History of Racism

Antiquity

Racism dates as far back as the mature period of 2600–1900 BCE during the Indus Valley Civilization, which centered mostly in the western part of the Indian subcontinent. According to the Indo-Aryan migrations theory, Indo-Aryans migrated from Central Asia to India sometime after the collapse of the Indus Valley Civilization. Following the discovery of the Indo-European languages in the 19th century, British historians put forth the Aryan invasion theory which argued that it was "Aryans" who established the caste system, an elitist form of social organization that (according to the British) separated the "light-skinned" Indo-Aryan conquerors from the "conquered dark-skinned" indigenous Dravidian tribes through enforcement of "racial endogamy". This claim was used by the British, defining themselves as "purely Aryan", to justify British Rule in India. Much of this was simply conjecture, fueled by British imperialism. This shows the practice of racial segregation during the Antiquity times.

Middle Ages and the Renaissance

Richard E. Nisbett, a professor of social psychology, has said that the question of racial superiority may go back at least a thousand years, to the time when the Umayyad Caliphate invaded Hispania, occupying most of the Iberian Peninsula for six centuries, where they founded the advanced civilization of Al-Andalus (711-1492). Al-Andalus coincided with La Convivencia, an era of religious tolerance, and with the Golden age of Jewish culture in Iberia (912, the rule of Abd-ar-Rahman III - 1066, Granada massacre). It was followed by a violent Reconquista under the Reyes Catolicos (Catholic Kings), Ferdinand V and Isabella I. The Catholic Spaniards then created the Cleanliness of blood policy. It was during this time in history that the Western concept of aristocratic "blue blood" emerged in a highly racial and implicitly white supremacist context, as author Robert Lacey explains:

It was the Spaniards who gave the world the notion that an aristocrat's blood is not red but blue. The Spanish nobility started taking shape around the ninth century in classic military fashion, occupying land as warriors on horseback. They were to continue the process for more than five hundred years, clawing back sections of the peninsula from its Moorish occupiers, and a nobleman demonstrated his pedigree by holding up his sword arm to display the filigree of blue-blooded veins beneath his pale skin--proof that his birth had not been contaminated by the dark-skinned enemy. Sangre azul, blue blood, was thus a euphemism for being a white man--Spain's own particular reminder that the refined footsteps of the aristocracy through history carry the rather less refined spoor of racism.


20th Century

Japan proposed racial equality at the Paris Peace Conference in 1919. A large majority supported the Japanese racial equality proposal, however a few countries’ strong oppositions declined it.
Burma, China, India and Japan held Greater East Asia Conference in 1943. The conference declared working for the abolition of racial discrimination. Imperial Japanese Army general Kiichiro Higuchi and colonel Norihiro Yasue saved 20,000 Jews from Germans genocide. Japanese diplomat Chiune Sugihara saved 6,000 Jews from Germans genocide. According to Herbert Bix, Racial discrimination against other Asians was habitual in Imperial Japan.
The Nazis considered Jews, Gypsies, Poles along with other Slavic people like the Russians, Ukrainians, Czechs and anyone else who was not an "Aryan" according to the contemporary Nazi race terminology to be subhuman (Untermensch). The Nazis reasoned that the Germans, being a super human (Übermenschlich) race, had a biological right to displace, eliminate and enslave inferiors. The Nazis killed approximately 6 million Jews during the Holocaust.
After the war, under the "Big Plan", Generalplan Ost foresaw the eventual expulsion of more than 50 million non-Germanized Slavs of Eastern Europe through forced migration, as well as some of the Balts, beyond the Ural Mountains and into Siberia. In their place, Germans would be settled in an extended "living space" (Lebensraum) of the 1000-Year Empire (Tausendjähriges Reich). Herbert Backe was one of the orchestrators of the Hunger Plan - the plan to starve tens of millions of Slavs in order to ensure steady food supplies for the German people and troops.

Heinrich Himmler speech to about 100 SS Group Leaders in Posen, occupied Poland, 1943:

"What happens to the Russians, what happens to the Czechs, is a matter of utter indifference to me... Whether the other peoples live in comfort or perish of hunger interests me only in so far as we need them as slaves for our culture; apart from that it does not interest me. Whether or not 10,000 Russian women collapse from exhaustion while digging a tank ditch interests me only in so far as the tank ditch is completed for Germany... We Germans, who are the only people in the world who have a decent attitude to animals, will also adopt a decent attitude to these human animals, but it is a crime against our own blood to worry about them and to bring them ideals... I shall speak to you here with all frankness of a very serious subject. We shall now discuss it absolutely openly among ourselves, nevertheless we shall never speak of it in public. I mean the evacuation of the Jews, the extermination of the Jewish race."

Mother Teresa

Mother Teresa (26 August 1910 – 5 September 1997) was an Albanian Roman Catholic nun with Indian citizenship who founded the Missionaries of Charity in Kolkata (Calcutta), India in 1950. For over 45 years she ministered to the poor, sick, orphaned, and dying, while guiding the Missionaries of Charity's expansion, first throughout India and then in other countries. Following her death she was beatified by Pope John Paul II and given the title Blessed Teresa of Calcutta.

By the 1970s she was internationally famed as a humanitarian and advocate for the poor and helpless, due in part to a documentary, and book, Something Beautiful for God by Malcolm Muggeridge. She won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1979 and India's highest civilian honour, the Bharat Ratna, in 1980 for her humanitarian work.

Mother Teresa's Missionaries of Charity continued to expand, and at the time of her death it was operating 610 missions in 123 countries, including hospices and homes for people with HIV/AIDS, leprosy and tuberculosis, soup kitchens, children's and family counselling programs, orphanages, and schools.

She has been praised by many individuals, governments and organizations; however, she has also faced a diverse range of criticism. These include objections by various individuals and groups, including Christopher Hitchens, Michael Parenti, Aroup Chatterjee, Vishva Hindu Parishad, against the proselytizing focus of her work including a strong stance against abortion, a belief in the spiritual goodness of poverty and alleged baptisms of the dying. Medical journals also criticised the standard of medical care in her hospices and concerns were raised about the opaque nature in which donated money was spent.

Braille system

The Braille system is a method that is widely used by blind people to read and write. Braille was devised in 1821 by Louis Braille, a blind Frenchman.

Each Braille character or cell is made up of six dot positions, arranged in a rectangle containing two columns of three dots each. A dot may be raised at any of the six positions to form sixty-four (26) permutations, including the arrangement in which no dots are raised. For reference purposes, a particular permutation may be described by naming the positions where dots are raised, the positions being universally numbered 1 to 3, from top to bottom, on the left, and 4 to 6, from top to bottom, on the right. The lines of horizontal Braille text are separated by a space, much like visible printed text, so that the dots of one line can be differentiated from the Braille text above and below. Punctuation is represented by its own unique set of characters.

