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Kalina P

The Space Race - History.com Articles, Video, Pictures and Facts - 3 views

  • Cold War
  • crucial not to lose too much ground to the Soviets. In addition, this demonstration of the overwhelming power of the R-7 missile--seemingly capable of delivering a nuclear warhead into U.S. air space--made gathering intelligence about Soviet military activities particularly urgent.
  • Space exploration served as another dramatic arena for Cold War competition. On October 4, 1957, a Soviet R-7 intercontinental ballistic missile launched Sputnik
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  • fueled by the arms race and the growing threat of nuclear weapons, wide-ranging espionage and counter-espionage between the two countries, war in Korea and a clash of words and ideas carried out in the media.
  • In 1959, the Soviet space program took another step forward with the launch of Luna 2, the first space probe to hit the moon
  • In April 1961, the Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin became the first person to orbit Earth, traveling in the capsule-like spacecraft Vostok 1. For the U.S. effort to send a man into space, dubbed Project Mercury, NASA engineers designed a smaller, cone-shaped capsule far lighter than Vostok; they tested the craft with chimpanzees, and held a final test flight in March 1961 before the Soviets were able to pull ahead with Gagarin's launch. On May 5, astronaut Alan Shepard became the first American in space (though not in orbit).
  • Later that May, President John F. Kennedy made the bold, public claim that the U.S. would land a man on the moon before the end of the decade. In February 1962, John Glenn became the first American to orbit Earth, and by the end of that year, the foundations of NASA's lunar landing program--dubbed Project Apollo--were in place.
  • 500 percent
  • budget was increased
  • After landing successfully on July 20, Armstrong became the first man to walk on the moon's surface; he famously called the moment "one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind."
  • By landing on the moon, the United States effectively "won" the space race that had begun with Sputnik's launch in
  • ublic's attention was captivated by the space race, and the various developments by the Soviet and U.S. space programs were heavily covered in the national media. This frenzy of interest was further encouraged by the new medium of television. Astronauts came to be seen as the ultimate American heroes, a
  • Soviets, in turn, were pictured as the ultimate villains, with their massive, relentless efforts to surpass America and prove the power of the communist system.
  • Soyuz vehicle. When the commanders of the two crafts officially greeted each other, their "handshake in space" served to symbolize the gradual improvement of U.S.-Soviet relations in the late Cold War-era.
Kalina P

Cold War - History.com Articles, Video, Pictures and Facts - 0 views

  • “containment.”
  • President Harry Truman (1884-1972) agreed. “It must be the policy of the United States,” he declared before Congress in 1947, “to support free peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation…by outside pressures.”
  • deadly "arms race
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  • Soviets tested an atom bomb of their own. In response, President Truman announced
  • that the United States would build an even more destructive atomic weapon: the hydrogen bomb, or "superbomb." Stalin followed suit.
  • the nuclear age could be. It created a 25-square-mile fireball that vaporized an island, blew a huge hole in the ocean floor and had the power to destroy half of Manhattan. Subsequent American and Soviet tests spewed poisonous radioactive waste into the atmosphere.
  • ever-present threat of nuclear annihilation had a great impact on American domestic life as well. People built bomb shelters in their backyards
  • attack drills in schools and other public places
  • Cold War was a constant presence in Americans’ everyday lives.
  • first man-made object to be placed into the Earth's orbit.
  • Sputnik
  • 1958, the U.S. launched its own satellite, Explorer I, designed by the U.S. Army
  • Space Race was underwa
  • creating the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), a federal agency dedicated to space exploration, as well as several programs seeking to exploit the military potential of space. Still, the Soviets were one step ahead, launching the first man into space in April 1961.
  • U.S. would land a man on the moon by the end of the decade. His prediction came true on July 20, 1969, when Neil Armstrong of NASA’s Apollo 11 mission, became the first man to set food on the moon, effectively winning the Space Race for the Americans.
  • hearings designed to show that communist subversion in the United States was alive and well.
  • forced hundreds of people who worked in the movie industry to renounce left-wing political beliefs and testify against one another. More than 500 people lost their jobs. Many of these "blacklisted" writers, directors, actors and others were unable to work again for more than a decade
  • include anyone who worked in the federal government. Thousands of federal employees were investigated, fired and even prosecuted. As this anticommunist hysteria spread throughout the 1950s, liberal college professors lost their jobs, people were asked to testify against colleagues and "loyalty oaths" became commonplace.
  • military action of the Cold War began when the Soviet-backed North Korean People’s Army invaded its pro-Western neighbor to the south
  • but the war dragged to a stalemate and ended in 1953.
  • . The Bay of Pigs invasion in 1961 and the Cuban missile crisis the following year seemed to prove that the real communist threat now lay in the unstable, postcolonial "Third World" Nowhere was this more apparent than in Vietnam, where the collapse of the French colonial regime had led to a struggle between the American-backed nationalist Ngo Dinh Diem in the south and the communist nationalist Ho Chi Minh in the north. Since the 1950s, the United States had been committed to the survival of an anticommunist government in the re
  • new approach to international relations.
  • Cold War heated up again under President Ronald Reagan (1911-2004). Like many leaders of his generation, Reagan believed that the spread of communism anywhere threatened freedom everywher
  • nstead of viewing the world as a hostile, "bi-polar" place, he suggested, why not use diplomacy instead of military action to create more poles? To that end, he encouraged the United Nations to recognize the communist Chinese government and, after a trip there in 1972, began to establish diplomatic relations with Beijing. At the same time, he adopted a policy of "détente"–"relaxation"–toward the Soviet Union. In 1972, he and Soviet premier Leonid Brezhnev (1906-1982) signed the Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty (SALT I), which prohibited the manufacture of nuclear missiles by both sides and took a step toward reducing the decades-old threat of nuclear war.
  • , he worked to provide financial and military aid to anticommunist governments and insurgencies around the worl
  • redefined Russia's relationship to the rest of the world: "glasnost," or political openness, and "perestroika," or economic reform
  • the Berlin Wall–the most visible symbol of the decades-long Cold War–was finally destroyed, just over two years after Reagan had challenged the Soviet premier in a speech at Brandenburg Gate in Berlin: "Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall." By 1991, the Soviet Union itself had fallen apart. The Cold War was over.
Zoe w

