Archaeological excavations took place at Oakley Plantation in West Feliciana Parish, Louisiana during 1991 and 1992. Four African-American assemblages dating from the period of slavery through the 1940s were recovered.

　One of the most striking trends in the African-American assemblages is the predominance of personal adornment related artifactsat the house sites. Artifacts included in this group are buttons, beads,jewelry, and hair combs. In the slavery-period assemblage, personal adornment-related artifacts comprise 10.0% of the assemblage. In the late nineteenth-century assemblage, 27.9% were related to personal adornment. The 1920s assemblage had 21.3% of the artifacts relatedto personal adornment, while the 1940s assemblage has 23.6% in this category.

　Large numbers of personal adornment artifacts, most commonly buttons,have been found at other African-American sites in the Caribbean and American South. Such high proportions of personal adornmentartifacts are not typical of European-American sites. Personal adornment comprises only a smallportion the planter assemblages at Oakley, with 6.1% of the antebellumand 2.8% of the postbellum artifacts being related to this category.

　Personal adornment serves as an expression of a personal aesthetic. Adornment of the body can be achieved through jewelry, clothing, hair plaiting, bodypiercing, painting, tattooing, tooth filing, or scarification. All of these bodily alterations are common throughout Africa, but were seenas threatening by European-American planters, and usually discouraged under slavery. Denied this form of personal expression, African-Americans seemto have turned to personal ornamentation through material items. Beads arecommon at slave sites, and represent a mode of ornamentation familiar toAfrican slaves. Buttons, which can be strung much like beads, or used todecorate cloth in the same way as beads, represent a common and in expensive means of ornamentation.

[Wilkie, L. Archaeological Evidence of an African-American Aesthetic. In Newsletter of the African-American Archaeology Network Number 10, Spring 1994: www.newsouthassoc.com/Spring1994.html]

Edouard Manet

　Edouard Manet (1832-83) said, "There is only one important thing ... Put down what you see the first time. If that's it, thatﾕs it." In this, and other ideas, he was obviously a great influence on the group of younger Impressionist painters who would gather eagerly round him at their frequent meetings at the Caf� Guerbois in Paris.

　　Like fellow artist Degas, Manet was older than, and of a different social class, to the core Impressionist painters. He was born into an affluent Parisian family and significantly, at 18 years old, gained permission and support from his father to pursue a career as a painter. His non-conformist attitude is demonstrated by an incident at Thomas Couture's studio when he reprimanded the models' exaggerated poses by asking them whether they would adopt such gestures when buying radishes at the market.

　　Manet did not depart entirely from artistic tradition. Initially he travelled to the Netherlands, central Europe and Italy to study works of art and also made frequent trips to the Louvre in Paris. In fact, his work, Le D史eurner sur lﾕherbe (1862-3), which was refused entry into the 1863 Salon, was loosely based on a painting in the Louvre by Giorgione and the composition on an engraving by Marcantonio Raimondi after Raphael.

　　Nevertheless Manetﾕs work differed radically from these sources and enraged critics. He had brought the subject matter up to date with contemporary dress and emphasised the girlsﾕ naked, not classically nude, state. Also Manetﾕs technique was different. He used pure, flat colours without shadows provoking Courbet to comment that Manet painted people as flat as figures on playing cards.

[http://www.bbc.co.uk/arts/news_comment/artistsinprofile/manet.shtml]

　　　Reading is perhaps the most important duty that consumes most parents of near school-age children. While it hardly gets a thought prior to the age of 4 or 5, the barrage of literature and media that enters the home just when school begins to be a concern is overwhelming. Will my child be an easy reader? How will I know what I can do? What happens if there are problems?

　The track record of US schools in teaching reading is not good, even for children from more advantaged homes. In the nation's most populous state, California, in1994 only 44% of 4th graders were at or above a "basic" reading level, while a mere 18% were at or above a proficient level of reading, leading the state to revisit its once-heralded modern ways of teaching reading.

　In the end, the research is clear: that matter what the advantage, children do not learn reading automatically and without clear, decisive instruction rooted in teaching about our language, too many children will face difficulties too many will face endless difficulties.