The Braille system was based on a method of communication originally developed by Charles Barbier in response to Napoleon's demand for a code that soldiers could use to communicate silently and without light at night called night writing. Barbier's system was too complex for soldiers to learn, and was rejected by the military. In 1821 he visited the National Institute for the Blind in Paris, France, where he met Louis Braille.

Braille identified the major failing of the code, which was that the human finger could not encompass the whole symbol without moving, and so could not move rapidly from one symbol to another. His modification was to use a 6 dot cell — the Braille system — which revolutionized written communication for the blind.

Music in China

Traditional Music
Traditional music in China is played on solo instruments or in small ensembles of plucked and bowed stringed instruments, flutes, and various cymbals, gongs, and drums. The scale is pentatonic. Bamboo pipes and qin are among the oldest known musical instruments from China; instruments are traditionally divided into categories based on their material of composition: animal skins, gourd, bamboo, wood, silk, earth/clay, metal and stone. Chinese orchestras traditionally consist of bowed strings, woodwinds,plucked strings and percussion.

Instruments
· Woodwind and percussion
sheng, paigu, gong, paixiao, guan, bells, cymbals
· Bowed strings
erhu, zhonghu, dahu, banhu, jinghu, gaohu, gehu, yehu, cizhonghu, diyingehu, leiqn
· Plucked and struck strings
guqin, sanxian, yangqin, guzheng, ruan, konghou, liuqin, pipa, zhu

Chinese vocal music has traditionally been sung in a thin, non resonant voice or in falsetto and is usually solo rather than choral. All traditional Chinese music is melodic rather than harmonic. Chinese vocal music probably developed from sung poems and verses with music. Instrumental pieces played on an erhu or dizi are popular, and are often available outside of China, but the pipa and zheng music, which are more traditional, are more popular in China itself. The qin is perhaps the most revered instrument in China, even though very few people know what it is or seen and heard one being played. The zheng, a form of zither, is most popular in Henan, Chaozhou, Hakka and Shandong. The pipa, a kind of lute, believed to have been introduced from the Arabian Peninsula area during the 6th century and adopted to suit Chinese tastes, is most popular in Shanghai and surrounding areas.


Folk music
Han folk music thrives at weddings and funerals and usually includes a form of oboe called a suona and percussive ensembles called chuigushou. The music is diverse, sometimes jolly, sometimes sad and often based on Western pop music and TV theme songs. Ensembles consisting of mouth organs (sheng), shawms (suona), flutes (dizi) and percussion instruments (especially yunluo gongs) are popular in northern villages; their music is descended from the imperial temple music of Beijing, Xi'an, Wutai shan and Tianjin. Xi'an drum music consisting of wind and percussive instruments is popular around Xi'an, and has received some popularity outside China in a highly-commercialized form. Another important instrument is the sheng, pipes, which is an ancient instrument that is an ancestor of all Western free reed instruments, such as the accordion. Parades led by Western-type brass bands are common, often competing in volume with a shawm/chuigushou band.
Sizhu ensembles use flutes and bowed or plucked string instruments to make harmonious and melodious music that has become popular in the West among some listeners. These are popular in Nanjing and Hangzhou, as well as elsewhere along the southern Yangtze area. Sizhu has been secularized in cities but remains spiritual in rural areas.
Jiangnan Sizhu (silk and bamboo music from Jiangnan) is a style of instrumental music, often played by amateur musicians in teahouses in Shanghai, that has become widely known outside of its place of origin.Guangdong Music or Cantonese Music is instrumental music from Guangzhou and surrounding areas. It is based on Yueju (Cantonese Opera) music, together with new compositions from the 1920s onwards. Many pieces have influences from jazz and Western music, using syncopation and triple time. Famous Groups include Blacklist Studio.

Dance history in China

Dance is a sport and art form that generally refers to movement of the body, usually rhythmic and to music, used as a form of expression, social interaction or presented in a spiritual or performance setting.
The earliest forms of dance in China grew out of religious rituals and drunken masked dances- and courtship festivals and developed into a form of entertainment patronized by the court.
In ancient times, dance was regarded as kind of physical exercise that help harmonise the body and mind. It was incorporated into confucian rituals and military exercises.
In the Tang Dynasty dances and music styles from outside of China were incorporated into Chinese dance and Chinese styles were passed onto other parts of the world, particularly Korea and Japan. Hundreds of young men and women were trained in dance and music at a school called the Academy of the Pear Garden. Tang poets wrote of “the dance of the rainbow skirt and feathered jacket” and described how dancer used their long silk sleeves to accentuate their hand movements. This kind of sleeve dancing was also depicted in Buddhist cave art from this period. After the Tang dynasty the custom of foot binding began to take root. This was a severe blow for women dancers. It is difficult to walk, let alone dance with bound feet.
Dance was widely promoted and utilized for propaganda purposes in the 1950s. A typical dance troupe performed a Lotus Dance, a dance infused with Russian folk-style dance steps, a comical lion dance, a trick wrestling bout and a classical sword dance. Such troupes often served to draw a crowds that were then indoctrinated with some kind of Communist message. These troupes also traveled around the world and later incorporated elements of Cambodian, Burmese, Indonesian and Ethiopian dances.
Dance in the Cultural Revolution was labeled as "bourgeois and decadent" and discouraged. Ballet and Western-style dancing were singled out for particularly vitriolic condemnation. Instead people were entertained with “revolutionary ballets” like The Red Detachment of Women and The White Haired Girl, both put together under the supervision of Jiang Qing, Mao’s wife and Gang of Four member. Nixon was entertained with a performance of The Red Detachment of Women when he made his historic first trip to China. Chinese who grew up in the Cultural Revolution do not know how to dance because dancing then was mostly banned.

The Change of Women's Garments

In the Nineteenth Century, women had been expected to concern themselves only with domestic matters. They could not vote and had limited legal rights. Even so, women were idealized because they were thought to have a higher sense of morality than men. Victorian women's clothing reflected their place in society; although frequently beautiful, their dress was extremely constricting and confining. The woman's costume of the 1800s featured a pinching corset with whalebone or spring steel stays, tight bodice, long, heavy skirt, and gloves a size too small. When fully dressed, women completely covered their bodies and only their faces and hair showed under their hats. Victorian morality dictated that a woman should not show her "limbs," and even a glance of a woman's ankle was considered shocking.

Women's position in society was changing then, but very slowly. Both the bicycle and the automobile led to new courting styles and eventually to more freedom for women. High school and college enrolments by women increased during this time, and more young women entered the workplace although, for many, their working years were a prelude to marriage. Only a few women had careers. The modern short skirts and loose chemise dresses that slipped on so easily symbolized a change in the role of women. No longer bound in tight, boned corsets or hampered by long ground-sweeping skirts as they had been in Victorian times, women at last could work or play with ease.


