Biography of Sylvia Plath - 1452 Words

Critical Analysis Sylvia Plath, a great American author, focuses mostly on actual experiences. Plath’s poetry displays feelings and emotions. Plath had the ability to transform everyday happenings into poems or diary entries. Plath had a passion for poetry and her work was valued. She was inspired by novelists and her own skills. Her poetry was also very important to readers and critics. Sylvia Plath’s work shows change throughout her lifetime, relates to feelings and emotions, and focuses on day to day experiences. Plath’s difficulties with narrative prose contrasts between her novelistic dreams and her character. Plath’s passion for classic novelists and her own talent made her realize the fitting narrative prose were densely†¦show more content†¦Sylvia Plath had the ability to get emotional responses through her word-pictures and poems. Plath was also able to create a picture from her trip to Spain, tied up ships, or even a beautiful beach set ting (Magill 2225). Spring of 1959, Plath randomly wrote â€Å"Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dream,† a first-person short story that is written in a voice that resembles terror (Hughes 1). Plath later work shows the strong dissatisfaction of her dreams. Plath dreamt of discovering cheerfulness through work, marriage, and family, which was a disappointment, caused by a miscarriage and appendectomy, her divorce, and mood swings. Plath felt defenseless to men and apocalyptic to natural forces, mainly death (Draper 2734). Plath’s post-obituary writings imitate the persisting importance in her work. Three Women: A Monologue for Three Voices (1968), originally published on British Radio in 1962, discusses pregnancy of three women (Draper 2735). Plath was inspired to write â€Å"The Jailer† which was about her husband who drugged then raped her. Plath eventually became â€Å"The Lever of His Wet Dreams.† The exact prodigy occurs in most of her confessional poems , mainly in â€Å"Daddy† (Magill 2224). Plath’s tone changes throughout most of her poems (Magill 2228). In â€Å"Daddy,† Plath tells about herself being rebellious in her poems (Magill 2229). â€Å"No writer has meant more to the current feminist movement.† Kath Pollitt described this collection as â€Å"a storehouseShow MoreRelatedBiography of Sylvia Plath942 Words   |  4 Pagestwentieth century, Sylvia Plath was highly esteemed by fans and fellow writers alike. Sylvia Plath’s parents, Aurelia Schober and Otto Plath, had met when Aurelia became Otto’s student at Boston University. Otto was a biology professor with an infatuation with bees; he had even published a book titled Bumblebees and their ways. Otto and Aurelia married in January of 1932, and by October of the same year Aurelia gave birth in Jamaica Plain, Massachusetts to a daughter, Sylvia. Sylvia spent her childhoodRead MoreA Biography on the Life of Sylvia Plath Essay528 Words   |  3 PagesSylvia Plath was born on October 27, 1932 in Boston, Massachusetts. Her parents were Otto and Aurelia Plath. Plaths father, Otto, immigrated to America from Germany when he was just sixteen years old. He wanted to study ministry at the Northwestern College, which was a small Lutheran school. According to his wife, Aurelia, Otto changed his ambitions because he didnt feel a true calling for the ministry. He received a master of the arts from Washington University, and the doctor of science fromRead MorePeople s Love At First Sight By Sylvia Plath1567 Words   |  7 Pages People dream of falling in love at first sight. Sylvia Plath, an American writer, experienced the desirable moment the first time she saw Ted Hughes, an English poet (Middlebrook). The romantic relationship between Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath grew instantly. They both shared a love of writing, but yet their rela tionship began to go downhill five years after their marriage (Popova). The marriage between Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath was destructive because of Sylvia’s unstable mental health and Ted’sRead MoreSylvia Plath s Life And Life1425 Words   |  6 Pagesor introspectively passive and sad or I can go mad by ricocheting in between.† (Goodreads, 2013) This is a quote from Sylvia Plath, a poet who faced many obstacles in her life including attempting suicide; getting divorced due to lies and infidelity; and leaving her children behind. Sylvia Plath was born on October 27, 1932 in Boston Massachusetts Plath’s father Otto Plath author of a book on bees. (The Famous People Website, 2013; About.com, 2013). Her father taught at Boston University, whereRead MoreSylvia Plath s Life And Accomplishments974 Words   |  4 PagesSylvia Plath’s work is marked with her trademark style, one full of enigmatic analogies and ambiguous metaphors. Sadly though, the life of Sylvia Plath was indeed shorter than anyone expected. Nevertheless, in the thirty years Plath meandered through the world, she left an everlasting impact. Remembered as one of the most dynamic and admired poets of the twentieth century, Plath cultivated a literary community unlike any predecessor. Additionally, since a sizable portion of Plath’s work was readRead MoreSylvia Plath’s Life1219 Words   |  5 PagesElizabeth Winder’s Pain, Parties, Work: Sylvia Plath in New York, Summer 1953 illuminates different aspects of Sylvia Plath’s life. However, Winder depicts Plath not as the mythologized martyr of a collapsed marriage or the tragic woman poet with a debilitating illness but rather as a young girl wanting to immerse herself in the rich, material culture of her time. Winder’s biography gives insight to the life of an intelligent young woman amidst the gender constraints of mid-century America, a themeRead MoreThe Collection Biographical Connections By Sylvia Plath1422 Words   |  6 PagesConnections 1. Sylvia Plath worked as a guest editor during the summer of 1953 in New York for the magazine Mademoiselle. Shortly after her stint as a guest editor, she attempted suicide by taking sleeping pills (Sylvia Plath Biography†). 2. Plath recovered after she received treatment at a mental health facility (Sylvia Plath Biography†). 3. Sylvia Plath and poet Ted Hughes married in 1956. They later divorced in 1962 when Hughes left Plath for another woman (Sylvia Plath Biography†). 4. FollowingRead MoreSylvia Plath836 Words   |  4 Pages Sylvia Plath is said to be one the most prodigious, yet interesting, confessional poets of her time. She was an extremely vital poet of the post-World War II time period and expressed her feelings towards her father and husband through her poetry. Plath’s mental illness had a dramatic influence upon her work in which she demonstrated the hatred she had for her father specifically. The poem â€Å"Daddy† is an easily applicable example. Within this piece of work, Plath uses direct references to howRead MoreAnalysis Of `` Daddy `` By Sylvia Plath1210 Words   |  5 PagesSylvia Plath had turbulent and unstable life leading up to her suicide. Her father died when she was very young, although he held considerable weight in her poetry. Sylvia even dedicated an entire poem, titled â€Å"Daddy†, to her thoughts and feelings about her deceased father. Ted Hughes, her husband, also proved to be a large influe nce in much of her work, and also helped shape her ideas of feminism and motherhood. He was also referenced in the poem â€Å"Daddy†, along with many other poems. DepressionRead MoreThe Poetry Of An Author962 Words   |  4 Pageseven the way they were ordered poems. In the case that concerns us Sylvia Plath I could not shake that biographism; What s more, thanks to him I met the poetry of this woman who, otherwise, would never have aroused my curiosity. So, biographical circumstance for some critics is almost like a curse. It has been the key element that led me to the poetry of this woman. My first approach to Sylvia Plath came after seeing the film Sylvia (a biopic, to increase my biographer fault) starring Gwyneth Paltrow

Leadership Styles in Professional Nursing Armon Copeland Chamberlain Free Essays

Leadership Styles in Professional Nursing Armon Copeland Chamberlain College of Nursing 351: Transitions to Professional Nursing Spring Term 2011 Introduction Leadership in the 21st century has been redefined. As leaders we provide the voucher and guidance to begin the journey, while the managers are the ones who drive the team to the destination. Leadership is something you know when you see it, but is very challenging to describe. We will write a custom essay sample on Leadership Styles in Professional Nursing Armon Copeland Chamberlain or any similar topic only for you Order Now Leadership development in the nursing profession is important because it directly impacts the care that is delivered to patients. It is critical that the entire senior leadership have the self-same vision or mental image of what the organization intends to aim for as structure, management and organization in terms of changes for a solid foundation. Leadership Leadership is a blend of personal characteristics, abilities, strategies, and circumstances that enable a leader to influence individuals and organizations to accomplish a goal. Although there is no single formula for becoming a successful leader, some common elements include self- confidence, courage, a clear vision of the goal and how to reach it, the ability to clearly communicate the goal as well as strong personal commitment, and the ability to inspire trust and respect among followers. Leadership differs from management in that leadership is a combination of personal qualities and abilities whereas management is a process. Leaders are more likely to be effective when they use the management process to achieve goals. Managers are more effective when their actions demonstrate leadership qualities; thereby earning the respect and trust of those they manage (Hamilton, 1996). Styles of Leadership Transformational and Transactional leadership styles are two very different methods of leadership in the nursing profession. This paper will compare and contrast these two leadership styles and support that transformational leadership style encourages quality care, job fulfillment and improved patient outcomes. The traditional authoritarian style of leadership the top-down directive approach has largely been replaced with a more democratic and/or participative style, which involves such collaborative behaviors as consulting, discussing, cooperating, or negotiating. No one style is effective for all situations, however, so flexibility is important. For example, an authoritarian approach may be the most effective in dealing with acute situations when decisions must be made and implemented quickly. Rapid technological growth, increased diversity in the workforce, and growing complexity within organizations has led to changes in the way effective leadership is defined. Leadership researchers and theorists define good leadership as â€Å"future-oriented rather than present-oriented and as fostering followers’ commitment and ability to contribute creatively to organizations† (Eagly, 2007). Political scientist James McGregor Burns (1978) described this type of leadership as transformational leadership. Transformational leaders establish themselves as role models by gaining followers’ trust and confidence. They establish the organization’s goals, plan how to achieve the goals, and innovate. As Eagly (2007) explains, â€Å"Transformational leaders mentor and empower their subordinates and encourage them to develop their potential and thus to contribute more effectively to their organization. † Researchers also describe a more conservative type of leadership as transactional leadership, in which leaders establish exchange relationships with their frontline employees. After clarifying objectives and subordinates’ responsibilities, transactional leaders reward those who meet objectives and correct them when they fail to meet objectives. The word politics is a loaded term, heavy with images of shady characters in smoke-filled rooms, wheeling, dealing, and often stealing. But politics is really a neutral term. According to Policy and Politics for Nurses, â€Å"Politics means influencing, specifically, influences the allocation of scarce resources. Politics is a process by which one influences the decisions of others and exerts control over situations and events. It is a means to an end† (Mason et al. , 2002). Becoming influential is something that can be learned, and it has as much to do with attitude as with behavior. Both aspects are necessary (Sullivan, 2004). Becoming influential includes such skills as understanding power and how to use it, communicating effectively, understanding the political process, and dealing with difficult people and situations. Conclusion â€Å"Work hard, play by the rules, be nice, be polite, hold yourself accountable and you will get ahead. Our mothers were right, up to a point. Taking that advice, you do get ahead and your hard work is rewarded until you hit the glass ceiling. Or, as one physician called it, the â€Å"gauze ceiling. † Being the best at what you do is not enough to break through the gauze ceiling into positions of leadership. It’s not enough to have clinical skills; you need political skills as well. Leaders make a difference in their world by influencing others to support the leader’s vision or cause. To make a difference, you need political skills. Everything is political in the work environment, professional organization, community, and government. References Hamilton PM. (1996). Realities of Contemporary Nursing, 2nd ed. Menlo Park, CA: Addison-Wesley. Eagley AH. (2007). Female leadership advantage and disadvantage: Resolving the contradictions. Psychology of Women Quarterly 31:1–12. Mason DJ, Leavitt JK, Chaffee MW. (2002). Policy and Politics in Nursing and Healthcare, 4th ed. Philadelphia: Saunders/Elsevier. Sullivan EJ. (2004). Becoming Influential: A Guide for Nurses. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson Education. How to cite Leadership Styles in Professional Nursing Armon Copeland Chamberlain, Essay examples