　When nearly half of all fourth graders fail to measure up at even a proficient level of reading, we have an enormous problem; in fact, some would call it a crisis. More than half of our nationﾕs children will find learning to read a formidable challenge. For at least 20% to 30%, reading is one of the most difficult tasks they will have to master throughout their schooling. These numbers include all children and are not limited to those from disadvantaged areas.

　While some children are simply not exposed to an adequate amount of reading and language patterns early in life, poor reading instruction is reason for reading problems in most children. Family and home-life do have great influences on a child's proclivity to reading. But the research increasingly shows that problem learners are not exposed to proper, formal reading methods.

[The Center for Education Reform: edreform.com/pubs/ReadingReport.htm]

　Sigmud Freud (1856 - 1939), a physician in Vienna who treated mental problems, invented the therapeutic method knwn as psychoanalysis. From the many patients he saw, Freud developed the idea that most mental problems were caused by conflicts and emotions of which his patients were unaware. He believed that psychological problems in adults could be traced to traumatic epsodes in early childhood. Memories of those events would cause anxiety if allowed into consciousness, Freud thought, so they were blocked from consciousness, or repressed, and preserved in the unconscious. However, in his view, many the bizarre symptoms of mental illness were outlets for these repressed memories of the early traumatic experiences.

　　The task of the psychoanalyst, therefore, was to help bring these memories into consciousness through free association techniques and the interpretation of dream, which Freud argued were the "royal road to the unconscious." The patient would then be able to deal rationally with the repressed memories in order to relieve the psychological disturbance.

　　Freud's theory is a creative and complicated construction that has a controversial status. His anaylysis helped initiate the systematic study of personality development, abnormal behavior, and therapies for mental problem. It has also been roundly criticized by many psychologists (particularly behaviorists) as vague and generally untestable.

　　Freud did, however, call attention to a number of interesting phenomena, such as dreams, slips of the tongue, and memory lapses, that have received careful scientific study more recently. Today other types of psychoanalytic theory have expanded on the traditional Freudian version.

[Roediger III, H., J. Rushton, E. Capald, and S. Paris. (1984). Psychology. Boston: Little, Brown and Company]

　Broadly defined as "the faithful representation of reality" or "verisimilitude," realism is a literary technique practiced by many schools of writing. Although strictly speaking, realism is a technique, it also denotes a particular kind of subject matter, especially the representation of middle-class life.

　A reaction against romanticism, an interest in scientific method, the systematizing of the study of documentary history, and the influence of rational philosophy all affected the rise of realism. According to William Harmon and Hugh Holman, "Where romanticists transcend the immediate to find the ideal, and naturalists plumb the actual or superficial to find the scientific laws that control its actions, realists center their attention to a remarkable degree on the immediate, the here and now, the specific action, and the verifiable consequence."

　Many critics have suggested that there is no clear distinction between realism and its related late nineteenth-century movement, naturalism. As Donald Pizer notes in his introduction to The Cambridge Companion to American Realism and Naturalism: Howells to London, the term "realism" is difficult to define, in part because it is used differently in European contexts than in American literature. Pizer suggests that "whatever was being produced in fiction during the 1870s and 1880s that was new, interesting, and roughly similar in a number of ways can be designated as realism, and that an equally new, interesting, and roughly similar body of writing produced at the turn of the century can be designated as naturalism" (5). Put rather too simplistically, one rough distinction made by critics is that realism espousing a deterministic philosophy and focusing on the lower classes is considered naturalism.

　In American literature, the term "realism" encompasses the period of time from the Civil War to the turn of the century during which William Dean Howells, Rebecca Harding Davis, Henry James, Mark Twain, and others wrote fiction devoted to accurate representation and an exploration of American lives in various contexts. As the United States grew rapidly after the Civil War, the increasing rates of democracy and literacy, the rapid growth in industrialism and urbanization, an expanding population base due to immigration, and a relative rise in middle-class affluence provided a fertile literary environment for readers interested in understanding these rapid shifts in culture.

