Life in Pompeii Essay Example for Free

Life in Pompeii Essay The amphitheatre was built in 70bc by the magistrates to provide entertainment for the people of Pompeii. The Pompeii amphitheatre is the oldest surviving amphitheatre in the Roman world. The capacity was 24000 and because seats were numbered, only the most important people of Pompeii would be allowed to sit at the front. The amphitheatre was mainly used for games that lasted a week and were funded by the magistrates. While entering the stadium, the people would salute the important dignitaries. Political Life: The amphitheatre was built by magistrates and events were fully funded by them aswell. Although built for the whole city to enjoy, only special people could sit at the front. Cultural Life: The amphitheatre was made from stone and included a parapet that separated the stand from the arena. The parapet was decorated with frescoes of gladiatorial combat which over time have been lost. Events that were primarily used at the amphitheatre were gladiatorial battles, hunts, and wild beast fights. The Basilica Economic and Political Life: The Basilica was a structure in the Forum where legal and business activities took place. It was built in-between 120bc and 78bc and was 24 by 55 metres in size. The basilica was originally a market but was changed in the first century to become the new law courts Cultural Life: The Basilica was covered by a large, double pitched tiled roof and the entrance had five doors with wooden shutters, the large hall was surrounded by twenty eight ionic columns, 11 metres in height. On the west side, stood a two story structure known as the Tribunal which was guarded by a statue of Augustus. The marbel panels on the side walls were decorated in the first style art and graffiti was found everywhere, not unusual in Pompeii. The Baths: Economic life: Just about everyone except slaves and the poor visited the baths as not only was it a place for cleaning but also a social hub. The baths would be opened at around midday and remained open well into the evening. Most people were accompanied by slaves who assisted them with their cleaning. Political life: Pompeii had four main baths, the forum baths, the stabian baths, the central baths and the amphitheatre baths. The stabian baths were the oldest and biggest baths in Pompeii and date as far back as the early 4th century. The baths has a Apodyterium, a frigidarium, a tepiderium, a caldarium, toilets and the stabian baths featured a swimming pool. Usually the baths were divided between men and women and when this wasn’t the case, men and women would attend the baths at different times. There was however mixed bathing in some places. Cultural Life: Apart from cleaning, at the baths people also enjoyed physical activity and sport at the palestra. There was also massage, music, poetry, reading and business contacts to be made. Graffiti and wall drawings also depicted sexual activity at the baths. Women wore modest clothing and men wore either trunks or bathed naked. The floor was made of square stones and supported brick columns and there was space between the tiles and walls because of the use of the special nipple tiles. The hot air generated from the furnace located at the back of the caldarium would flow up between the tiles and the wall, heating all the rooms. Via Del Abbondanza The Via Dell Abbondanza was the main street of Pompeii and the main business district of the city. The streetscape had a grid like pattern which although was popular in other roman times, was not precisely applied in Pompeii. The street contained stepping stones so that when it had been raining, people didn’t have to walk through sewage. There was enough room between stones for wheeled traffic aswell. Deep groove marks in the roads indicate to us that there was alot of wheeled traffic on the road. There were two different roads, the Decumani and the Cardines. The decumani ran east to west and the cardines ran north to south. On cross roads there were shrines called nymphaea which were water fountains. Via Stabiana: The Via Stabiana stretches from the Porta Stabia to the center of the city. Along this street, on the west side is the Gladiators’ Barracks and the Odeon. There were stepping stones to allow pedestrians to cross the street without stepping into whatever might be in the street itself. Carriages could still travel along the streets, their wheels passing between the stepping stones. On the east are a number of residences and shops, including a bakery with an oven which is seen as a hole in the wall with a large stone above it. Next door is a thermapolium with a counter containing four pottery jars sunk into the counter. Further along on the Via Stabiana is the Domus of Q. Octavius Romulus. Villa of the Papyri: The Villa of the papyri is a large residential complex situated on the slope of Vesuvius in Herculaneum. Judging from the size and value of the house, it can be said that the owner of the house was extremely wealthy. Unlike other ancient roman houses, it had its own water supply which in those days was extreme luxury. It was decorated with statues and columns of Greek influence. Praedia of Julia Felix: Julia Felix was an extremely wealthy woman from Pompeii who inherited her fortune from family. She owned a large estate which was decorated with floral motifs, statues and scenes of the Nile river aswell as a shrine to Isis the Egyptian goddess.