By the turn of the century, clothing had begun to change only slightly. The Gibson Girl became a symbol of America's model woman. Idealized in the drawings of Charles Dana Gibson, the Gibson Girl possessed a beautiful face framed by a lovely hair style and often crowned with a wide-brimmed, elaborately decorated hat. She had a very peculiar silhouette because the type of corset worn at the time forced the figure into an unnatural bent position, sometime called the "Gibson bend."

This style continued for almost a decade until the new mode of a straight, upright figure, which Paul Poiret, a Parisian designer, introduced, became popular. Long skirts continued to be the norm until the mid-teen years when women raised their skirts to ankle length.
By the 1920s women's clothing had changed drastically and now featured chemise-style dresses with short skirts, light-weight fabrics, and short or no sleeves. In order to look good in the waistless chemise, which had a rectangular shape, women had to have boyish figures. As they had in previous decades, women used foundation garments to achieve the ideal silhouette so that they could wear the fashionable styles.

During the transition from the Victorian times of the 1890s to the modern times of the 1920s, women's increased interest in participating in sports influenced clothing styles for, even in sports, women had been hampered by clothing that restricted their movements. The bicycling craze of the 1890s had caused a grassroots movement among women cyclists to alter their clothing so that they could cycle more easily. This was the first sign that women meant to adjust their clothing to their lives rather than their lives to their clothing. Sportswear changed very slowly also, but by the 1920s it permitted the movement needed to swim, golf, play tennis or other sports.

From the 1850s, some women had been concerned with dress reform for reasons of physical comfort, ease in movement, and as a political statement. Even after the woman suffrage supporters decided to abandon the drive for dress reform, a few women continued to agitate for dress reform. Ironically, not long after the Nineteenth Amendment became law, the reformers' wishes came true; women's clothing styles reflected a new-found freedom, a change from Victorian to modern.

This shows the history of women’s clothing as well as how our footing with men changes along with the types of garments our outfits evolve into. This can be seen from in the past where men ruled over women, women’s outfits constrained women from doing “male” stuff.

Women Suffrage

Since ancient times, men have always been seen as a higher ranking being compared to women. The struggle to achieve equal rights for women is often thought to have begun, in the English-speaking world, with the publication of Mary Wollstonecraft's A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792).

During the 19th century, as male suffrage was gradually extended in many countries, women became increasingly active in the quest for their own suffrage. However, it was not until 1893, in New Zealand, did women achieve suffrage on the national level. Australia followed in 1902, but American, British, and Canadian women did not win the same rights until the end of World War I.

This shows the turning point for women to stand on equal footing with men.

Helen Keller, 1880-1968

There are many writers and teachers in the world today. However, how many of them are actually both blind and deaf?

Helen Keller could not see nor hear however, she was able to do more with her life then many people can. This achievements made by her has given other disabled people hope.

She was born on June Twenty-Seventh, Eighteen Eighty in a small town in Northern Alabama. She yearned to communicate with others and do what she wanted to do. Despite this, due to her handicaps, she could not explain herself, leading to her being very mentally frustrated.

Luckily, she had a teacher, Anne Sullivan to teach her self control and methods to communicate with other people. Helen Keller managed to learn not only one but many languages such as Latin, Greek, French and German. Due to her perseverance, she managed to break through and do what other disable people could not do, such as speaking like a normal person.

On June Twenty Eight, Nineteen Hundred and Four, Helen Keller became the first ever deaf and blind person to earn a Bachelor of Arts degree and also published many books about her life. In Nineteen Sixty Four, she was also awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation’s highest civilian award by President Lyndon Johnson.

From Helen Keller, we can learn that from this incident, family of disable people will not give up hope and can achieve great things if we give them the chance to. Thus, creating a milestone in history for the deaf and the blind people all around the world.

Amelia Earhart, 1897-1937

Flying is a very common thing nowadays. This can be seen through flying as the use of modern transport and can even be done by women. However, this could not have been the case should Amelia Earhart had not flown across the Atlantic Ocean, proving that women could do a man’s job. Which is in this scenario, piloting planes.

Amelia Earhart was one of America’s first Female pilots. She was born in the eighteen ninety-seven in the Middle Western state of Kansas. She was in fact, able to receive an education equal to a boy of that time. This is unlike the rest of the girls born then, who were just taught how to sit quietly and speak softly, not allowed to play rough activities such as climbing trees that though considered normal for boys, were not the norm for girls.

She was totally captivated by the art of flying, something that boys were stereotyped to do. However, she still learnt how to fly a plane.

On June Seventeen, Nineteen Twenty-Eight, a plane left the eastern province of Newfoundland, Canada. Both the pilot and engine expert were men and the passenger was Amelia Earhart. Upon landing in Wales Twenty hours and forty minutes later, it was the first time in history that a woman had crossed the Atlantic Ocean by air.

In the last years of the Nineteen Twenties, hundreds of record flights were made, even a few by women. However, no woman had yet flown across the Atlantic Ocean.

On May Twentieth, Nineteen Thirty-Two, Amelia Earhart took off from Newfoundland. She headed East in the plane. Though encountering some problems, after fifteen hours, she landed in Ireland. As such, she became the first woman to fly across the Atlantic Ocean alone. This proved that women could stand on the same or an even better level as men, thus making history.

Jews during WWII

By World War II, nearly all Jewish companies had either collapsed under financial pressure and declining profits, or had been forced to sell out to the Nazi-German government as part of the "Aryanization" policy inaugurated in 1937. As the war started, large massacres of Jews took place. Pogroms (racial riots) were also encouraged by the Nazis, especially early in the war before the larger mass killings began.

The first of these pogroms was Kristallnacht in Nazi Germany, often called Pogromnacht, or "night of broken glass," in which Jewish homes were ransacked in numerous German cities along with 11,000 Jewish shops, towns and villages,[1] as civilians and SA stormtroopers destroyed buildings with sledgehammers, leaving the streets covered in smashed windows — the origin of the name "Night of Broken Glass." Jews were beaten to death; 30,000 Jewish men were taken to concentration camps; and 1,668 synagogues ransacked with 267 set on fire. In the city of Lvov, Ukrainian nationalists organized two large pogroms in July, 1941, in which around 6,000 Jews were murdered.

In Lithuania, anti-Soviet partisan groups engaged in anti-Jewish pogroms on July 25 and 26, 1941, before Nazi forces even arrived, killing about 3,800 Jews and burning synagogues and Jewish shops. Perhaps the deadliest of these Holocaust-era pogroms was the Iaşi pogrom in Romania, in which as many as 14,000 Jews were killed by Romanian citizens, police, and military officials.

By December 1941, Adolf Hitler decided to completely exterminate European Jews. In January 1942, during the Wannsee conference, several Nazi leaders discussed the details of the "Final Solution of the Jewish question" (Endlösung der Judenfrage). Dr. Josef Bühler urged Reinhard Heydrich to proceed with the "Final Solution" in the General Government. They began to systematically deport Jewish populations from the ghettos and all occupied territories to the seven camps designated as Vernichtungslager, or extermination camps: Auschwitz, Belzec, Chelmno, Majdanek, Maly Trostenets, Sobibór and Treblinka II. Sebastian Haffner published the analysis in 1978 that Hitler from December 1941 accepted the failure of his goal to dominate Europe forever on his declaration of war against the United States, but that his withdrawal and apparent calm thereafter was sustained by the achievement of his second goal—the extermination of the Jews.

