Becca Ballenger

You've asked a few questions here, so I'll focus on your first question: the factors behind the scramble for Africa and its effects on the African continent. European nations had been colonizing...

In the years after the Revolutionary War, architecture became a powerful way to express the enthusiastic and romantic ideas of a liberated republic. It makes sense that architecture became a...

The office of the Presidency was created by the U.S. Constitution, but many of the powers of the office were still undefined by the document. The early U.S. presidents were in the unique position...

The Progressive Era—and the reformers who populated it—sprung from dissatisfaction with the status quo of the Gilded Age. The laissez-faire, business-first attitude of many nineteenth-century...

Hubris: Hubris, generally described as a hero's excessive pride or self-confidence which leads him to his downfall, is a central theme of the Oresteia. It is best exemplified in the character of...

Neoclassicism, as its name implies, drew on classical concepts to create a new framework for arts and culture. Using Aristotle as their guide, neoclassicists established a system to determine what...

Herbert Hoover, the thirty-first president, was only eight months into his first term when the stock market crashed in 1929. His failure to stabilize the nation in the following years ensured that...

The opening scene of An Inspector Calls creates the sense for the audience that they will be seeing a traditional British living room comedy. Sheila is described as speaking "gaily," or happily;...

Epic theatre, best demonstrated in the work of Bertolt Brecht, was already a pretty dramatic departure from traditional drama. Twentieth-century writers who followed Brecht, like Samuel Beckett,...

Napoleon's popularity as a military hero made it fairly easy for him to claim power in France in 1799. On declaring himself emperor, he immediately began to spread his influence, leading conquests...