The Ramayana, the famous Hindu epic, is retold here in words and illustrations by "The Golden Eagles," Loretta Hopper's Grade 2 class from Ephesus Elementary in Chapel Hill, North Carolina.

Carmen Fields interviews Frank Hector (World War II veteran) and Ralph Cooper (Vietnam veteran) about their experiences in the military. Hector talks about the accomplishments of African American soldiers and war veterans. Hector says that the military is a good experience for young African Americans. Cooper talks about the disproportionate numbers of African American soldiers in the front lines and the lack of services for veterans of color. Hector and Cooper talk about their opinions of Colin Powell (Head, US Joint Chiefs of Staff). Field's report is accompanied by footage of Powell and soldiers during the Persian Gulf War. Fields reports that many African Americans join the military to escape the high unemployment rate in the African American community. Field's report is accompanied by footage of Reverend Michael Haynes (Twelfth Baptist Church) leading a church service at the Twelfth Baptist Church. Relatives of soldiers in the Persian Gulf War stand in front of the altar to pray for the soldiers. Fields interviews Haynes. Haynes says that African American soldiers must be granted equal rights and privileges when they return home from the war. Fields' report is accompanied by footage from interviews with people on the street about African American soldiers in the Persian Gulf War. This edition of the Ten O'Clock News also included the following item: Students at Boston University attend a prayer service for peace in the Persian Gulf. BU Theology students talk about the Persian Gulf War

This site explores the diversity of Africa's cultures and their influence on work, family, and community. Sculptures, textiles, interviews, proverbs, prayers, folk tales, and songs are included.

Sometime after 1492, the concept of the New World or America came into being, and this concept appeared differently — as an experience or an idea — for different people and in different places. This semester, we will read three groups of texts: first, participant accounts of contact between native Americans and French or English speaking Europeans, both in North America and in the Caribbean and Brazil; second, transformations of these documents into literary works by contemporaries; third, modern texts which take these earlier materials as a point of departure for rethinking the experience and aftermath of contact. The reading will allow us to compare perspectives across time and space, across the cultural geographies of religion, nation and ethnicity, and finally across a range of genres — reports, captivity narratives, essays, novels, poetry, drama, and film. Some of the earlier authors we will read are Michel Montaigne, William Shakespeare, Jean de Léry, Daniel Defoe and Mary Rowlandson; more recent authors include Derek Walcott, and J. M. Coetzee.

During the second quarter of the 19th century numerous radical movements emerged, and some withdrew from society and formed ideal or utopian communities. The Shakers (or Shaking Quakers) were the oldest and largest of these utopian movements, founded in Great Britain by Mother Ann Lee, who arrived in North America in 1774. Shakers abandoned the traditional family in favor of a new fellowship of men and women who lived as brothers and sisters, worked in agriculture and artisanal crafts, and adopted the practices of cooperation and celibacy. Many were attracted to their communitarian message, especially women like Mary Doolittle of New Lebanon, New York, who joined the local Shakers (the second of what became 19 communities stretching from New England, across New York, to Ohio and Kentucky). Doolittle narrates her initial emotional conflict between family and belief, and the suspicion, even hostility, of local people toward her new "Family," as Shaker units were called.

With his famously laconic style, President Calvin Coolidge captured the spirit of the 1920s when he announced in a speech before the Society of American Newspaper Editors that "the chief business of the American people is business." Coolidge's aphorism revealed the centrality of commerce to the nation and its culture in the 1920s, even while it concealed some of the wrenching cultural changes that were required to accommodate a commercial civilization. Coolidge, as a son of rural Vermont and small-town Massachusetts, played a key role in reassuring people that the new business order was compatible with traditional American values. In this 1925 address to the New York State Chamber of Commerce, Coolidge mixed new prescriptions for a pro-business government with traditional homilies about the contributions of American business "to the spiritual restoration of the world." He insisted that "traditional" values could fit comfortably into a business civilization.

A teacher guide of classroom activities for grades 4-8 focused on ancient solar astronomical observation and calendaring by early cultures, particularly in the American Southwest. Activities range from individual or small group projects to whole-class exercises. The activities are designed to have students engage in real scientific data-taking and analysis while at the same time getting a sense of how non-technological cultures observed and tracked the cycles of nature, particularly the Sun, long ago.

This is a collection of digitized material from the Ancient Near East collection at the University of Chicago. The project focused on materials published between 1850 - 1950, drawn from two of the Library's complimentary collections, the Ancient Near East and Classics Collections. Preserved materials relate to the study of the ancient Near East and cover such topics as the archeology, art, history, language, law, and religions of Sumer, Babylonia, Assyria, Egypt, Nubia, Persia, and other ancient peoples of Anatolia and the Fertile Crescent. Classics materials span the time from the rise of Bronze Age Aegean culture through the period in the Middle Ages and include volumes relating to the history, art and archeology of the classical world. Together, these two collections form a rational continuum in the progress of mankind's achievements towards civilization.

Malcolm X was a civil rights leader, a spokesperson for the Nation of Islam, and a leading black nationalist during the early 1960's. Viewing integration as an illusory solution to the problems of black Americans, Malcolm X advocated self-reliance, black pride, and unity. Malcolm's message became popular among Northern blacks as the Civil Rights movement failed to alleviate problems such as poverty, joblessness, police brutality, and de facto segregation. Although many Northern whites felt uncomfortable confronting racial inequities close to home, conditions for African Americans living in Northern and Western cities rivaled those of the South. In 1962 the Los Angeles Police Department, notorious in the Watts section of L.A. for harassing and brutalizing black youth, targeted the Nation of Islam in an act of violence. Malcolm X spoke out about the incident on WBAI radio.

