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Among the materials used for research in history, biography, the social sciences, and other fields, primary sources are considered original materials. In history, this means that the things were...

“The Use of Force” chronicles a doctor’s attempts to diagnose and provide medical treatment to a young girl, who stubbornly opposes these efforts. Throughout the course of William Carlos Williams’s...

The animals win the earlier Battle of the Cowshed decisively. It is also not a savage battle: Boxer, for example, mourns when he accidentally kills a farm hand. Also, the only casualties the...

Animal Farm has a stack of timber that both Pilkington and Frederick want to buy for their farms. Napoleon at first says he has no intention of selling the wood to Frederick. Stories circulate on...

In August Wilson's play Fences, main character Troy Maxson was once a talented baseball player who didn't make it into the major leagues only because of his race. Yet baseball has stayed with him...

There is no set formula for a classic work of literature and, at a time when the concept of a literary canon is often disputed, little agreement on what the word "classic" means. However, there are...

In Tennessee Williams's play The Glass Menagerie, Amanda is looking for a proper suitor for her painfully shy daughter, Laura. Her son, Tom, invites a friend, Jim O'Connor, home from work to have...

During the controversial trial in part two of the novel, Bob and Mayella Ewell boldly lie on the witness stand and accuseTom Robinson of assaulting and raping Mayella. When Atticus cross-examines...

Planet Earth can be divided into various layers. Earth's atmosphere has different layers, and the planet's oceans have different layers; and the solid parts of planet Earth are no different. There...

Set in Macomb, Alabama, Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird revolves around the moral, emotional, and mental development of the protagonist and narrator, Scout Finch. Much of her development is...

At the beginning of chapter 10 of To Kill a Mockingbird, Jem and Scout go outside to shoot the new air-rifles they received for Christmas. Knowing that Jem will want to try shooting at living...

Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird is set in the fictional town of Maycomb, Alabama, in the 1930s. The 1930s were years of serious economic turmoil and racial tension in the United States. The book...

There were many factors that led to English settlement in the New World. While Spain and France used the New World as a place to extract raw materials, England used the New World's resources as...

We first hear about gray eyes in Ambrose Bierce's story “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge,” when the narrator notes that Peyton Farquhar, the man about to be hung, has large, “dark gray” eyes....

It is a sin to kill Tom Robinson for the same reason that it is a sin to kill a mockingbird. After the children receive air-rifles, Atticus tells Jem that while, ideally, he'd prefer they only...

Kennings are often structured as two-word phrases that are essentially metaphors for something simpler and more concrete and are combined in order to make a more ordinary subject or object look and...

Auden wrote "The Unknown Citizen" in 1939 after he moved to The United States. It was published early in 1940. At this point, World War II had begun in Europe, but the US would not enter the war...

Obedience is a form of social influence in which a subject acquiesces to direct, specific commands from an authority figure. It is generally distinguished from conformity, when the subject intends...

The Crucible is an amazing play for a variety of reasons. One reason is that the play is able to build so much tension during its rising actions. The tension that it creates is amazing to me...

The reason why “Brokeback Mountain” and “Recitatif” cover such a long period of time could have to do with the respective authors’ determination to provide readers with a full portrayal of their...

In Wole Soyinka’s The Lion and the Jewel, Baroka is called the lion because he is a very strong man. Baroka is the old, wise chief of the village of Ilujinle. Even though he is sixty-two years old...

The short stories resemble each other in their treatment of mothers. In “No Name Woman,” the aunt, a soon-to-be mom, is a complex and mysterious person. Her character is so elusive that she can’t...

In the wake of a heavy rainstorm, a fifty-yard sinkhole opens up beneath Lake Windsor Middle School, taking a large part of the school with it. Fortunately, no one is killed or seriously injured,...

Both Lydia Davis's “The Caterpillar” and David Foster Wallace's “Incarnations of Burned Children” move readers' emotions through accounts of the trials and sufferings of small, helpless creatures....

In Kate Chopin's 1892 short story "Ripe Figs," very little is made explicit about the two characters, Babette and Maman-Nainaine. The term "Maman-Nainaine" translates to grandmother, but Chopin...