Setting and Its Effect on Understanding Young Goodman Brown Essay

Setting and its Effect on Understanding Young Goodman Brown   Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Every tale ever told shares similar formal elements. All of these formal elements have equally important consequence on a story. The setting of a story has direct correlations to the way that the reader consumes the meaning of the story. The setting in Young Goodman Brown allows its author, Nathaniel Hawthorne, to leave the ending ambiguous, without closure. The reader is constantly expected to decide for themselves truth. Literal interpretation, widely accepted after its initial publication, respected the story as a puritan fable. The message of which: Without faith in God you are defenseless against the evils of the world. This paper is written with the understanding that Young Goodman Brown left his faith at home and ventured to meet the devil in the godless wild. The devil has earned a reputation of being the worst of all tricksters. On the worst night of the year, along the scariest path outside of the birthplace of American witches, Young Goodman Brown met the devil and the devil played a terrible trick on him, or did he? Whether this apparition was a dream or a reality, the devil cursed Young Goodman Brown with a life long distrust of all those around him for his troubles. The setting of Young Goodman Brown is essential in achieving the uncertainty of actual events regarding the end of the story.   Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  If we believe that God above is the all powerful goo...

Peopod

CASE: III Peapod Online Grocery—2003 The online grocery turned out to be a lot tougher than analysts thought a few years ago. Many of the early online grocers, including Webvan, ShopLink, StreamLine, Kosmom, Homeruns, and PDQuick, went bankrupt and out of business. At one time, Webvan had 46 percent of the online grocery business, but it still wasn’t profitable enough to survive. The new business model for online grocers is to be part of an existing brick-and-mortar chain. Large grocery chains, like Safeway and Albertson’s, are experiencing sales growth in their online business but have yet to turn a profit.Jupiter Research estimates that online grocery sales will be over $5 billion by 2007, about 1 percent of all grocery sales, while it expects more than 5 percent of all retail sales to be online by then. A few years ago, optimistic analysts estimated online grocery sales would be 10 to 20 times that by 2005, but it didn’t work out that way. One of the fe w online grocers to survive in 2003 is Peapod, the first online grocer, started by brothers Andrew and Thomas Parkinson in 1990.However, even Peapod was failing until 2001 when Dutch grocery giant Royal Ahold purchased controlling interest in the company for $73 million. Peapod operates in five markets, mainly by closely affiliating itself with Ahold-owned grocery chains. Peapod by Giant is in the Washington, DC, area, while Peapod by Stop and Shop runs in Boston, New York, and Connecticut. The exception is Chicago, where Peapod operates without an affiliation with a local grocery chain. Peapod executives claim the company is growing by 25 percent annually and has 130,000 customers, and all of its markets except Connecticut are profitable.Average order size is up to $143 from $106 three years earlier. The online grocery business seemed like a sure winner in the 1990s. Dual-income families strapped for time could simply go online to do their grocery shopping. They has about the same choices of products that they would have had if they went to a brick-and-mortar grocery, about 20,000 SKUs (stockkeeping units). They could browse the â€Å"aisles† on their home computers and place orders via computer, fax or telephone. The orders were filled at ffiliated stores and delivered to their homes in a 90-minute window, saving them time and effort and simplifying their daily lives. For all this convenience, consumers were willing to pay a monthly fee and a fee per order for packaging, shipping, and delivery. Since most of the products purchased were well-known branded items, consumer faced little risk in buying their traditional foodstuffs. Even perishables like produce and meat could be counted on to be high quality, and if consumers were concerned, they could make a quick trip to a brick-and-mortar grocery for these selections.However, while all of this sounded good, most consumers didn’t change their grocery shopping habits to take advantage of the online alternative. Currently analysts do not expect the online grocery industry to take off in the near future, if ever. Miles Cook of Bain & Company estimates that only 8 to 10 percent of U. S. consumers will find ordering groceries online appealing, but only about 1 percent will ever do so. He concludes: â€Å"This is going to remain a niche offering in a few markets. It’s not going to be a national mainstream offering. Jupiter Media Metrix analyst Ken Cassar concludes that â€Å"The moral of the story is that the ability to build a better mousetrap must be measured against consumers’ willingness to buy it. † Question: 1. What behaviors are involved in online grocery shopping? How does online shopping compare with traditional shopping in terms of behavioral effort? 2. What types of consumers are likely to value online grocery shopping from Peapod? 3. Overall, what do you think about the idea of online grocery shopping? How does it compare with simply eating in res taurants and avoiding grocery shopping and cooking altogether?

