of our self-image as being good, competent, and worthy. To counter such identity abrasions, we deny our experiences, avoid difficult conversations, react angrily, and seek advice only to confirm our innocence. These behaviors have only one goal: self-protection. When self-protection becomes more important than the work, the group's mission, or relationships with others, people lose their connections to one another, making it difficult to take risks, learn, and solve problems creatively together. (While we have outlined these dynamics as they occur in the United States, we believe that the impulse to protect oneself manifests similarly in all interactions among members of groups that are marked by a history of prejudice, discrimination, or misunderstanding.) Principles for Constructively Engaging Differences Short-circuiting these emotional reactions is not easy, but our research suggests that when people replace their need to defend themselves with a desire to learn, the possibilities for constructive cross-cultural interactions increase enormously. Learning requires people to acknowledge their limitations and to suspend their need to be right or to prove their competence. In so doing, they make themselves vulnerable to others' judgments so that they can perform their jobs more effectively. Of course, those who consciously hold and defend their prejudices offer little opportunity for constructive engagement. Nevertheless, we have seen that far too often people draw conclusions about others prematurely, missing crucial opportunities for advancing mutually held goals. The five principles that follow are not sequential steps. They occur, sometimes simultaneously, throughout the learning process; together, they contribute to one's overall ability to handle identity abrasions constructively. Principle 1: Pause. When we experience a threat to our identity, our first response is a negative emotion such as anger. We react by casting blame and judgment, which most often incites defensiveness in others. Taking time—even a few moments—to identify our feelings and consider our responses will help us to respond more effectively. Consider the case of Mary, a 30-year veteran of a large and venerable law firm in which she was partner. Earlier in her career, when her male colleagues said or did something that she found offensive, Mary's immediate impulse was to "get in their faces" about it. In learning to step back and recenter herself when irritants arose, Mary found she could be more effective by drawing people in rather than pushing them away. Mary's actions in a recent partner meeting are illustrative. When a male colleague told an off-color joke about women and others laughed, Mary felt her anger rising. Yet instead of lecturing her colleagues on the errors of their ways, as she might have done earlier in her career, she paused and took several deep breaths. She then checked her anger and jettisoned her sense of self-righteousness. Mary recognized her anger as a signal, not as a springboard for reaction. Her feelings told her to be careful, that she was about to interpret reality in a way that might not be fully accurate or that might lead her to react in ways that would not serve her larger goals. Rather than admonishing her colleagues when she was offended by their remarks, she stepped back, calmed herself down, and refocused on what was important to her. This response enabled her to enact the next principle. Principle 2: Connect. When we experience an identity abrasion, our impulse is to focus inward, to justify, explain, and defend ourselves. One way to resist this impulse is to focus outward, on goals that are larger than we are, such as advancing broad social ideals, contributing to a task, or striving to achieve an organization's mission. Goals such as these connect us with others by infusing our lives with meaning. Meaningful goals remind us of what is at stake in a given situation, giving us a reason to engage with others even if we feel threatened. Mary, for example, learned to replace a defensive goal (demonstrating her moral superiority) with a generative one (making the law firm a place where women could more easily advance to partner). She was then able to see more clearly what was at stake in her interactions with her male colleagues. She could either alienate them or connect with them by focusing on a goal that mattered more to her than being right. Once we've anchored on such a goal, we can clarify our intention for a given interaction. Our intentions shape how we come across to others and influence how they, in turn, respond. When we enter into an interaction from a stance of anger or defensiveness, we are likely to deepen the fissure in the relationship. In contrast, when we approach that interaction with the intention of broadening our understanding—whether of ourselves, the other person, the relationship, or the task—we are far more likely to repair the fissure and to move forward productively with our work. Mary demonstrated her intention to learn in the partner meeting. Searching for a way to connect with her colleagues, she realized that their laughter at the expense of women didn't fit with her core belief that they were good, decent men. So, in the moments following the joke, she reflected: What experiences underlie their dispar-aging humor about women? To engage them in this question, Mary responded to the joke, which alluded to a woman's lack of fit in an all-male culture, by describing her personal experience of entering the firm: what it was like to enter an environment filled with unspoken rules she