RACIAL PROBLEMS IN U.K.

There have been many waves of immigration into Britain. In order to escape religious or political persecution, during the centuries many people from Italy, Germany, Poland and other European countries and also Jews came to Britain, because of its long tradition of accepting refugees.

In the 50s and 60s other immigrants (Chinese, Greeks, Italians, and Turkish Cypriots)  entered the country to seek jobs and better ways of life.

After 1945, as a consequence of U.K.’s imperial past, citizens from the Commonwealth’s countries had free entry into Britain as they were told they were British subjects for generations and were encouraged to come and take jobs which had been considered inconvenient for the British.

The immigrants number became higher  and higher and tension started in on. In1961 a racial movement arose. The phenomenon was called Powellism, from its leader Enoch Powell. This movement made a campaign against non-white immigrants painting them as a scapegoat for most British problems.

Reactions against immigrants arose again in the 70s because of rising unemployment, inflation and low productivity and the Skinheads appeared. They supported the National Front and upheld the idea that coloured people are ignorant, lazy, dirty, slow at learning things, difficult to be understood and incapable of understanding because of their bad English. As a result the immigration Act of 1971 restricted entry to the country even further than what the Government decided on restriction  in 1962: immigrants could be admitted only if they had documents proving they had a job waiting for them.

Nowadays, even if deep enmity seems to have gone along with significant popular support for legislation against racial discrimination, conflicts occasionally arise especially in the greatest industrial areas, where immigrants are amassed and where youth unemployment is a serious problem.

 

 

Per approfondire clicca su :

http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,838868,00.html

 

RACIAL PROBLEMS IN U.K.

There have been many waves of immigration into Britain. In order to escape religious or political persecution, during the centuries many people from Italy, Germany, Poland and other European countries and also Jews came to Britain, because of its long tradition of accepting refugees.

In the 50s and 60s other immigrants (Chinese, Greeks, Italians, and Turkish Cypriots)  entered the country to seek jobs and better ways of life.

After 1945, as a consequence of U.K.’s imperial past, citizens from the Commonwealth’s countries had free entry into Britain as they were told they were British subjects for generations and were encouraged to come and take jobs which had been considered inconvenient for the British.

The immigrants number became higher  and higher and tension started in on. In1961 a racial movement arose. The event was called Powellism, from its leader Enoch Powell. This man directed a campaign against non-white immigrants painting them as a scapegoat for most British problems.

Reactions against immigrants arose again in the 70s because of rising unemployment, inflation and low productivity and the Skinheads appeared. They supported the National Front and upheld the idea that coloured people are ignorant, lazy, dirty, slow at learning things, difficult to be understood and incapable of understanding because of their bad English. As a result the immigration Act of 1971 restricted entry to the country even further than what the Government decided on restriction  in 1962: immigrants could be admitted only if they had documents proving they had a job waiting for them.

Nowadays, even if deep enmity seems to have gone along with significant popular support for legislation against racial discrimination, conflicts occasionally arise especially in the greatest industrial areas, where immigrants are amassed and where youth unemployment is a serious problem .

 

 

Per approfondire clicca su :

http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,838868,00.html

 

RACIAL PROBLEMS IN U.S.A.

The United States Declaration of Independence says that all men are created equal, but it didn’t actually mean that all people are treated equally and given equal opportunities.

When Columbus landed on America, in 1492, he called the friendly natives Indians as he thought he was in the East Indies. Then. the first European settlers called them Redskins because they used to cover their faces and hands with red earth. Now we call them (more correctly) Native Americans.

There were many tribes (over 500) who reflected great diversity of geographic location, language and behaviours. The main tribes were: Mohawk (Iroquois), Mohican (Mohegan and/or Mahican), Creek, Cherokee,

Southwest: Navajo (Dineh, Navaho), Zuni, Hopi, Yavapai,  Apache, 

Plains: Kiowa, Pawnee (Pani, Pana, Panana, Panamaha, Panimaha), Comanche, Sioux,

Great Lakes: Miami (Maumee, Twightwee), Huron (Wyandot), Ottawa, Ojibwa (Chippewa)

Northwest: Nez Perce, Flathead (Salish), Blackfoot (Siksika), Shoshone (Shoshoni), Kwakiutl

Between 1513 and 1542 they met the Spanish and were compelled to submit to the King of Spain and the Catholic Church.  From the 16th through the 19th centuries, the population of Native Americans declined in the following ways: epidemic diseases brought from Europe; violence and warfare, displacement from their lands; internal warfare, enslavement; and a high rate of intermarriage.