Information And Communication Technology In Education †Free Samples

Question: Discuss about the Information And Communication Technology In Education. Answer: Introduction This is known as the virtual age and Information and communication technology or ICT is the process by which individuals, organizations or government run in the virtual world. It is the system by which information is processed, analyzed and sorted so that the end user gets the information they are looking for (Martnez-Caro, Cegarra-Navarro and Cepeda-Carrin 2015). Communication is a process using medium to give or take information in order to express ideas, emotions, basic information etc. ICT is an amalgamation of audiovisual networks, applications or devices that helps individuals, governments or organizations to interact with one another (Morgado et al. 2014). The tools that are used in ICT are a dynamic and ever changing or upgrading itself. Starting from traditional transistors and radio to the progressive technologies like artificial intelligence and robotics. ICT is regularly used for the advancement of socio-economic development, interpersonal communication and also intrapersonal communication at times. ICT has now enabled an individual to be connected to the rest of the world with just a click (Clark and Mayer 2016). The advancement of technology and modern medium has drastically changed the life of everyone. Social media is the new calling of the millennial people lead their life on social media. As it is so impactful and so diverse in nature ICT should be used consciously by everyone. It is impossible to predict or to even realize the reach and the ultimate boundaries of information technology (en.unesco.org 2017). Literature Review According to Das and Das (2015), ICT has set a new paradigm and benchmark in the education system in the recent times. It has made the learning process less monotonous and more dynamic there is a plethora of medium that are available. There is a large shortage of trained and skilled teachers, thanks to ICT there are now provisions of online classes which facilitates whiteboard collaboration along with sharing the content with pupils across the world. It is of the new parameters of quality education that is taken into consideration by parents when they admit their child to an A league school or college. The present generation is growing up surrounded with information technology hence it is much easier for this generation to imbibe the e-learning technicalities. In compared to the traditional learning process ICT has enable teachers to engage children better and have given them a wider view of the subjects. It facilitates communicative learning process. Das and Das (2015) has discussed about blended learning and how growth of ICT in the education sector is going to elevate the procedure of distance learning program. In colleges and places of higher education ICT has a special role to play as it is enabling to remove the stigma associated to distance education, rather the technologies available is making it possible to teach various subjects and offer a lot more flexibility in the course curriculum. In the report they have also pointed out the difficulties that are being faced by the digitalization of classrooms. The biggest confrontation that has been observed is from the teachers as they tend to believe in the misconception that technology is going to replace teachers in the future. The authors call this a misconception because there is already a scarcity of skilled teachers around the world and the technology is only to help the teachers in the communication process. It is not a replacement but is only a helping hand. Rather it is the other way around where the technology is dependent on the teacher for the better understanding of the pupils. Another issue with the technology that is discussed is the lack of training among the teachers. Most teachers cannot use the technology at disposal to its full capability. Tough teachers from UK, US, Japan and Australia are comparatively more enthusiastic than other countries where the resources are available. E-learning plan Teaching is a profession that has been practiced from a long time. The student-teacher equation changes as the student grows up. In many cultural teachers are regarded above parents it is a profession to be respected and cultivated. Spreading knowledge requires skills, not everyone who is an expert in a subject has the ability to impart the knowledge. First of all it is important to understand that by learning people perceive the conventional classroom teaching. In order to cultivate the e-learning system what is important is a proper training for the teachers to enable them to use the facilities to its full capacity (Balta and Duran 2015). Dedicated time should be allotted to every teacher in the institution to learn the technicalities of using digital media to teach children. Based on the subject expertise of the teacher the training session should be held. Because teaching math is a lot different form teaching history even in the digital space (Cherner, Dix and Lee 2014). The idea of teachers being replaced by technology should be wiped out and the teachers should learn to use the technology at disposal to enhance their teaching abilities and make the student understand better. Some of the tools which can be used in the teaching medium are: Interactive whiteboard It is an expensive installation but one of the most widely used ICT components. It is a device more like a white board which can be attached to a laptop or a tablet. The elements can be moved and change places according to the need of the teacher, so that it is easy to explain it to the children. One of the most innovate feature of this board is that it can also work as the traditional black board where the teacher writes to explain (Mangano et al. 2014). Here the instructor can not only write but this text can be saved as a document. So after erasing the text from the board the information is not lost. This is very helpful, in case of young kids most of the time it is a problem that they cannot keep up with the pace of the teacher and miss out bits and pieces of the notes that the teacher is putting up on the board (Surjono 2014). After installing the board every teacher should receive a through training for at least 10 days to learn the optimum utility of the device. If it is used creatively it can prove useful, informative, fun and also interactive. This should training period should take place while there is a long vacation for the students, so that it doesnt hamper the curriculum of the students. It is also important to incorporate the e-learning method from a fresh academic session instead of implementing it mid-way. Students may get confused and may not behave positively (bbcactive.com 2017). Though this is an expensive installation, it can also be deemed as cost effective because a fully equipped IT classroom is way more expensive than a whiteboard. Audiovisual Audiovisual medium has grown in leaps and bounces with the advancement of technology. Technologies which are available to create audio or visual elements are also becoming less expensive and are widely used by common people. The availability of these audios or videos is also just a click away. If a lecture is accompanied by an audio or visual clip of the relevant subject then it is much easier for the student to grasp the concept and remember it. This is where the usage of the white board is also important. It is much more effective as it binds the knowledge that the lecturer is trying to impart (De-Marcos et al. 2014). Social Media Social media is a revolutionary invention of this century, people from all over the word with an internet connection is connected to one another with a string. This is a set up ideal for distance education and learning purposes. This is mostly advisable for higher education, for students who are willing to learn and put that extra effort. Google plus or Google hangout is a popular platform and is being widely used for educational purposes. Seminars are held and participants from around the world are welcome to join. A seminar can also include a guest lecturer from another part of the world to the platform without being physically present through Skype or any other such medium (Hirsh-Pasek et al. 2015). Google Classroom There are many free applications which can be used by students and educators for learning purposes but Google has come up with one exclusive application which is custom built for the purpose of teaching. It is effective and saves a lot of precious time of teachers and students it allows submission of paper less assignments and notes. Circulation of notes is also easy as it automatically programmed to create folders and slip in the notes through Google drive. It allows the student to work in an organized way and keep track of the curriculum and assignments that are due (nytimes.com 2017). Conclusion The difference between an animal and a human being is the presence of a conscious mind with which we have the ability to learn and adapt to the change and upgrade ourselves to live in a society. Knowledge is precious it empowers an individual to live a life of wellbeing. Hence teachers play an important role in the lives of every individual from a very young age. With the advancement of technology now there are several ways with which we can learn more easily. ICT like any other sphere of life has also changed the education system worldwide. Many argue that the traditional way is the most effective teaching method but it is this is a subjective behavior. It depends up on the circumstances, the subject and the person who is teaching along with many other circumstances. References Balta, N. and Duran, M., 2015. Attitudes of students and teachers towards the use of interactive whiteboards in elementary and secondary school classrooms.TOJET: The Turkish Online Journal of Educational Technology,14(2). bbcactive.com. 2017.Interactive Whiteboard. [online] Available at: https://www.bbcactive.com/BBCActiveIdeasandResources/Whatisaninteractivewhiteboard.aspx [Accessed 27 Jul. 2017]. Cherner, T., Dix, J. and Lee, C., 2014. Cleaning up that mess: A framework for classifying educational apps.Contemporary Issues in Technology and Teacher Education,14(2), pp.158-193. Clark, R.C. and Mayer, R.E., 2016.E-learning and the science of instruction: Proven guidelines for consumers and designers of multimedia learning. John Wiley Sons. De-Marcos, L., Domnguez, A., Saenz-de-Navarrete, J. and Pags, C., 2014. An empirical study comparing gamification and social networking on e-learning.Computers Education,75, pp.82-91. en.unesco.org. 2017.Education. [online] Available at: https://en.unesco.org/themes/ict-education [Accessed 26 Jul. 2017]. Hirsh-Pasek, K., Zosh, J.M., Golinkoff, R.M., Gray, J.H., Robb, M.B. and Kaufman, J., 2015. Putting education in educational apps: lessons from the science of learning.Psychological Science in the Public Interest,16(1), pp.3-34. Mangano, N., LaToza, T.D., Petre, M. and van der Hoek, A., 2014, April. Supporting informal design with interactive whiteboards. InProceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems(pp. 331-340). ACM. Martnez-Caro, E., Cegarra-Navarro, J.G. and Cepeda-Carrin, G., 2015. An application of the performance-evaluation model for e-learning quality in higher education.TotalQuality Management Business Excellence,26(5-6), pp.632-647. Morgado, E.M.M., Ortuo, R.A.C., Yang, L.L. and Ferreras-Fernndez, T., 2014. Adaptation of Descriptive Metadata for Managing Educational Resources in the GREDOS Repository.International Journal ofKnowledge Management (IJKM),10(4), pp.50-72. nytimes.com. 2017.How Google Took Over the Classroom. [online] Available at: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/13/technology/google-education-chromebooks-schools.html [Accessed 27 Jul. 2017]. Surjono, H.D., 2014. The evaluation of a moodle based adaptive e-learning system.International Journal of Information and Education Technology,4(1), p.89.

