The history of racism aside, the enormity of the prison system is the most persistent discredit to American ideals.
In the United States today, about four to five million Americans receive criminal records every year. Roughly one in five American. citizens has a criminal record. In a society severely divided by race and class, most of those who are pushed into the penal system are black, brown and poor. One third of all prisoners were unemployed at the time of their arrest, with the others averaging less than $15,000 annual incomes in the year prior to their arrest. About one half of the 1.8 million people in federal and state prisons and jails are African-Americans (Marable).
In effect, the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which guaranteed millions of African-Americans the right to the electoral franchise, is being gradually repealed by state restrictions on ex-felons from voting. A people who are imprisoned in disproportionately higher numbers, and then systematically...
American Expansion Post-Reconstruction America gave rise to an incredibly transformative society and culture. Modernism was beginning to sweep the land with the industrial revolution, urbanization and westward expansion. How did the underprivileged fare in this new America? What were the experiences and problems of the Native Americans, women, African-Americans, and various immigrant groups at this time? Be specific. Was there a gap between the rhetoric of hope and democracy peddled by
American History Final Exam Stages of the American Empire Starting in the colonial period and continuing up through the Manifest Destiny phase of the American Empire in the 19th Century, the main goal of imperialism was to obtain land for white farmers and slaveholders. This type of expansionism existed long before modern capitalism or the urban, industrial economy, which did not require colonies and territory so much as markets, cheap labor and
American Ethnic Culture What is an American? It is clear that Progressive era Americans from different backgrounds differentially defined precisely what being an American actually meant. Stephen Meyer wrote in the work entitled "Efforts at Americanization in the Industrial Workplace 1914-1921 that Americanization "…involved the social and cultural assimilation of immigrants into the mainstream of American life…" but that the process was of the nature that was comprised of "a unique and distinctly
62). In the records of the trial, a disturbing trend appears in depositions provided by supposed witnesses to the time period immediately preceding the rape. In short, the investigators seem less interested in determining the facts of the case than in showing that Watkins was, for lack of a better phrase, "asking for it" due to her sexually aggressive nature and the fact that she had been drunk (Sweet, 2010,
First, American ideas about freedom have evolved over time, and this might be the natural model for freedom. To believe that an emerging democracy would immediately look like modern day America ignores the fact that freedom continues to evolve in America. Moreover, freedom is guaranteed by certain institutions, such as an independent judiciary, that generally develop over time. In Presidential address: American freedom in a global age, Eric Foner gives
America: A nation of paradoxes America is a nation of paradoxes. On one hand, it is a nation that has symbolized freedom to many immigrants, as poignantly illustrated in Emma Lazarus' poem "The New Colossus," a poem included on the famed Statue of Liberty that greeted so many refugees as they strove to escape from Europe and avoid intolerable situations. The Lazarus poem proclaims the dawning a new America, free of
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