The twentieth century American novel
The year 1900 produced little significant American fiction, if compared with 1899 or 1901.1900 writings by:
v Charles Chestnutt
v Stephen Crane
v Mark Twain
v Theodore Dreiser

Realism
v It emphasized the representative rather than the exotic or exceptional matters previously considered too unpleasant or controversial to figure in the novels are now given an airing such as :
v Divorce, in William Deam Howells's “A Modern Instance”(1882)
v A child awareness of adult sexuality, in James's “What Maisie Knew” (1887)
Naturalism
It shares with realism some commitment to an objective account of external reality and a tendency toward impersonal technique; a penchant for third person rather than first person.
Sordid subjects:
v Dire Poverty in Hamlin Garland's “Main -Traveled Roads”
v Prostitution in Craine's” Maggie:A Girls of the Streets.”
v Capitalist greed in Norris's “The Octopus” - Dreiser's “The Financier”
v Alcoholism in George's “Mother”
The movement from innocence to experience can be seen in :

v Mark Twain's “Huckleberry Finn”
v Fitzgerald's “The Great Gatsby”
v Salinger's “The Catcher in The Rye”

Three Major Novelists
v ERNEST HEMINGWAY

v FITZGERALD

v WILLIAM FAULKNER

ERNEST HEMINGWAY
v Hemingway's career began in the 1920s and extended to the beginning of the 1960s.His greatest work both as a novelist and as a short story writer , came in the inter-war year :
Novels:
v The Sun Also Rises (Fiesta) 1926
v A Farewell to arms 1929
v For Whom The Bell Tolls 1940
Short story collections:
v In our time 1925
v Men Without Women 1927
v Winner Take Nothing 1933
The Lost Generation :
v Those writers and critics who turned their backs on the values of the pre-war world and finding no artistic stimulus in the post-war American society. His style is inseparable from his world-view.

FITZGERALD
He borrows heavily from literary antecedents, the structure of Gatsby ,looks back to both “Moby-Dick” and Conrad's “Heart of Darkness”, and everywhere one finds echoes of Fitzgerald 's favorites poet, John Keats. The Keats Ian technique which the impression gained is described in an unexpected mixing of senses and the other aspects makes Fitzgerald a romantic writer where Hemingway was emphatically not. Fitzgerald was also a more committed American writer. “The Great Gatsby” is generally regarded as one of the most brilliant and complex attempts to delineate the American Dream. Although “Tender is the Night” deals with expatriates Americans in Europe would show, how many references there are to American culture.

WILLIAM FAULKNER
He probably the greatest of the three in the quality of his fictional output ,was a southern writer. This implies a strong interest in cultural memory ,for southern society is ruled by the twin fixations of the Civil War and Slavery.
v Faulkner used an array of modernist techniques in order to brings his characters into Byzantine relationships with the history ,class structure , racial divides , economics and myths of his very own community. Some of his techniques:

v Complex Time-schemes
v Multiple Narrators
v Stream of Consciousness

OTHER WRITERS

v Sherwood Anderson
v Sinclair Lewis
v John Doss Passos
v John Steinbeck
v Nathanael West
Sherwood Anderson:

He seemed to embody much of the artistic spirit of his time. He influenced in various ways both Hemingway and Faulkner and produced the first major work of American literature after the first World War.
Works that are indebted to him for this techniques:
v Faulkner's The Unvanquished (1938) and Go Down,Moses(1942)
v Hemingway's In Our Time(1925)
v William March's Company K (1933)
v John Steinbeck's The Long Valley(1938)
v Eudora Welty's The Golden Apples(1949)
Sinclair Lewis
He became in 1930,the first American author to received the Noble Prize in literature.
v Main Street (1920)
v Arrowsmith(1925)
v Elmer Gantry (1927)
John Doss Passos
He made significant contributions to the modernist impulse in early 20th-century American fiction with his great trilogy:
v 1.U.S.A:The 42nd Parallel (1930)
v 2.1919 (1932)
v 3.The Big Money (1936)
v In these writing he sought to encompass the life of the American nation between 1900 and 1929.
v 4.John Steinbeck
The Grapes of Wrath(1939)
5.Nathanael West

His short novels are :
v The Dream Life of Balso Snell(1931)
v A cool Million (1934)
v Miss Lonlyhearts(1933)
v The Day of the Locust(1939
New Voices and Social Developments

THE WORLD WARS
The war novels :
v Three soldiers by Doss Passos
v The Enormous Room by e .e. Cummings
v Company K by March
v A Farewell To Arms by Hemingway

JEWISH NOVELS
The Jewish novelists were also the city novelists par excellence and came into prominence with a knowledge of the Holocaust and ,therefore, great feelings of anger ,guilt and fear.
novelists of Jewish fiction:
v Bernard Malamud
v Edward Lewis Wallant
v Philip Roth
v Saul Bellow
In these novels , particularly Malamud's “The Assistant”(1957), suffering becomes a key condition for understanding the meaning of existence and the necessity of becoming fully human.
YOUTH MOVEMENT
The 1950s in American was also the decade of 'Youth Culture' when teenagers separated themselves from the culture of their parents to asserts their own identity and stress the importance of peer-group politics, and that their culture was a subculture rather than a counterculture.