Even as the German Nazi war machine faltered in the last years of the war, precious military resources such as fuel, transport, munitions, soldiers, and industrial resources were still being heavily diverted away from the war and towards the death camps. By the end of the war, much of the Jewish population of Europe had been killed in the Holocaust. Poland, home of the largest Jewish community in the world before the war, had over 90% of its Jewish population, or about 3,000,000 Jews, murdered by the Nazis. Greece, Yugoslavia, Hungary, Lithuania, Bohemia, the Netherlands, Slovakia, and Latvia each had over 70% of their Jewish population killed.

Belgium, Romania, Luxembourg, Norway, and Estonia lost around half of their Jewish population, the Soviet Union lost over one third of its Jews, and even countries such as France and Italy each saw around a quarter of their Jewish population killed.

The invention of the internet

The Internet is a worldwide network of thousands of computers and computer networks. It is a public, voluntary, and cooperative effort between the connected institutions and is not owned or operated by any single organization. The Internet and Transmission Control Protocols were initially developed in 1973 by American computer scientist Vinton Cerf as part of a project sponsored by the United States Department of Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) and directed by American engineer Robert Kahn.

The Internet began as a computer network of ARPA (ARPAnet) that linked computer networks at several universities and research laboratories in the United States. The World Wide Web was developed in 1989 by English computer scientist Timothy Berners-Lee for the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN).

"The design of the Internet was done in 1973 and published in 1974. There ensued about 10 years of hard work, resulting in the roll out of Internet in 1983. Prior to that, a number of demonstrations were made of the technology - such as the first three-network interconnection demonstrated in November 1977 linking SATNET, PRNET and ARPANET in a path leading from Menlo Park, CA to University College London and back to USC/ISI in Marina del Rey, CA." . - Vinton Cerf explains the timing.

Internet, interconnection of computer networks that enables connected machines to communicate directly. The term popularly refers to a particular global interconnection of government, education, and business computer networks that is available to the public. There are also smaller internets, usually for the private use of a single organization, called intranets.
Internet technology is a primitive precursor of the Information Superhighway, a theoretical goal of computer communications to provide schools, libraries, businesses, and homes universal access to quality information that will educate, inform, and entertain. In early 1996, the Internet interconnected more than 25 million computers in over 180 countries and continues to grow at a dramatic rate.

Internets are formed by connecting local networks through special computers in each network known as gateways. Gateway interconnections are made through various communication paths, including telephone lines, optical fibers, and radio links. Additional networks can be added by linking to new gateways. Information to be delivered to a remote machine is tagged with the computerized address of that particular machine.

Different types of addressing formats are used by the various services provided by internets (see Internet address). One format is known as dotted decimal, for example: 123.45.67.89. Another format describes the name of the destination computer and other routing information, such as "machine.dept.univ.edu." The suffix at the end of the internet address designates the type of organization that owns the particular computer network, for example, educational institutions (.edu), military locations (.mil), government offices (.gov), and non-profit organizations (.org). Networks outside the United States use suffixes that indicate the country, for example (.ca) for Canada.

Once addressed, the information leaves its home network through a gateway. It is routed from gateway to gateway until it reaches the local network containing the destination machine. Internets have no central control, that is, no single computer directs the flow of information. This differentiates internets from other types of online computer services, such as CompuServe, America Online, and the Microsoft Network.

The Internet Protocol is the basic software used to control an internet. This protocol specifies how gateway machines route information from the sending computer to the recipient computer. Another protocol, Transmission Control Protocol, checks whether the information has arrived at the destination computer and, if not, causes the information to be resent.

Even though computer interaction is in its infancy, it has dramatically changed our world, bridging the barriers of time and distance, allowing people to share information and work together. Evolution toward the Information Superhighway will continue at an accelerating rate. Available content will grow rapidly, making it easier to find any information on the Internet. New applications will provide secure business transactions and new opportunities for commerce. New technologies will increase the speed of information transfer, allowing direct transfer of entertainment-on-demand. Broadcast television may be replaced by unicast, in which each home receives a signal especially tailored for what its residents want to see when they want to see it.

The September 11 Attack

An overview

The September 11 attacks (often referred to as September 11th or 9/11) were a series of coordinated suicide attacks by al-Qaeda upon the United States on September 11, 2001. On that morning, 19 al-Qaeda terrorists hijacked four commercial passenger jet airliners. The hijackers intentionally crashed two of the airliners into the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center in New York City, killing everyone on board and many others working in the buildings. Both buildings collapsed within two hours, destroying nearby buildings and damaging others. The hijackers crashed a third airliner into the Pentagon in Arlington, Virginia, just outside Washington, D.C. The fourth plane crashed into a field near Shanksville in rural Pennsylvania, after some of its passengers and flight crew attempted to retake control of the plane, which the hijackers had redirected toward Washington, D.C. There were no survivors from any of the flights.

2,976 victims and the 19 hijackers died in the attacks. The overwhelming majority of casualties were civilians, including nationals of over 90 countries. In addition, the death of at least one person from lung disease was ruled by a medical examiner to be a result of exposure to dust from the World Trade Center's collapse.

The United States responded to the attacks by launching a War on Terrorism, invading Afghanistan to depose the Taliban, who had harbored al-Qaeda terrorists, and enacting the USA PATRIOT Act. Many other countries also strengthened their anti-terrorism legislation and expanded law enforcement powers. Some American stock exchanges stayed closed for the rest of the week following the attack, and posted enormous losses upon reopening, especially in the airline and insurance industries. The destruction of billions of dollars worth of office space caused serious damage to the economy of Lower Manhattan.

The damage to the Pentagon was cleared and repaired within a year, and the Pentagon Memorial was built on the site. The rebuilding process has started on the World Trade Center site. In 2006 a new office tower was completed on the site of 7 World Trade Center. 1 World Trade Center is currently under construction at the site and, at 1,776 ft (541 m) upon completion in 2013, it will become one of the tallest buildings in North America. Three more towers were originally expected to be built between 2007 and 2012 on the site. Ground was broken for the Flight 93 National Memorial on November 8, 2009, and the first phase of construction is expected to be ready for the 10th anniversary of the attacks on September 11, 2011.

Economic aftermath

The attacks had a significant economic impact on the United States and world markets. The New York Stock Exchange (NYSE), the American Stock Exchange (AMEX), and NASDAQ did not open on September 11 and remained closed until September 17. When the stock markets reopened, the Dow Jones Industrial Average (DJIA) stock market index fell 684 points, or 7.1%, to 8921, a record-setting one-day point decline.
By the end of the week, the DJIA had fallen 1,369.7 points (14.3%), its then-largest one-week point drop in history, though later surpassed in 2008 during the global financial crisis. U.S. stocks lost $1.4 trillion in value for the week. This is equivalent to $1.69 trillion in present day terms.