The Indians did not understand the invaders’ idea of owning land as they thought land could be used by everybody living on it. They were nomadic and followed animals, hunting particularly bison on which they depended for their food and clothing. When the Whites occupied their fertile land, they were forced to move West, but soon the invaders spread over the whole continent and hunted bison depriving the Indians of their source of food and clothing.

Today Native Americans make up less than one percent of the total U.S. population but represent half the languages and cultures in the nation.

From 1654 until 1865, slavery for life was legal within the boundaries of much of the present U.S.A. Most slaves were black and were held by whites, although some Native Americans and free blacks also held slaves; there were a small number of white slaves as well.

A ship landed in Virginia with some Africans in 1619, began the slave trade. The reasons which led to slavery system were economic and based on the exploitation of labour power, as the North based its economy on industry and trade while the South concentrated on agriculture and slaves were considered necessary for the huge plantations.

Blacks were considered subhuman creatures, between monkeys and men. In 1808 Congress outlawed the importation of slaves but the South States didn’t agree. South Carolina, Alabama, Louisiana, Florida, Georgia, Mississippi, Texas, Arkansas, North Carolina, Tennessee and Virginia left the Union to form the Confederate States of America, with Jefferson Davis as President.

Fierce episodes as the execution of the abolitionist John Brown in Virginia aroused great indignation in the North and Civil war broke out. It lasted from 1861 to 1865. North won and Lincoln declared that all slaves should be free. On April l4th, 1865 he was shot.

Secret societies were organized in the South to maintain supremacy through terror. The Ku-Klux-Klan dates back to 1866. From 1890 to 1901 the southern States passed laws to stop Blacks from voting and sharing public services with the Whites. Blacks were forced not to enter certain public buildings or occupy the front seats of buses, to live in segregation, to take the humblest jobs, to have a system of separate education. Some important men who worked hard to change the situation:

John F. Kennedy, leader of an ambitious programme of social reform, shot in Dallas in 1963; his brother Robert, fighting for the same ideals and assassinated in Los Angeles in 1968; Martin Luther King, the leader of the non-violent campaign for civil rights and integration, murdered in Memphis in 1968; Malcolm X, leader of the Black Muslims and against integration, assassinated in Harlem, New York, in 1965.

The Voting Right Act was passed in 1965 and by 1967 Blacks can be elected to state offices and to U.S.A. House  of Representatives.

Per approfondire:

http://www.americanindians.com/

http://www.slaveryinamerica.org/geography/slave_census_1860.htm

WHO WAS SHAKESPEARE ACTUALLY?

For hundreds of years, many scholars have questioned whether the actor William Shakespeare really wrote the plays that bear his name, but John Hudson is the first to suggest that the true author was a Jewish woman named Amelia Bassano Lanier.

Amelia was member of an Italian/Jewish family and lived in England as a Marrano and has heretofore been known only as the first woman to publish a book of poetry ("Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum" in 1611).

The hypothesis  Shakespeare was not even a man at all, but a woman isn’t new. Some  scholars, as Sam Sloan, for example, believe that the true author of Shakespeare was a woman and a good place to start would be Elizabeth Vere. It so happens that she was the daughter of Edward de Vere (17th Earl of Oxford), who is considered to be a possible author of Shakespeare, and she was also the wife of William Stanley (Sixth Earl of Derby), who is another leading candidate for being the author of Shakespeare.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772 –1834) wrote: “…In Shakespeare all the elements of womanhood are holy….drawn, indeed, in all its distinctive energies of faith, patience, constancy, fortitude…” and James S. Shapiro (born 1955) goes so far as to claim that Shakespeare was 'the noblest feminist of them all'. Other authors, as Liz Lewis or  Kate McLuskie (Director of The Shakespeare Institute),on the contrary, think it is historically incorrect to regard him as a feminist.

There had been many other attempts to identify the playwright as Francis Bacon (or his brother) or as the Earl of Southampton or as Sir Walter Raleigh or Rutland or Derby or Oxford.

According on an Italian researcher, Martino Juvara (from Ragusa) the Bard was Michelangelo Florio the child of the Sicilian physician Giovanni Florio and of Guglielma Crollalanza (in Italian, "Shake" means "scrolla","speare" equals "lancia") The thesis that Shakespeare was Italian had been advanced already in letters by Santi Paladino in 1925, who in a volume by a Calvinist, Michelangelo Florio, discovered the proverbs that are found in Hamlet: now Juvara has set together wedges of various studies offering a suggestive mosaic.