AFRICAN AMERICAN LITERATURE
Early progenitors of this were :
v James weldon Johnson's Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man (1912)
v Jean Toomer's Cane(1923)
v Nella Larson's Quicksand (1928) and Passing(1929)

WOMAN WRITERS
It took the development of civil rights in the1950s and 1960s to rediscover the work of women writers ,such as: Kate Chopin and Mary Austin .Some of significant works of women :
v Mary McCarthy's The Group (1963)
v Alison Lurie's The Nowhere City (1965)3)
v Joyce Carol Oates's Expensive People (1968) and Theme(1969)

NEW VOICES, NEW STYLES
v After 1950, there was an argument that the chronicle of society had had its day and needed to be replaced by a new kind of journalism that would perform the task of showing the interplay between people and forces around them.
v Norman mailer's The Armies of the Night(1968)
v At this time, novels began to mix history and fiction to great effect even if the history is itself fantastic.
v E. L.Doctrow'sTHe Book of Daniel(1971) and Ragtime(1975)
THE MELTING POT
“The Melting Pot" of American society is now producing a truly multicultural range of fictions an experimental and epic variety of writing that seeks to find new voices and capture the immense potential and frustration of holding together such a vast complex and contradictory culture.

Jewish identity, American Citizenship



America is a country which has always faced a lot of immigrants who were looking for a good life. These people from different nationalities, languages, ethnicities, identities shaped the new America; both effecting and affected.

Jews, after Hitler Europe, immigrated in large numbers to America, and tried to reconstruct their identity, different from their previous suppressed one, in Europe. This identity is important since it is viewed in two levels both subjectively and by other Americans.

As, according to their religious lessons, a chosen nation by God they have always tried to have interactions among themselves. This is termed in this article under “Jewish exceptionalism”.

On the other hand, however, they continued their effort to have a strong appeal to Americans’ mind through a strong adjustment into the American “melting pot”.

Now after some decades they are not only the weak minority in U.S but they are seen as a beloved people who are deserved to be considered respectful citizens. Minority in population, they did not consider themselves as minors in rights.

Iranian Jewish Identity


Identities according to Barker" are wholly social constructions and can not exist outside of cultural representation."

Iran is a country of several ethnicities, languages, local cultures, religions which have lived peacefully during a long period. Islam, Christianity, Judaism, and Zoroastrianism, are the main religions in Iran.

Despite the fact that the majority in Iran are Muslims, Jews as a religious minority, are considered as "people of Book", who have been legally benefited by the Constitution. Iran has the largest population of Jews of all the Muslim countries.

Although after the revolution in Iran some of them immigrated to U.S and Israel, those Jews who remained have the full citizenship. They exercise freely their religious practices and festivals. They can participate in political elections and have a seat in Parliament.

With an anti Zionism approach among Iranian administration and people, Jews community in Iran has not been mixed with Zionists or Israelis, only they have been considered as Jewish Iranians.

It seems that Jewish identity in Iran, formed by their nationality and their religion, is very different from the Jewish identity in other parts of the world. They do not consider themselves, as the only chosen nation by God, but as the followers of Moses.

Iranian culture has influenced Iranian Jews and shaped the most part of their identity. The Jewish culture has been adjusted to the Iranian culture so that, apart from the religious attitudes, they don’t separate themselves from other Iranian citizens. But at the same time they represent themselves as a different community and try to pass Jewish values through generations in family unit and educational system.

Types of Primaries


Primary elections, as means for for political parties to nominate candidates for general election, are held on behalf of the parties.The electoral college is a particular American institution.When Americans vote for Presidents and vice_presidents, they do not acctually vote fore those people , but for electors.These electors meet in their state capitals after the general election and cast votes for President and vice_President.Though electors are pledged to the candidates of their party, there is nothing in the Constitution requiring them to so vote.
There are four main types of primaries:
*Closed
*Open
*Blanket
*Run_off

Closed:
In this direct primary, those voters who are registered members of a party, may vote in that party's primary.So the important case, here is declaring party affiliation and independents can not vote.It may strengthen party unity and doesn't let other party's members to vote to nominate weak candidate for their own party's benefit.
In Semi_closed primary, even unaffiliated voters can participate in voting.Here, independents , based on the states , can privatelychoose party primary inside the voting booth or publicaly by registering withany party on Election Day.