didn't know, where everyone else seemed comfortable with one another, and where her energy and way of relating were foreign to the dominant culture. Her story was not a diatribe; her intention was not to teach or to blame but to engage and inquire. She then asked the men: What had it been like for them when women entered the firm? What did they feel they had lost? What might they have gained? The conversation went to a whole different level as people opened up. In the course of it, Mary was able to explain the range of feelings and judgments that come up for her—and that she has to work hard to suppress—when a well-meaning colleague tells an off-color joke. When we have an intention to learn, we step out of the need to be right. A learning orientation motivates us to seek to understand—rather than to judge—the other person. Such understanding can help us connect with the other's humanity, which can provide further impetus for seeking mutually beneficial solutions. Principle 3: Question yourself. This principle is probably the most challenging one. It requires taking risks precisely when we feel most in need of protecting ourselves from a perceived or actual threat. It demands that we ask ourselves such questions as, "What am I missing in the way I'm seeing this situation? How might my desire to be proven right or innocent be distorting my view of reality or of the other person?" This principle is particularly challenging for women and people of color, whose concerns others have so often dismissed or trivialized. Consider the case of Brianna, the African-American CEO of a start-up that consulted to executives of nonprofit organizations. She became CEO when Jay, the company's white founder, stepped down from the position. Jay remained a close adviser to the leadership team, but his autocratic style rubbed Brianna the wrong way. The tension between the two reached a peak after a leadership team meeting when Jay told Brianna that she needed to "lighten up" on her push to market more vigorously to clients of color. He told her that she was being "too aggressive." Brianna's immediate impulse was dismissive; it seemed to her that Jay just couldn't bear the authority of a strong black woman. Instead of going head-to-head with Jay, Brianna chose to shift to a self-questioning stance. Rather than presuming she knew the truth about Jay's intentions, she sought further clarification from him. She learned that Jay feared that her approach would narrow the firm's marketability and realized that she needed to better articulate how her strategy connected to the firm's mission. The discussion helped Brianna to question herself and, by doing so, to discover how her focus on pushing the team to see her point of view had caused her to miss theirs. As the discussion became more open, Brianna told Jay what it felt like to be a black woman in her position. She was excited to be leading such a firm, she explained, but she also felt her success was a symbol of what black people can do when given sufficient resources and authority. She was anxious to set a positive example for those not used to seeing black women in such roles and thus put a good deal of pressure on herself to succeed. That Brianna felt any anxiety about anything had never occurred to Jay; she had always struck him as confidence personified. Brianna's openness emboldened Jay to take risks and question himself as well. He began to reflect more deeply on his negative reaction to Brianna's marketing ideas and realized that he found them threatening: Consulting to executives of color pushed him (and probably others) too far outside his comfort zone. Brianna could well imagine his fears; she reflected on times when she was outside her comfort zone and how difficult that was for her. More important, she could see how her forcefulness had not made it any easier for her team to discuss their fears. It was slowly dawning on Brianna that her investment in being seen as a powerful black woman had gotten in the way of her actually being a powerful black woman. In this conversation, Brianna and Jay were able to see that each had only a partial view of reality. This realization gave them an opportunity to create a different kind of connection with each other. Their shared commitment to the firm's mission had motivated them to take these risks, which strengthened their relationship. Their relationship, in turn, increased their capacity to work toward that mission more effectively. The principle of self-questioning puts the learning orientation into action. Interrogating ourselves and asking others for clarification means abandoning our need to present and maintain a particular image of ourselves. It also opens the way for the other person to make a similar move. When people take risks with one another, they short-circuit defensive identity-related processes, enabling them to move forward in their work. Interpretation is not the same as truth. By this principle, we do not mean to suggest that people should question their experiences. On the contrary, feeling offended or threatened in an interaction provides an important signal that invites inquiry. Instead, we are suggesting that people question their interpretations of their experiences, their beliefs about what has happened, who is right, and so forth. Interpretation is not the same as truth. Questioning oneself means letting go of one's protective scripts, identifying what images of self feel threatened, being open to perspectives that may be difficult to hear, and seeing what can be learned. Principle 4: Get genuine support. To help us sort