Gilbert du Motier

For a man who was quoted for his dislike of Paris, Marquis de Lafayette spent a large proportion of his life fighting for the city, and working hard to help it grow. It seemed that no matter what the man could do, he would not be recognized for what he did for his country. He lived in Paris through its biggest period of change. Such periods were the revolution, the reign of terror, napoleon, the bourbon restoration and the July revolution. In each time his name was known, and he worked hard to have an effect, yet he is known mostly for the streets named after him. Marie-Joseph Paul Yves Roch Gilbert du Motier, Marquis de Lafayette grew up with a name that was a mouthful. He said in his autobiography “It’s not my fault, I was baptized…

Three years ago Kent State redshirt sophomore Jimmy Hall was sitting inside of a jail cell in New York. Three years ago Hall’s basketball, and possibly his future, was over. Hall had been arrested and charged with burglary. That was the moment in Hall life when for the first time in his life when he realized that there were serious consequences for his mistakes. “We were just kids who weren’t doing the right thing,” Hall said of the situation. “We got caught up in something we weren’t…

The perception of our emotions, and the world we live in isn’t all that it seems. Daniel Gilbert, a professor of social psychology at Harvard has an inquisitive view of the relationship between perceived happiness, and reality. In the chapter “Immune to Reality” from his book Stumbling on Happiness, Gilbert reasons that our psychological immune system causes us to be self-deceiving and as a result, causing us to have the tendency to cook the facts of situations that can affect our happiness.…

Willa Cather’s “A Wagner Matinee” was first published in 1904 and is a short story about a woman, named Georgiana, who finds herself transition from the ecstatic city of Boston, to the primitive Nebraska frontier. Cather’s “A Wagner Matinee” was inspired by Richard Wagner who was a German composer and conductor that lived from 1813 to 1883. He’s well known for his operas and his most famous work is that of “The Flying Dutchman”. Willa Cather, instead, wasn’t a musician but was an author of the…

1. Hofstadter 18-21 Richard Hakluyt “Discourse of the Western Planting” The passage depicts the arguments that Richard Hakluyt makes to convince the Queen of England to support Sir Walter Raleigh's and Sir Humphrey Gilbert’s colonization efforts. Through the passage, Hakluyt brings up the religion, economy, and power. He stresses that the colonies can be used as tools to convert Indians to Christianity, which has now been reformed due to the Protestant Reformation. Hakluyt also states that…

One of Musical Theatre’s most loved productions, Pirates of Penzance, has delighted and enthralled audiences all around the world since its first production in 1879. In Opera Australia’s 2006 performance of this Gilbert and Sullivan classic they showed that even after a century, this production was timeless, a true testament to the genius of her creators. Pirates of Penzance is about a young man named Frederic (David Hobson) who has been wrongly apprenticed to a band of pirates, led by the…

Thinking of high school plays and musicals, not much thought goes into the similarities and differences between the two people tend to think they are pretty much the same thing. Although in reality they are not, even when I start a play or a musical the audition process is different. Being part of the cast and crew can also be different depending on if a play or a musical. In the end, the performances are pretty much the same with slight differences in the preparation for the show. Auditioning…

A rising art form in popular culture today is none other than the American musical theatre. An array of factors have emerged and collided over the past decade to bring what was once a niche staple of American culture to the forefront of the media and culture around the world. The sum of an evolving variety of music genres within the form, an increased interest and engagement by A and B list celebrities, an increasingly globalized Western culture, among other influences have allowed for the…

As humans, we often assume that our sole purpose in life is to be happy at all times. Consequently narratives such as our physiological system, experience and culture systems on have taken advantage of this assumption and marketed happiness to vulnerable people who desire to attain happiness. In the article, “Immune to Reality” by Daniel Gilbert, the author discusses with the readers how our psychological system markets positive thoughts during negative situations in order to make us happy.…

In class and through our readings we have learned a lot. Part of learning is putting the terms and ideas into tangible examples. I will be discussing spotlight effect, possible selves, planning fallacy, automatic thinking, controlled thinking, and immune neglect. “The spotlight effect means seeing ourselves at center stage…” (Myers, 2013, pg. 34). People have the tendency to think that others attention is on them, even when it is not. This happens a lot which students in middle school. They…