Middle Ages for Kids - Medieval Castles - 0 views

  • The Keep: One of the largest spaces behind the thick walls was the keep. The keep was a storage area topped by a huge square tower with slotted windows for castle archers to use. The keep stored food, wine, and grain in case of siege.
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    Really good website to find some vocabulary and questions about the castle.
Kalina P

Barbara Ehrenreich: Nickel and Dimed (2011 Version) - 2 views

  • , “Make love not war,” and then -- down at the bottom -- “Screw it, just make money.”
  • A Florida woman wrote to tell me that, before reading it, she’d always been annoyed at the poor for what she saw as their self-inflicted obesity.
  • . I started with my own extended family, which includes plenty of people without jobs or health insurance, and moved on to trying to track down a couple of the people I had met while working on Nickel and Dimed
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  • widely read among low-wage workers. In the last few years, hundreds of people have written to tell me their stories: the mother of a newborn infant whose electricity had just been turned off, the woman who had just been given a diagnosis of cancer and has no health insurance, the newly homeless man who writes from a library computer.
  • t things have gotten much worse, especially since the economic downturn that began in 2008.
  • earned less than a barebones budget covering housing, child care, health care, food, transportation, and taxes -- though not, it should be noted, any entertainment, meals out, cable TV, Internet service, vacations, or holiday gifts. Twenty-nine percent is a minority, but not a reassuringly small one, and other studies in the early 2000s came up with similar figures.
  • -- the skipped meals, the lack of medical care, the occasional need to sleep in cars or vans -
  • The economy was growing, and jobs, if poorly paid, were at least plentiful.
  • many of these jobs had disappeared and there was stiff competition for those that remained
  • a healthy diet wasn’t always an option.  And if I had a quarter for every person who’s told me he or she now tipped more generously, I would be able to start my own foundation.
  • and and was subsisting on occasional cleaning and catering jobs. Neither seemed unduly afflicted by the recessi
  • suicide a “coping strategy,” but it is one way some people have responded to job los
  • Media attention has focused, understandably enough, on the “nouveau poor” -- formerly middle and even upper-middle class people who lost their jobs, their homes, and/or their investments in the financial crisis of 2008 and the economic downturn that followed it, but the brunt of the recession has been borne by the blue-collar working class, which had already been sliding downwards since de-industrialization began in the 1980s.
  • were especially hard hit for the simple reason that they had so few assets and savings to fall back on as jobs disappea
  • cut back on health care.
  • e to moves and suspensions of telephone service
  • Food i
  • “food auctions,” which offer items that may be past their sell-by dates.
  • urban hunting. In Racine, Wisconsin, a 51-year-old laid-off mechanic told me he was supplementing his diet by “shooting squirrels and rabbits and eating them stewed, baked, and grilled.” In Detroit, where the wildlife population has mounted as the human population ebbs, a retired truck driver was doing a brisk business in raccoon carcasses, which he recommends marinating with vinegar and spices.
  • ncrease the number of paying people per square foot of dwelling space -- by doubling up or renting to couch-surfer
  • “people who’ve lost their jobs, or at least their second jobs, cope by doubling or tripling up in overcrowded apartments, or by paying 50 or 60 or even 70 percent of their incomes in rent.”
  • g members of my extended family, have given up their health insurance.
  • - a government safety net that is meant to save the poor from spiraling down all the way to destitutio
  • The food stamp program has responded to the crisis fairly well, to the point where it now reaches about 37 million people, up about 30% from pre-recession levels.
  • ? There is a right to food stamps. You go to the office and, if you meet the statutory definition of need, they h
  • elp you. For welfare, the street-level bureaucrats can, pretty much at their own discretion, just say no.
  • Delaware residents who had always imagined that people turned to the government for help only if “they didn’t want to work.
  • ace a state-sponsored retraining course in computer repairs -- only to find that those skills are no longer in demand.
  • 44% of laid-off people at the time, she failed to meet the fiendishly complex and sometimes arbitrary eligibility requirements for unemployment benefits. Their car started falling apart.
  • Temporary Assistance to Needy Families.
  • TANF does not offer straightforward cash support like Aid to Families with Dependent Children, which it replaced in 1996. It’s an income supplementation program for working parents, and it was based on the sunny assumption that there would always be plenty of jobs for those enterprising enough to get them.
  • When the Parentes finally got into “the system” and began receiving food stamps and some cash assistance, they discovered why some recipients have taken to calling TANF “Torture and Abuse of Needy Families.” From the start, the TANF experience was “humiliating,” Kristen says. The caseworkers “treat you like a bum. They act like every dollar you get is coming out of their own paychecks.”
  • 40 jobs a week