This class examines how anthropology and speculative fiction (SF) each explore ideas about culture and society, technology, morality, and life in "other" worlds. We investigate this convergence of interest through analysis of SF in print, film, and other media. Concepts include traditional and contemporary anthropological topics, including first contact; gift exchange; gender, marriage, and kinship; law, morality, and cultural relativism; religion; race and embodiment; politics, violence, and war; medicine, healing, and consciousness; technology and environment. Thematic questions addressed in the class include: what is an alien? What is "the human"? Could SF be possible without anthropology?

The Art of the Probable" addresses the history of scientific ideas, in particular the emergence and development of mathematical probability. But it is neither meant to be a history of the exact sciences per se nor an annex to, say, the Course 6 curriculum in probability and statistics. Rather, our objective is to focus on the formal, thematic, and rhetorical features that imaginative literature shares with texts in the history of probability. These shared issues include (but are not limited to): the attempt to quantify or otherwise explain the presence of chance, risk, and contingency in everyday life; the deduction of causes for phenomena that are knowable only in their effects; and, above all, the question of what it means to think and act rationally in an uncertain world. Our course therefore aims to broaden students’ appreciation for and understanding of how literature interacts with--both reflecting upon and contributing to--the scientific understanding of the world. We are just as centrally committed to encouraging students to regard imaginative literature as a unique contribution to knowledge in its own right, and to see literary works of art as objects that demand and richly repay close critical analysis. It is our hope that the course will serve students well if they elect to pursue further work in Literature or other discipline in SHASS, and also enrich or complement their understanding of probability and statistics in other scientific and engineering subjects they elect to take.

This Wide Angle video segment illustrates Islamic and secular elements of life in Turkey, and introduces Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, the first president of Turkey, and his reforms.

The Five Points was a notorious mid-nineteenth century New York City slum. Located just east of the fashionable stores, columned banks, and well-dressed crowds of Broadway, its squalor served to remind New Yorkers of the destitution that so closely underlay the city's surging wealth. The neighborhood included the infamous "Old Brewery," which had once been a real brewery but by mid-century had degenerated into a miserable tenement dwelling for the very poor. In the early 1850s the New York Ladies Home Missionary Society of the Methodist Episcopal Church purchased the "Old Brewery," demolished it, and built a mission on the site. The women of the Home Missionary Society made children their first concern, as, increasingly, did many other reformers of this period. While in this selection these Protestant missionary women showcase the children's gratitude, many Irish-Catholic immigrant families resented the missionaries' assumption of superiority and regarded their proselytizing as antagonistic to their own desire to pass on their religious beliefs to their children.

Religious concepts and metaphors suffused the words and ideas of many late nineteenth-century American workers. The New and Old Testaments provided not only personal succor to many working people but also a set of allusions and parables they applied directly to their lives and struggles in industrial America. Working-class ideas and writing often were cast in stark millenarian terms, with prophesies of imminent doom predicted for capitalists who worshiped at Mammon's temple and imminent redemption for hard-working, long-suffering, and God-fearing laboring men and women. Christ was uniformly depicted in workers' writing as a poor workingman put on Earth to teach the simple principles of brotherhood and unionism. Trade unionist William D. Mahon chastised organized religion for ignoring its "true mission" to "establish the brotherhood of man" in this 1899 speech espousing a strong church role in helping the labor movement.

This course serves as an introduction to the Buddhist artistic traditions of South, Southeast, and East Asia, as well as the Himalayas. It starts with the core tenets of Buddhism, Buddhist iconography, and early Buddhist art and architecture in India, then progresses to Southeast Asia. The course then focuses on Vajrayana Buddhism and its artistic traditions in the Himalayas, then examines Mahayana Buddhist art and architecture in China, Korea and Japan. Upon successful completion of this course, students will be able to: identify the core beliefs of Buddhism, major Buddhist schools, and basic Buddhist iconography; identify major works of Buddhist art and Buddhist monuments from South, Southeast, and East Asia, as well as the Himalayas; identify the major developments in Buddhist doctrine and Buddhist art and architecture, as well as the relationship between the two as the religion spread throughout Southeast Asia, East Asia, and the Himalayas. (Art History 406)

A developing commentary on the Code of Canon Law 1983 of the Roman Catholic Church

As electronic resources continue to permeate scholarship, the challenge of keeping abreast with new developments becomes ever more pressing. The Catalogue of Digitized Medieval Manuscripts seeks to provide a technological solution to a simple and rather delightful "problem": the breathtaking increase in the number of medieval manuscripts available on the web in their entirety, but in a bewildering range of venues and formats.

This course provides a historical, theoretical and practical overview of the principles and themes of the Roman Catholic social encyclical tradition. It explores views on Christian social responsibility through classic texts and contemporary problems.

This is one way that we can learn how Christmas is celebrated around the world! Look through this site to see how other countries celebrate Christmas, you must read about four countries. Christmas Around the World Answer these questions about each country you read about: 1. How is their Christmas celebration different from ours? 2. How is it the same? 3. Would you like to try one of their traditions? After you ...