Spanish Verb Book Essays - Parts Of Speech, Spanish Verbs

Spanish Verb Book Present Tense The following section will be the present you are implying that the action is occurring at the present time. For example: Joseph reads the book. The reads in the sentence shows that Joseph is in the process of reading the book. Regular AR Infinitives acabar (de) to come after acompa?ar to accompany admirar to admire ayudar to help bailar to dance bajar to go down brillar to shine buscar to look for caminar to walk cantar to sing cenar to have supper chupar to suck cocinar to cook colabarar to collaborate coleccionar to collect comenzar to start comprar to buy conservar to conserve contestar to answer dar to give dejar to leave descansar to rest dibujar to draw doblar to turn ense?ar to teach entrar to enter escuchar to listen esquiar to ski estudiar to study evitar to avoid explicar to explain fascinar to fascinate formar to farm ganar to win gustar to like hablar to speak interesar to interest lavar to wash limpiar to clean llegar to arrive llevar to take mirar to look at neccisitar to need observar to observe olividar to forget pagar to pay for participar to participate pasar to spend time patinar to skate pesear to wish practicar to practice preguntar to ask preparar to prepare prestar to lend programar to program quedar to be located regresar to spend money renunciar to renounce respetar to respect sacar to take out tomar to take trabajar to work viajar to travel visitar to visit Canta muy bien. She sings very well. Hablo espa?ol, I speak Spansh. ?Poder ayundo tu? Can I help you? ?Te viajar? Do you travel? viajar - to travel cantar - to sing ayudar - to help hablar - to speak viajo viajamos canto cantamos ayudo ayudamos hablo hablamos viajas --- cantas --- ayudas --- hablas --- viaja viajan canta cantan ayuda ayudan habla habla hablan Regular AR's are the most common of all verbs, to use them, remove the ar ending and insert the appropriate ending on the chart: o for i ___, as for you ___, a for he/she ___, amos for we ___, an for they ___. You can also use the following chart for the respective endings. Singlar Plural o amos 1st Person as --- 2nd Person a an 3rd Person Irregular AR's dar to give estar to be Da el perro Mike. He gives the dog to Mike. Yo quiero a estar un abogado. I want to be a lawyer o for singular Ella est? mi amiga. She is my friend. Yo doy t? este carro. I give you this car. estar - to be dar - to give estoy estamos doy damos estas --- das --- esta estan da dan Irregular AR's truly have no rule, to use them you must learn the specific way each is conjugated. See the conjugations above. AR Stem-Changers (e - ie) cerrar to close empezar to begin nevar to show pensar to think (about) recomendar to reccomend Pieso el dinero. I am thinking about the money. Cierra el libro. He closes the book. Ellos empiezan a leer. They begin to read. Yo recomiendo el pollo. I recommend the chicken. pensar - to think cerrar - to close nevar - to show empezar - to begin pieso pensamos cierro cerramos nievo nevamos empiezo empezamos piesas --- cierras --- nievas --- empiezas --- piesa piensan cierra cierran nieva nievan empieza empiezan The AR stem-changers (e - ie) are a type of verb. To conjugate them you simply change the last e in the stem (which means all the parts of the verb but the ar ending) to an ie, then you remove the ar ending and add the appropriate ending. However there is one exception, in first person plural you do not change the e to an ie, you leave the stem as it is before changing. You can follow the rule below. Singlar Plural (e - ie) o (e - e) amos 1st Person (e - ie) as --- --- 2nd Person (e - ie) a (e - ie) an 3rd Person AR Stem-Changers (o - ue) almorzar to have lunch costar to cost encontrar to find recordar to remember volar to show jugar* to play * jugar is a unique verb, it is treated as the o - ue verbs are, but with a u - ue. Muestras mi tu trabajar. Show me your work. Cuesta muchos dinero. It costs much money. Juego el partido. I play the game. Encuentran un amigo. They find a friend. mostrar - to show costar - to cost volar - to show jugar* - to play muestro mostramos cuesto costamos vuelo volamos juego jugamos muestras --- cuestas --- vuelas --- juegas --- muestra muestran cuesta cuestan vuela vuelan juega juegan The AR stem-changers (o - ue) are a type of verb. To conjugate them you simply change the last o in the stem (which means all the

Usman dan Fodio and the Sokoto Caliphate

Usman dan Fodio and the Sokoto Caliphate In the 1770s, Uthman dan Fodio, still in his early 20s, began preaching in his home state of Gobir in Western African. He was one of the many Fulani Islamic scholars pushing for the revitalization of Islam in the region and the rejection of allegedly pagan practices by Muslims. Within a few decades, dan Fodio would rise to become one of the most recognized names in nineteenth-century West Africa. Hijra and Jihad As a young man, dan Fodios reputation as a scholar grew quickly. His message of reform and his criticisms of the government found fertile ground in a period of growing dissent. Gobir was one of several Hausa states in what is now northern Nigeria. There was widespread dissatisfaction in these states, especially among the Fulani pastoralists from whom dan Fodio came. dan Fodios growing popularity soon led to persecution from the Gobir government, and he withdrew, performing the hijra- a migration from  Mecca to Yathrib- as the Prophet Muhammad had also done. After his hijra, dan Fodio launched a powerful jihad in 1804, and by 1809, he had established the Sokoto caliphate that would rule over much of northern Nigeria until it was conquered by the British in 1903. Sokoto Caliphate The Sokoto Caliphate was the largest state in West Africa in the nineteenth century, but it was really fifteen smaller states or emirates united under the authority of the Sultan of Sokoto. By 1809, leadership was already in the hands of one of dan Fodios sons, Muhammad Bello, who is credited with solidifying control and establishing much of the administrative structure of this large and powerful state. Under Bellos governance, the Caliphate followed a policy of religious tolerance, enabling non-Muslims to pay a tax rather than try to enforce conversions. The policy of relative tolerance as well as attempts to ensure impartial justice helped earn the state the support of the Hausa people within the region. The support of the populace was also achieved in part through the stability the state brought and the resulting expansion of trade. Policies toward Women Uthman dan Fodio followed a relatively conservative branch of Islam, but his adherence to Islamic law ensured that within the Sokoto Caliphate women enjoyed many legal rights. dan Fodio strongly believed that women too needed to be educated in the ways of Islam. This meant he wanted women in the mosques learning. For some women, this was an advance, but certainly not for all, as he also held that women should always obey their husbands, provided that the husbands will did not run counter to the teachings of the Prophet Muhammad or Islamic laws. Uthman dan Fodio also, however, advocated against female genital cutting, which had been gaining a hold in the region at the time, ensuring that he is remembered as an advocate for women.

Assignment #2 355 Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 500 words

#2 355 - Assignment Example Additionally, the family is constantly involved in wrangles and family conflicts, mainly associated with limited resource availability and distribution. One aspect worth noting with the family is the aspect of the gendered division of labor. Jay, who is the head of the family, struggles in order to provide for his big family, which comprises of his second wife, who also works though for limited pay, and, therefore only takes care of her two children, a stepson, an infant son, two adult children, their spouses, one couple of which comprises same sex individuals, and children. Jay and the two adult children all struggle with menial jobs to make ends meet in for the provision of the familys basic needs , while Jay’s second wife, despite also working, only takes care of her children while the other adult children’s spouses, work on the housekeeping duties. Considering how big the family is, with a house that is tiny, the house is rarely clean, with the large number of members as well as the struggle between the adult females in the house about the person to clean the house contributing to the house untidiness. The lead characters are individuals of 20 years and above, among whom conflict is constantly witnessed. There is no frail elderly individual in the family; however, Jay’s stepson is constantly on the wheelchair because of broken limbs from an earlier accident. From the TV show, work is presented favorably as a factor towards the contribution of provision of family’s basic needs. However, the family is presented negatively as despite the effort put by Jay and the adult children in their duties towards providing for the family, the family members is always in conflict, especially the Jay’s second wife and Jay’s other children. Modern family characters portray a critical aspect of what a modern family in America comprises. First, is an

Stereotyping of the Aging Research Paper Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1750 words