Economist and Crisis Consultant Randall Bell was retained by the city and state of New York to compute the economic damages to The World Trade Center site. He writes in his book, Strategy 360, "The World Trade Center damages, estimated by the New York City Mayor's Office, were staggering: Clean up and stabilization of the WTC site - $9.0 billion; Repairing and replacing damaged infrastructure - $9.0 billion; Rebuilding the World Trade Center as smaller buildings - $6.7 billion; Repairing and restoring other damaged buildings - $5.3 billion; Lost rent of the destroyed buildings - $1.75 billion."

In New York City, about 430,000 job-months and $2.8 billion in wages were lost in the three months following the 9/11 attacks. The economic effects were mainly focused on the city's export economy sectors. The city's GDP was estimated to have declined by $27.3 billion for the last three months of 2001 and all of 2002. The Federal government provided $11.2 billion in immediate assistance to the Government of New York City in September 2001, and $10.5 billion in early 2002 for economic development and infrastructure needs.

The 9/11 attacks also hurt small businesses in Lower Manhattan near the World Trade Center, destroying or displacing about 18,000 of them. Assistance was provided by Small Business Administration loans and federal government Community Development Block Grants and Economic Injury Disaster Loans. Some 31.9 million square feet of Lower Manhattan office space was damaged or destroyed.

Many wondered whether these jobs would return, and the damaged tax base recover.[194] Studies of the economic effects of 9/11 show that the Manhattan office real-estate market and office employment were less affected than initially expected because of the financial services industry's need for face-to-face interaction.

North American air space was closed for several days after the attacks and air travel decreased upon its reopening, leading to nearly a 20% cutback in air travel capacity, and exacerbating financial problems in the struggling U.S. airline industry.

Health effects

The thousands of tons of toxic debris resulting from the collapse of the Twin Towers consisted of more than 2,500 contaminants, including known carcinogens. This has led to debilitating illnesses among rescue and recovery workers, which many claim to be directly linked to debris exposure. For example, NYPD Officer Frank Macri died of lung cancer that spread throughout his body on September 3, 2007; his family contends the cancer is the result of long hours on the site and they have filed for line-of-duty death benefits, which the city has yet to rule on.
Health effects have also extended to some residents, students, and office workers of Lower Manhattan and nearby Chinatown. Several deaths have been linked to the toxic dust caused by the World Trade Center's collapse and the victims' names will be included in the World Trade Center memorial. There is also scientific speculation that exposure to various toxic products in the air may have negative effects on fetal development. Due to this potential hazard, a notable children's environmental health center is currently analyzing the children whose mothers were pregnant during the WTC collapse, and were living or working near the World Trade Center towers.

The Great Depression

The Great Depression (1929-1939)

A worldwide depression struck countries with market economies at the end of the 1920s. Although the Great Depression was relatively mild in some countries, it was severe in others, particularly in the United States, where, at its nadir in 1933, 25 percent of all workers and 37 percent of all nonfarm workers were completely out of work. Some people starved; many others lost their farms and homes. Homeless vagabonds sneaked aboard the freight trains that crossed the nation. Dispossessed cotton farmers, the “Okies,” stuffed their possessions into dilapidated Model Ts and migrated to California in the false hope that the posters about plentiful jobs were true. Although the United States had experienced several depressions before the stock market crash on October 27, 1929, none had been as severe nor as long lasting before "Black Thursday" struck Wall Street. At first, economists and leaders thought this was a mild bump, perhaps merely a correction of the market, or in any case, no worse than the recession the nation suffered after World War I.

Numbers soon proved the optimists incorrect. The depression steadily worsened. By spring of 1933, when FDR took the oath of office, unemployment had risen from 8 to 15 million (roughly 1/3 of the non-farmer workforce) and the gross national product had decreased from $103.8 billion to $55.7 billion. Forty percent of the farms in Mississippi were on the auction block on FDR's inauguration day. Although the depression was world wide, no other country except Germany reached so high a percentage of unemployed. The poor were hit the hardest. By 1932, Harlem had an unemployment rate of 50 percent and property owned or managed by blacks fell from 30 percent to 5 percent in 1935. Farmers in the Midwest were doubly hit by economic downturns and the Dust Bowl. Schools, with budgets shrinking, shortened both the school day and the school year.

The breadth and depth of the crisis made it the Great Depression.
No one knew how best to respond to the crisis. The Great Depression is often called a “defining moment” in the twentieth-century history of the United States. Its most lasting effect was a transformation of the role of the federal government in the economy. The long contraction and painfully slow recovery led many in the American population to accept and even call for a vastly expanded role for government, though most businesses resented the growing federal control of their activities. The Great Depression is often called a “defining moment” in the twentieth-century history of the United States. Its most lasting effect was a transformation of the role of the federal government in the economy. The long contraction and painfully slow recovery led many in the American population to accept and even call for a vastly expanded role for government, though most businesses resented the growing federal control of their activities. President Hoover believed the dole would do more harm than good and that local governments and private charities should provide relief to the unemployed and homeless. By 1931, some states began to offer aid to local communities. FDR, then governor of New York, worked with Harry Hopkins and Frances Perkins to begin a direct work relief program. This helped only a very few. By 1932, only 1/4 of unemployed families received any relief. In 1932, only 1.5 percent of all government funds were spent on relief and averaged about $1.67 per citizen. Cities, which had to bear the brunt of the relief efforts, teetered on the edge of bankruptcy. By 1932, Cook County (Chicago) was firing firemen, police, and teachers (who had not been paid in 8 months). Breadlines and Hoovervilles (homeless encampments) appeared across the nation.

Those hurt the most were more stunned than angry. Many sank into despair and shame after they could not find jobs. The suicide rates increased from 14 to 17 per 100,000. Protest that did occur was local, not national: "farm holidays," neighbors of foreclosed farmers refusing to bid on farms at auction, neighbors moving evicted tenants' furniture back in, and local hunger marches.
Resistance to protest often turned violent. In 1932, four members of the Dearborn hunger march were shot and killed when 1,000 soldiers accompanied by tanks and machine guns evicted veterans living in the Bonus Army camp in Washington, D.C.

FDR, after assuming the presidency, promoted a wide variety of federally funded programs aimed at restoring the American economy, helping relieve the suffering of the unemployed, and reforming the system so that such a severe crisis could never happen again. However, while the New Deal did help restore the GNP to its 1929 level and did introduce basic banking and welfare reforms, FDR refused to run up the deficits that ending the depression required. Only when the federal government imposed rationing, recruited 6 million defense workers (including women and African Americans), drafted 6 million soldiers, and ran massive deficits to fight World War II did the Great Depression finally end.

It's a sugary story

Did you know that sugar, one of the most commonly used ingredient in most meals today plays an important role in history?

