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…
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…
Although Signature Theatre has not yet produced Guys and Dolls, it is one that their company could undoubtedly do in the future. The theatre certainly has the capabilities and facilities necessary to produce a high quality version of this musical. However, this fact, although relevant is not the most important factor in deciding whether or not they would choose to produce the show. The theatre must also have a desire to pick this specific musical out of the hundreds of other choices that exist.…
Photographs became an important tool for the National Geographic and helped with its ongoing efforts of positioning itself between the boundaries of science and entertainment (Lutz and Collins 1993:27). Alexander Graham Bell took over the National Geographic Society in 1898, and hired Gilbert Hovey Grosvenor who saw the potential in photographs increasing the magazine’s popularity (Lutz and Collins 1993:27). In 1905 Grosvenor published photographs that were sent to him by Russian travelers of…
Bonnie Grape is the laughing stock of Endora, Iowa. She never wanted to be morbidly obese and depressed, unable to help her family, but after the death of her husband, she became a recluse, an unmoving member of her family of five. This once highly sought after beauty was now a joke to be spied on by small children and mocked by the entire small town community. Throughout the movie, What’s Eating Gilbert Grape, both her and her children struggle with her current physical state in different ways.…