  • miles a day to attend “job readiness” classes offered by a private company called Arbor, wh
  • were “frankly a joke.”
  • , “applying for welfare is a lot like being booked by the police.”  There may be a mug shot, fingerprinting, and lengthy interrogations as to one’s children’s true paternity. The ostensible goal is to prevent welf
  • fraud, but the psychological impact is to turn poverty itself into a kind of crime.
  • The most shocking thing I learned from my research on the fate of the working poor in the recession was the extent to which poverty has indeed been criminalized in America.
  • Perhaps the constant suspicions of drug use and theft that I encountered in low-wage workplaces should have alerted me to the fact that, when you leave the relative safety of the middle class, you might as well have given up your citizenship and taken residence in a hostile nation.
  • Most cities, for example, have ordinances designed to drive the destitute off the streets by outlawing such necessary activities of daily life as sitting, loitering, sleeping, or lying down. Urban officials boast that there is nothing discriminatory about such laws: “If you’re lying on a sidewalk, whether you’re homeless or a millionaire, you’re in violation of the ordinance,” a St. Petersburg, Florida, city attorney stated in June 2009, echoing Anatole France’s immortal observation that “the law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich as well as the poor to sleep under bridges...”
  • the criminalization of poverty has actually intensified as the weakened economy generates ever more poverty.
  • ordinances against the publicly poor has been rising since 2006, along with the harassment of the poor for more “neutral” infractions like jaywalking, littering, or carrying an open container.
  • ban on begging
  • grizzled 62-year-old, he inhabits a wheelchair and is often found on G Street in Washington, D.C. -- the city that is ultimately responsible for the bullet he took in the spine in Phu Bai, Vietnam, in 1972.
  • “They arrested a homeless man in a shelter for being homeless?”
  • , led by Las Vegas, passed ordinances forbidding the sharing of food with the indigent in public places, leadi
  • way to be criminalized by poverty is to have the wrong color skin. Indignation runs high when a celebrity professor succumbs to racial profiling, but whole communities are effectively “profiled” for the suspicious combination of being both dark-skinned and poor. Flick a cigarette and you’re “littering”; wear the wrong color T-shirt and you’re displaying gang allegiance. Just strolling around in a dodgy neighborhood can mark you as a potential suspect. And don’t get grumpy about it or you could be “resisting arrest.”
  • e government defunds services that might help the poor while ramping up law enforcement.
  •  Shut down public housing, then make it a crime to be homeless. Generate no public-sector jobs, then penalize people for falling into debt.
  • The experience of the poor, and especially poor people of color, comes to resemble that of a rat in a cage scrambling to avoid erratically administered electric shocks. And if you should try to escape this nightmare reality into a brief, drug-induced high, it’s “gotcha” all over again, because that of course is illegal too.
  • r staggering level of incarceration,
  • g. And what public housing remains has become ever more prison-like, with random police sweeps and, in a growing number of cities, proposed drug tests for residents.
  • The safety net, or what remains of it, has been transformed into a dragnet.
  • official level of poverty increasing -- to over 14% in 2010 -- some states are beginning to ease up on the criminalization of poverty, using alternative sentencing methods, shortening probation, and reducing the number of people locked up for technical violations like missing court appointments. But others, diabolically enough, are tightening the screws: not only increasing the number of “crimes,” but charging prisoners for their room and board, guaranteeing they’ll be released with potentially criminalizing levels of debt.
  • a higher minimum wage, universal health care, affordable housing, good schools, reliable public transportation, and all the other things we, uniquely among the developed nations, have neglected to do.
  • : if we want to reduce poverty, we have to stop doing the things that make people poor and keep them that way. Stop underpaying people for the jobs they do. Stop treating working people as potential criminals and let them have the right to organize for better wages and working conditions.
  • : if we want to reduce poverty, we have to stop doing the things that make people poor and keep them that way. Stop underpaying people for the jobs they do. Stop treating working people as potential criminals and let them have the right to organize for better wages and working conditions.
  • : if we want to reduce poverty, we have to stop doing the things that make people poor and keep them that way. Stop underpaying people for the jobs they do. Stop treating working people as potential criminals and let them have the right to organize for better wages and working conditions.
  • : if we want to reduce poverty, we have to stop doing the things that make people poor and keep them that way. Stop underpaying people for the jobs they do. Stop treating working people as potential criminals and let them have the right to organize for better wages and working conditions.
  • Stop the institutional harassment of those who turn to the government for help or find themselves destitute in the streets
  • But at least we should decide, as a bare minimum principle, to stop kicking people when they’re down.
Garth Holman

