Throughout the course of history, in the Untied States of America, many groups have beneficially influenced the modern day practices and values of the American citizenry. Most Americans hold organizations such as the NAACP, women's civil rights movement, and ACLU in high regard for their contri...

Karl Marx was one of the most influential men who ever lived. His writings and personal accomplishments have greatly swayed economics, social sciences, politics, religion and scholarship in general. During his lifetime, his political efforts, although not revolutionary, influenced the views of other...

Reform or Revolution was Rosa Luxembourg\'s first major political work, and one of the most enduring contributions to socialist thought. When Rosa Luxembourg arrived in Berlin in 1898, she found the SPD (German Social Democratic Party) engulfed in a crisis of conscience provoked by Eduard Bernstein....

Corruption of Power In the words of Winston Churchill, "Power corrupts, but absolute power corrupts absolutely". This statement echo's a typical yet sometimes unpleasant characteristic of human nature. Time and again throughout history mankind has repeatedly demonstrated an inheren...

From the patriarchal laments of a bygone epoch in the tales of King Arthur to the powerful protest songs of the 1960s and 1970s songwriters, the concerns of each culture echoes in the art it produces. Differences between the dominant themes of writings from different cultures exist because each soci...

A Real "Jungle" "Things that were quite unspeakable went on there in the packing houses all the time, and were taken for granted by everybody". Sinclair uses this quote to depict how terrible life as an immigrant worker in Chicago's "Packingtown" really ...

The development of liberal thought began in the seventeen-century England. Often, constitutional monarchy is perceived as a beginning of liberalism. Growth of commercial middle classes and wealth accumulation and consumption, leaded to a new, individualistic morality. The individual is a basic un...

Social stratification refers to the presence of distinct social groups which are ranked one above the other in terms of factors such as prestige and wealth (Haralambos & Holborn, 2004). Those who belong to a particular group or stratum will have some awareness of common interests and a common identi...

America's Own Choir of Individuals Walt Whitman helped shape American poetry through his various works. In "I Hear America Singing," he glorified the average working man in his "Ideal Democracy." In the introduction to Leaves of Grass, Whitman expressed his belief in the ...

The government, whether we think about it or not, plays a very significant role in all of our lives regardless of our ethnic background. Though there are many differing forms of government, they affect our lives in the same way. Changes in how the government works slowly begin to effect how we car...

André Malraux was a French writer, explorer and statesman, who was born in Paris on 3 November 1901. He was self-taught through his love of books and paintings and his early acquaintance with avant-garde poets and artist. (Winegarten 268) He learned Oriental languages that came in ha...

At the core of Communist theory, is the idea that the average person within a society is essentially separated (alienated) from the ability to determine his own destiny. The idea was that with bureaucracy, dictatorial autocratic rule, and automation of work within the industrialized world, people a...

Many people associate the 1920's in Russia as a preparation for Stalin, and the period of time after 1953 as a long recovery from his dictatorship. People who were anti-revolution pointed to the horror and fatality under Stalin as justification for their position on the issue of the revolution. On t...

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe wrote his book \"Faust\" throughout his lifetime. Goethe began writing his book in his twenties, then worked on it in intervals up until his death at the age of eighty-two. When I first saw the book \"Faust,\" I immediately thought of the story of a man who sells his soul ...

Ideology, Music and File-Sharing In this ever-growing technological world in which we live, it is ultimately inevitable that the industries in which we consume goods will be tested by advances in the ways people acquire products. The issue of music piracy has been at the forefront of this deba...