[http://www.gonzaga.edu/faculty/campbell/enl311/realism.htm]

HISTORY OF THE PRIZES

　　In the latter years of the 19th century, Joseph Pulitzer stood out as the very embodiment of American journalism. Hungarian-born, an intense indomitable figure, Pulitzer was the most skillful of newspaper publishers, a passionate crusader against dishonest government, a fierce, hawk-like competitor who did not shrink from sensationalism in circulation struggles, and a visionary who richly endowed his profession.

　　His innovative New York World and St. Louis Post-Dispatch reshaped newspaper journalism. Pulitzer was the first to call for the training of journalists at the university level in a school of journalism. And certainly, the lasting influence of the Pulitzer Prizes on journalism, literature, music, and drama is to be attributed to his visionary acumen. In writing his 1904 will, which made provision for the establishment of the Pulitzer Prizes as an incentive to excellence, Pulitzer specified solely four awards in journalism, four in letters and drama, one for education, and four traveling scholarships.

　　In letters, prizes were to go to an American novel, an original American play performed in New York, a book on the history of the United States, an American biography, and a history of public service by the press. But, sensitive to the dynamic progression of his society Pulitzer made provision for broad changes in the system of awards. He established an overseer advisory board and willed it "power in its discretion to suspend or to change any subject or subjects, substituting, however, others in their places, if in the judgment of the board such suspension, changes, or substitutions shall be conducive to the public good or rendered advisable by public necessities, or by reason of change of time."

　　He also empowered the board to withhold any award where entries fell below its standards of excellence. The assignment of power to the board was such that it could also overrule the recommendations for awards made by the juries subsequently set up in each of the categories.

　　Since the inception of the prizes in 1917, the board, later renamed the Pulitzer Prize Board, has increased the number of awards to 21 and introduced poetry, music, and photography as subjects, while adhering to the spirit of the founder's will and its intent.

[http://www.pulitzer.org/History/history.html]

　The most elementary functional unit on the grammatical level is not necessarily the word. Wors such as now, here, and with cannot be divided into smaller parts, each with its own meaning. But more complex words such as blackbird, singer, and advertisement can be devided into meaningful shorter sequences. Moreover, such sequences are subject to rules and the rules must belong to grammar and not phonology. For example, the word sing-er is divisible into two parts, one of which signifies the act of singing and the other, -er, the agent. In English numerous nouns are derived from verbs in this way and the -er is said to be a "suffix" since its position is fixed in that it always follows the verb root. 　　　　　

　Grammar then cannot consist only of rules that govern the way words are combined with each other, but also must include rules that specify how more elementary units are combined to form the words themselves. Linguists call these more elementary units "morpheme."

　Assuming that the word is a valid unit at some level of analysis, grammar then falls quite naturally into two subdivisions. One has to do with the internal structure of words and is traditionally called "morphology." The other has to do with the way in which words themselves combine to form high structural units such as phrases. caluses, and sentences. We call the latter "syntax."

　Morphology really covers two different topics, word formation and inflection, but it most often used for inflection. To grasp the differences between word formation and inflection, let us consider a complex words such as farmers. We can divide it into three separate morphemes, or minimal meaningful units: farm, -er, and -s. These elements are different. The first one, farm, has the most concrete meaning. The meaning of -er is more abstract, that of agent or "one who does." Finally, the -s of the plural is the most abstract of all. The grammatical functions of these elements also differ. The -er is a "derivational morpheme," It can never occur in isolation and its function is to form more more complext words from roots like farm.

　The function of the final -s of farmer-s is quite different from the derivational function of -er. It does not form a new word with a different dictionary meaning, but expresses a category of the complex farm-er, namely plurality. Morphemes like the -s plural are generally called "inflectional."

[Greenberg, H. (1977). A New Invitation to Linguistics. New York: Doubleday & Company.]

　Millions of Americans in the early 1900's shared the view that special privileges handed out by government were the source of corruption in poublic life. They also agreed that one way to combat the evils of special provoleges was to restore the control of government to the people.