This dissident poet says elections and the nuclear pact give him hope for Iran | Public... - 0 views

  • The 44-year-old journalist and poet might have ended up dead, like some of his writer friends back home in Iran. Several of them were murdered in a series of political assassinations that began in the late 1990s.
  • freedom of expression, the Islamic Republic of Iran is among the worst of the worst. The country is ranked 169th, out of a total of 180 countries, on the 2016 World Press Freedom Index published by Reporters Without Borders.
  • Rafizadeh looks every bit the intellectual — glasses, leather jacket, cigarette. As a child, he would wake up early and recite Persian poetry out loud, annoying his father and his siblings. 
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  • “The [Iranian] government intrudes into your personal life no matter who you are. That’s why, after the murders started happening, I decided to write political poems,” he says. 
  • “Other intellectuals were killed, too,” he says. “The Iranian regime was murdering innocent people just because they dared to call for political change and reform.” 
  • afizadeh managed to shine a light on the killings with his writings in the pages of pro-reformist newspapers. But only for a time. Eventually, Rafizadeh was arrested.“I spent 86 days in a cell that was 1.5 meters by 2 meters,” Rafizadeh says. “And I was tortured.” 
  • Even after he was released, pending trial, he says authorities threatened to harm his children if he didn’t make public statements saying he was treated well in prison and that his past writings were false.
  • Rafizadeh says he did what he was being pressured to do. But he adds that, “the Iranian public knew who was lying and who was telling the truth.” “Other journalists besides me wrote about the human rights situation in Iran and we did have an impact,” Rafizadeh says. Nonetheless, he felt he had to leave the country after the courts sentenced him to 20 lashes and nine months in prison. He escaped into Turkey in 2005. Two years later, he got asylum in Canada. 
  • “But, as it happened, there is in Iran what you might call a ‘deep state.’” 
  • None of these political actors are entirely answerable to Iran’s elected government. That enabled the hardliners to launch a brutal crackdown against the pro-reform camp of then-president Mohammad Khatami and his supporters. The crackdown began in in the late '90s and continued into the early 2000s.
  • “You can fight for rights and freedoms in the political space all you like, but if there is not judicial protection of them, that is a fundamental problem,” she says. 
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    Dissident and actions in the modern world. 
tabitha p

Slavery in China - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia - 1 views

    • Aden S
       
      What was the total population of the Shang Dinasty
    • sarah l
       
      i never thought that slavery could be so different all around the world
  • Slavery in China has taken various forms throughout history. Never as absolute as its Muslim or European models, Chinese slavery still often viewed its objects as "half-man, half-thing" (半人, 半物).[1] Slavery was repeatedly abolished as a legally-recognized institution, including in a 1909 law[2][1] fully enacted in 1910,[3] although the practice continued until at least 1949.[4]
  • Men punished with castration during the Han dynasty were also used as slave labor.[9
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  • Slavery was established in China by at least the Shang dynasty, at which point it has been estimated that about 5 percent of the population was enslaved.[5]
  • Deriving from earlier Legalist laws, the Han dynasty set in place rules that the property of and families of criminals doing three years of hard labor or sentenced to castration were to have their families seized and kept as property by the government.
  • As part of his land reform laws, Wang Mang either abolished all slavery[1] or trade in slaves.[citation needed] The swift collapse of his dynasty led to the restoration of both.
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    Ancient Slavery in China
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    Slavery of China
  •  
    Ancient chinese slavery information. I hilighted the first paragraph and its on wiki!
sasha p

