...Rodjanét Williams History 101 Professor Saul Panski April 22, 2013 To Justify War or Not to Justify War? That is the Question On May 11, 1846, James K. Polk delivered his address to Congress requesting a Declaration of War on the Republic of Mexico. President Polk justified his war by saying in his message that Mexico had attacked American troops and invaded the United States. He also brought up the issue that initially brought about all of the tensions between the U.S. and Mexico, which was the Mexican government had not been cooperative in negotiations over the Texas boundary. Polk, as well as most of the rest of Americans at this time, saw the declaration of war as a legitimate and natural expression of America’s Manifest Destiny, which will be later explained. The question remains, however, was Polk’s declaration of war on Mexico really necessary, let alone justified? Was peace what he really wanted, or was his true intention just to acquire more land and expand the U.S. westward as fast as he could? President Polk did appear to have taken several steps to try to avoid an armed conflict with Mexico. First, Polk tried to reopen diplomatic relations between the U.S. and Mexico by sending an envoy, Mr. John Slidell of Louisiana, invested with full powers to make adjustments to the current state of affairs between the two countries. He sent this envoy, seemingly, as evidence that he did not want war, but peace and harmonious engagements between the U.S. and Mexico from...
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...J.S.Mill (1806 –1873) John Stuart Mill was a British philosopher andcivil servant. An influential contributor to social theory, political theory, andpolitical economy, his conception of liberty justified the freedom of the individual in opposition to unlimited state control.[2] He was a proponent of utilitarianism, an ethical theory developed by Jeremy Bentham, although his conception of it was very different from Bentham's. Hoping to remedy the problems found in aninductive approach to science, such as confirmation bias, he clearly set forth the premises of falsification as the key component in the scientific method.[3] Mill was also a Member of Parliament and an important figure in liberal political philosophy. Alfred Marshall (1842 - 1924) Alfred Marshall was an Englishman and one of the most influential economists of his time. His book, Principles of Economics (1890), was the dominant economic textbook in England for many years. It brings the ideas of supply and demand, marginal utility and costs of production into a coherent whole. He is known as one of the founders of neoclassical economics. John Maynard Keynes (1883 – 1946) John Maynard Keynes, 1st Baron Keynes of Tilton was a British economist whose ideas, known as Keynesian economics, had a major impact on modern economic and political theory and on many governments' fiscal policies. Milton Friedman (1912 – 2006) Milton Friedman was an American economist and statistician at the University of Chicago, and recipient...
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...Helen Fonzy English 223: American Literature Ms. Reed Interpretive Writings on Quotes from Thomas Paine 9:00 /10.00 Time Makes Converse than Reason Thomas Paine, one of our Founding Fathers by virtue of having written "Common Sense," lost many friends and made many enemies with "The Age of Reason. “Paine called himself a Deist, by which he meant that he believed in one God, the Creator of the universe, and in no other, including Son and Holy Ghost. Paine believed that, in order to know God, a person needed to study creation. Creation was the only true word of God, the Bible and all other sacred texts being the work of men, and not at all the word of God. In fact, Paine thought that the Bible, being false, was an impediment to knowing God. The second part of "The Age of Reason" is a book-by-book dismantling of the Bible by its own internal logic. While his own logic is not always perfectly rigorous, he definitely makes an excellent case against the Bible being the word of God. Paine's point of view is that of many in the scientific eighteenth century. By our standards, he was still a little too anthropocentric, in that he thought that creation was meant as a teaching tool for Man's rational mind. He virtually instigated the American Revolution and the break from the shackles of religious slavery. Ben Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, Thomas Paine, and many others were Deists who believed the human mind needn't suffer from the dogma of the day nor unscientific, supernatural...