Open:
Here, registered's party affiliation is not so important.Voters can vote in any party primary.They enter the voting booth and choose the party ballot on which they will vote in secret.This system, sometimes, let voters of opposing party, to participate and vote for the weakest candidate of the other side to increase their own party the chance of having more votes for it's candidates.This practice is known as "raiding".Each person can vote in only one primary.
Semi_open primary, is different with open primary in public announcement which the voters must declare their primary before the entering the voting booth.They request a ballot and electional officials record their choice and provid them parties access to information.

Blanket:
Voters can vote, according to this system, for one candidate.Their membership in a special party is not important.Through this syste, political party candidates can be selected.The candidates who have taken the majority of votes by party can continue to the general election.Although in open primary voters may vote for candidates, regardless of their own party registration, they must stick to one party's candidate.
In comparison with the other primaries, this system makes the voters less limited, because it doesn't limit them to select from just one party's candidates.There are some critics, however,that say it is aweakness for the system, because it reduces party loyalty.

Run_off
The ballots in this primary are not limited to one party and the top two candidates advance to general election, regardless of party affiliation.If no candidate gain the majority of votes, all candidates, except the the two with the most votes, are eliminated and a second round of voting happens.

Climate Stewardship and Innovative Act of 2007
Democrats on the Issue


IPCC, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has released an assessment that holds human actions responsible for the up growing air pollution and warming of climate. This has led the democrats to feel the emergency of legislations on the issue. The republicans, however, except for senator McCain, the candidate of 2008 elections, have rejected the importance of the issue and the mandating condition.

Any provision for the issue requires the coping of the legal frameworks in US with the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change. In introducing one of the issues in the Congress, that is the climate change and the necessary legal provisions for it, this paper would also look very briefly at the ideas of major democrats in senate, who have also been candidates for 2008 presidential election. The reason of not including the republicans is that they have generally ignored the issue, except for senator McCain.

The legal setting that is waiting to be passed by the House of Representatives is the most recent bill of Climate Stewardship and Innovative Act of 2007.

More than any other democrat candidate, Senator Joseph Biden has been active in promoting the issue of legislation in the area of climate change. The Clean Power Act of 2005, was a bill introduced by him in that year that never became a law.

Senator Hillary Clinton, the 2008 election major delegate, is a strong proponent of the legislation on the issue of climate change. She is also a member of the Senate Committee on Environment and Pubic Works. She has sponsored the Climate Stewardship and Innovation Act of 2007. This act would have cut the amount of green gases by 30% by 2050 having passed. The other act she is the sponsor of is the Global Warming Pollution Reduction Act.

Senator Chris Dodd was another democrat candidate who sponsored the Clean Power Act of 2005 along with Biden.

Senator John Edwards is the first to announce that for the bilateral purpose of reducing green house gases and the economic provision regarding fuel, the completely carbon neutral fuel should be utilized.

And the last but not the least, Senator Barak Obama, the other 2008 election delegate, has sponsored the Climate Stewardship and Innovative Act of 2007, along with Hillary Clinton. This is a bill that has not been passed yet, but alive.

ON THE SLAVERY IN THE UNITED STATES


One of the important issues in the history of the United states is SLAVERY, that even resulted to the American Civil War(1861_1865).It has a long and considereable history in the America till it can be said that even after the Civil War it remained still one of the crucial issues.

The speed of the spreading slavery through the colonies was so fast that it can be said that just during about a century all of the colonies became slaveholders and their economic was based on it.

First the European indentured servents were the labor force in the agricultural colonies.But there was a problem there. After their time was over, they became free. So the colonists needed to a kind of labor forcewith little wage and everlasting period of time to serve on the farms.

Labor system became more important on southern agricultural regions.On other parts it was mostly for serving at homes or something like this.So it was not vital as the fundumental base of economy.

The slave population of the United States increased after that the law put an end to slaveryand it was mostly because of natural increase.

Different locations and size to crops grown and methods of slaveholding made different anteballums.Living on larg cotton plantations in south withlarg numbers of slaves needed more watchful eyes of overseers than northern parts where the masters themseleves supervised their servents.