through our reactions, identify a fuller picture of reality, and, most difficult, question our assumptions, we need other people. Unfortunately, most of us seek help from the wrong people, seeing those who challenge our point of view as threats and those who reinforce it as allies. Receiving reinforcement may be comforting, but it often doesn't confer much learning. Before we look at what support is, let's consider what support is not. Support is not necessarily validation that your interpretation of the situation is correct or that your behavior was appropriate or warranted. Although that kind of backing can feel good in the moment, it provides the opposite of what we really need. What's needed is the counsel of trusted colleagues who can help us identify choices we make about how to behave or what to believe, as well as what alternatives are available. When Brianna was at her wits' end with Jay, she sought support from two friends to whom she frequently vented her feelings. They agreed with Brianna's interpretation of his behavior, and Brianna felt vindicated, but she was not any closer to finding a way to work with him. Indeed, she felt angrier. Next, Brianna sought the advice of an old and trusted mentor, a black professor from her MBA program. He helped her sort through her feelings and priorities and asked her to identify what she felt Jay, at his best, had to offer her and the firm. He suggested that she approach her next interaction with Jay as if he had her best interests at heart and, from that standpoint, see what she might be able to learn from him. Brianna's mentor was able to hear her concerns, but instead of reinforcing her anger, he pushed back and helped her develop a more useful approach. Giving genuine support means challenging the person seeking it; receiving that support means not reacting defensively. Virtually every time we've seen someone address an identity abrasion effectively, there has been genuine support. Principle 5: Shift your mind-set. We have found that people who are able to turn identity abrasions into opportunities have the capacity to radically shift their way of thinking—about themselves, their situations, and other people. Such people tend to be highly self-aware, but they were not born with self-awareness; they continuously develop it as they systematically reflect on and analyze the behavioral patterns that underlie dissatisfaction in their lives. Through self-reflection, people break out of negative patterns. The fundamental shift is away from a mind-set that says, "You need to change," to one that asks, "What can I change?" People who are able to turn identity abrasions into opportunities have the capacity to radically shift their way of thinking—about themselves, their situations, and other people. Take Richard, a white codirector of a financial services firm. One morning, Richard e-mailed a board member about his disagreement with a policy that his black business partner, Michele, supported, and he inadvertently copied Michele on the message. Michele was understandably furious. Richard felt bad and apologized, but over the next several days, he had a more complicated reaction, including strong feelings of anger toward Michele. They had genuine disagreements that needed to be hashed out, but as Richard saw it, Michele didn't seem interested in discussing them. Increasingly, it seemed to Richard, she had become controlling, domineering, cold, and withholding. Richard saw himself as fair-minded and progressive and felt somewhat uncomfortable challenging a black woman. He decided not to say anything. Still, Richard cared deeply about the company, and he was self-aware enough to realize that his inability to collaborate with Michele was hampering their work. Richard decided that something needed to change, and he understood that the only thing he could change was himself. To start, Richard asked himself: "Could I be wrong about Michele?" He realized he had to stop assuming the worst about her, so he looked more carefully at his feelings. As he reflected, with the support of two trusted colleagues, Richard saw that what truly bothered him most about Michele was that she always made him feel guilty. He had apologized about the e-mail incident—he knew what he had done was wrong—but his apology seemed to fall on deaf ears. As he further contemplated his reactions, Richard realized that, as was often the case, he had been looking for Michele's approval. When she wouldn't offer it, he'd retaliate. (Indeed, it occurred to him that such a motive might have unconsciously prompted the e-mail incident.) Richard concluded that his reactions to Michele, which he had always believed were her fault, were in fact driven by his own needs and anxieties: He wanted Michele's reassurance that he wasn't a bigot. With this insight, Richard was ready to try a different approach. Rather than seeking Michele's approval, Richard decided to learn how he might give her support. He invited her to a series of meetings in which they could discuss their individual agendas with an eye to better understanding each other. Richard learned that worries about the firm's increasing volume of work had driven Michele—anxious to belie the racial stereotype that she was unqualified for the job—to become highly detail oriented. With so many balls in the air, she worried that something important was bound to fall. Richard had interpreted her detail orientation as a need for control and as implicit criticism of him. Angry, he had withdrawn, which had fueled her anxiety; her reactions, then, had fueled his anger. The vicious