As quoted by Richard H. Robbins, in Global Problems and the Culture of Capitalism, (Allyn and Bacon, 1999), p.208, “The first sweetened cup of hot tea to be drunk by an English worker was a significant historical event, because it prefigured the transformation of an entire society, a total remaking of its economic and social basis. We must struggle to understand fully the consequences of that and kindred events for upon them was erected an entirely different conception of the relationship between producers and consumers, of the meaning of work, of the definition of self, of the nature of things.” The consumption of sugar and its history gives a great insight into various inter-related issues, such as economics, human rights, slavery, environmental issues, health, consumerism issues and so on. We also see a hint at the “hidden costs” and impacts to society.

Initially, sugar was a luxury item as around 1000 years ago, sugar was used in a variety of ways, such as: medicinal purposes (because it can be beneficial in limited quantities), as a preservative, as a spice and as a sweetener, of course. Yet up to the seventeenth century, it was an expensive luxury item. To be consumed by the masses, this luxury had to be turned into a necessity and be available in abundance to drive prices down.

As sugar was a lucrative trade in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. The growing of Spain and Portugal’s sugarcane was expanded into the Caribbean and parts of South America. From there, it would be shipped to places like Lisbon for refining. However, such benefits were also accompanied by detrimental effects. One such cost was slavery. The slave trade was a major factor in the expansion of the sugar industries. Coupled with the growing demand for and production of sugar created the plantation economy in the New World and was largely responsible for the expansion of the Atlantic slave trade in the sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. From 1701 to 1810 almost one million slaves were brought to Barbados and Jamaica to work the sugar plantations.

However, sugar was turned into a necessity as consumption rose tremendously than other basic food necessities such as bread, meat and dairy products. It became one of the most important ingredients in preparing meals in the past. Furthermore, an increased production of sugar led to a decrease in price. Hence, what was once confined to the upper classes was more widely affordable to the middle classes as well. (For a while, prices were still high due to tariffs and political influence of the powerful plantation owners etc.) Benefits of sugar were widely touted by various authorities and heavily promoted in many aspects of people’s lives. Moreover, it was used as a sweetener in other substances such as tea, coffee and cocoa. In addition, sugar’s reputation as a luxury good inspired the middle class to use it to emulate the wealthy. Sugar was a sign of status! As the price of sugar declined further, even the poorer classes were able to consume for this and the other reasons. Most importantly, government increases in purchase of sugar and sugar products led to further use as well. The capture of Jamaica from the French led to more sugar plantations being captured and creating rum rations for the British Navy.
On a side note, sugar has affected the environment in many disastrous ways - Forests must be cleared to plant sugar, wood or fossil fuel is needed in processing steps, waste products from processing affect the environment and parallel consumption of other items related to sugar, including coffee, tea, chocolate, etc all collectively put additional resource requirements on the environment.

Most importantly, sugar has greatly influenced our preferences for food. As an example, consider the following, about Coca Cola: “If the cultural, health and economic problems with Coke’s colonization of Latin America weren’t bad enough, it also has a labor record that puts even most other multinational companies to shame. In Guatemala and Colombia, there is strong evidence that the Coca-Cola company actively supported the murders of union activists by paramilitary members at bottling plants run by its subsidiaries and contractors over the years. In Mexico, El Salvador and other countries there have also been ample allegations of the company using paramilitary strength to prevent unionizing and keep employees in line.
In 2001, Human Rights Watch (HRW) and the United Auto Workers (UAW) filed a lawsuit against Coke for the murder of union activist Isidro Gil Segundo and an ongoing campaign of intimidation, terror, murder and paramilitary activity against union members and leaders. Across the board, Coke and its Latin American bottling partners, including Panamco and Bebidas y Alimentos, have waged vicious anti-union campaigns and been accused of rampant illegal labor practices, intimidation techniques, unfair firings and physical attacks.

Today, Coca-Cola plainly stands as an unvarnished symbol of neoliberalism and modern corporate mercantilism. It is, plainly said, a multinational corporation exploiting cheap labor and “emerging markets,” that employs an array of illegal and criminal business “strategies,” and utilizes powerful public relations, marketing and lobbying powers to avoid accountability and fatten the company’s profits just as its product fattens its consumers.” This was quoted by — Kari Lydersen, Sugar and Blood: Coke in Latin America, Lip Magazine, 28 May 2002.
Moreover, In 1978, the typical teenage boy in the United States drank about seven ounces of soda every day; today he drinks nearly three times that amount, deriving 9 percent of his daily caloric intake from soft drinks. Soda consumption among teenage girls has doubled within the same period, reaching an average of twelve ounces a day. A significant number of teenage boys are now drinking five or more cans of soda every day as claimed by Eric Schlosser, Fast Food Nation; The Dark Side of the All-American Meal.

As such, we see that a food industry is highly influenced by consumerism and that during this process, exploitation has continued. From slavery, it has moved to consumers and children (albeit in another form), while the environment continues to suffer.

HELLO? The invention of the TELEPHONE!

Alexander Graham Bell, a Scottish-born inventor, scientist, philanthropist and teacher of the deaf is the person most widely credited as the inventor of the electric telephone. On March 7th 1876 he became the first to receive a patent for this device, and at that time resided in Salem, Massachusetts.

Alexander Graham Bell conceived of the telephone at his summer home in Brantford, Ontario and physically created his first phone in Boston, Massachusetts (where, he said, it was 'born'). This was a result of his research into improving the telegraph system. Bell was experimenting into improving the telegraph system so that multiple messages could be sent at the same time (his theory of the 'harmonic telegraph' was based on the principle that several messages could be sent simultaneously along the same wire if the different telegraph signals each had a different pitch). However at the same time he began working on the novel idea that speech could be transmitted electronically, as he accidentally discovered that the sound of a spring being twanged could be heard over his harmonic telegraph system. Almost a year later in March 1876 Bell uttered the first famous words into the device to his assistant in the next room: "Mr. Watson, come here -I want to see you".

A young black man, Lewis Lattimer, was employed as a draftsman by the patent law firm that Alexander Graham Bell used, and contributed to Bell's patent drawings. Lattimer become a successful inventor in his own right.

As with many other important technological devices, several people often worked on and independently created the same, or similar devices in the same general time period -an example being the modern navigational quadrant or sextant. While Bell was the first to receive a patent for the telephone, several others preceded his research and credit for inventing the electric telephone remains in dispute.

Despite the claims of those defending Alexander Graham Bell, its been suggested that both Antonio Meucci and then Elisha Gray successfully invented telephones in the United States before Alexander Graham Bell did in 1876. Some of the others who performed pioneering experimental work with electrical voice transmissions over wires included Thomas Edison, Innocenzo Manzetti, Charles Bourseul and Johann Philipp Reis.