Slavery - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia - 1 views

shared by sasha p on 16 Nov 11 - Cached
  • Slavery is a system under which people are treated as property and are forced to work.[1] Slaves can be held against their will from the time of their capture, purchase or birth, and deprived of the right to leave, to refuse to work, or to demand compensation. Conditions that can be considered slavery include debt bondage, indentured servitude, serfdom, domestic servants kept in captivity, adoption in which children are effectively forced to work as slaves, child soldiers, and forced marriage.[2]
  • Slavery is a system under which people are treated as property and are forced to work . [1] Slaves can be held against their will from the time of their capture, purchase or birth, and deprived of the right to leave, to refuse to work, or to demand compensation. Conditions that can be considered slavery include debt bondage, indentured servitude, serfdom, domestic servants kept in captivity, adoption in which children are effectively forced to work as slaves, child soldiers, and forced marriage.[2]
  • Slavery is a system under which people are treated as property and are forced to work.[1] Slaves can be held against their will from the time of their capture, purchase or birth, and deprived of the right to leave, to refuse to work, or to demand compensation. Conditions that can be considered slavery include debt bondage, indentured servitude, serfdom, domestic servants kept in captivity, adoption in which children are effectively forced to work as slaves, child soldiers, and forced marriage.[2]
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  • Slavery is a system under which people are treated as property and are forced to work . [1] Slaves can be held against their will from the time of their capture, purchase or birth, and deprived of the right to leave, to refuse to work, or to demand compensation. Conditions that can be considered slavery include debt bondage, indentured servitude, serfdom, domestic servants kept in captivity, adoption in which children are effectively forced to work as slaves, child soldiers, and forced marriage
  • Slavery predates written records and has existed in many cultures . [3] The number of slaves today is higher than at any point in history , [4] remaining as high as 12 million [5] to 27 million, [6][7][8] though this is probably the smallest proportion of the world's population in history. [
  • Slavery predates written records and has existed in many cultures.[3] The number of slaves today is higher than at any point in history,[4] remaining as high as 12 million[5] to 27 million,[6][7][8] though this is probably the smallest proportion of the world's population in history.
  • Chattel slavery, so named because people are treated as the personal property of an owner and are bought and sold as commodities, is the traditional form of slavery. It is the least prevalent form of slavery today.[10]
  • Evidence of slavery predates written records, and has existed in many cultures.[3] Prehistoric graves from about 8000 BC in Lower Egypt suggest that a Libyan people enslaved a San[disambiguation needed ]-like tribe.[16] Slavery is rare among hunter–gatherer populations, as slavery is a system of social stratification. Mass slavery also requires economic surpluses and a high population density to be viable. Due to these factors, the practice of slavery would have only proliferated after the invention of agriculture during the Neolithic Revolution about 11,000 years ago.[17] The earliest records of slavery can be traced to the oldest known records, which treat it as an established institution, not one newly instituted. The Code of Hammurabi (ca. 1760 BC), for example, stated that death was prescribed for anyone who helped a slave to escape, as well as for anyone who sheltered a fugitive.[18] The Bible refers to slavery as an established institution.[3] Slavery was known in civilizations as old as Sumer, as well as almost every other ancient civilization, including Ancient Egypt, Ancient China, the Akkadian Empire, Assyria, Ancient India, Ancient Greece, the Roman Empire, the Islamic Caliphate, and the pre-Columbian civilizations of the Americas.[3] Such institutions were a mixture of debt-slavery, punishment for crime, the enslavement of prisoners of war, child abandonment, and the birth of slave children to slaves.
John Woodbridge

How a Medieval Philosopher Dreamed Up the 'Multiverse' - Yahoo News - 0 views

  • written by a philosopher named Robert Grosseteste — into English. Grosseteste was "one of the most dazzling minds of his generation, lauded by his successors as a mathematical genius, theologian, politician and church leader; he was the bishop of Lincoln from 1235-53,"
  • In Grosseteste's time, the dominant cosmological model was the one developed mainly by the Greek philosopher Aristotle. He postulated that there were nine planets (called spheres), one inside the other, with planet Earth at the center.
  • In De Luce, Grosseteste assumed that the universe was born from an explosion that pushed everything, matter and light, out from a single point — an idea that is strikingly similar to the modern Big Bang theory.
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  • matter and light were linked together
  • rapid expansion
  • light-matter crystallizing and forming the outermost sphere — the so-called "firmament" — of the medieval cosmos.
  • The medieval philosopher realized this problem, too. To deal with it, he added an extra reason to explain why there were "exactly nine celestial spheres plus one, an 'imperfect' Earth," Bower said.
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    Science
Chandni B