cycle was clear. Recognizing this pattern went a long way toward easing tensions between them. They decided to manage their workload by continuing to meet weekly to discuss their goals, task allocation, and means of supporting one another. This arrangement helped ease Michele's concerns about the work and pushed Richard to take on more of the load. Richard put his insecurities aside and sought only appropriate, task-related feedback from Michele. This change made it easier for her to be supportive of him, which gave Richard the confidence to disagree with her without feeling that he was risking her condemnation. A year later, Richard and Michele were coleading the firm in an energizing rather than enervating way. Richard's success in turning his relationship with Michele around rested on his ability to make a fundamental mind-set shift. In so doing, he was able to move from feeling powerless to taking effective action. The clarity that comes from making such a shift often reveals a business problem that turns out to have little directly to do with cultural issues. (In the case of Richard and Michele, the engine of their problem was an increased volume of work, which they were ultimately able to address with relative ease.) Until the shift is made, threats to identity take up the center stage, hampering people's ability to see other problems clearly and to achieve truly effective partnerships. Guidelines for Leaders Leaders who follow the above principles of engagement and who demonstrate personal resilience in the face of identity abrasions inspire the same behavior in others. Company leaders can support and encourage people to confront identity abrasions directly and constructively by doing the following. Create safety. People in the organization need to feel that, in questioning themselves or making themselves vulnerable, they will not be judged or punished. In other words, they need to feel safe. Leaders create safety by publicly stating their assumption that people are well-intentioned and by overtly ensuring that well-intentioned actions will not lead to punishment. They resist the judgmental tone that diversity discussions so often acquire, by making it clear that mistakes will not impugn anyone's moral character. Being candid themselves, they also encourage others to be candid. Perhaps most important, such leaders acknowledge their own fallibility in cross-cultural interactions. When they describe publicly their own learning, they legitimate discussions of identity-related experiences, giving permission to employees to provide and solicit feedback, air conflicts, and learn from their missteps. People in the organization need to feel that, in questioning themselves or making themselves vulnerable, they will not be judged or punished. In other words, they need to feel safe. Creating a safe environment requires care in determining what kind of misconduct is punishable. Zero-tolerance policies, for example, can cut two ways. Leaders create safety when they express zero tolerance for intentional forms of harassment—for instance, "hate e-mail" directed toward specific groups. Such incidents require swift, public repudiation, but zero tolerance does not mean zero discussion. Immediate removal of employees responsible for these acts may well be called for, but often these sorts of firings stir as many fears as the violations themselves. Leaders who support a learning orientation offer forums for discussing such incidents and for delving more deeply into questions about how and why they occurred. These forums can include "town hall meetings," in which large groups of employees convene with the chief executive to air different points of view. Alternatively, the forums can consist of systematic inquiry, with focus groups of employees led by experienced professionals who summarize and feed back their findings to management and to groups of employees for collective review. Very often, outright misconduct is the culminating event of a long history of identity abrasions that have been occurring under the radar. Effective leaders see these incidents as a signal that the company's culture requires attention. Assiduously model the third principle. We believe leaders should model all the principles above, but the most difficult—and rewarding—is that of questioning oneself. This principle is challenging for managers because it runs counter to the image of the confident, decisive leader. As it turns out, however, leaders who question themselves and learn from others in the service of clear goals do not bespeak a lack of confidence; rather, they demonstrate humility, clarity, and strength. Indeed, the leaders we have observed who exemplify this principle generate fierce respect and loyalty from their followers. They model vulnerability, respond nondefensively to questions and challenges, are aware of their own biases and emotional triggers, demonstrate resilience in the face of identity abrasions, and openly rely on others to test the validity of their perspective. As one leader we worked with noted, being a role model involves "making myself vulnerable in the face of attack so that others see my humanity." Seek out others' experience. Leaders need to understand how social identities influence the way employees experience the organization's work and culture. By developing a deeper understanding of those who differ from them in gender, race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, and so on, leaders learn to anticipate how employees are likely to read situations. That way, leaders can intervene early and respond effectively