　　A major step toward more democratic government was the adoption of the Australian ballot, or secret vote. Until about 1890 each political party printed its own hallots in a distinctive color. Thus when a person cast a ballot -- in open view of anybody who cared to watch -- it was easy to determine how the person had voted. The secret ballot, developed in Australia and adopted in the United States, eliminated this open voting. Ballots listing the names of all candiates on a single sheet of paper were printed at public expense. The voters could then makr and cast their ballots in secrecy.

　　In trying to secure a more democratic government, the progressives supported the use of the initiative, referendm, and recall. All of these reform measures had been advocated by the Pupulists in the 1890's.

　　The initiative enables voters in a state to initiate, or introduce, legistlation at any time. Suppose, for instance, that a group of citizens wanted to increase the amount of state money spent for public schools. They would draw up a bill and attach to it a petition containing the signatures of a certain percentage of the voters in the state (usually from 5 to 15 percent, depending upon state law). When the petition was presented to the state legislature, the representatives were required by law to debate the bill openly.

　　The referendum was a companion to the initiative. By securing a specified number of signatures to a petition, voters could compel the legislature to place a bill before all the state's voters for approval or disapproval.

　　The recall enabled voters to remove an elected government official before the official's term expired. When a specified number of votersd, usually 25 percent, presented a petition, a special election had to be held. In this election all of the voters would have the opportunity to vote for or against allowing the official to continue in office.

[Todd, L. & M. Curti. (1982). Rise of the American Nation. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Publishers.]

　One of the fundamental principles of American government is the adaptability of the Constitution to changing times and changing circumstances. The Constitution has successfully survived the years for two main reasons. First, it lays down rules of procedure that must be followed even in critical times. Second, it is a "living" document, flexible enough to meet the changing needs of a growing nation.

　Ameicans have been able to adapt the Constitution to changing ways and changing times. In general, the Constitution works as well today for an industrialized nation of fifty states and a population of over 226 million people as it once worked for an agricultural nation of thirteen states and 4 million people.

　The frames of the Constitution were as wise in what they did not write as in what they did write. They wrote down only the fundamental laws for the nation. They left it to Congress to pass additional laws as they might be needed. Each timee Congress meets, it passes such laws.

　Even so, the frames knew that changes in the fundamental law might have to be made from time to time. Accodringly, they wrote Article 5, which carefully specifies the procedures by which the Constitution may be amended.

　Because the amending process is slow and difficult, it is seldom used unless the need for change appears great. Some people think the process is too slow and difficult. Others think it wise that no changes can be made in the "supreme law of the land" untils the pros and cons have been thoroughly debated. In any event, only 26 amendments have been adopted since 1789, including the first ten amendments -- the Bill of Rights.

[Todd, L. & M. Curti. (1982). Rise of the American Nation. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Publishers.]

　　American women make up nearly 53 percent of the population. They are the largest group struggling against discrimination. During the 1960's the struggle came to be known as women's liberation or the women's rights movement and gathered strength.

　　In part, the movement gained strength because of the growing number of American women who were now employed. By the mid-1970's women made up about 50 percent of the nation's labor force. Their average wages, howver, were only 60 percent of those paid to men doing comparable work. Even more revealing, only a small percentage of women held higher^paying and more responsible positions. Among the directors of karge corporations, for example, only three percent were women.

　　Another factor in the rise of the women's rights movement was the civil rights movement. Many women had been actively involved in he civil rights movement and had gained ability and confidence for their own struggle.

　　Their struggle was also aided by a clause in the Civil Rights Act of 1964. This clause outlawed discrimination based on sex in employment. Ysing this clause, women battled to secure equal treatment in business, education, and the other professions.

　　Growing number of women agreed with movement leaders that sex discrimination kept many women from realizing their full potential. According to public opinion polls, a majority of American women did not feel that taking care of a home and raising children were restrictive or frustrating roles. Bythe mid-1970's, however, a majority of American women did approve of equal opportunities for their sex in all areas of life.

[Todd, L. & M. Curti. (1982). Rise of the American Nation. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Publishers.]

　The decisive worldwide struggle between the British and the French broke our in 1754. The British colonies in North America were involved when the expanding empires of France and Great Britain clashed in the land beyond the Appalachian Mountains. The conflict was called the French and Indian War in America, or the Seven Year's War in Europe.