Stereotyping of the Aging - Research Paper Example This is usually against the senior members of society by the much younger persons. Stereotyping of aging, often known as ageism, is something that has affected people all over the world. It is a form of discrimination just like racism and sexism. It takes the same pattern as these two since it was believed that the elderly faced the same prejudice due to their old age. This paper will review some of the negative and positive stereotypes of aging, and the process of aging. As seen above, this stage is inevitable. Every living thing that has been born must go through the process of aging. This is to ensure that the life cycle is maintained as the birth, and growth of other living organisms occurs. However, over the years, theories and myths have come up about aging. They often lead the much older people to be perceived in a certain way. The manner in which they are treated by the much younger generation is not right. A name has been given to this form of treatment. It is known as ageis m. It took this name since it had the same pattern as other forms of discrimination (Branch & Palmore, 2005). Stereotyping of the aging has become a common trend especially in these modern times. In modern times, families and relatives of old people still love them. However, this love is often shown to them if they are far away from the much younger family members. This shows that not many people value what the older people have to offer (Branch & Palmore, 2005). When they die, they often think of it as a relief since they were already old, and could not fend for themselves. They think that occasional is enough to show affection and appreciation. Also, that old folks will be satisfied with seeing their children and grandchildren once in a year is something that works. This cannot be considered the correct way to go about treating all those that paved the way for others. They paved the way for everyone, so it is the responsibility of everyone in society to guide and protect them in t heir old age. Stereotyping can be defined as a set of beliefs that often guide a person in everyday life. They shape the way an individual thinks and relates to their immediate surroundings. There are a number of stereotypes about aging and the old that run the lives of many people around the world today (Branch & Palmore, 2005). There are positive and negative stereotypes that exist about aging. The negative stereotyping of the aging has often taken centre stage in the lives of many. This means that the negative beliefs that many people harbour about aging are more than the positive ones. This should not be the scenario as the older generation still have a lot to offer the world. They might be old, but what they know, and believe in could be valuable to each and every person because they are bound to age with time. Positive Beliefs One positive stereotype could be that the aging are often kind. This stereotype can lead to many people believing that at a certain age, they often thin k of putting others before themselves. This is an immensely positive mind-set for those who believe that old people are unkind to those around them, and themselves, as well (Levy, 2001). As people grow older, they get the knowledge that is often not acquired in a classroom with the use of books. This knowledge is acquired with the coming of age. They often tend to become wiser than they were when they were much younger. This can tell all those who believe

Market Invironment Project Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 500 words

Market Invironment Project - Essay Example The R+D ensures that restaurant always offer top quality products and varied, popular flavors to its customers. The restaurant uses the innovative concept of â€Å"speed scratch cuisine†, for noticing the public on the means of obtaining faster services from their store. Preparation of products and services in Montaditos is in the presence of diners, who provide ranging natural ingredients where numerous products can be selected to create their favorite Montaditos. The restaurant works with high-speed partners and top-flight suppliers, to provide and guarantee their customers a wide range of products including drinks, salads, among other culinary items. Restaurant Services and professional employees are capable of leading the restaurant to success in South Miami market. The restaurant operates at varied times in different days of the week and makes to be reliable for all categories of customers. Form Monday to Wednesday and Sunday, the restaurant opens from eleven in the morning to eleven at night. On Thursday, the restaurant operates until midnight. (100Montaditos, 2011) On Fridays and Saturdays, the restaurant extends its services to one in the morning from eleven in the morning. Ideally, 100 Montaditos is a good place for children since it is a place of moderate noise and provides its services in entirely in casual attires. The ambience of the restaurant is also casual. The restaurant offers its services to anyone, but does not have waiters or Wi-Fi system; also, it does not offer reservations or deliveries. Moreover, the restaurant is suitable for group meetings and it is a good place for dinner and lunch. Additionally, the restaurant has a garage as well as a wheelchair for persons with such special needs. 100 Montaditos offers drinks includin g soft drinks, wine and beer. The restaurant’s management accepts payments in cash and credit card terms. Finally, it has TV as a form of

When primary participants talk to interpreters Essay Example for Free

When primary participants talk to interpreters Essay To be realistic about an interpreters role, we can examine several more examples of the way speakers interact and take turns. In this first example, І look at Ð ° turn in which Ð ° primary participant speaks directly to the Interpreter. Because examples from this case study corpus are relatively limited, І will add another example that appeared in an interpreter membership association newsletter, interpreters complain frequently about the propensity of primary participants to address utterances directly to interpreters. They imply that the primary participants should know better; they should know that interpreters only relay messages; they do not answer or speak directly to participants. Interestingly, their complaints seem to focus on the participant who is the professional or institutional representative, generally Ð ° speaker of Ð ° majority language, not the citizen or client, who speaks Ð ° minority language. Asking Ð ° question or speaking directly to an interpreter affords an opportunity to study the interaction around this dilemma, to examine different responses, and to learn whether primary participants are confirming or denying the role performance of the interpreter. S: FILMING? pointing at the researcher FILMING? І: [to the researcher] FILMING? Are you filming? R: yes І: YES [to the Student] The Student wants to know if filming has begun so he poses the question to the Interpreter. The Interpreter then asks the Researcher (who understands ASL) first using ASL, and then asking in English. Because the camera lens was fogged and the Researcher could not see clearly (Ð ° problem that cleared up), she did not respond to the signed utterance. When she heard the question, she answered in English, and the Interpreter relayed the answer to the Student. Although the Interpreter does relay this query from the Student, he is supposed to relay this question to the Professor as the other primary participant. In interpreting ideology, interpreters are not supposed to answer direct questions; rather they should pass on the question to allow the primary speaker to answer (see Metzger 1995: Chap 5). The Researcher is an ancillary participant who is supposed to be ignored because she is filming the event. But the Interpreter did relay the question on to Ð ° participant other than himself. That leaves two questions to be asked: To whom was the question directed? Why didnt the Interpreter relay the question to the Professor? Let us begin with the second question. The Interpreter did not relay the question to the Professor because she was answering the telephone and was speaking to the person who called. In conversational interaction, one primary participant can be called to attend to other matters or conversations, Ð ° perfectly ordinary occurrence in interaction. For example, when І accompany my mother to the lawyers office, the lawyer occasionally interrupts the meeting to answer Ð ° phone call or conduct Ð ° side conversation with his secretary. While he is engaged, my mother and І talk over what she and her lawyer are discussing or something else entirely. In this interaction, when the Professor is otherwise engaged, the Student can and does ask the Interpreter Ð ° question about the other activity at the meeting. So the Interpreter does not relay the question to the Professor because the question was not directed at her. Now lets consider the first question: To whom was the question directed? Because the Student could see the Professor uses the phone and because he asked the Interpreter, rather than turning around and asking the Researcher, and simply pointed in the direction of the Researcher, the question seems to be directed at the Interpreter. Most likely, the Student thought that the Interpreter could answer because video cameras generally have lights that come on when filming my point here is that Ð ° primary participant spoke directly to the Interpreter when the other primary participant was not attending to the interaction and had absented herself from the interaction with the Student. Participants act and react to interpreters as potential conversational partners and seem unaware that the task of interpreting should preclude treating an interpreter as Ð ° potential interlocutor. To primary participants, then, it must seem natural, even ordinary, to interact with interpreters as capable human beings who can answer and ask questions. This might suggest to interpreters that primary participants are never going to act as though interpreters are not also real participants in the interaction. It also suggests that interacting directly with an interpreter does not come about arbitrarily, but rather because of other social norms that govern interaction when Ð ° primary participant is interrupted and moves the focus off the reason and purpose for coming together. My next example is drawn from an article in Views (January 1998), the newsletter of the Registry of Interpreters for the Deaf, Ð ° North American association of sign language interpreters. In this article, the author presented an example similar to the previous one: Ð ° primary speaker asks an interpreter Ð ° question. The situation was Ð ° doctors office where Ð ° Deaf patient was being examined. During the examination the doctor turns to the interpreter and asks, How did you get into the field? Is sign language hard to learning? The dilemma presented to readers was that the interpreter was asked Ð ° question by the doctor but was not sure how to handle this situation or who should answer the question. The author suggested that determining Ð ° solution is Ð ° matter of ethics and that knowing ways of solving ethical dilemmas assists interpreters, particularly beginning interpreters, in arriving at good solutions. Although І agree that student interpreters should be trained to solve ethical dilemmas, under the scrutiny of discourse analysis, this particular phenomenon might not be an ethical problem but rather an ordinary happenstance in the interactional process of discourse. We can begin by noting that no other information is provided about the meeting and its progress. The doctors question is presented in isolation. As the preceding example demonstrated, it matters what the other participants are doing. We do not know what the patient is doing, what was said prior, or what is said afterward. This is the point about studying interpreters in actual interaction. Utterances do not arise on their own but are created in and reflected by the ongoing situation, and understanding or interpreting utterances is based on and is particular to that context. The patient could be changing clothes, could be having her temperature taken, or could be in the bathroom. The next thing to consider is that whether or not people are engaged in purposeful activity that may have serious consequences, such as Ð ° medical exam, they also monitor relationships, attitudes, and feelings. When doctors examine patients, it is not out of the ordinary to engage in small talk which seems to put everyone at ease. Nor is it unusual, when patients are unavailable for conversation, for doctors to engage in brief conversations with other person(s) in the room. Once, while my teenager was having her temperature taken, Ð ° doctor turned and began chatting with me about the extreme heat we were experiencing that summer. In general, all the participants engaged in interaction are available for conversation (Goffman 1967). In some ways, professionals, such as doctors and lawyers, experience Ð ° sense of being hosts within their spaces and thus attempt to acknowledge all the participants within the space, either by conversation or nonverbally.

naturalism :: essays research papers

Naturalism in THE HURRICANE   Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Naturalism is the theory that one's surroundings and background determines their fate. THE HURRICNE has many naturalistic elements. Rubin Carter's background and surroundings are what determined his fate.   Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Trouble started very young for Rubin Carter. When he was just a boy he was sent to a juvenile home. Rubid didn nothing wrong, but because he was black it made it easier for him to get accused. As Carter got older, he grew stonger and wiser. He became a boxer. Soon, hte name stayed with him, Rubin the Hurricane Carter. He was an excellent boxer and had many things going for him. In a bar one night two men were shot and killed. But because Carter was black it was very easy for him to be accused. Rubin lost his case and went to prison.   Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  The Hurricane has many naturalistic elements. The fate of Rubin Carter was determined by his background and surroundings. Because Carter was black, it made it easier for him to be accused of crimes wheterher he committed them or not. Therefore, based upon Carter's surroundings and background, his fate of being accused of a crime he did not committ and going to prison for it showes that THE HURRICANE has naturalistic elements. Naturalism is the theory that one's fate is determined by their surroundings. Antying that happnes to someone is due to everything around them. Such things as thier family, where they live, where they work, and so on. THE JUNGLE is an excellent example of a naturalistic piece of literature. Many of the characters fateswere determined by their surroundings.   Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  THE JUNGLE is a very good example of a naturalistic piece of literature. The characters in the novel all have a fate which is determined by their surroundgins. One example is Jurgis. His fate of becoming an addict to alcohol was caused by everything surrounding him. Things that happened to his family and at his work caused him to start drinking. Many things went wrong at work. It was a very bad environment for him to work in. His injury kept him away from work which motivated him to drink. The death of his wife, Ona, and his child, Little Antanas also motivated Jurgis to start drinking.   Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Another example is Little Antanas. His fate, which was death, was caused due to the poor living conditions that surrounded him. Everything that surrounded him was filthey.