when difficult situations arise, as they inevitably will. Moreover, when conflicts occur, the leader's ability to understand all sides increases employees' trust that difficult situations will be handled fairly—that is, not biased by anyone's identity-based interests. To develop that kind of insight, leaders can build trusting personal relationships with senior-level staff who represent the organization's diversity. They can also meet with networking groups composed of employees with shared social identities. Foster people's investment in relationships. Leaders who support a learning orientation in cross-cultural interactions give employees a reason to put their self-images at risk and to invest more deeply in relationships with coworkers. By taking every opportunity to link the mission of the company with the five principles outlined above, leaders reinforce the message that a learning orientation to diversity issues will promote pro- ductive and fulfilling relationships. • • • The five principles we have identified are difficult to enact. They entail taking risks and opening up when we feel most vulnerable and in need of self-protection. When others accuse us of holding prejudicial attitudes, we should interrogate ourselves; when we believe others are treating us unfairly, we should reach out to understand their actions. These prescriptions do not sell easily; self-righteousness feels more satisfying. But self-righteousness can also lead to divisive conflict, alienation, and ultimately, poor performance. When others accuse us of holding prejudicial attitudes, we should interrogate ourselves; when we believe others are treating us unfairly, we should reach out to understand their actions. When people treat their cultural differences—and the conflicts and tensions that arise from them—as opportunities to seek a more accurate view of themselves, each other, and the situation, trust builds and relationships become stronger. To support this approach, leaders should put aside the PC rule book and instead model and encourage risk taking in service of building the organization's capacity to foster high-quality relationships. The value of these skills will reverberate through every dimension of the company's work. Robin J. Ely is the Diane Doerge Wilson Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School and the faculty chair of the HBS Gender Initiative. DM Debra Meyerson ([email protected]) is an associate professor of education and (by courtesy) organizational behavior at Stanford University in Stanford, California. MD Martin N. Davidson is an associate professor of Business Administration at the Darden Graduate School of Business at the University of Virginia. (HBR)

Can I get an overview on the OJ Simpson trial?

O.J. Simpson Case Summary & Facts Instructor: Rachael Smith Show bio Cite this lesson Learn about the history of the O.J. Simpson trial. Discover a timeline and examine the evidence, people, and debate involved in the O.J. Simpson case. Updated: 06/19/2022 Who Is O.J. Simpson? O.J. Simpson was born on July 9th, 1947, as Orenthal James Simpson in San Francisco, California. In 1968, he won the Heisman Trophy while attending the University of Southern California. This prestigious award for young people is for his excellence and dedication to the sport of football. O.J. Simpson then went on to have a successful NFL career starting out playing for the Buffalo Bills. Then he played with the San Francisco 49ers until his retirement in 1979. After his lucrative football career, he became a broadcaster, spokesman, and actor. 1985 was a significant year for O.J. Simpson. He was inducted into the Pro Football Hall of Fame. He also married his longtime girlfriend, Nicole Brown. They had two children together. However, in 1992, Nicole Brown Simpson divorced O.J. Simpson claiming irreconcilable differences. Even with his impressive career, and his personal life in the spotlight, O.J. Simpson is more widely known for being arrested, tried, and acquitted of the murders of Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald Goldman. Their bodies were found on June 13, 1994, outside Nicole's home. When was the O.J. Simpson Trial? When was the O.J. Simpson trial, and how long did the O.J. Simpson trial last? The following lists the dates of important events leading up to O.J. Simpson's trial and the end of the trial: June 12, 1994 — Nicole Brown Simpson and Ron Goldman are murdered June 13, 1994 — Nicole Brown Simpson and Ron Goldman's bodies are discovered June 15, 1994 — Robert Shapiro, a lawyer, decides to take on O.J. Simpson as a client June 17, 1994 — Police issue a warrant for the arrest of O.J. Simpson June 17, 1994 — O.J. Simpson attempts to flee police in a white Bronco SUV July 9, 1994 — O.J. Simpson's preliminary trial takes place September 24, 1994 — The beginning of jury selection/voire dire. November 3, 1994 — The jury selection is completed January 18, 1995 — Johnnie Cochran replaces Shapiro as O.J. Simpson's lead counsel January 24, 1995 — Opening statements from the prosecution begin January 25, 1995 — Opening statements from the defense begin February 12, 1995 — The jury is taken to key locations, both homes of Simpson and Brown May 10, 1995 — The DNA evidence is presented to the jurors June 15, 1995 — O.J. Simpson tries on the "too tight" gloves in court September 28, 1995 — Closing arguments are presented by the defense October 3, 1995 — O.J. Simpson is acquitted of murdering Nicole Brown Simpson and Ron Goldman (Study.com)

postal

referring to the post (i.e. the system of delivering letters, etc.)