Giovanni Florio left Palermo for religious reasons and took refuge with a family in Venice, in the palace built for the commander Otello, who, according to legend, killed his wife Desdemona for jealousy. The young Michelangelo graduated in grammar and philosophy in Padova. His love for one Juliet, daughter of a Milanese count, was opposed for religious reasons. He killed her and took refuge in England along with a maternal cousin who had already changed the name from Crollalanza to Shakespeare.

In official literature Shakespeare’s Italian inspiration is explained with his contacts "with Italian humanist adventurers like John Florio", the same name as his father in the Juvara version.

John (Giovanni) Florio was a linguist a lexicographer and a royal language tutor at the Court of James I . He also translated Montaigne and wrote Florio’s 1611 Italian/English Dictionary.

Michelangelo Florio was an Italian tutor to Lady Jane Grey and to Princess Elizabeth, later Queen Elizabeth I.

A woman from New England named Delia Bacon went to England in 1853 to try to dig Shakespeare’s corpse up to prove that there was no body in his grave, just a bag of rocks, but the British authorities stopped her. One reason why she felt so strongly that there were no bones in the grave was that the tombstone of Shakespeare specifically states that it mustn’t be dug up. His tombstone reads: "Good frend for Jesus sake forebeare, To digg the dust enclosed heare. Blese be ye man that spares the stones, And curst be he that moves my bones."

Well, Shakespeare’s identity is still the greatest literary mystery of all time.

 

Per approfondire clicca i seguenti links:

 

http://www.literature-study-online.com/essays/shakespeare_women.html

 

http://www.jstor.org/pss/372745

 

http://www.endex.com/gf/shkspr/shlt040800.htm

 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Florio

ARE NOWADAYS WOMEN REALLY FREE?

Nowadays women are bombarded by mass-media messages. Photographs in magazines and TV images present them as successful smartly dressed people, with a luminous make-up and a perfect hair-style, but, most of all, thin as a toothpick and in good form.

Above all teenage girls, try to imitate them wiping out their personality in their new idols’ favour.

In the attempt to obtain their good form and their wonderful figure they follow the most rigorous rules in order to get slimmer. As doctors and psychologists say  all this is due to social pressures and the ongoing slimming of models and actresses over the last years. The danger is women follow the strangest diets forgetting that their body needs certain kinds of food to maintain its functions. Pasta provides carbohydrates that muscles need to work,  vegetables and fruit give us vitamins and minerals for our skin, meat and fish provides proteins, milk supplies calcium, vitamins proteins to build our bones and teeth, , iron and vitamins for our muscles, for example.

Women are manipulated by fashion designers too. They impose how women should make themselves up and what they should be wearing. In this way they make women feel insecure, unable to choose by themselves. They have to buy more and more until they are fully trapped. They do not realize that a style is not a valid fashion for them, if it does not work for the way they live.

So they arrive at a point where they hide their personality to turn just into the image offered them by others.

However being modern has nothing to do with age or beauty. It has to do with a way of life. A modem woman, on the contrary, contributes to her society instead of taking from it and absorbing what it offers uncritically. Real charm effuses warmth, is something inner and is not so much what one does as what one does not do. It has not much to do with perfection.

TWO GREAT WOMEN

In 19th century one of the few acceptable jobs for women was nursing. The most famous nurse of this time was Florence Nightingale. She was born in 1820 into a rich, upper-class, well-connected British family at the Villa Colombaia, Florence, Grand Duchy of Tuscany, and was named after the city of her birth Florence in Italy. She hated money and fought her family to become a nurse. In 1845 the Crimean War started and she went to help in a military hospital in Istanbul. During the Crimean campaign,  Florence gained the nickname "The Lady with the Lamp", deriving from a phrase in a report in The Times: She is a ‘ministering angel’ without any exaggeration in these hospitals, and as her slender form glides quietly along each corridor, every poor fellow's face softens with gratitude at the sight of her. When all the medical officers have retired for the night and silence and darkness have settled down upon those miles of prostrate sick, she may be observed alone, with a little lamp in her hand, making her solitary rounds’. Florence Nightingale wrote books on nursing, raised money for hospitals and pioneered reforms in the nursing profession and hospitals. She is famous around the world for her influence on modern nursing, too.