American culture Essay

The arts, more than other features of culture, provide avenues for the expression of imagination and personal vision. They offer a range of emotional and intellectual pleasures to consumers of art and are an important way in which a culture represents itself. There has long been a Western tradition distinguishing those arts that appeal to the multitude, such as popular music, from those—such as classical orchestral music—normally available to the elite of learning and taste. Popular art forms are usually seen as more representative American products. In the United States in the recent past, there has been a blending of popular and elite art forms, as all the arts experienced a period of remarkable cross-fertilization. Because popular art forms are so widely distributed, arts of all kinds have prospered. The arts in the United States express the many faces and the enormous creative range of the American people. Especially since World War II, American innovations and the immense energy displayed in literature, dance, and music have made American cultural works world famous. Arts in the United States have become internationally prominent in ways that are unparalleled in history. American art forms during the second half of the 20th century often defined the styles and qualities that the rest of the world emulated. At the end of the 20th century, American art was considered equal in quality and vitality to art produced in the rest of the world. Throughout the 20th century, American arts have grown to incorporate new visions and voices. Much of this new artistic energy came in the wake of America’s emergence as a superpower after World War II. But it was also due to the growth of New York City as an important center for publishing and the arts, and the immigration of artists and intellectuals fleeing fascism in Europe before and during the war. An outpouring of talent also followed the civil rights and protest movements of the 1960s, as cultural discrimination against blacks, women, and other groups diminished. American arts flourish in many places and receive support from private foundations, large corporations, local governments, federal agencies, museums, galleries, and individuals. What is considered worthy of support often depends on definitions of quality and of what constitutes art. This is a tricky subject when the popular arts are increasingly incorporated into the domain of the fine arts and new forms such as performance art and conceptual art appear. As a result, defining what is art affects what students are taught about past traditions (for example, Native American tent paintings, oral traditions, and slave narratives) and what is produced in the future. While some practitioners, such as studio artists, are more vulnerable to these definitions because they depend on financial support to exercise their talents, others, such as poets and photographers, are less immediately constrained. Artists operate in a world where those who theorize and critique their work have taken on an increasingly important role. Audiences are influenced by a variety of intermediaries—critics, the schools, foundations that offer grants, the National Endowment for the Arts, gallery owners, publishers, and theater producers. In some areas, such as the performing arts, popular audiences may ultimately define success. In other arts, such as painting and sculpture, success is far more dependent on critics and a few, often wealthy, art collectors. Writers depend on publishers and on the public for their success. Unlike their predecessors, who relied on formal criteria and appealed to aesthetic judgments, critics at the end of the 20th century leaned more toward popular tastes, taking into account groups previously ignored and valuing the merger of popular and elite forms. These critics often relied less on aesthetic judgments than on social measures and were eager to place artistic productions in the context of the time and social conditions in which they were created. Whereas earlier critics attempted to create an American tradition of high art, later critics used art as a means to give power and approval to nonelite groups who were previously not considered worthy of including in the nation’s artistic heritage. Not so long ago, culture and the arts were assumed to be an unalterable inheritance—the accumulated wisdom and highest forms of achievement that were established in the past. In the 20th century generally, and certainly since World War II, artists have been boldly destroying older traditions in sculpture, painting, dance, music, and literature. The arts have changed rapidly, with one movement replacing another in quick succession. a) Visual arts. The visual arts have traditionally included forms of expression that appeal to the eyes through painted surfaces, and to the sense of space through carved or molded materials. In the 19th century, photographs were added to the paintings, drawings, and sculpture that make up the visual arts. The visual arts were further augmented in the 20th century by the addition of other materials, such as found objects. These changes were accompanied by a profound alteration in tastes, as earlier emphasis on realistic representation of people, objects, and landscapes made way for a greater range of imaginative forms. During the late 19th and early 20th centuries, American art was considered inferior to European art. Despite noted American painters such as Thomas Eakins, Winslow Homer, Mary Cassatt, and John Marin, American visual arts barely had an international presence. American art began to flourish during the Great Depression of the 1930s as New Deal government programs provided support to artists along with other sectors of the population. Artists connected with each other and developed a sense of common purpose through programs of the Public Works Administration, such as the Federal Art Project, as well as programs sponsored by the Treasury Department. Most of the art of the period, including painting, photography, and mural work, focused on the plight of the American people during the depression, and most artists painted real people in difficult circumstances. Artists such as Thomas Hart Benton and Ben Shahn expressed the suffering of ordinary people through their representations of struggling farmers and workers. While artists such as Benton and Grant Wood focused on rural life, many painters of the 1930s and 1940s depicted the multicultural life of the American city. Jacob Lawrence, for example, re-created the history and lives of African Americans. Other artists, such as Andrew Wyeth and Edward Hopper, tried to use human figures to describe emotional states such as loneliness and despair. Abstract Expressionism. Shortly after World War II, American art began to garner worldwide attention and admiration. This change was due to the innovative fervor of abstract expressionism in the 1950s and to subsequent modern art movements and artists. The abstract expressionists of the mid-20th century broke from the realist and figurative tradition set in the 1930s. They emphasized their connection to international artistic visions rather than the particularities of people and place, and most abstract expressionists did not paint human figures (although artist Willem de Kooning did portrayals of women). Color, shape, and movement dominated the canvases of abstract expressionists. Some artists broke with the Western art tradition by adopting innovative painting styles—during the 1950s Jackson Pollock â€Å"painted† by dripping paint on canvases without the use of brushes, while the paintings of Mark Rothko often consisted of large patches of color that seem to vibrate. Abstract expressionists felt alienated from their surrounding culture and used art to challenge society’s conventions. The work of each artist was quite individual and distinctive, but all the artists identified with the radicalism of artistic creativity. The artists were eager to challenge conventions and limits on expression in order to redefine the nature of art. Their radicalism came from liberating themselves from the confining artistic traditions of the past. The most notable activity took place in New York City, which became one of the world’s most important art centers during the second half of the 20th century. The radical fervor and inventiveness of the abstract expressionists, their frequent association with each other in New York City’s Greenwich Village, and the support of a group of gallery owners and dealers turned them into an artistic movement. Also known as the New York School, the participants included Barnett Newman, Robert Motherwell, Franz Kline, and Arshile Gorky, in addition to Rothko and Pollock. The members of the New York School came from diverse backgrounds such as the American Midwest and Northwest, Armenia, and Russia, bringing an international flavor to the group and its artistic visions. They hoped to appeal to art audiences everywhere, regardless of culture, and they felt connected to the radical innovations introduced earlier in the 20th century by European artists such as Pablo Picasso and Marcel Duchamp. Some of the artists—Hans Hofmann, Gorky, Rothko, and de Kooning—were not born in the United States, but all the artists saw themselves as part of an international creative movement and an aesthetic rebellion. As artists felt released from the boundaries and conventions of the past and free to emphasize expressiveness and innovation, the abstract expressionists gave way to other innovative styles in American art. Beginning in the 1930s Joseph Cornell created hundreds of boxed assemblages, usually from found objects, with each based on a single theme to create a mood of contemplation and sometimes of reverence. Cornell’s boxes exemplify the modern fascination with individual vision, art that breaks down boundaries between forms such as painting and sculpture, and the use of everyday objects toward a new end. Other artists, such as Robert Rauschenberg, combined disparate objects to create large, collage-like sculptures known as combines in the 1950s. Jasper Johns, a painter, sculptor, and printmaker, recreated countless familiar objects, most memorably the American flag. The most prominent American artistic style to follow abstract expressionism was the pop art movement that began in the 1950s. Pop art attempted to connect traditional art and popular culture by using images from mass culture. To shake viewers out of their preconceived notions about art, sculptor Claes Oldenburg used everyday objects such as pillows and beds to create witty, soft sculptures. Roy Lichtenstein took this a step further by elevating the techniques of commercial art, notably cartooning, into fine art worthy of galleries and museums. Lichtenstein’s large, blown-up cartoons fill the surface of his canvases with grainy black dots and question the existence of a distinct realm of high art. These artists tried to make their audiences see ordinary objects in a refreshing new way, thereby breaking down the conventions that formerly defined what was worthy of artistic representation. Probably the best-known pop artist, and a leader in the movement, was Andy Warhol, whose images of a Campbell’s soup can and of the actress Marilyn Monroe explicitly eroded the boundaries between the art world and mass culture. Warhol also cultivated his status as a celebrity. He worked in film as a director and producer to break down the boundaries between traditional and popular art. Unlike the abstract expressionists, whose conceptual works were often difficult to understand, Andy Warhol’s pictures, and his own face, were instantly recognizable. Conceptual art, as it came to be known in the 1960s, like its predecessors, sought to break free of traditional artistic associations. In conceptual art, as practiced by Sol LeWitt and Joseph Kosuth, concept takes precedent over actual object, by stimulating thought rather than following an art tradition based on conventional standards of beauty and artisanship. Modern artists changed the meaning of traditional visual arts and brought a new imaginative dimension to ordinary experience. Art was no longer viewed as separate and distinct, housed in museums as part of a historical inheritance, but as a continuous creative process. This emphasis on constant change, as well as on the ordinary and mundane, reflected a distinctly American democratizing perspective. Viewing art in this way removed the emphasis from technique and polished performance, and many modern artworks and experiences became more about expressing ideas than about perfecting finished products. Photography. Photography is probably the most democratic modern art form because it can be, and is, practiced by most Americans. Since 1888, when George Eastman developed the Kodak camera that allowed anyone to take pictures, photography has struggled to be recognized as a fine art form. In the early part of the 20th century, photographer, editor, and artistic impresario Alfred Stieglitz established 291, a gallery in New York City, with fellow photographer Edward Steichen, to