What does it mean to be asexual?

What does it mean to be asexual? Medically reviewed by Jennifer Litner, PhD, LMFT, CST — By Amanda Barrell — Updated on August 3, 2021 What is asexuality? Spectrums How do you know? Celibacy and abstinence Summary Not everyone agrees on the definition of asexuality. It is a spectrum. An asexual person feels little or no sexual attraction, but they may engage in sexual activity. Asexuality is a sexual orientation, like being gay or straight. It is different from celibacy or abstinence. The spectrum of asexuality contains much diversity in people's experiences of attraction and arousal and desires for relationships. An estimated 1% of the population is asexual, though experts believe that the number could actually be higher. This article looks at what asexuality is, what it is not, and some of the spectrums that people may identify with. Asexuality is a sexual orientation, just like homosexuality, bisexuality, and heterosexuality. It is both an identity and a spectrum. Asexual people are sometimes known as ace or aces for short. According to The Trevor Project, the asexuality spectrum is an umbrella term that describes a variety of ways in which a person might identify. While most asexual people have little interest in having sex, they may experience romantic attraction. Others may not. Asexual people have the same emotional needs as everyone else. Most will desire and form emotionally intimate relationships with other people. Asexual people may be attracted to the same sex or other sexes. Every asexual person will have a different experience, which may include: falling in love experiencing arousal having orgasms masturbating getting married having children Different spectrums In the initialism LGBTQIAP+, the A stands for asexual spectrum, or a-spec. The asexual spectrum has two orientations; sexual orientation and romantic orientation. Several identities fall under these categories. Asexual people have the same emotional needs as everyone else. Everyone is different, and how individuals fulfill those needs varies widely. Some aces may want romantic relationships. They can feel romantically attracted to other people, which may include the same sex or other sexes. Other aces prefer close friendships to intimate relationships. Some will experience arousal, and some will masturbate while having no interest in having sex with another person. Some asexual people do not want to have sexual contact, while others may feel "sex-neutral." Other asexual people will engage in sexual contact to gain an emotional connection. Other common identities which fall into the asexual or aromantic spectrum include: Aromantic Aromantic is a romantic orientation, which is different from a sexual orientation. Although the two are interwined for most people, they are different. Aromantic people experience little or no romantic attraction. They prefer close friendships and other nonromantic relationships. Many aromantic people will form queer platonic partnerships, or QPPs. QPPs are platonic yet have the same level of commitment as romantic relationships. Some people in QPPs choose to live together or have children together. Demisexual People who are demisexual experience sexual or romantic attraction, but only after they have formed a close, emotional connection with someone. Graysexual or grayromantic Graysexual or grayromantic people identify somewhere between sexual and asexual. This can include but is not limited to: people who only experience romantic attraction sometimes people who only experience sexual attraction sometimes people who experience sexual attraction but have a very low sex drive people who desire and enjoy sexual or romantic relationships but only in very specific circumstances How do you know if you are asexual? Asexuality is a sexual orientation. Typically, an asexual person has little or no interest in sexual contact with other people. However, they may engage in sexual activity alone or with a partner. Being asexual is not the same as suddenly losing interest in sex or choosing to not have sex while still experiencing sexual attraction. Asexuality, celibacy, and abstinence Asexuality is not the same as celibacy or abstinence. If someone is celibate or abstains from sex, this means they have taken a conscious decision to not take part in sexual activity despite experiencing sexual attraction. It is also important to note that asexuality is not the same as hypoactive sexual desire disorder or sexual aversion disorder. These are medical conditions associated with anxiety towards sexual contact. Social pressure may make asexual people feel anxious about sex, but that is different. Asexuality is not: abstinence on religious grounds sexual repression, aversion, or dysfunction a fear of intimacy loss of libido due to age, illness, or other circumstances Summary Just as some people are gay or bisexual, some people are asexual. An asexual person has no or little interest in sex. They may or may not feel romantic attraction, and they may or may not engage in sexual activity. There is a wide range of identities on the asexual spectrum, from people who experience no sexual or romantic attraction to people who engage in sexual contact under some conditions. Many asexual people form meaningful, lasting relationships, and some get married or have children. Asexuality is not the same as celibacy or abstinence, both of which mean someone experiences sexual attraction but chooses not to act on it. (Medical News Today)