Geography of Greece - Crystalinks - 0 views

  • About 80% of Greece consists of mountains or hills, thus making Greece one of the most mountainous countries of Europe. Western Greece contains lakes and wetlands. Pindus, the central mountain range, has a maximum elevation of 2,636 m. The Pindus can be considered as a prolongation of the Dinaric Alps. The range continues by means of the Peloponnese, the islands of Kythera and Antikythera to find its final point in the island of Crete. (Actually the islands of the Aegean are peaks of underwater mountains that once consisted an extension of the mainland). The Central and Western Greece area contains high, steep peaks dissected by many canyons and other karstic landscapes, including the Meteora and the Vikos gorge the later being the second largest one on earth after the Grand Canyon in the US.
  • We begin to look at the geography of ancient Greece by examining how Greeks lived on their farms, why they traded, road systems, and the plant life that ancient Greece had. Geography has always had a great influence on Greece and its inhabitants. It is largely responsible for numerous continuities in its extensive history. While the mountains that split the Greek lands have contributed to localism they have been a major barrier to unity as a nation. The struggle of communication by land and the significant presence of the sea have made mariners out of Greeks for numerous generations. The natural resources ensure a steady flow of abundance and guarantee sustenance if governed wisely.
  • The Greeks had their private space that consisted of the agricultural fields in the territory of the polis and their houses compacted in settlements, whether in the central town of the city-state, in smaller towns, or villages. Ancient Greeks preferred to live in such compacted settlements, even when agriculture was their main source of support. Occasionally, there has been evidence of how agricultural land was organized by the residents of the settlements in rectangular and equal lots. The idea was that each family would farm a single plot of land. But, there was a tendency for farmland to become divided and for a landowner to own many plots of land scattered all over the community.
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  • In ancient Greece, many cities had land that was used for farming within the city, but most of the people lived in small towns and villages outside of the city.
  • Greece consists of a large mainland at the southern end of the Balkans; the Peloponnesus peninsula (separated from the mainland by the canal of the Isthmus of Corinth); and numerous islands (around 3,000), including Crete, Rhodes, Kos, Euboea and the Dodecanese and Cycladic groups of the Aegean Sea as well as the Ionian sea islands. Greece has more than 15,000 kilometres of coastline and a land boundary of 1,160 kilometres.
    • Chandni B
       
      Greece is very mountainous. Western Greece contains many lakes. Pindus is the main mountain range.
  • high range, the Rhodope, located in Eastern Macedonia and Thrace
  • Mount Olympus forms the highest point in Greece at 2,919 metres above sea level.
  • covered with vast and thick century old forests like the famous Dadia
  • Plains are mainly found in Eastern Thessaly, Central Macedonia and Thrace.Greece's climate is divided into three well defined classes the Mediterranean, Alpine and Temperate, the first one features mild, wet winters and hot, dry summers. Temperatures rarely reach extremes, although snowfalls do occur occasionally even in Athens, Cyclades or Crete during the winter.
  • Alpine is found primarily in Western Greece
  • temperate climate is found in Central and Eastern Macedonia as well as in Thrace at places like Komotini, Xanthi and northern Evros; with cold, damp winters and hot, dry summers.
  • About 50% of Greek land is covered by forests with a rich varied vegetation which spans from Alpine coniferous to mediterranean type vegetation.
  • Seals, sea turtles and other rare marine life live in the seas around Greece, while Greece's forests provide a home to Western Europe's last brown bears and lynx as well as other species like Wolf, Roe Deer, Wild Goat, Fox and Wild Boar among others.
  • According to this information, there would have been many villages, hamlets, single farms, and occasional small towns scattered over the land; as can still be seen in Crete.
  • The land was organized for mules and donkeys with built mule-tracks reaching every settlement.
  • Ancient Greeks became a sea-going people due to the close proximity of the sea to most Greek city-states. These merchants and traders developed a sense of freedom and independence not seen before.
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    What was the geography of Greece like? How did they farm?
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    What was the geography of Greece like? How did they farm?
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    What was the geography of Greece like? How did they farm?
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    This website talks about the geography of Greece
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    Describes Geek Geography.
matt k

Ancient Egyptian Inventions - 7 views

shared by matt k on 04 Nov 11 - No Cached
  • The shadoof was a very useful device that the Egyptians built to help them with their water, and the Nile River. It was operated by hand and was used to lift water from the river onto land in buckets. It has a long pole and there are two objects at each end of it. On one side, there is a bucket. On the other, there is a weight. The Egyptians would lower the bucket, and allowed the water to flow into the bucket. Then they would drop it, causing the weight to lift it back up so they could retrieve it. This was a very nifty device.
    • ed h
       
      this is a very cool device.
    • Everett m
       
      very helpful thanks
  • Paper was another remarkable invention the Egyptians came up with. Their paper was made out of papyrus, a plant very abundant in the Nile area. First they had to slice the core of the stalk into very fine pieces. These pieces get submerged in water to remove sugar. The they are pounded to drain the water. The strips are  then lay side by side and are weaved into each other. The end result is papyrus paper. In fact, the English word “paper” is derived from the word papyrus.
    • anna g
       
      they invented paper
  • papyrus.                                                                                      
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  • Locks were another making of the Egyptians. These were made to prevent the endless robberies. They made a wooden crossbar that was almost entirely enclose except for some space for the key and the pins. They dropped these pins into cavities, which locked the door. To unlock it, they slid the key into the opening, which pushed the pins out of the way, enabling the door to open.            
    • anna g
       
      they made locks
    • sarah l
       
      Thats intresting i didnt know that.
    • matt k
       
      Cool, except you could just break the lock by smashing the wood. :)
  • The shadoof was a very useful device that the Egyptians built to help them with their water, and the Nile River. It was operated by hand and was used to lift water from the river onto land in buckets. It has a long pole and there are two objects at each end of it. On one side, there is a bucket. On the other, there is a weight. The Egyptians would lower the bucket, and allowed the water to flow into the bucket. Then they would drop it, causing the weight to lift it back up so they could retrieve it. This was a very nifty device.
    • cassidy s
       