showcase the works of photographers and painters. They also published a magazine called Camera Work to increase awareness about photographic art. In the United States, photographic art had to compete with the widely available commercial photography in news and fashion magazines. By the 1950s the tradition of photojournalism, which presented news stories primarily with photographs, had produced many outstanding works. In 1955 Steichen, who was director of photography at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, called attention to this work in an exhibition called The Family of Man. Throughout the 20th century, most professional photographers earned their living as portraitists or photojournalists, not as artists. One of the most important exceptions was Ansel Adams, who took majestic photographs of the Western American landscape. Adams used his art to stimulate social awareness and to support the conservation cause of the Sierra Club. He helped found the photography department at the Museum of Modern Art in 1940, and six years later helped establish the photography department at the California School of Fine Arts in San Francisco (now the San Francisco Art Institute). He also held annual photography workshops at Yosemite National Park from 1955 to 1981 and wrote a series of influential books on photographic technique. Adams’s elegant landscape photography was only one small stream in a growing current of interest in photography as an art form. Early in the 20th century, teacher-turned-photographer Lewis Hine established a documentary tradition in photography by capturing actual people, places, and events. Hine photographed urban conditions and workers, including child laborers. Along with their artistic value, the photographs often implicitly called for social reform. In the 1930s and 1940s, photographers joined with other depression-era artists supported by the federal government to create a hotographic record of rural America. Walker Evans, Dorothea Lange, and Arthur Rothstein, among others, produced memorable and widely reproduced portraits of rural poverty and American distress during the Great Depression and during the dust storms of the period. In 1959, after touring the United States for two years, Swiss-born photographer Robert Frank published The Americans, one of the landmarks of documentary photography. His photographs of everyday life in America introduced viewers to a depressing, and often depressed, America that existed in the midst of prosperity and world power. Photographers continued to search for new photographic viewpoints. This search was perhaps most disturbingly embodied in the work of Diane Arbus. Her photos of mental patients and her surreal depictions of Americans altered the viewer’s relationship to the photograph. Arbus emphasized artistic alienation and forced viewers to stare at images that often made them uncomfortable, thus changing the meaning of the ordinary reality that photographs are meant to capture. American photography continues to flourish. The many variants of art photography and socially conscious documentary photography are widely available in galleries, books, and magazines. A host of other visual arts thrive, although they are far less connected to traditional fine arts than photography. Decorative arts include, but are not limited to, art glass, furniture, jewelry, pottery, metalwork, and quilts. Often exhibited in craft galleries and studios, these decorative arts rely on ideals of beauty in shape and color as well as an appreciation of well-executed crafts. Some of these forms are also developed commercially. The decorative arts provide a wide range of opportunity for creative expression and have become a means for Americans to actively participate in art and to purchase art for their homes that is more affordable than works produced by many contemporary fine artists. 4. Performing arts As in other cultural spheres, the performing arts in the United States in the 20th century increasingly blended traditional and popular art forms. The classical performing arts—music, opera, dance, and theater—were not a widespread feature of American culture in the first half of the 20th century. These arts were generally imported from or strongly influenced by Europe and were mainly appreciated by the wealthy and well educated. Traditional art usually referred to classical forms in ballet and opera, orchestral or chamber music, and serious drama. The distinctions between traditional music and popular music were firmly drawn in most areas. During the 20th century, the American performing arts began to incorporate wider groups of people. The African American community produced great musicians who became widely known around the country. Jazz and blues singers such as Bessie Smith, Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, and Billie Holiday spread their sounds to black and white audiences. In the 1930s and 1940s, the swing music of Benny Goodman, Tommy Dorsey, and Glenn Miller adapted jazz to make a unique American music that was popular around the country. The American performing arts also blended Latin American influences beginning in the 20th century. Between 1900 and 1940, Latin American dances, such as the tango from Argentina and the rumba from Cuba, were introduced into the United States. In the 1940s a fusion of Latin and jazz elements was stimulated first by the Afro-Cuban mambo and later on by the Brazilian bossa nova. Throughout the 20th century, dynamic classical institutions in the United States attracted international talent. Noted Russian-born choreographer George Balanchine established the short-lived American Ballet Company in the 1930s; later he founded the company that in the 1940s would become the New York City Ballet. The American Ballet Theatre, also established during the 1940s, brought in non-American dancers as well. By the 1970s this company had attracted Soviet defector Mikhail Baryshnikov, an internationally acclaimed dancer who served as the company’s artistic director during the 1980s. In classical music, influential Russian composer Igor Stravinsky, who composed symphonies using innovative musical styles, moved to the United States in 1939. German-born pianist, composer, and conductor Andre Previn, who started out as a jazz pianist in the 1940s, went on to conduct a number of distinguished American symphony orchestras. Another Soviet, cellist Mstislav Rostropovich, became conductor of the National Symphony Orchestra in Washington, D. C. , in 1977. Some of the most innovative artists in the first half of the 20th century successfully incorporated new forms into classical traditions. Composers George Gershwin and Aaron Copland, and dancer Isadora Duncan were notable examples. Gershwin combined jazz and spiritual music with classical in popular works such as Rhapsody in Blue (1924) and the opera Porgy and Bess (1935). Copland developed a unique style that was influenced by jazz and American folk music. Early in the century, Duncan redefined dance along more expressive and free-form lines. Some artists in music and dance, such as composer John Cage and dancer and choreographer Merce Cunningham, were even more experimental. During the 1930s Cage worked with electronically produced sounds and sounds made with everyday objects such as pots and pans. He even invented a new kind of piano. During the late 1930s, avant-garde choreographer Cunningham began to collaborate with Cage on a number of projects. Perhaps the greatest, and certainly the most popular, American innovation was the Broadway musical, which also became a movie staple. Beginning in the 1920s, the Broadway musical combined music, dance, and dramatic performance in ways that surpassed the older vaudeville shows and musical revues but without being as complex as European grand opera. By the 1960s, this American musical tradition was well established and had produced extraordinary works by important musicians and lyricists such as George and Ira Gershwin, Irving Berlin, Cole Porter, Richard Rodgers, Lorenz Hart, Jerome Kern, and Oscar Hammerstein II. These productions required an immense effort to coordinate music, drama, and dance. Because of this, the musical became the incubator of an American modern dance tradition that produced some of America’s greatest choreographers, among them Jerome Robbins, Gene Kelly, and Bob Fosse. In the 1940s and 1950s the American musical tradition was so dynamic that it attracted outstanding classically trained musicians such as Leonard Bernstein. Bernstein composed the music for West Side Story, an updated version of Romeo and Juliet set in New York that became an instant classic in 1957. The following year, Bernstein became the first American-born conductor to lead a major American orchestra, the New York Philharmonic. He was an international sensation who traveled the world as an ambassador of the American style of conducting. He brought the art of classical music to the public, especially through his â€Å"Young People’s Concerts,† television shows that were seen around the world. Bernstein used the many facets of the musical tradition as a force for change in the music world and as a way of bringing attention to American innovation. In many ways, Bernstein embodied a transformation of American music that began in the 1960s. The changes that took place during the 1960s and 1970s resulted from a significant increase in funding for the arts and their increased availability to larger audiences. New York City, the American center for art performances, experienced an artistic explosion in the 1960s and 1970s. Experimental off-Broadway theaters opened, new ballet companies were established that often emphasized modern forms or blended modern with classical (Martha Graham was an especially important influence), and an experimental music scene developed that included composers such as Philip Glass and performance groups such as the Guarneri String Quartet. Dramatic innovation also continued to expand with the works of playwrights such as Edward Albee, Tony Kushner, and David Mamet. As the variety of performances expanded, so did the serious crossover between traditional and popular music forms. Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, an expanded repertoire of traditional arts was being conveyed to new audiences. Popular music and jazz could be heard in formal settings such as Carnegie Hall, which had once been restricted to classical music, while the Brooklyn Academy of Music became a venue for experimental music, exotic and ethnic dance presentations, and traditional productions of grand opera. Innovative producer Joseph Papp had been staging Shakespeare in Central Park since the 1950s. Boston conductor Arthur Fiedler was playing a mixed repertoire of classical and popular favorites to large audiences, often outdoors, with the Boston Pops Orchestra. By the mid-1970s the United States had several world-class symphony orchestras, including those in Chicago; New York; Cleveland, Ohio; and Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Even grand opera was affected. Once a specialized taste that often required extensive knowledge, opera in the United States increased in popularity as the roster of respected institutions grew to include companies in Seattle, Washington; Houston, Texas; and Santa Fe, New Mexico. American composers such as John Adams and Philip Glass began composing modern operas in a new minimalist style during the 1970s and 1980s. The crossover in tastes also influenced the Broadway musical, probably America’s most durable music form. Starting in the 1960s, rock music became an ingredient in musical productions such as Hair (1967). By the 1990s, it had become an even stronger presence in musicals such as Bring in Da Noise, Bring in Da Funk (1996), which used African American music and dance traditions, and Rent (1996) a modern, rock version of the classic opera La Boheme. This updating of the musical opened the theater to new ethnic audiences who had not previously attended Broadway shows, as well as to young audiences who had been raised on rock music. Performances of all kinds have become more available across the country. This is due to both the sheer increase in the number of performance groups as well as to advances in transportation. In the last quarter of the 20th century, the number of major American symphonies doubled, the number of resident theaters increased fourfold, and the number of dance companies increased tenfold. At the same time, planes made it easier for artists to travel. Artists and companies regularly tour, and they expand the audiences for individual artists such as performance artist Laurie Anderson and opera singer Jessye Norman, for musical groups such as the Juilliard Quartet, and for dance troupes such as the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater. Full-scale theater productions and musicals first presented on Broadway now reach cities across the country. The United States, once a provincial outpost with a limited European tradition in performance, has become a flourishing center for the performing