Wealthy Virginians caused the first of a series of events that led to the French and Indian War. These colonists formed a company and secured from the British king a huge grant of land in the upper Ohio Valley. They intended to make a profit by dividing the land into small farms and selling the farms to settlers.

The French were alarmed by the Virginians' real estate activities on territory which the French claimed as their own. In 1753 the French started constructing a chain of forts connecting Lake Erie with the Ohio River.

The governor of Virginia sent George Washington, a 21-year-old surveyor from Virginia, to the Ohio Valley to warn the French that the land belonged to the British. The French ignored Washington's warning.

The following year Washington, now a major, returned to the Ohio Valley. Leading a company of militia, civilians who trained as soldiers to fight in times of emergency, he built Fort Necessity a few miles souch of the French Fort Duquesne. Fort Duquesne itself was situated at the strategic point where the Monongahela and Allegheny rivers join to form the Ohio River -- the present site of Pittsburgh. A small force of French and Indians defeated Washington and his troops in a battle fought at Fort Necessity on July 4, 1754.

[Todd, L. & M. Curti. (1982). Rise of the American Nation. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Publishers.]

The Native Americans of what are now the United States and Canada did not live as subject people in empires like those of the Incas and the Aztechs, In a few instances, several tribes did join together for mutual support or protection. Sometimes tribes traded with neighbors and staged raids against nearby enemies. As a rule, however, each of the numerous North American tribes lived a largely independent life in its own territory.

Each tribe adapted its way of life to its own environment. Usually tribes that lived near each other had similar ways of life. A region in which most of the tribes had the same sort of culture is described as a culture area. The different culture areas produced a rich variety of ways of life on the North American continent.

The Plains Indians -- among them the Sioux, Pawnees, Kiowas, Dakotas, Osages, and Comanches -- combined hunting and farming. For much of the year the Plain Indians lived in villages along the banks of the Missouri and the other rivers that drained into the Mississippi. There the women cultivated corn and other crops in fields around the villages.

During the summer, however, small bands of closely related families moved out onto the Great Plains to hunt buffalo. They slept in tepees -- cone-shped tents of buffalo skins stretched over a frame of lodge poles. The buffalo provided the Indians with almost all of their basic needs. from the skins they made clothing, tens, ropes, and wool. With the sinews they made threads with which to sew their clothes and tents. From the bones they made tools. On the treeless plains, dried buffalo droppings served as the chie fuel for cooking and for campfires.

The Plain Indians lived under a demoractic form of government. Chiefs were chosen for specific purposes -- to lead a hunting party or a raiding expedition. No single chief had toral control for any extended length of time. Leading members of a band or of a tribe gathered in council meetings to make important decisions. Like so many other tribes of North America, the Plains Indians prized their freedom and independence.

[Todd, L. & M. Curti. (1982). Rise of the American Nation. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Publishers.]

　During the 1500's and 1600's, Europe was torn by religious strife that broke out shortly after Columbus's voyages. At thattime nearly everyone in Western Europe belonged to the Roman Catholic Church. The conflict began when some people began to question certain Church practices and beliefs. Martin Luther in Germany and John Calvin in Switzerland were two such people.

These religious leaders and people who shared their feelings broke away from the Roman Catholic Church and established Protestant, or "protesting," religious organizations. Roman Catholic called this movement the Protestant Revolt. Protestants called the same movement the Reformation. By whatever name, this religious conflict was not just a battle of words and ideas. Armies marched, wars were fought, and thousands of people died in battle or were burned at the stake in the name of religion.

England broke with the Roman Catholic Church in 1534. At that time King Henry VIII established the Church of England, sometimes called the Anglican Church. The king of England became the head of this Church. According to English law, all English citizens, regardless of religious beliefs, had to belong to the Anglican Church and contribute to its support.

In spite of the law, many people in England objected to the Anglican Church. Roman Catholics insisted upon their right to worship as they always had. Among those who accepted the Protestant Reformation, some felt that the Anglican Church was too much like the Roman Catholic Church. They wanted to carry the Reformation further and to simplify or "purify" the Anglican Church. These people were known as Puritans or Dissenters.