The Granger Laws and the Granger Movement

The Granger laws were a group of laws enacted by states off Minnesota, Iowa, Wisconsin, and Illinois in the late 1860s and early 1870s intended to regulate rapidly rising crop transport and storage fees railroads and grain elevator companies charged farmers. Passage of the Granger laws was promoted by the Granger Movement, a group of farmers belonging to the National Grange of the Order of Patrons of Husbandry. As the source of extreme aggravation to the powerful railroad monopolies, the Granger Laws led to several important U.S. Supreme Court cases, highlighted by Munn v. Illinois and Wabash v. Illinois. The legacy of the Granger Movement remains alive today in the form of the National Grange organization.   Key Takeaways: Granger Laws The Granger laws were state laws passed in the late 1860s and early 1870s regulating the fees grain elevator companies and railroads charged farmers to store and transport their crops.Granger laws were enacted in the states of Minnesota, Iowa, Wisconsin, and Illinois.Support for the Granger laws came from farmers belonging to the National Grange of the Order of Patrons of Husbandry.Supreme Court challenges to the Granger laws led to the enactment of the Interstate Commerce Act of 1887.Today, the National Grange remains a vital part of life in American farming communities. The Granger movement, the Granger Laws, and the modern Grange stand as evidence of the great importance America’s leaders have historically placed on farming. â€Å"I think our governments will remain virtuous for many centuries; as long as they are chiefly agricultural.† – Thomas Jefferson Colonial Americans used word â€Å"grange† as they had in England to refer to a farmhouse and its associated outbuildings. The term itself comes from the Latin word for grain, grÄ num. In the British Isles, farmers were often referred to as â€Å"grangers.† The Granger Movement: The Grange is Born The Granger movement was a coalition of American farmers mainly in Midwestern and Southern states that worked to increase farming profits in the years following the American Civil War. The Civil War had not been kind to farmers. The few that had managed to buy land and machinery had gone deeply in debt to do so. Railroads, which had become regional monopolies, were privately owned and entirely unregulated. As a result, the railroads were free to charge farmers excessive fares to transport their crops to market. Vanishing income along with the human tragedies of the war among farming families had left much of American agriculture in a dismal state of disarray. In 1866, President Andrew Johnson sent U.S. Department of Agriculture official Oliver Hudson Kelley to assess the postwar condition of agriculture in the South. Shocked by what he found, Kelley in 1867 founded the National Grange of the Order of Patrons of Husbandry; an organization he hoped would unite Southern and Northern farmers in a cooperative effort to modernize farming practices. In 1868, the nation’s first Grange, Grange No. 1, was founded in Fredonia, New York. While first established mainly for educational and social purposes, the local granges also served as political forums through which farmers protested the constantly increasing prices for transporting and storing their products. The granges succeeded in reducing some of their costs through the construction of cooperative regional crop storage facilities as well as grain elevators, silos, and mills. However, cutting transportation costs would require legislation regulating the massive railroad industry conglomerates; legislation that became known as the â€Å"Granger laws.† The Granger Laws Since the U.S. Congress would not enact federal antitrust laws until 1890, the Granger movement had to look to their state legislatures for relief from the pricing practices of the railroad and grain storage companies. In 1871, due largely to an intense lobbying effort organized by local granges, the state of Illinois enacted a law regulating railroads and grain storage companies by setting maximum rates they could charge farmers for their services. The states of Minnesota, Wisconsin, and Iowa soon passed similar laws. Fearing a loss in profits and power, the railroads and grain storage companies challenged the Granger laws in court. The so-called â€Å"Granger cases† eventually reached the U.S. Supreme Court in 1877. The court’s decisions in these cases set legal precedents that