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In 1877 Queen Victoria was given a new title, Empress of India. The British Empire occupied an area of 4 million square miles and more than 400 million people were ruled over by the British. The Empire was becoming more difficult to control and there was a growing sense of the " white man's burden", a difficult combination of the duty to spread Christian civilisation. India was economically importat for British goods and strategically necessary to British control of Asia.
Rudyard Kipling's poem "The mission of the coloniser", written in 1899 to give advice to the United States on the occasion of the annexation of the Philippines, contains the author's most famous phrase "the white man's burden", which made them the bard of the English Empire and came to symbolize the belief in the superiority of the Anglo-Saxon race.
This text is divided in four stanza, which each of this has the word “burden” as the principal term. This word has a different meaning for each stanza:
In the first one “burden” means sacrifice, exile, predestination;
In the second stanza means patience and humilty;
In the third means peace, put an end to hunger and disease;
and in the last one means hard work.
In the 1860 the republic canditate Abraham Lincoln won the presidential election. Soon after, 11 southern states seceded and formed the Conferedate States of America. Lincoln supported by a majority of northerners, refused to concede that any American State had the constitunional right to withdraw from the Union. The civil war broke out in 1861 and lasted four years, ending in 1865. President Lincoln was assassinated by a southern fanatic five days later the end of the war. The civil war determined what kind of nations the United States would be, that is an indivisibile nation with a sovereign national government. The war ended the institution of slavery.
Walt Withman wrote a poem
"O Captain!my Captain!" after Lincoln's assassination on 14th April 1865, by John Wilkes Booth, a well known actor who had long been plotting against the president.
This poem is a elegy, a song for a death. The themes are: feeling of immediacy, patriotism, belief in the American dream, father and man, American virtues of honesty and courage, and mourning.
The poem was composed of nine quatrains divided into three stanzas. The text followed the course of a ballad, which is why the refrain “Oh captain! My captain!".
Oh Captain! My captain! can be read as a metaphor. The term "captain" in fact refers to President Abraham Lincoln who was the head of his country, in the same way that a captain is responsible for leading his crew.
The "ship" instead refers to the nation led by Lincoln, therefore to the United States of America.
The storm is the emblem of the conflict that shook the ship, therefore America, in the Civil War underway in those years.
The allusion to victory: “the coveted prize is won” refers to the recent triumph of the Union.
Finally, the death of the captain is a metaphor for the death of Abraham Lincoln (killed by John Wilkes Booth): he dies on deck, unjustly attacked, shortly after victory. The poem O Captain! My captain! it was written by Whitman as a eulogy, but also as a last act of extreme gratitude to President Abraham Lincoln in whom the poet saw the effective proponent of the Great American Dream.
Slavery ended with the end of the Civil War in 1865. The abolition of slavery didn’t grant the blacks equality and economy security. They were free but without money and a home. Some migrated to the North, others remained with their old masters, who guaranteed them a good amount of their crops.
A new movement that didn't accept the abolition of slavery was born: Ku Klux Klan was a gang of people who terrorised the blacks and their families. To stop the vandalism of the racist movement the government introduced the ‘black codes’, which segregated the blacks in schools, hospitals and means of transport.
Langston Hughes’ poem ‘I, Too, Sing America’ is an incredibly personal poem that Hughes wrote during the Harlem Renaissance. The poem expresses how he felt like an unforgotten American citizen because of his skin color. In the short poem, Hughes proclaims that he, too, is an American, even though the dominant members of society are constantly pushing him aside and hiding him away because he is an African American. Even though Hughes feels excluded because of his race, he still sings like an American. The speaker of the poem is perseverant, he doesn't give up his social struggle and thinks that in future racism and injustices will stop. He thinks that white people will be ashamed of the segregation, they'll see how beautiful black people are. When Hughes uses the pronoun "I", he wants to represent the entire black community.
In ‘I, Too, Sing America,’ the poet Langston Hughes utilizes free verse, short lines and a simple language. This means that the poet makes use of no rhyme scheme or metrical pattern. This adds a conversational feeling to the piece. The poem is very brief, containing only five stanzas, two of which are only one line long. In total, there are only eighteen lines to the work. However, the simplicity of the poem doesn’t reduce from the powerful message of the work. Instead, it emphasizes it even more.
Institutionalized racial segregation was ended as an official practice during the civil rights movement by the efforts of such civil rights activists as Clarence M. Mitchell Jr., Rosa Parks, Martin Luther King Jr. and James Farmer working for social and political freedom during the period from the end of World War II through the Interstate Commerce Commission desegregation order of 1961, the passage of the Civil Rights Act in 1964 and the Voting Rights Act in 1965 supported by President Lyndon B. Johnson. Many of their efforts were acts of non-violent civil disobedience aimed at disrupting the enforcement of racial segregation rules and laws, such as refusing to give up a seat in the black part of the bus to a white person (Rosa Parks), or holding sit-ins at all-white diners. By 1968, all forms of segregation had been declared unconstitutional by the Supreme Court under Chief Justice Earl Warren, and by 1970 support for formal legal segregation had dissolved.
In 1955 in Montgomery, Rosa Parks (1913-2005), an African American woman, was on a bus on her way home from work. When she refused to give her seat to a white man, the bus driver called the police. The police arrested her and the Montgomery Bus Boycott began. 40,000 African Americans boycotted public buses for over a year. The protest only ended when racial segregation on buses stopped in 1956. This was the beginning of the Civil Rights Movement in the US.
filosofia: la libertà per Hegel
storia: i lager nazisti
italiano: (Leopardi)l'uomo è perseguitato dalla natura, non può liberarsi di essa.
fisica: Il libero, o non, movimento degli elettroni all'interno di un corpo conduttore o isolante.
scienze: le catene carboniose
diritto: diritto alla libertà e alla sicurezza.