arts. . Arts and letters The arts, more than other features of culture, provide avenues for the expression of imagination and personal vision. They offer a range of emotional and intellectual pleasures to consumers of art and are an important way in which a culture represents itself. There has long been a Western tradition distinguishing those arts that appeal to the multitude, such as popul ar music, from those—such as classical orchestral music—normally available to the elite of learning and taste. Popular art forms are usually seen as more representative American products. In the United States in the recent past, there has been a blending of popular and elite art forms, as all the arts experienced a period of remarkable cross-fertilization. Because popular art forms are so widely distributed, arts of all kinds have prospered. The arts in the United States express the many faces and the enormous creative range of the American people. Especially since World War II, American innovations and the immense energy displayed in literature, dance, and music have made American cultural works world famous. Arts in the United States have become internationally prominent in ways that are unparalleled in history. American art forms during the second half of the 20th century often defined the styles and qualities that the rest of the world emulated. At the end of the 20th century, American art was considered equal in quality and vitality to art produced in the rest of the world. Throughout the 20th century, American arts have grown to incorporate new visions and voices. Much of this new artistic energy came in the wake of America’s emergence as a superpower after World War II. But it was also due to the growth of New York City as an important center for publishing and the arts, and the immigration of artists and intellectuals fleeing fascism in Europe before and during the war. An outpouring of talent also followed the civil rights and protest movements of the 1960s, as cultural discrimination against blacks, women, and other groups diminished. American arts flourish in many places and receive support from private foundations, large corporations, local governments, federal agencies, museums, galleries, and individuals. What is considered worthy of support often depends on definitions of quality and of what constitutes art. This is a tricky subject when the popular arts are increasingly incorporated into the domain of the fine arts and new forms such as performance art and conceptual art appear. As a result, defining what is art affects what students are taught about past traditions (for example, Native American tent paintings, oral traditions, and slave narratives) and what is produced in the future. While some practitioners, such as studio artists, are more vulnerable to these definitions because they depend on financial support to exercise their talents, others, such as poets and photographers, are less immediately constrained. Artists operate in a world where those who theorize and critique their work have taken on an increasingly important role. Audiences are influenced by a variety of intermediaries—critics, the schools, foundations that offer grants, the National Endowment for the Arts, gallery owners, publishers, and theater producers. In some areas, such as the performing arts, popular audiences may ultimately define success. In other arts, such as painting and sculpture, success is far more dependent on critics and a few, often wealthy, art collectors. Writers depend on publishers and on the public for their success. Unlike their predecessors, who relied on formal criteria and appealed to aesthetic judgments, critics at the end of the 20th century leaned more toward popular tastes, taking into account groups previously ignored and valuing the merger of popular and elite forms. These critics ften relied less on aesthetic judgments than on social measures and were eager to place artistic productions in the context of the time and social conditions in which they were created. Whereas earlier critics attempted to create an American tradition of high art, later critics used art as a means to give power and approval to nonelite groups who were previously not considered worthy of including in the nation’s artisti c heritage. Not so long ago, culture and the arts were assumed to be an unalterable inheritance—the accumulated wisdom and highest forms of achievement that were established in the past. In the 20th century generally, and certainly since World War II, artists have been boldly destroying older traditions in sculpture, painting, dance, music, and literature. The arts have changed rapidly, with one movement replacing another in quick succession. a) Visual arts. The visual arts have traditionally included forms of expression that appeal to the eyes through painted surfaces, and to the sense of space through carved or molded materials. In the 19th century, photographs were added to the paintings, drawings, and sculpture that make up the visual arts. The visual arts were further augmented in the 20th century by the addition of other materials, such as found objects. These changes were accompanied by a profound alteration in tastes, as earlier emphasis on realistic representation of people, objects, and landscapes made way for a greater range of imaginative forms. During the late 19th and early 20th centuries, American art was considered inferior to European art. Despite noted American painters such as Thomas Eakins, Winslow Homer, Mary Cassatt, and John Marin, American visual arts barely had an international presence. American art began to flourish during the Great Depression of the 1930s as New Deal government programs provided support to artists along with other sectors of the population. Artists connected with each other and developed a sense of common purpose through programs of the Public Works Administration, such as the Federal Art Project, as well as programs sponsored by the Treasury Department. Most of the art of the period, including painting, photography, and mural work, focused on the plight of the American people during the depression, and most artists painted real people in difficult circumstances. Artists such as Thomas Hart Benton and Ben Shahn expressed the suffering of ordinary people through their representations of struggling farmers and workers. While artists such as Benton and Grant Wood focused on rural life, many painters of the 1930s and 1940s depicted the multicultural life of the American city. Jacob Lawrence, for example, re-created the history and lives of African Americans. Other artists, such as Andrew Wyeth and Edward Hopper, tried to use human figures to describe emotional states such as loneliness and despair. Abstract Expressionism. Shortly after World War II, American art began to garner worldwide attention and admiration. This change was due to the innovative fervor of abstract expressionism in the 1950s and to subsequent modern art movements and artists. The abstract expressionists of the mid-20th century broke from the realist and figurative tradition set in the 1930s. They emphasized their connection to international artistic visions rather than the particularities of people and place, and most abstract expressionists did not paint human figures (although artist Willem de Kooning did portrayals of women). Color, shape, and movement dominated the canvases of abstract expressionists. Some artists broke with the Western art tradition by adopting innovative painting styles—during the 1950s Jackson Pollock â€Å"painted† by dripping paint on canvases without the use of brushes, while the paintings of Mark Rothko often consisted of large patches of color that seem to vibrate. Abstract expressionists felt alienated from their surrounding culture and used art to challenge society’s conventions. The work of each artist was quite individual and distinctive, but all the artists identified with the radicalism of artistic creativity. The artists were eager to challenge conventions and limits on expression in order to redefine the nature of art. Their radicalism came from liberating themselves from the confining artistic traditions of the past. The most notable activity took place in New York City, which became one of the world’s most important art centers during the second half of the 20th century. The radical fervor and inventiveness of the abstract expressionists, their frequent association with each other in New York City’s Greenwich Village, and the support of a group of gallery owners and dealers turned them into an artistic movement. Also known as the New York School, the participants included Barnett Newman, Robert Motherwell, Franz Kline, and Arshile Gorky, in addition to Rothko and Pollock. The members of the New York School came from diverse backgrounds such as the American Midwest and Northwest, Armenia, and Russia, bringing an international flavor to the group and its artistic visions. They hoped to appeal to art audiences everywhere, regardless of culture, and they felt connected to the radical innovations introduced earlier in the 20th century by European artists such as Pablo Picasso and Marcel Duchamp. Some of the artists—Hans Hofmann, Gorky, Rothko, and de Kooning—were not born in the United States, but all the artists saw themselves as part of an international creative movement and an aesthetic rebellion. As artists felt released from the boundaries and conventions of the past and free to emphasize expressiveness and innovation, the abstract expressionists gave way to other innovative styles in American art. Beginning in the 1930s Joseph Cornell created hundreds of boxed assemblages, usually from found objects, with each based on a single theme to create a mood of contemplation and sometimes of reverence. Cornell’s boxes exemplify the modern fascination with individual vision, art that breaks down boundaries between forms such as painting and sculpture, and the use of everyday objects toward a new end. Other artists, such as Robert Rauschenberg, combined disparate objects to create large, collage-like sculptures known as combines in the 1950s. Jasper Johns, a painter, sculptor, and printmaker, recreated countless familiar objects, most memorably the American flag. The most prominent American artistic style to follow abstract expressionism was the pop art movement that began in the 1950s. Pop art attempted to connect traditional art and popular culture by using images from mass culture. To shake viewers out of their preconceived notions about art, sculptor Claes Oldenburg used everyday objects such as pillows and beds to create witty, soft sculptures. Roy Lichtenstein took this a step further by elevating the techniques of commercial art, notably cartooning, into fine art worthy of galleries and museums. Lichtenstein’s large, blown-up cartoons fill the surface of his canvases with grainy black dots and question the existence of a distinct realm of high art. These artists tried to make their audiences see ordinary objects in a refreshing new way, thereby breaking down the conventions that formerly defined what was worthy of artistic representation. Probably the best-known pop artist, and a leader in the movement, was Andy Warhol, whose images of a Campbell’s soup can and of the actress Marilyn Monroe explicitly eroded the boundaries between the art world and mass culture. Warhol also cultivated his status as a celebrity. He worked in film as a director and producer to break down the boundaries between traditional and opular art. Unlike the abstract expressionists, whose conceptual works were often difficult to understand, Andy Warhol’s pictures, and his own face, were instantly recognizable. Conceptual art, as it came to be known in the 1960s, like its predecessors, sought to break free of traditional artistic associations. In conceptual art, as practiced by Sol LeWitt and Joseph Kosuth, concept takes precedent over actual object, by stimulating thought rather than following an art tradition based on conventional standards of beauty and artisanship. Modern artists changed the meaning of traditional visual arts and brought a new imaginative dimension to ordinary experience. Art was no longer viewed as separate and distinct, housed in museums as part of a historical inheritance, but as a continuous creative process. This emphasis on constant change, as well as on the ordinary and mundane, reflected a distinctly American democratizing perspective. Viewing art in this way removed the emphasis from technique and polished performance, and many modern artworks and experiences became more about expressing ideas than about perfecting finished products. Photography. Photography is probably the most democratic modern art form because it can be, and is, practiced by most Americans. Since 1888, when George Eastman developed the Kodak camera that allowed anyone to take pictures, photography has struggled to be recognized as a fine art form. In the early part of the 20th century, photographer, editor, and artistic impresario Alfred Stieglitz established 291, a gallery in New York City, with fellow photographer Edward Steichen, to