Ironically in 2001 the United States Congress passed a 'resolution' stating that given all the facts of the patent disputes between Gray and Bell, under no terms could Alexander Graham Bell have been awarded the patent for the telephone by the United States Patent and Trademark Office in 1876. However that Congressional resolution by itself served only as a declaration, and did not annul or modify the patent Bell received in 1876. The 2001 resolution was also subsequently followed by another legislative declaration upholding Bell's priority and his status as inventor of the telephone.

The person who first successfully 'patented' the telephone was indisputably Alexander Graham Bell, however given what we currently know, earlier inventors of 'telephone-like' devices may have been Meucci or even others before him.

Interestingly, the commercialization of Alexander Graham Bell's telephone was actually performed by several independent businesses which eventually created the 'Bell System' (and later AT&T), to which 'Alec', as he preferred to be called, participated very little in. Alexander Graham Bell, who went on to become an eminent scientist, inventor and humanitarian, considered the telephone to be an intrusion into his real work and refused to have one in his study.

Biography of Martin Luther King Jr.

Martin Luther King, Jr., (January 15, 1929 to April 4, 1968) was born Michael Luther King, Jr., but later had his name changed to Martin. His grandfather began the family's long tenure as pastors of the Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, serving from 1914 to 1931; his father has served from then until the present, and from 1960 until his death Martin Luther acted as co-pastor. Martin Luther attended segregated public schools in Georgia, graduating from high school at the age of fifteen; he received the B. A. degree in 1948 from Morehouse College, a distinguished Negro institution of Atlanta from which both his father and grandfather had graduated. After three years of theological study at Crozer Theological Seminary in Pennsylvania where he was elected president of a predominantly white senior class, he was awarded the B.D. in 1951. With a fellowship won at Crozer, he enrolled in graduate studies at Boston University, completing his residence for the doctorate in 1953 and receiving the degree in 1955. In Boston he met and married Coretta Scott, a young woman of uncommon intellectual and artistic attainments. Two sons and two daughters were born into the family.

In 1954, Martin Luther King became pastor of the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, Alabama. Always a strong worker for civil rights for members of his race, King was, by this time, a member of the executive committee of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, the leading organization of its kind in the nation. He was ready, then, early in December, 1955, to accept the leadership of the first great Negro nonviolent demonstration of contemporary times in the United States, the bus boycott described by Gunnar Jahn in his presentation speech in honor of the laureate. The boycott lasted 382 days. On December 21, 1956, after the Supreme Court of the United States had declared unconstitutional the laws requiring segregation on buses, Negroes and whites rode the buses as equals. During these days of boycott, King was arrested, his home was bombed, he was subjected to personal abuse, but at the same time he emerged as a Negro leader of the first rank.

In 1957 he was elected president of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, an organization formed to provide new leadership for the now burgeoning civil rights movement. The ideals for this organization he took from Christianity; its operational techniques from Gandhi. In the eleven-year period between 1957 and 1968, King traveled over six million miles and spoke over twenty-five hundred times, appearing wherever there was injustice, protest, and action; and meanwhile he wrote five books as well as numerous articles. In these years, he led a massive protest in Birmingham, Alabama, that caught the attention of the entire world, providing what he called a coalition of conscience. and inspiring his "Letter from a Birmingham Jail", a manifesto of the Negro revolution; he planned the drives in Alabama for the registration of Negroes as voters; he directed the peaceful march on Washington, D.C., of 250,000 people to whom he delivered his address, "l Have a Dream", he conferred with President John F. Kennedy and campaigned for President Lyndon B. Johnson; he was arrested upwards of twenty times and assaulted at least four times; he was awarded five honorary degrees; was named Man of the Year by Time magazine in 1963; and became not only the symbolic leader of American blacks but also a world figure.

At the age of thirty-five, Martin Luther King, Jr., was the youngest man to have received the Nobel Peace Prize. When notified of his selection, he announced that he would turn over the prize money of $54,123 to the furtherance of the civil rights movement.

On the evening of April 4, 1968, while standing on the balcony of his motel room in Memphis, Tennessee, where he was to lead a protest march in sympathy with striking garbage workers of that city, he was assassinated.

The History of English

The English language is the international language of commerce, science, and many other things. It is the language that give people of different origins to communicate and form ties with each other.

English is a West Germanic language that originated from the Anglo-Frisian dialects brought to Britain by Germanic invaders from various parts of what is now northwest Germany and the Netherlands. Initially, Old English was a diverse group of dialects, reflecting the varied origins of the Anglo-Saxon Kingdoms of England. One of these dialects, Late West Saxon, eventually came to dominate. The original Old English language was then influenced by two further waves of invasion: the first by speakers of the Scandinavian branch of the Germanic language family, who conquered and colonized parts of Britain in the 8th and 9th centuries; the second by the Normans in the 11th century, who spoke Old Norman and ultimately developed an English variety of this called Anglo-Norman. These two invasions caused English to become "mixed" to some degree.

Cohabitation with the Scandinavians resulted in a significant grammatical simplification and lexical enrichment of the Anglo-Frisian core of English; the later Norman occupation led to the grafting onto that Germanic core of a more elaborate layer of words from the Romance languages (Latin based languages). This Norman influence entered English largely through the courts and government. Thus, English developed into a "borrowing" language of great flexibility, resulting in an enormous and varied vocabulary.

Oil

As a fuel, oil was originally used as kerosene for lighting, replacing animal, vegetable and coal oils. It also came to be used in furnaces. Its biggest use, however, came with the development of the automobile. Today almost all forms of locomotion -- cars, trucks, buses, trains, ships and airplanes -- are fueled by oil, diesel or gasoline. Fuel oil has also been burned to produce electricity, although that has always been mostly coal's job.

Oil has been known and used since the most ancient times and has been mentioned by most ancient historians since the time of Herodotus. It was used chiefly as a liniment or medicine, not as a fuel. Today, most human activities depend on oil. Without oil, most technology would cease to function, pulling us back to the past. Although alternatives are being sourced for, we cannot deny the importance of oil, and therefore, the history of such an important factor in our lives.

The earliest known oil wells were drilled in China in 347 CE or earlier. They had depths of up to about 800 feet (240 m) and were drilled using bits attached to bamboo poles. The oil was burned to evaporate brine and produce salt. By the 10th century, extensive bamboo pipelines connected oil wells with salt springs. The ancient records of China and Japan are said to contain many allusions to the use of natural gas for lighting and heating.

The first streets of Baghdad were paved with tar, derived from petroleum that became accessible from natural fields in the region. In the 9th century, oil fields were exploited in the area around modern Baku, Azerbaijan, to produce naphtha. These fields were described by the Arab geographer Abu al-Hasan 'Alī al-Mas'ūdī in the 10th century, and by Marco Polo in the 13th century, who described the output of those wells as hundreds of shiploads. Petroleum was distilled by the Persian alchemist Muhammad ibn Zakarīya Rāzi (Rhazes) in the 9th century, producing chemicals such as kerosene in the alembic (al-ambiq), and which was mainly used for kerosene lamps. Arab and Persian chemists also distilled crude oil in order to produce flammable products for military purposes. Through Islamic Spain, distillation became available in Western Europe by the 12th century. It has also been present in Romania since the 13th century, being recorded as păcură.