would forever change U.S. business and industrial practices. Munn v. Illinois In 1877, Munn and Scott, a Chicago-based grain storage company, was found guilty of violating the Illinois Granger law. Munn and Scott appealed the conviction claiming the state’s Granger law was an unconstitutional seizure of its property without due process of law in violation of the Fourteenth Amendment. After the Illinois Supreme Court upheld the Granger law, the case of Munn v. Illinois was appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court. In a 7-2 decision written by Chief Justice Morrison Remick Waite, the Supreme Court ruled that businesses serving the public interest, such as those that store or transport food crops, could be regulated by the government. In his opinion, Justice Waite wrote that government regulation of private business is right and proper â€Å"when such regulation becomes necessary for the public good.† Through this ruling, the case of Munn v. Illinois set an important precedent that essentially created the foundation for the modern federal regulatory process. Wabash v. Illinois and the Interstate Commerce Act Almost a decade after Munn v. Illinois the Supreme Court would severely limit the rights of the states to control interstate commerce through its ruling in the 1886 case of Wabash, St. Louis Pacific Railway Company v. Illinois. In the so-called â€Å"Wabash Case,† the Supreme Court found Illinois’ Granger law as it applied to the railroads to be unconstitutional since it sought to control interstate commerce, a power reserved to the federal government by the Tenth Amendment. In response to the Wabash Case, Congress enacted the Interstate Commerce Act of 1887. Under the act, the railroads became the first American industry subject to federal regulations and were required to inform the federal government of their rates. In addition, the act banned the railroads from charging different haul rates based on distance. To enforce the new regulations, the act also created the now-defunct Interstate Commerce Commission, the first independent government agency. Wisconsin’s Ill-Fated Potter Law Of all the Granger laws enacted, Wisconsin’s â€Å"Potter Law† was by far the most radical. While the Granger laws of Illinois, Iowa, and Minnesota assigned the regulation of railroad fares and grain storage prices to independent administrative commissions, Wisconsin’s Potter Law empowered the state legislature itself to set those prices. The law resulted in a state-sanctioned system of price fixing which allowed little if any profits for the railroads. Seeing no profits in doing so, the railroads stopped building new routes or extending existing tracks. The lack of railroad construction sent Wisconsin’s economy into a depression forcing the state legislature to repeal the Potter Law in 1867. The Modern Grange Today the National Grange remains an influential force in American agriculture and a vital element in community life. Now, as in 1867, the Grange advocates for the causes of farmers in areas including global free trade and domestic farm policy.  Ã¢â‚¬Ëœ According to its mission statement, the Grange works through fellowship, service, and legislation to provide individuals and families with opportunities to develop to their highest potential in order to build stronger communities and states, as well as a stronger nation.   Headquartered in Washington, D.C., the Grange is a non-partisan organization that supports only policy and legislation, never political parties or individual candidates. While originally founded to serve  farmers and agricultural interests, the modern Grange advocates for a wide variety of issues, and its membership is open to anyone. â€Å"Members come from all over -- small towns, large cities, farmhouses, and penthouses,† states the Grange. With organizations in more than 2,100 communities in 36 states, local Grange Halls continue to serve as vital centers of rural life for many farming communities. Sources and Further Reference â€Å"The Granger Laws.† American History. From Revolution to Reconstruction and Beyond.Boden, Robert F. â€Å".†Railroads and the Granger Laws Marquette Law Review 54, no. 2 (1971).â€Å"Munn v. Illinois (1877): An Important Granger Case.† United States History.â€Å"The Supreme Court Strikes Down Railroad Regulation.† George Mason University. History Matters.Detrick, Charles R. â€Å",†The Effects of the Granger Acts Journal of Political Economy 11, no. 2 (1903).