      The Ancient Egyptiond=s invented the shadoox,and without it it would be very difficult for them to get water.
  •  
    I don't think this is a very reliable site. In the first two paragraphs, there are 3 grammer mistakes. This could be reliable, but the creator of this site really needs to get an editor to fix the mistakes.
Garth Holman

Middle Ages Art - 1 views

  • Byzantine Art was the name given to the style of art used in very early Middle Ages Art.
  • Byzantium Art and its effects on art during the Middle Ages.
  • The Roman Empire was spit into two sections - the Eastern and Western part of the Roman Empire. The Roman Empire fell when the German Visigoth
  • ...12 more annotations...
  • Pietistic painting (religious art)
  • Artists were members of religious houses such as monasteries
  • There were no sculptures as these were looked upon as a form of idolatry
  • Sombre tones
  • Byzantine Art was totally flat - one dimensional. There was no perspective
  • There were no shadows
  • Figures in Byzantine Art were generally depicted front-facing
  • Byzantine Art featured long, narrow and solemn faces
  • There was no attempt to portray realism in sombre Byzantine Art
  • Early Middle Ages Art was initially restricted to the production of Pietistic painting (religious art) in the form of illuminated manuscripts, mosaics and fresco paintings in churches. There were no portrait paintings. The colors were generally muted.
  • The artists and painters were founders of the movement towards greater realism which culminated in the Renaissance art style.
  • Brighter colorsSculpturesMetal work in the form of bronze artMiddle Ages art in the form of stained glass windowsMove towards realismThe development of perspective and proportion in Middle Ages artThe use of shadows and lightNew ideals of naturalismCreation of a sense of pictorial spaceThe use of symmetry in Middle Ages artChanges in subject matter including the depiction of animals and mythological scenes
Garth Holman

Renaissance Art Basics: Everything You Need to Know to Sound Smart at a Cocktail Party ... - 1 views

  • The 14th century was a time of great crisis; the plague, the Hundred Years war, and the turmoil in the Catholic Church all shook people’s faith in government, religion, and their fellow man. In this dark period Europeans sought a new start, a cultural rebirth, a renaissance.
  • Humanistic education, based on rhetoric, ethics and the liberal arts, was pushed as a way to create well-rounded citizens who could actively participate in the political process. Humanists celebrated the mind, beauty, power, and enormous potential of human beings. They believed that people were able to experience God directly and should have a personal, emotional relationship to their faith. God had made the world but humans were able to share in his glory by becoming creators themselves.
  • Prior to the Renaissance Period, art was largely commissioned by the Catholic Church, which gave artists strict guidelines about what the finished product was to look like. Medieval art was decorative, stylized,  flat, and two-dimensional and did not depict the world or human beings very realistically. But a thriving commercial economy distributed wealth not just to the nobility but to merchants and bankers who were eager to show their status by purchasing works of art
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • while Italy’s trade with Europe and Asia produced wealth that created a large market for art.
  • Perspective. To add three-dimensional depth and space to their work, Renaissance artists rediscovered and greatly expanded on the ideas of linear perspective, horizon line, and vanishing point.
  • Vanishing point: The vanishing point is the point at which parallel lines appear to converge far in the distance, often on the horizon line. This is the effect you can see when standing on railroad tracks and looking at the tracks recede into the distance.
  • Shadows and light. Artists were interested in playing with the way light hits objects and creates shadows. The shadows and light could be used to draw the viewer’s eye to a particular point in the painting.
  • Realism and naturalism. In addition to perspective, artists sought to make objects, especially people, look more realistic. They studied human anatomy, measuring proportions and seeking the ideal human form. People looked solid and displayed real emotions, allowing the viewer to connect with what the depicted persons were thinking and feeling.
alove_

Why every world map you're looking at is WRONG: Africa, China and India are distorted d... - 0 views

  • The distortion is the result of the Mercator map which was created in 1596 to help sailors navigate the worldIt gives the right shapes of countries but at the cost of distorting sizes in favour of the wealthy lands to the northFor instance, north America looks larger, or at least as big, as Africa, and Greenland also looks of comparable sizeIn reality, you can fit north America into Africa and still have space for India, Argentina, Tunisia and some left overMap suggests Scandinavian countries are larger than India, whereas in reality India is three times the size The biggest challenge for cartographers is that it is impossible to portray reality of spherical world on a flat map
  • ideological assumptions that can change the way we see the world.
Paige W