The modern history of petroleum began in 19th century with refining kerosene from crude oil. While Russian Dubinin brothers purified kerosene on their factory (1823) directly from petroleum, in 1846 the process of refining kerosene from coal by Nova Scotian Abraham Pineo Gesner was discovered and only Ignacy Łukasiewicz improved Gesner's method to develop a means of refining kerosene from the more readily available "rock oil" seeps in 1852 and the first rock oil mine was built in Bóbrka, near Krosno in Galicia(Poland/Ukraine) in the following year. In 1854, Benjamin Silliman, a science professor at Yale University in New Haven, was the first American to fractionate petroleum by distillation. These discoveries rapidly spread around the world, and Meerzoeff built the first modern Russian refinery in the mature oil fields at Baku in 1861. At that time Baku produced about 90% of the world's oil.

The first commercial oil well in Romania was drilled in 1857, and the world's first oil refinery opened at Ploiesti, Romania being the first country in the world with a crude oil output officially recorded in international statistics, namely 275 tonnes.

Today, Saudi Arabia the world's most important oil producer where it accounts for nearly 13 percent of world output and 35 percent of total OPEC output in 1991. Unquestionably, Saudi Arabia's dominance of international crude oil markets is unchallenged. Although reluctant to play the role, Saudi Arabia has become the "swing producer," balancing international oil demand and supply. Therefore, within limits, Saudi oil production policies can have a profound impact on international prices. Since the early 1970s, the kingdom has occasionally used this dominance to influence oil prices, usually to further its objectives of sustaining long-term oil consumption and ensuring economic stability in the industrialized world.

An account of the E-mail

Computer engineer, Ray Tomlinson invented internet based email in late 1971. Under ARPAnet several major innovations occurred: email (or electronic mail), the ability to send simple messages to another person across the network (1971). Ray Tomlinson worked as a computer engineer for Bolt Beranek and Newman (BBN), the company hired by the United States Defense Department to build the first Internet in 1968.

Ray Tomlinson was experimenting with a popular program he wrote called SNDMSG that the ARPANET programmers and researchers were using on the network computers (Digital PDP-10s) to leave messages for each other. SNDMSG was a "local" electronic message program. You could only leave messages on the computer that you were using for other persons using that computer to read. Tomlinson used a file transfer protocol that he was working on called CYPNET to adapt the SNDMSG program so it could send electronic messages to any computer on the ARPANET network.

The @ Symbol
Ray Tomlinson chose the @ symbol to tell which user was "at" what computer. The @ goes inbetween the user's login name and the name of his/her host computer. Today, more than a billion people around the world type that @ sign every day

First Email
The first email was sent between two computers that were actually sitting besides each other. However, the ARPANET network was used as the connection between the two. The first email message was "QWERTYUIOP".

This has since revolutionised the way information is transmitted. With the advent of technology and globalisation, information needs to be transmitted faster in our fast-paced world. This method of transmitting information is used by more than a billion people world wide, and is not only restricted to computers. Smartphones and even MP3 players with wi-fi functions can access emails.

The Disney Story

Walter Elias "Walt" Disney (December 5, 1901 – December 15, 1966) was an American film producer, director, screenwriter, voice actor, animator, entrepreneur, entertainer, international icon and philanthropist. Disney is famous for his influence in the field of entertainment during the twentieth century. As the co-founder (with his brother Roy O. Disney) of Walt Disney Productions, Disney became one of the best-known motion picture producers in the world. The corporation he co-founded, now known as The Walt Disney Company, today has annual revenues of approximately U.S. $35 billion.

Disney is particularly noted for being a film producer and a popular showman, as well as an innovator in animation and theme park design. He and his staff created a number of the world's most famous fictional characters including Mickey Mouse. He received fifty-nine Academy Award nominations and won twenty-six Oscars, including a record four in one year, giving him more awards and nominations than any other individual. He also won seven Emmy Awards. He is the namesake for Disneyland and Walt Disney World Resort theme parks in the United States, Japan, France, and China.

He is famous for creating some of the world's most iconic cartoon characters such as Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck. Following the footsteps of Mickey Mouse series, a series of musical shorts titled, Silly Symphonies was released in 1929. The first of these was titled The Skeleton Dance and was entirely drawn and animated by Iwerks, who was also responsible for drawing the majority of cartoons released by Disney in 1928 and 1929. Although both series were successful, the Disney studio was not seeing its rightful share of profits from Pat Powers, and in 1930, Disney signed a new distribution deal with Columbia Pictures. The original basis of the cartoons were musical novelty, and Carl Stalling wrote the score for the first Silly Symphony cartoons as well.

Through Silly Symphonies, Disney would also create his most successful cartoon short of all time, The Three Little Pigs, in 1933. The cartoon ran in theaters for many months, and also featured the hit song that became the anthem of the Great Depression, "Who's Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf".

By the early 1960s, the Disney empire was a major success, and Walt Disney Productions had established itself as the world's leading producer of family entertainment. Walt Disney was the Head of Pageantry for the 1960 Winter Olympics.

After decades of pursuing, Disney finally procured the rights to P.L. Travers' books about a magical nanny. Mary Poppins, released in 1964, was the most successful Disney film of the 1960s and featured a memorable song score written by Disney favorites, the Sherman Brothers. The same year, Disney debuted a number of exhibits at the 1964 New York World's Fair, including Audio-Animatronic figures, all of which were later integrated into attractions at Disneyland and a new theme park project which was to be established on the East Coast.

The final productions in which Disney had an active role were the animated feature The Jungle Book and the live-action musical comedy The Happiest Millionaire, both released in 1967. Disney died of lung cancer on December 15, 1966, a few years prior to the opening of his Walt Disney World Resort dream project in Florida.

Traditional hand-drawn animation, with which Walt Disney started his company, was, for a time, no longer produced at the Walt Disney Animation Studios. After a stream of financially unsuccessful traditionally-animated features in the early 2000s, the two satellite studios in Paris and Orlando were closed, and the main studio in Burbank was converted to a computer animation production facility. In 2004, Disney released what was announced as their final "traditionally animated" feature film, Home on the Range. However, since the 2006 acquisition of Pixar, and the resulting rise of John Lasseter to Chief Creative Officer, that position has changed, and the upcoming 2009 film The Princess and the Frog will mark Disney's return to traditional hand-drawn animation.

Walt Disney was the inaugural recipient of a star on the Anaheim walk of stars. The star was awarded in honor of Disney's significant contributions to the city of Anaheim, California, specifically, Disneyland, which is now the Disneyland Resort. The star is located at the pedestrian entrance to the Disneyland Resort on Harbor Boulevard. Disney has two stars on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, one for motion pictures and the other for television.