1st millennium

The Old Jewish Prague is the second oldest Jewish cemetery in Europe. You can see gravestones from various historical periods there: long black Gothic ones, marble stones from the 16 th century, typical Renaissance decoration, mighty Baroque gravestones, and some of the Rococo ones. This cemetery was founded in the April 23, 1439 and is the oldest existing graveyard from the 15th century. This Jewish element has been the foundation of the medieval Prague and has a unique look to it since the…

Dwight Macdonald has discussed the difference between reading and skimming a text in Reading and Thought. He uses examples such as functional curiosity relating to the growth of educated people to explain how the way we read affects our thinking. Macdonald explains that the more we read from the media, the more irrelevant information we gain. He uses the comparison of people reading in the sixteenth century and the nineteenth century and found that the average educated person back then took…

“Think You 're Escaping and Run into Yourself”: An Analysis of Memories as a Form of Escape in James Joyce’s “The Dead” In “The Dead,” James Joyce marks his characters’ lives with an overwhelming paralysis that they can only break away from by reliving their memories. This reconstruction of memories is especially relevant to Gabriel Conroy, a character whose self-consciousness and routine-driven existence enhance the stagnation he perceives in his life. Gabriel finds his salvation by revisiting…

Assessing patterns and causes of mortality rates in England (16th to 19th century AD) When researching into to the topic of mortality rates, (Scott et al, 2005) observes that it is very complex to understand the historical patterns of mortality in England and that the ‘demographic parameters of mortality decline are unclear’. Mortality rate can vary when studying various types of geographic settings, different periods of time and on the age and gender allocation of a given population. Scientist…

L’homme armé Surviving today in music manuscripts of the late fifteenth century and beyond are more than thirty-five polyphonic Masses built on the popular tune of L’homme armé. Wright & Simms (2010) reported that composers borrowed this melody more often for religious purposes than any other piece of music. Pierce (2011) asserted that the composer of the original monophonic melody L’homme armé, while unknown, created the piece around the 10th century near Burgundy, east-central France and later…

In James Joyce’s stories “Araby” and “The Dead”, both main characters fight deep inner battles that drive them to feel alienated. Alienation is depicted through the stories in different forms, spanning from the depiction of weather to the description of a neighborhood. Both characters have different manners in handling their inner battle. In Araby, the unnamed character is filled with anguish and retreats into the darkness of his thoughts. On the other hand, Gabriel feels himself becoming one of…

African Ivory Trade Throughout the course of history there has remained one constant, humans are never satisfied. Since the dawn of human history humans have had this desire to crave more and want better. The idea of never being satisfied has led to many accomplishments for the human race, from the expansion of empires such as the Greek and Roman empires, to technological advances in medicine that have pro longed life, and the expansion of knowledge through books and curiosity. All have come…

If Christianity as a religion has played significant roles in the history of the United States, the place of worship must also have an important meaning. John Smith, the earliest colonial leader of Jamestown, New Jersey, described the first Christian church built in the colony as "a homely thing like a barn set on crachetts, covered with rafts, sedge and earth" (“Jamestown Churches”). The picture of this structure in the imagination seems like an ordinary house made of logs and a thatch roof; it…

Topic: Consumerism and Photography Consumer societies emerged in the context of modernity in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries with the rise of mass production in the wake of the industrial revolution and with the consolidation of populations in major urban centers that tookplace in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries throughout much of the industrialized world. In a consumer society, the individual is confronted with and surrounded by a vast assortment of goods. As urban…

Archaeology is not just ‘digging’, although the excavation of artefacts is important, there are many more aspects involved that are all as significant. Archaeology can best be described as the study of extinct human cultures (Woodbury, 2008). There are 3 different fields of archaeologist, these being Field archaeologist, university archaeologist and museum archaeologist. A field archaeologist main point of concentration is on the excavation of sites and documenting records of their work. A…