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...The Industrial revolution had the long term effect of greatly improving the living standards for common people in Britain. There is however a constant debate on whether or not the British living standards rose during the early part of the Industrial Revolution (1770-1850). The optimists generally believed that the industrialization brought higher wages, and a better standard of living. T.S. Ashton suggested that for the majority of the population, the gain in real wages was substantial, and outweighed the negative effects brought by industrialization. Pessimists argue that the quality of life for workers deteriorated greatly between 1780 and 1850, with very limited improvements for some skilled sectors before the 1870’s. This purpose of this paper is to analyze the debate from an economic and social perspective. We will examine both arguments and prove that although there was a rise in real wages, that rise was not as high as many optimists believe, and that the rise in real wages did not mean that the living standards of the average citizen were necessarily improved. This paper will substantiate that the benefits resulting from the rise in real wages, did not outweigh the costs that followed. We will examine how pollution, poor working conditions, and an overall lack of basic human rights and equality, plagued the British population and did not initially raise the living standards of the average person in Britain. The majority of debates between pessimists and optimists...
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...Matthew Galvin American Revolution Professor Kelley November 21, 2014 George Roberts Twelves Hewes and the American Revolution In the years leading up to the American Revolution, the city of Boston became a hot bed of colonist rebellion against the British Government. The citizens in Boston, of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, had become fed up with unjustified taxation levied against them by the British. The colonists of Boston also saw it to be problematic that the colonies were subject to British rule, but were not represented in Parliament. In the half-decade prior to the Revolutionary War, the city of Boston hosted two monumental events that rallied the colonists into the direction of independence; the Boston Massacre and the Boston Tea Party. A man named George Roberts Twelve Hewes had the honor of being able to witness and take direct involvement in both the Massacre and the Tea Party. George Roberts Twelve Hewes was born and raised in Massachusetts and saw the development of the Revolution from the perspective of an “everyday” colonist. He was born on August 25th, 1742. Hewes was a shoemaker by trade and was never able to amount an impressive net worth. If anything, it can be argued that Hewes was very much more poverty stricken than anything else. Money never seemed to influence Hewes’s actions; instead George Roberts Twelve Hewes was a man of principal and integrity. Prior to the Revolutionary War, Hewes participated in both the Boston Massacre and Boston Tea Party...
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...The action of trade is so heavily integrated into today’s modern society that it is hard to believe a time where trade did not exist. In can be found in the preliminary stages of North American culture where the natives would trade with one another before the creation of currency, to a more modern level where society trades their labour to create a product or service in exchange for a wage. The discussion of private property is one covered by many different scholars throughout the years; this essay will focus primarily on the workings of John Locke and Karl Marx. Both being raised in a different time, thus different upbringings have resulted in a difference in their train of thought and philosophical approaches on life. Karl Marx has been forced...
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...this choice? What factors contributed to it? TM: The choice of activism is always a combination of processes. There is no particular moment when you can say, "I've been a student or a theoretician so far, let me become an activist now," or vice versa. I got to Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar from Jamaica, which is a kind of pinnacle of middle-class and national achievement. But by that time the changes in my own outlook pointed me toward a radical path, combining activism as a student at the University of the West Indies with a concern for theoretical work at the same time. The Cuban revolution occurred in 1959. In the 1960s Jamaica - along with many other Caribbean colonies - became independent; and in the Studies in Political Economy 31, Spring 1990 9 Studies in Political Ecomomy early 1960s the thing that struck many of the high-school students coming out of those institutions, including myself, was the contrast between what independence promised and the real conditions we saw around us. You could see, in my case, the...
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...worldview’ is a theory that uses a study of cultural development to determine the thoughts of the eighteenth-century North Americans. It was initiated by James Deetz in his first edition of In Small Things Forgotten (1977). The term encapsulates Deetz’s structuralism-based idea that the evident alteration within English material culture and landscape design was more than a change in style, but a universal change in human consciousness—from medieval to modern—and this extended across the Atlantic despite the colony’s increasing political distance from the homeland (Deetz, 1996: 62-63; 2003: 221). Deetz believed that shared artefact form reflected shared thought (2003: 220). The theory has enabled historical archaeologists to recognise a distinctive shift in many areas of material culture which subsequently encouraged a succession of scholars to further this idea by posing key questions: why did the worldview develop, where else was a Georgian worldview visible, how did it present itself in areas outside New England? In the quest for answers to these questions, archaeologists have developed the concept which accordingly shaped interpretations of the material discoveries of eighteenth-century North America. Deetz’s model for the cultural development of New England illustrates that following an interval (1660-1760) of limited English influence on North American material culture, the contemporary homeland culture—which had recently been influenced by the rationality of the Enlightenment—became...