showcase the works of photographers and painters. They also published a magazine called Camera Work to increase awareness about photographic art. In the United States, photographic art had to compete with the widely available commercial photography in news and fashion magazines. By the 1950s the tradition of photojournalism, which presented news stories primarily with photographs, had produced many outstanding works. In 1955 Steichen, who was director of photography at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, called attention to this work in an exhibition called The Family of Man. Throughout the 20th century, most professional photographers earned their living as portraitists or photojournalists, not as artists. One of the most important exceptions was Ansel Adams, who took majestic photographs of the Western American landscape. Adams used his art to stimulate social awareness and to support the conservation cause of the Sierra Club. He helped found the photography department at the Museum of Modern Art in 1940, and six years later helped establish the photography department at the California School of Fine Arts in San Francisco (now the San Francisco Art Institute). He also held annual photography workshops at Yosemite National Park from 1955 to 1981 and wrote a series of influential books on photographic technique. Adams’s elegant landscape photography was only one small stream in a growing current of interest in photography as an art form. Early in the 20th century, teacher-turned-photographer Lewis Hine established a documentary tradition in photography by capturing actual people, places, and events. Hine photographed urban conditions and workers, including child laborers. Along with their artistic value, the photographs often implicitly called for social reform. In the 1930s and 1940s, photographers joined with other depression-era artists supported by the federal government to create a photographic record of rural America. Walker Evans, Dorothea Lange, and Arthur Rothstein, among others, produced memorable and widely reproduced portraits of rural poverty and American distress during the Great Depression and during the dust storms of the period. In 1959, after touring the United States for two years, Swiss-born photographer Robert Frank published The Americans, one of the landmarks of documentary photography. His photographs of everyday life in America introduced viewers to a depressing, and often depressed, America that existed in the midst of prosperity and world power. Photographers continued to search for new photographic viewpoints. This search was perhaps most disturbingly embodied in the work of Diane Arbus. Her photos of mental patients and her surreal depictions of Americans altered the viewer’s relationship to the photograph. Arbus emphasized artistic alienation and forced viewers to stare at images that often made them uncomfortable, thus changing the meaning of the ordinary reality that photographs are meant to capture. American photography continues to flourish. The many variants of art photography and socially conscious documentary photography are widely available in galleries, books, and magazines. A host of other visual arts thrive, although they are far less connected to traditional fine arts than photography. Decorative arts include, but are not limited to, art glass, furniture, jewelry, pottery, metalwork, and quilts. Often exhibited in craft galleries and studios, these decorative arts rely on ideals of beauty in shape and color as well as an appreciation of well-executed crafts. Some of these forms are also developed commercially. The decorative arts provide a wide range of opportunity for creative expression and have become a means for Americans to actively participate in art and to purchase art for their homes that is more affordable than works produced by many contemporary fine artists. . Performing arts As in other cultural spheres, the performing arts in the United States in the 20th century increasingly blended traditional and popular art forms. The classical performing arts—music, opera, dance, and theater—were not a widespread feature of American culture in the first half of the 20th century. These arts were generally imported from or strongly influenced by Europe and were mainly appreciated by the wealthy and well educated. Traditional art usually referred to classical forms in ballet and opera, orchestral or chamber music, and serious drama. The distinctions between traditional music and popular music were firmly drawn in most areas. During the 20th century, the American performing arts began to incorporate wider groups of people. The African American community produced great musicians who became widely known around the country. Jazz and blues singers such as Bessie Smith, Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, and Billie Holiday spread their sounds to black and white audiences. In the 1930s and 1940s, the swing music of Benny Goodman, Tommy Dorsey, and Glenn Miller adapted jazz to make a unique American music that was popular around the country. The American performing arts also blended Latin American influences beginning in the 20th century. Between 1900 and 1940, Latin American dances, such as the tango from Argentina and the rumba from Cuba, were introduced into the United States. In the 1940s a fusion of Latin and jazz elements was stimulated first by the Afro-Cuban mambo and later on by the Brazilian bossa nova. Throughout the 20th century, dynamic classical institutions in the United States attracted international talent. Noted Russian-born choreographer George Balanchine established the short-lived American Ballet Company in the 1930s; later he founded the company that in the 1940s would become the New York City Ballet. The American Ballet Theatre, also established during the 1940s, brought in non-American dancers as well. By the 1970s this company had attracted Soviet defector Mikhail Baryshnikov, an internationally acclaimed dancer who served as the company’s artistic director during the 1980s. In classical music, influential Russian composer Igor Stravinsky, who composed symphonies using innovative musical styles, moved to the United States in 1939. German-born pianist, composer, and conductor Andre Previn, who started out as a jazz pianist in the 1940s, went on to conduct a number of distinguished American symphony orchestras. Another Soviet, cellist Mstislav Rostropovich, became conductor of the National Symphony Orchestra in Washington, D. C. , in 1977. Some of the most innovative artists in the first half of the 20th century successfully incorporated new forms into classical traditions. Composers George Gershwin and Aaron Copland, and dancer Isadora Duncan were notable examples. Gershwin combined jazz and spiritual music with classical in popular works such as Rhapsody in Blue (1924) and the opera Porgy and Bess (1935). Copland developed a unique style that was influenced by jazz and American folk music. Early in the century, Duncan redefined dance along more expressive and free-form lines. Some artists in music and dance, such as composer John Cage and dancer and choreographer Merce Cunningham, were even more experimental. During the 1930s Cage worked with electronically produced sounds and sounds made with everyday objects such as pots and pans. He even invented a new kind of piano. During the late 1930s, avant-garde choreographer Cunningham began to collaborate with Cage on a number of projects. Perhaps the greatest, and certainly the most popular, American innovation was the Broadway musical, which also became a movie staple. Beginning in the 1920s, the Broadway musical combined music, dance, and dramatic performance in ways that surpassed the older vaudeville shows and musical revues but without being as complex as European grand opera. By the 1960s, this American musical tradition was well established and had produced extraordinary works by important musicians and lyricists such as George and Ira Gershwin, Irving Berlin, Cole Porter, Richard Rodgers, Lorenz Hart, Jerome Kern, and Oscar Hammerstein II. These productions required an immense effort to coordinate music, drama, and dance. Because of this, the musical became the incubator of an American modern dance tradition that produced some of America’s greatest choreographers, among them Jerome Robbins, Gene Kelly, and Bob Fosse. In the 1940s and 1950s the American musical tradition was so dynamic that it attracted outstanding classically trained musicians such as Leonard Bernstein. Bernstein composed the music for West Side Story, an updated version of Romeo and Juliet set in New York that became an instant classic in 1957. The following year, Bernstein became the first American-born conductor to lead a major American orchestra, the New York Philharmonic. He was an international sensation who traveled the world as an ambassador of the American style of conducting. He brought the art of classical music to the public, especially through his â€Å"Young People’s Concerts,† television shows that were seen around the world. Bernstein used the many facets of the musical tradition as a force for change in the music world and as a way of bringing attention to American innovation. In many ways, Bernstein embodied a transformation of American music that began in the 1960s. The changes that took place during the 1960s and 1970s resulted from a significant increase in funding for the arts and their increased availability to larger audiences. New York City, the American center for art performances, experienced an artistic explosion in the 1960s and 1970s. Experimental off-Broadway theaters opened, new ballet companies were established that often emphasized modern forms or blended modern with classical (Martha Graham was an especially important influence), and an experimental music scene developed that included composers such as Philip Glass and performance groups such as the Guarneri String Quartet. Dramatic innovation also continued to expand with the works of playwrights such as Edward Albee, Tony Kushner, and David Mamet. As the variety of performances expanded, so did the serious crossover between traditional and popular music forms. Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, an expanded repertoire of traditional arts was being conveyed to new audiences. Popular music and jazz could be heard in formal settings such as Carnegie Hall, which had once been restricted to classical music, while the Brooklyn Academy of Music became a venue for experimental music, exotic and ethnic dance presentations, and traditional productions of grand opera. Innovative producer Joseph Papp had been staging Shakespeare in Central Park since the 1950s. Boston conductor Arthur Fiedler was playing a mixed repertoire of classical and popular favorites to large audiences, often outdoors, with the Boston Pops Orchestra. By the mid-1970s the United States had several world-class symphony orchestras, including those in Chicago; New York; Cleveland, Ohio; and Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Even grand opera was affected. Once a specialized taste that often required extensive knowledge, opera in the United States increased in popularity as the roster of respected institutions grew to include companies in Seattle, Washington; Houston, Texas; and Santa Fe, New Mexico. American composers such as John Adams and Philip Glass began composing modern operas in a new minimalist style during the 1970s and 1980s. The crossover in tastes also influenced the Broadway musical, probably America’s most durable music form. Starting in the 1960s, rock music became an ingredient in musical productions such as Hair (1967). By the 1990s, it had become an even stronger presence in musicals such as Bring in Da Noise, Bring in Da Funk (1996), which used African American music and dance traditions, and Rent (1996) a modern, rock version of the classic opera La Boheme. This updating of the musical opened the theater to new ethnic audiences who had not previously attended Broadway shows, as well as to young audiences who had been raised on rock music. Performances of all kinds have become more available across the country. This is due to both the sheer increase in the number of performance groups as well as to advances in transportation. In the last quarter of the 20th century, the number of major American symphonies doubled, the number of resident theaters increased fourfold, and the number of dance companies increased tenfold. At the same time, planes made it easier for artists to travel. Artists and companies regularly tour, and they expand the audiences for individual artists such as performance artist Laurie Anderson and opera singer Jessye Norman, for musical groups such as the Juilliard Quartet, and for dance troupes such as the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater. Full-scale theater productions and musicals first presented on Broadway now reach cities across the country. The United States, once a provincial outpost with a limited European tradition in performance, has become a flourishing center for the performing arts.