 

In 1900s poor women worked in very bad conditions. Middle and upper-class women stayed at home, but some British middle-class women worked as teachers or nurses and a few were doctors, anyway they still did not have the vote . In contrast, men have a vote even if they could have no job or be criminals . A growing number of women thought this was very unfair and their leader was Emmeline Pankhurst.

Emmeline Pankhurst was a political activist and leader of the British suffragette movement. Her real surname was Goulden. She was born on 14 July 1858 in Manchester into a family with a tradition of radical politics. In 1879 she married Richard Pankhurst, a lawyer and supporter of the women's suffrage movement. He was the author of the Married Women's Property Acts of 1870 and 1882, which allowed women to keep earnings or property acquired before and after marriage.

 In 1889, she started her first political group with the help of her husband: the Women's Franchise League, which fought to allow married women to vote in local elections. In 1903, she started the WSPU (Women’s Social and Political Union) to fight for the vote for women. The word “suffrage” means ‘the right to vote’ so the newspapers called Emmeline and her followers “suffragettes”

Emmeline's daughters Christabel and Sylvia were both active in the cause. British politicians, press and public were astonished by the demonstrations, window smashing, arson and hunger strikes of the suffragettes. In 1913, WSPU member Emily Davison was killed when she threw herself under the King's horse at the Derby as a protest at the government's continued failure to grant women the right to vote.

 Like many suffragettes, Emmeline was arrested many times over the next few years and went on hunger strike herself, resulting in violent force-feeding. In 1913 in response to the wave of hunger strikes, the government passed what became known as the 'Cat and Mouse' Act. Hunger striking prisoners were released until they grew strong again, and then re-arrested.

In 1914, the action stopped because of the First World War. Emmeline turned her energies to supporting the war effort. “What is the use of fighting for a vote if we have not got a country to vote in?” – Emmeline said.

Women did men’s jobs during the war and this increased the pressure to give women the vote.

At the end of the war in 1918, women who were more than 30 years old and who were married with a home got the vote. Women did not get the same voting rights as men until 1928.

WOMEN’S RIGHTS

At the start of the twentieth century, British women had no rights. if a woman had any money, it belonged to her husband. Poor women worked in very bad conditions. Middle and upper-class women stayed at home. Many women did not go to school.

In fact, since the Bible, because of Eve’s treachery women have always been considered second-class beings and  in the Middle Ages some of them were considered witches, persecuted and condemned to the stake.

Up to our times men have always attempted to prevent them from doing anything important in the social, economic or political fields. From their infancy they have been educated towards marriage and having family in the attempt to limit their role as perpetuators of the species.

 The first feminist movements began in the 19th century. The first Woman ‘s Rights Convention assembled at Seneca Falls in New York in 1848 to demand female suffrage and equal opportunities in jobs and education. In the U.S. women won the right to vote in 1920. In Great Britain the Equal Pay Act in 1970 stated that a woman doing the same work as a man qualifies for equal pay and conditions of employment. The Sex Discrimination Act in 1975 required that equal job opportunities should be given to men and women and an employer cannot ask for either one or the other, but both. all this thanks to the fact that in recent years women have been demanding improvements such as equal pay for equal work, equal job opportunities, equal treatment by the law and so on.

Nowadays, the dividing lines between the roles of man and woman have become less defined and in the more highly developed countries they are given the same education; a girl is encouraged to learn a job, to build up a life of her own, even if when she marries or has a baby she is expected to arrange her job and career aside to be a wife and a mother.

The increase of household gadgets which reduce the time spent on housework and the decline in size of families, and the more need of money increased as well the number of married women who go out to work. So, more and more families depend on double incomes and the opportunities available to women are much greater than some years ago. But, most women’s desire to have a job stems from economic reasons and from values of independence and self sufficiency too.

Even if working wives still do most of their duties as housewives too, they think they have the right to develop their own capabilities. Some young husbands are more “egalitarian “ and share everything with their wives.

In our time there are more female managers, lawyers, and politicians too, but they are still outnumbered by men and most of them are often steered towards the jobs that men do not want.

Some women have risen to high-powered positions, becoming female versions of the male or making personal sacrifices and putting career ahead of all other aspects of life. The biggest problem to face for them  is how to be engaged in a career and have a family as well. Many of them give up marrying, some divorce, others have no children.

AVVISO PER GLI ALUNNI DELLE TERZE

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