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...They were the most lethal terrorist attacks in history, taking the lives of 3000 American and international citizens and ultimately leading to changes in anti-terror approaches and operations in the U.S and around the globe. (www.fbi.gov). Before 9/11 occurred, the U.S was encountering a period of peace and economic boom. This fostered the illusion that International Relations were of no great significance in the wider arena. The American public and political classes were unconcerned with previous attacks on the World Trade Centre in 94, the attack on the USS Cole, and the attacks on US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. Attacks of 9/11 and the fall of the World Trade Centre’s marked the beginning of the real 21st century. (Brown 04). 9/11 was not simply an act of terror but the most destructive single act of terror since World War 2. Many in the Islamic community saw the attack, as an attack on “the symbolic heart of global capitalism” (Brown 04). 9/11 galvanised the American people, and less then 12 hours after the attacks, president Bush formally declared a “war on terror”. Overnight America’s relationships with Russia, China and India improved. Britain and Australia were also seen as close allies. President Bush and his supporters stressed the need to go on the offensive against terrorists, to deploy the U.S. military, and to promote democracy in the Middle East. (Gordon 07). The U.S is fighting a war on terror and must remain on the offensive. The Bush administration feel,...
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...movements in history that were justified by “science,” but which we see today as unjustifiable. These include biometrical methods like phrenology and craniology, the empirical definitions of racial difference in the 19th century, and the “scientifically” racist ideology of the Nazis, among many others. In many of these situations, biology has been used to support conceptions that were already accepted in the society of the time. However, they seemed stronger with scientific support, even if the scientific support was weak enough that it was eventually proven to be untrue. Considering this, why were these “scientific” conclusions seen as objective when, with the benefit of hindsight, it is clear that they were not? Additionally, why did the supporters of these ideologies want to use science as support? If science were seen as merely a collection of useless knowledge, it would not have been relied upon in the way that it was, so it is clear that the scientific method was trusted to add some additional level of truth to the given conclusions. The interactions between these systems of classifying groups of people, their scientific support, and society in general tell us many things about science and about people. Physiognomy and Phrenology The earliest versions of biological classification are found in the related disciplines of physiognomy and phrenology. Physiognomy, the science of reading a person’s character based on facial characteristics, was popularized by Johann Caspar...
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...the importance of a pure judiciary. Quebec highlights that the existing Supreme Courts are totally appointed in the conformance of federal executives, and it does not differentiate the difference between civil law and the British common law. Additionally the decisions of the Supreme Court are confirmed to be biased against the Quebecers. The debate since 1950s still needs a re-modification in the form of a pure Canadian Supreme Court, where the law holds every Canadian equal in the court of law (Sherman, 1999, p. 68). Senate The second modification proposed is the modification in the senate. The Canadian federation has long been considered to seek the reform in the Canadian senate. In the Federal-Provincial Conference 1887 the clause was the key agenda. Following the effort in the year 1923 a formal study titled as “The Unreformed Senate of England” by Professor R.A MacKay first highlighted the views about the weaknesses of the upper house to the general public. The studies nominated strategies for the proposed reforms as well that included tenure...