According to Du Bois, the history of the Black man in America has always been one of "strife," largely driven by the impossible dream of merging the two halves of his being—the Black half and the...

At an elementary level, “Of the Coming of John” is a short story in W. E. B. Du Bois’s classic work of literature The Souls of Black Folk. It is the only work of fiction in the collection; the rest...

It’s interesting that the misunderstanding of the two lines is attributed to the personal condition of the poet. It might be useful to engage in a close reading of the lines, put the afflictions of...

In Du Bois's view, the true importance of universities should be that the university seeks to help the student "know the end and aim" of life. The point of a university should not be simply to...

Du Bois did not coin the phrase "the Talented Tenth," but he uses it here in the same sense in which he used it in his 1903 essay of the same name. The Talented Tenth is a phrase which refers to...

Du Bois makes several references to the "headless host" throughout this book. He does not elaborate on what exactly he means, but his suggestion that Booker T. Washington was a "Joshua" called to...

There can be no doubt that Grenouille, the antihero of Suskind's Perfume: The Story of a Murderer, is a thoroughly evil man by anyone's standards. A soulless serial killer tagged as an abomination...

One of the central ideas of W. E. B. Du Bois's text is the "doubleness" of being African American. Du Bois describes this doubleness as a great challenge: a Black American is both Black and an...

When W. E. B. Du Bois writes in this paragraph about the underlying principles of "the great republic," he is discussing the fact that the so-called "Negro Problem" poses a test and a challenge to...

Steinbeck primarily uses dialogue to communicate Curley's wife's ambition. He sets up a scene in which Lennie is alone in the barn with the young wife. Lennie is the perfect audience because he...

In this first chapter, Du Bois lays out the broad outlines of what he says he will discuss in detail in later chapters. His goal is to lay out the "striving in the souls of black folk" so that...

A strong argument can be made that the groundwork of the 1960s was established in the 1950s. For a few years after the end of World War II, probably to roughly around 1950, the "old order" held,...

No one actually discovers Euclio's pot of gold in its first hiding place in Plautus's play The Pot of God. The housekeeper never knows the gold is there; she thinks the house is merely full of...

Writing is hard work, and it is a skill that needs to be developed and practiced. More often than not, good writers are good because they practice using their writing skills a lot. Soccer players...

This is an interesting speculative question. Benjamin Franklin died in 1790. He had been writing his autobiography for several years before his death, but the narrative breaks off in 1757. If we...

In the brief poem "Process (2)," the literary devices employed include imagery, alliteration, simile, personification, and parallelism. Using these devices helps the author express the theme of...

"Poem On His Birthday" is a poem of twelve stanzas with nine lines apiece. Thomas is writing to commemorate his thirty-fifth birthday. At the beginning of the poem, Thomas describes the view from...

Most people understandably don't think about death all that much. Frankly, it's all rather depressing. Even when we do think of death, we regard it with a profound sense of dread and foreboding....

The prefaces to William Wells Brown's novel Clotel; or, The President's Daughter and to the slave narratives of Olaudah Equiano, Frederick Douglass, and Harriet Jacobs all express a particular set...

Byron's lips become stuck to the car mirror on an extremely cold day. He is leaning over the outside mirror of the car, looking at himself from very close. While he is inspecting his reflection, he...

Before discussing how Alcibiades experiences love in a way that counters Socrates’s idea of love, perhaps it’d be best to clarify what Socrates thinks of love. In Symposium, Socrates’s concept of...

In the opening stanza, Thomas uses the image of "driftwood" to evoke the idea that he is dissatisfied with the direction of his life. Reflecting upon his thirty-five years of life, the speaker...

One might think about how the opening scene presents the conflict between the government and the general population in William Shakespeare’s tragedy Julius Caesar Flavius and Marullus are a part of...

In William Blake's Songs of Innocence and Experience, the poet connects the lamb, the child, and Christ through symbolism. Let's look at some examples of this. In “Introduction,” the speaker meets...

Raina's immediate reaction to the Bulgarian victory over Serb forces at the Battle of Slivnitza is one of nationalistic rapture. She positively revels in this great national triumph in which her...