Slaves were both human property for their masters and individuals with their own lives.Slavery in south was not just the reltionship between masters and the slaves but it made a new way of life that represented the new civilization.

Although, masters tried to have a complete control over the slaves they were not successful. Slaves lived as they could with their own traditional values, customs and family relationships.They were slaves but they tried to resist against their masters.So they were not just controlleable objects, and this resistance shaped their in dividual and social behavior.

Slavery shaped a different society in south in which the life of the whites was something different from the other Americans in other parts of the country, because their society was a slave one and based on slavery. Southern economy was based on slavery so that it's growth rate between 1840 and 1860 was even more than of the North. This difference was so huge that ended to the Civil War between South and the North.

The Northerner believed that western territories should be setteled just by the fre whites, while the Southerners didn't accept any expantions on the slavery issue.

Abraham Lincoln with Northern idea was elected in 1860, when the controvertial issue on the slavery had increased. So that some states in the south were separated and foremed the Confederate State of America.Civil War between slavery south and free north led to the end of slavery. Here, the important matter was not slaves but the UNION.

Slavery was over but the problems for the slaves remained in other ways. Civil War was necessary for the United States, otherwise it can be named "separated states" .

White House Facts
For two hundred years, the White House has stood as a symbol of the Presidency, the United States government, and the American people. Its history, and the history of the nation’s capital, began when President George Washington signed an Act of Congress in December of 1790 declaring that the federal government would reside in a district "not exceeding ten miles square…on the river Potomac." President Washington, together with city planner Pierre L’Enfant, chose the site for the new residence, which is now 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. As preparations began for the new federal city, a competition was held to find a builder of the "President’s House." Nine proposals were submitted, and Irish-born architect James Hoban won a gold medal for his practical and handsome design.
Construction began when the first cornerstone was laid in October of 1792. Although President Washington oversaw the construction of the house, he never lived in it. It was not until 1800, when the White House was nearly completed, that its first residents, President John Adams and his wife, Abigail, moved in. Since that time, each President has made his own changes and additions. The White House is, after all, the President’s private home. It is also the only private residence of a head of state that is open to the public, free of charge.
The White House has a unique and fascinating history. It survived a fire at the hands of the British in 1814 (during the war of 1812) and another fire in the West Wing in 1929, while Herbert Hoover was President. Throughout much of Harry S. Truman’s presidency, the interior of the house, with the exception of the third floor, was completely gutted and renovated while the Trumans lived at Blair House, right across Pennsylvania Avenue. Nonetheless, the exterior stone walls are those first put in place when the White House was constructed two centuries ago.
Presidents can express their individual style in how they decorate some parts of the house and in how they receive the public during their stay. Thomas Jefferson held the first Inaugural open house in 1805. Many of those who attended the swearing-in ceremony at the U.S. Capitol simply followed him home, where he greeted them in the Blue Room. President Jefferson also opened the house for public tours, and it has remained open, except during wartime, ever since. In addition, he welcomed visitors to annual receptions on New Year’s Day and on the Fourth of July. In 1829, a horde of 20,000 Inaugural callers forced President Andrew Jackson to flee to the safety of a hotel while, on the lawn, aides filled washtubs with orange juice and whiskey to lure the mob out of the mud-tracked White House.
After Abraham Lincoln’s presidency, Inaugural crowds became far too large for the White House to accommodate them comfortably. However, not until Grover Cleveland’s first presidency did this unsafe practice change. He held a presidential review of the troops from a flag-draped grandstand built in front of the White House. This procession evolved into the official Inaugural parade we know today. Receptions on New Year’s Day and the Fourth of July continued to be held until the early 1930s.
There are 132 rooms, 35 bathrooms, and 6 levels in the Residence. There are also 412 doors, 147 windows, 28 fireplaces, 8 staircases, and 3 elevators.
At various times in history, the White House has been known as the "President's Palace," the "President's House," and the "Executive Mansion." President Theodore Roosevelt officially gave the White House its current name in 1901.
Presidential Firsts while in office... President James Polk (1845-49) was the first President to have his photograph taken... President Theodore Roosevelt (1901-09) was not only the first President to ride in an automobile, but also the first President to travel outside the country when he visited Panama... President Franklin Roosevelt (1933-45) was the first President to ride in an airplane.
With five full-time chefs, the White House kitchen is able to serve dinner to as many as 140 guests and hors d'oeuvres to more than 1,000.
The White House requires 570 gallons of paint to cover its outside surface.
For recreation, the White House has a variety of facilities available to its residents, including a tennis court, jogging track, swimming pool, movie theater, and bowling lane.