Grapes of Wrath-Fiction vs. Non Fiction essays

Grapes of Wrath-Fiction vs. Non Fiction essays A portrait of the bitter conflict between the powerful and the powerless, of one man's fierce reaction to the injustice of the time, and of a familys quiet, forbearing strength, The Grapes of Wrath is a landmark of American literature, one that captures the horrors of the Great Depression and the Dust Bowl as it probes into the very nature of equality and justice in early twentieth century America. In the epic tale of the Joad familys migration from the terror floating in the midst of the Oklahoma Dust Bowl to the Eden of California, John Steinbeck depicts the lives of ordinary people striving to preserve their humanity in the face of social and economic desperation. When the Joads lose their tenant farm in Oklahoma, they join thousands of others, traveling the narrow concrete highways toward California and the dream of a piece of land to call their own. Each night on the road, they and their fellow migrants recreate the past, and rather, faraway society where leaders are chosen, silent standards of privacy and generosity evolve, and passion, violence, and malicious rage erupt (Bender, 20-25). Published in 1939, John Steinbeck's novel The Grapes of Wrath drew attention to the hardships faced by the "Okies": poor farmers who moved from the Dust Bowl area to California in search of work. While writing the book, John Steinbeck visited Bakersfield, California and based his book on Arvin Federal Government Camp, which he portrayed as "Weedpatch Camp." (Owens, 5). The camps solemn yet radical atmosphere, combined with the plight of Americas Great Depression bestowed onto the story a pungent perspective to that unforgettable time period. The camps history began in 1935 and lasted until 1940, when over one million people left their homes in Oklahoma, Texas, Arkansas and Missouri to escape the wind, dust, and drought caused by the monstrous Dust Bowl (Fanslow, 2). They quickly set out for Cal...

René Laennec and the Invention of the Stethoscope

Renà © Laennec and the Invention of the Stethoscope The stethoscope is an implement for listening to the internal sounds of the body. It is widely used by doctors and veterinarians to gather data from their patients, in particular, breathing and heart rate. The stethoscope may be acoustic or electronic, and some modern stethoscopes record sounds, as well.   The Stethoscope: An Instrument Born of Embarrassment The stethoscope was invented in 1816 by the French physician Renà © Thà ©ophile Hyacinthe Laà «nnec (1781-1826) at the Necker-Enfants Malades Hospital in Paris. The doctor was treating a female patient and was embarrassed to use the traditional method of Immediate Auscultation, which involved the doctor pressing his ear to the patients chest. (Laà «nnec recounts that the method was rendered  inadmissible by the age and sex of the patient.) Instead, he rolled up a sheet of paper into a tube, which allowed him to hear his patients heartbeat. Laà «nnecs embarrassment gave rise to one of the most important and ubiquitous medical instruments. The first stethoscope was a wooden tube similar to the ear horn hearing aids of the time. Between 1816 and 1840, the various practitioners and inventors replaced the rigid tube with a flexible one, but documentation of this phase of the device’s evolution is spotty. We do know that the next leap forward in stethoscope technology took place in 1851 when an Irish doctor named Arthur Leared invented a binaural (two-ear) version of the stethoscope. This was refined the next year by George Cammann and put into mass production.   Other improvements to the stethoscope came in 1926, when Dr. Howard Sprague of Harvard Medical School and M.B. Rappaport, an electrical engineer, developed a double-headed chest piece. One side of the chest piece, a flat plastic diaphragm, rendered higher-frequency sounds when pressed to the patient’s skin, while the other side, a cup-like bell, allowed sounds of a lower frequency to be discerned.

Duke Ellington Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1000 words - 1

Duke Ellington - Essay Example To write everything in just two pages would be impossible, so let's deal with the most important ones. To begin with we'd have to deal with Duke Ellington's origins. James Edward Ellington (Duke's father) who made blueprints for the navy and worked both as a carpenter and a White House butler, and Daisy (Kennedy) Ellington (Duke's mother) were strongly religious people belonging to the middle class black families in the USA. Both of them could play the piano well, and exposed their son to music at an early age (with "Miss Clinkscales"- his piano teacher, as he nicknamed her), hoping he would learn the piano and start playing the church organ later. However, E. K. "Duke" Ellington showed as more interested in drawing and painting at the time than in music. He created a poster and won a prize from the NAACP (National Association for the Advancement of Colored People) for it. He became interested in music in his teenage years (in high school) after all, because he realized girls liked p iano players, so he continued his piano lessons. At the age of fifteen he worked in a soda-shop after school. This experience led to his first composition, a jazz song titled as "Soda Fountain Rag". That was the time when he got his nickname Duke. Why and how he got it can only be speculated because there are so many stories about it (Duke Ellington Biography, http://www.musicguide/biographies/160800462/Duke-Ellington.html ). Duke dropped out of high school and started playing in jazz bands by night and painted signs as a freelancer during the day to make a living. Good looking, he married relatively young on July 2, 1918 to Edna Thompson. His only son from this marriage, Mercer, took leadership over the band after his death. What should be said about Duke's personality and appearances It could be seen the best from his personal quotes like "I'm a telephone freak, the greatest invention since peanut brittle" or when asked about how he got the scar on his face he replied " I have four stories about it, and it depends on which you like the best. One is a taxicab accident; another is that I slipped and fell on a broken bottle; then there is a jealous woman, and last is Old Heidelberg, where they used to stand toe to toe with a saber in each hand, and slash away. The first man to step back lost the contest, no matter how many times he's sliced the other. Take your pick." Also, in regards to his personality, we must add his own words and views on races and categories: "I don't believe in categories of any kind, and when you speak of problems between blacks and whites in the USA, you are referring to categories again" (Duke Ellington - Biography, http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0254153/bio ). Duke Ellington spent most part of his life on the road. Speaking of successful touring and performing, one mustn't neglect and forget the fact about Duke's restless and ambitious character. Although Duke grew up surrounded by people from the middle class, he became a man of dignity and tended to reach for higher goals in his life. He visited New York in 1923 for the first time, but before settling in New York he played together with Sonny Greer (a drummer from New Jersey), Otto Hardwicke and Arthur Whetsol in Wisconsin and Atlantic City. He assembled several