BBC - History - Ancient History in depth: The Democratic Experiment - 1 views

  • Take politics for example: apart from the word itself (from polis, meaning city-state or community) many of the other basic political terms in our everyday vocabulary are borrowed from the ancient Greeks: monarchy, aristocracy, tyranny, oligarchy and - of course - democracy.
  • demokratia
  • It meant literally 'people-power'
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  • The Greek word demos could mean either
  • Was it all the people
  • Or only some of the people
  • There's a theory that the word demokratia was coined by democracy's enemies, members of the rich and aristocratic elite who did not like being outvoted by the common herd, their social and economic inferiors.
  • By the time of Aristotle (fourth century BC) there were hundreds of Greek democracies. Greece in those times was not a single political entity but rather a collection of some 1,500 separate poleis or 'cities' scattered round the Mediterranean and Black Sea shores 'like frogs around a pond', as Plato once charmingly put it.
  • cities that were not democracies
  • power was in the hands of the few richest citizens
  • monarchies, called 'tyrannies' in cases where the sole ruler had usurped power by force rather than inheritanc
  • most stable,
  • most long-lived,
  • most radical, was Athens.
  • origin of the Athenian democracy of the fifth and fourth centuries can be traced back to Solon,
  • flourished
  • 600 BC.
  • was a poet and a wise statesman
  • but not - contrary to later myth - a democrat.
  • Solon's constitutional reform package that laid the basis on which democracy could be pioneered
  • Cleisthenes was the son of an Athenian, but the grandson and namesake of a foreign Greek tyrant
  • also the brother-in-law of the Athenian tyrant, Peisistratus,
  • eized power three times
  • before finally establishing a stable and apparently benevolent dictatorship.
    • Paige W
       
      Interesting insight on the beginning of democracy.
  • nder this political system that Athens successfully resisted the Persian onslaughts of 490 and 480/79
  • victory in turn encouraged the poorest Athenians to demand a greater say in the running of their city
  • Ephialtes and Pericles presided over a radicalisation of power that shifted the balance decisively to the poorest sections of society
  • he democratic Athens that won and lost an empire,
  • built the Parthenon,
  • eschylus, Sophocles,
  • Euripides and Aristophanes
  • laid the foundations of western rational and critical thought
  • was not, of course, without internal critics
  • when Athens had been weakened by the catastrophic Peloponnesian War (431-404) these critics got their chance
  • n 411 and again in 404 Athenian oligarchs led counter-revolutions that replaced democracy with extreme oligarchy
  • oligarchs were supported by Athens's old enemy, Sparta
  • mpossible to maintain themselves in power
  • democracy was restored
  • 'blips' such as the trial of Socrates - the restored Athenian democracy flourished stably and effectively for another 80 years
  • There were no proper population censuses in ancient Athens,
  • total population of fifth-century Athens, including its home territory of Attica, at around 250,000 - men, women and children, free and unfree, enfranchised and disenfranchised. Of those
  • 250,000 some 30,000 on average were fully paid-up citizens -
  • adult males of Athenian birth and full status
  • second key difference is the level of participation.
  • representative
  • we choose politicians to rule for us
  • Athenian
  • democracy
  • was direct
  • and in-your-face.
  • most officials and all jurymen were selected by lot.
  • This was thought to be the democratic way, since election favoured the rich, famous and powerful over the ordinary citizen.
  • mid fifth century, office holders, jurymen, members of the city's main administrative Council of 500, and even Assembly attenders were paid a small sum from public funds to compensate them for time spent on political service away from field or workshop.
  • eligibility
  • adult male citizens need apply for the privileges and duties of democratic government, and a birth criterion of double descent - from an Athenian mother as well as father -
  • Athenian democracy did not happen only in the Assembly and Council. The courts were also essentially political spaces, located symbolically right at the centre of the city.
  • defined the democratic citizen as the man 'who has a share in (legal) judgment and office'.
  • Athenian drama,
  • was a fundamentally political activity as well,
  • One distinctively Athenian democratic practice that aroused the special ire of the system's critics was the practice of ostracism -
  • potsherd
  • rom the Greek word for
  • decide which leading politician should be exiled for ten years
  • on a piece of broken pottery.
  • voters scratched or painted the name of their preferred candidate
  • 6,000 citizens had to 'vote' for an ostracism to be valid,
  • biggest
  • political
  • risked being fried
  • For almost 100 years ostracism fulfilled its function of aborting serious civil unrest or even civil war
  • Power to the people, all the people, especially the poor majority, remained the guiding principle of Athenian democracy.
  •  
    About of Greek Democracy
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