How has immigration affected the culture of America?

The United States is known as a nation of immigrants and
as a melting pot.  The fact that it is known in these ways shows us how immigration has
affected US culture.

From immigrants, we have gotten many
things.  The impact of these immigrants can be seen in things that are important and
things that are relatively trivial.  On the trivial side, we have a wide variety of
foods in the US that have come from the various ethnic groups that have immigrated to
the US.  On the more important side, we have an identity as a nation that welcomes
people of all types.  We have a culture that includes people based not on where they
comes from but on the extent to which they want to
belong.

Immigration has made the United States into a
melting pot of foods, names, looks, and ideas.

Comment on the theme of fantasy versus reality in John Synge's play, The Playboy of the Western World.

This theme is closely related to those of myth making and
imagination. Synge says in the Preface to The Playboy of the Western
World, "In Ireland ... we have a popular imagination that is fiery and
magnificent, and tender ...." It is this imagination that undergirds considerations of
fantasy and reality. Myth making depends upon imagination and thus inevitably causes a
disjunction with reality.

In the play the creation of contemporary
myth around Christy explodes as the villagers' imaginations fill in the missing details
of his story, then turn the skeleton of his confession into an epic with Christy as the
hero cast in a Byronic type.

readability="15">

JIMMY -
Bravery's a treasure in a
lonesome place, and a lad would kill his father, I'm thinking, would face a foxy divil
with a pitchpike on the flags of hell.

PEGEEN -
It's the
truth they're saying, and if I'd that lad in the house, I wouldn't be fearing the loosed
kharki cut-throats, or the walking
dead.

When Mr. Mahon storms
onto the scene to hunt down his son, reality clashes forcefully with the myth built from
imagination. Nonetheless, the villagers continue in the confines of imagination by
creating anti-myths as they prepare to cut Christy's life off for his unspeakable deed
(of thinking he killed his father--twice ...).

In the end, Christy
appropriates the myth as his own even while the villagers reject it. Thus he outlines a
new reality for himself with a self-composed new myth as its bedrock, thereby creating
the ultimate clash of fantasy versus reality in which fantasy ironically inspires
reality.

readability="16">

CHRISTY -
You're blowing for to
torture me (His voice rising and growing stronger.) That's your kind, is it? Then let
the lot of you be wary, for, if I've to face the gallows, I'll have a gay march down, I
tell you, and shed the blood of some of you before I die.

[...]
CHRISTY -
Ten thousand blessings upon all that's
here, for you've turned me a likely gaffer in the end of all, the way I'll go romancing
through a romping lifetime from this hour to the dawning of the judgment day. [He goes
out.]

Explain the doctrine of eternal return.

This is going to be difficult.  The doctrine of eternal
return essentially configures time in a cyclical pattern and not a linear one.  In this
light, the life we lead, we end up leading repeatedly.  If time and space are indeed
infinite, then the implication here would be that there would invariably be repeating
patterns to existence and consciousness.  This means that we, as human beings, are not
necessarily living a life that is completely and absolutely authentic.  Rather, figments
and fragments of it have been repeated as part of a vast time/ space cosmology.  This
notion is something that is a part of Hinduism, but with a direction towards the
advancement of the spirit.  Nietzsche really honed in on eternal return in his work. 
From an intellectual standpoint, he argued that eternal return means that all ideas are
borne out of something else.  There can really not be something as a "pure" thought or
something that has not come from something else.  In the idea of consciousness, the
challenge is understanding that we, as human beings, are part of a cyclical pattern of
life of being in the world and part of this is repeating.  Eternal return is a concept
that Nietzsche feels adds weight to our existence, pinning us down and making us
recognize an "unbearable burden."  If you are interested in a literary exploration of
this, consider Kundera's The Unbearable Lightness of
Being.

What are the key similarities and differences between Black Americans' social status in these two time periods (1860s vs. 1960s)?

I think that one of the major similaritiesies between the
lives of African- Americans in both post- Civil War America and Civil Rights America was
the basic question of how they shall live in America.  Both periods featured intense
amounts of questioning as to what path shall be taken.  In both settings, there might
have been a state of theoretical freedom, as granted by the Constitution.  Yet, there
was little in way of actual freedom.  For African- Americans after the Civil War, the
abolition of slavery in the 13th Amendment, guarantees of citizenship in the 14th, and
voting rights in the 15th did not immediately translate to full acceptance in American
society.  In much the same way, there was a struggle to fully grasp how African-
Americans would be able to possess full immersion in the American Dream in the 1960s,
the point where questions had begun to percolate to the surface in the demands of
change.  Due to the wonderment of what to do and how to proceed in American life, there
were African- American leaders in both periods that became instrumental in articulating
the path that people of color needed to taken.  In the post- Civil War America, men like
Booker T. Washington and W.E.B. DuBois helped to articulate this vision, and in the
Civil Rights period, Dr. King and Malcolm X also helped to forge this path for people of
color.  In both settings, the demand for change and need to be heard were common
threads.

How would you compare the politics of Gilded Age with present-day politics?

The main aspect of Gilded Age politics that people focus
on today is the corruption that seemed to be prevalent in the political system.  This
was a time when presidential administrations were wracked with scandals like the Credit
Mobilier scandal.  It was said that big businesses like the railroads "owned" US
Senators.  The government, it seemed, was run for the benefit of big
businesses.

The question then is whether politics today are
like this.  Of course, there are many who would argue that government does work only for
the rich.  However, the government today (inefficient and riddled with problems though
it is) is much more transparent and honest than it was in those days.  There have been
presidential scandals, of course, but nothing along the lines of the scandals of the
Gilded Age.  Senators cannot possibly be bought in the same way they once could since
any such overt bribery would quickly be brought to light by the
media.

So, while we have many justified complaints about
our government today, it is nowhere near as corrupt as the government was during the
Gilded Age.

Does "A Poison Tree" by William Blake suggest that because people enjoy being angry they tend to want to nourish their hatred rather than overcome...

This is a very subjective question which requires a
subjective answer. What this means is that every reader interprets a text, especially
poetry, in different ways.

As for the poem "A Poison Tree",
one could textually justify that anger is easier to nourish than
overcome.

This theology is compounded by the image of the
tree. It could remind one of the Biblical saying from Luke
6:43:

No good
tree bears bad fruit, nor does a bad tree bear good
fruit.

Therefore, a tree
rooted in wrath will bear nothing but wrath. Regardless of how adamant a person is,
wrath is something which can become so deep-seeded that a simple 'watering' of fears
will not insure that wrath will simply go away.

Therefore,
the fact that the speaker is glad to see his foe dead at the base of the tree speaks to
the fact that wrath is more deeply rooted in man than one could
imagine.

i want the exact theme for the play'scilence!the court is in session'

"Exact" theme may not really exist, as theme is often
relative to the perception of the reader. Remember that theme is the controlling idea or
central idea of a story. That being said, I believe the major theme of Silence! The
Court Is In Session is degradation of women in Indian society. The author seems to have
a deep and thoughtful understanding of the vulnerability of Indian women. He uses a
female character to display the male dominance in Indian culture and the hypocrisy that
comes with it. He also touches on other topics of social awareness such as political
corruption and uppity, pretentious government organizations. All in all, though, the
theme of the play centers on male dominance over women and the struggles women must
quietly endure in Indian culture.