Life in England was grim for all of the protesting groups, Catholic and Protestant alike. They were persecuted by their neighbors, fined by the government, and sometimes sent to jail. Thousands left England, hoping to find greater religious freedom in the New World. As the years passed, other religious refugees -- Catholics, Protestants, and Jews -- also fled to American from many of the other European countries.

[Todd, L. & M. Curti. (1982). Rise of the American Nation. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Publishers.]

　One of the greatest drwabacks to self-centered passions is that they afford so little variety in life. The man who loves only hmself cannot, it is true, be accused of promiscuity in his affections, but he is bound in the end to suffer intolerable boredom from the invariable sameness of the object of his devotion. The man who suffers from a sense of sin is suffering from a particular kind of self-love. In all this vast universe, the thing that appears to him of most importance is that he himself should be virtuous. It is a grave defect in certain forms of traditional religion that they have encouraged this particular kinf of self-absorption.

　The happy main is the man who lives objectively, who has free affections and wide interests, who secures his happiness through these interests and affections and throygh the fact that they, in return, make him an object of interest and affection to many others. To be the recioient of affection is a potent cause of happiness, but the man who demands affection is not the man upon whom it is bestowed. The man who receives affection is, speaking broadly, the man who gives it. But is is useless to attempt to give it as a calculation, in the way in which one might lend money at interest, for a calculated affection is not genuine and is not felt to be so by the recipient.

What then can a man do who is unhappy because he is encased in self? So lojg as he continues to think about the cause of his unhappiness, he continues to be self-centered and threfore does not get outside the vicious circle; hif he is to get outside it, it must be by genuine interests, not by simulated interests adopted merely as a medicine. Although this difficulty is real, there is nevertheless much that he can do if he has rightly diagnosed his trouble.

If, for example, his trouble is due to a sense of sin, conscious or unconscious, he can first persuade his conscious mind that he has no reason to feel sinful, and then proceed to plant this rational conviction in his unconscious mind, concerning himself meanwhile with some more or less neutral activity. If he succeeds in dispelling the sense of sin, it is probable that genuinely objective interests will arive spontaneously. If his trouble is self-pity, he can deal with it in the same manner after first persuading himself that there is nothing extraordinary unfortunate in his circumstances.

[Russell, B. (1975). The Conquest of Happiness. London: Unwin Paperbacks.]

　 The American economy uses petroleum products in countless ways. Most chemical products contain petroleum in some form; automobiles and airplanes use gasoline; plastic materials from kitchen utensils to sweaters contain petroleum. From the 1950s through 1973 petroleum use increased steadily, both in the production of fuel and in the manufacture of industrial products. Over that period the price of petroleum fell compared with the prices of other products. People were becoming used to that state of affairs.

In 1973 - 1974 all this changed very abruptly. The main oil-producing countries in the world, mostly located in the Middle East but also including Venezuela and Nigeria, belong to OPEC - the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries.

Recognizing that among them they produced most of the world's oil, they decided to raise the price they charged for their oil. OPEC knew that users of oild would try to cut back on their oil use when the price increased. But they they believed that other countries were so dependent on oil for basic transportation, heating, and industrial use that they could not cut back much. OPEC thus figured that if it raised the price substantially, it would end up selling only a little less oil than before, but at a much high price. That way it would make a lot more money.

The OPEC price increase shows up in 1973-1974, when oil in the world market went up from $2.90 to $9 per barrel -- the price tripled. The price increased more slowly from 1974 to 1978. Then there was another sharp price increase, from $12 per barrel to nearly $30, between 1978 and 1980. The dramatic price increases of 1973 - 1974 abd 1978 - 1980 were called the OPEC oil-price shocks. They were called shocks because they took the world by surprise, and also because they inflicted an enormous upheaval on the world economy. The world that had become accustomed to falling oil prices somehow had to handle two very large price increases within a few years.

[Fischer, S. & R. Dornbusch. (1984). Economics. London: McGraw-Hill Book Company.]