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...Abstract Hezbollah (Arabic for "Party of God") is an umbrella organization of various radical Islamic Shi'ite groups and organizations which receives substantial financial and philosophical support from Iran. Hezbollah's formation was a direct response to Israel's 1982 invasion of Lebanon designed to eliminate the Palestinian Liberation Organization's base of operations. Hezbollah's stated objectives include the establishment of a Shiite theocracy in Lebanon, the destruction of Israel, and the elimination of Western influences from the Middle East. The Hezbollah terrorist group can be described as a loosely coupled, highly adaptive networked organization. The ability of the Hezbollah and its affiliates to conduct increasingly larger and more audacious terror operations over years, suggests a well-developed pattern of organizational learning. Hezbollah focus was to create a terrorist organization that promotes the doctrine associated with radicals in the Islamic nation, namely the Shiites . This was all concocted by their fearless leader Ayatollah Khomeini, who departed life in 1989. Hezbollah started as a local group in Lebanon, and today has grown globally into political movement with global capabilities in the sphere of terrorism, a well-developed military apparatus, and destructive weapons that include land-to-land missiles. Hezbollah operates from three major areas, Lebanon, Palestine and on a global arena. This terrorist group relies heavily a network of collaborative...
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... 20th Century History of the Americas Alternative The Written Account & Assessment Criteria A. Plan of the Investigation B. Summary of Evidence C. Evaluation of Sources D. Analysis E. Conclusion F. Sources and Word Limit Sample History IAs 1Trotsky and the Russian Civil War 2US in Chile 3Women in the French Revolution 4PreWWI Alliances 4 7 9 10 11 12 13 14 14 1 2 2 3 4 10 16 Information in this guide is gathered from a variety of sources, including, but not limited to: The IB History Course Guide, Oxford’s IB Skills and Practice, IBOCC, and anecdotal experience. What is the History IA? The History IA is your chance to explore a period, theme, or event in history that you are interested in. For full IB Candidates, it also serves as 20% of your final History Grade. The final paper will be assessed by your teacher, with a sampling sent off to IB for score moderation. The History IA asks you to use the full range of skills you have been taught in class. In particular: ● knowledge and understanding ● application and interpretation ● synthesis and evaluation ● document analysis The structure of the IA is unlike any history paper you have ever written (and will most likely ever write again). An easy way to think of it is as a “deconstructed research paper,” or for those of you who are ...
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...countries may not agree on who would win a war between them, or whether victory would be overwhelming or merely eked out, because each side has military secrets about its own capabilities. They will not avoid the bargaining failure by sharing their secrets, since they cannot trust each other not to lie and exaggerate their strength to extract more concessions. For example, Sweden made efforts to deceive Nazi Germany that it would resist an attack fiercely, partly by playing on the myth of Aryan superiority and by making sure that Hermann Göring only saw elite troops in action, often dressed up as regular soldiers, when he came to visit. The American decision to enter the Vietnam War was made with the full knowledge that the communist forces would resist them, but did not believe that the guerrillas had the capability to long oppose American forces. Thirdly, bargaining may fail due to the states' inability to make credible commitments.[130] In this scenario, the two countries might be able to come to a bargain that would avert war if they could stick to it, but the benefits of the bargain will make one side more powerful and lead it to demand even more in the future, so...
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... Inspiration for the romantic approach initially came from two great shapers of thought, French philosopher Jean Jacques Rousseau and German writer Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. A The Romantic Spirit Rousseau established the cult of the individual and championed the freedom of the human spirit; his famous announcement was “I felt before I thought.” Goethe and his compatriots, philosopher and critic Johann Gottfried von Herder and historian Justus Möser, provided more formal precepts and collaborated on a group of essays entitled Von deutscher Art und Kunst (Of German Style and Art, 1773). In this work the authors extolled the romantic spirit as manifested in German folk songs, Gothic architecture, and the plays of English playwright William Shakespeare. Goethe sought to imitate Shakespeare's free and untrammeled style in his Götz von Berlichingen (1773; translated 1799), a historical drama about a 16th-century robber knight. The play, which justifies revolt against political authority, inaugurated the Sturm und Drang (storm and stress) movement, a forerunner of German romanticism. Goethe's novel The Sorrows of Young Werther (1774; translated 1779) was also in this tradition. One of the great influential...
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