Nopleon essays

Nopleon essays This essay will illustrate why Napoleon Bonaparte is regarded as one of the greatest military masterminds in the history of mankind. It will show the life of Napoleon from when he was a young boy, till he died in 1821. It will show how he deceived the French into giving him power, and how he used this power for his own interests. It will also reveal how he almost killed of an entire generation of French people, and once again prove that all good things must come to Napoleon Bonaparte was born on August 15, 1769 in Ajaccio on the island of Corsica. This was only a few months after France had annexed the island. He had 7 brothers and sisters, and his father was a lawyer whose family stemmed from the Florentine nobility. His original nationality was Cursican-Italian. In 1779 Napoleon went to school at Brienne in France. There he took a great interest in in history, especially in the lives of great ancient generals. Napoleon was often badly treated at Brienne because he was not as wealthy as his fellow classmates, and very short. He also did not speak French well, because Italian was spoken on Corsica where he grew up. He studied very hard so that he could do better then those who snubbed him. Napoleon attended the Ecole Military School in Paris in 1784 after receiving a scholarship. This is were he received his military training. He studied to be an artillery man and an officer. Napoleon finished his training and joined the French army when he was 16 years old. He was appointed to an artillery regiment , and commissioned as a lieutenant. Once again he was not well liked by his fellow officers because he was short, spoke with an Italian accent, and had little money. Napoleon spent little time with his regiment. He was more concerned with trying to free his home land of Corsica, witch had been taken with force by France. Soon after being commissioned his father died, and h...

How the Statue of Liberty Became a Symbol of Immigration

How the Statue of Liberty Became a Symbol of Immigration When the Statue of Liberty was dedicated on October 28, 1886, the ceremonial speeches had nothing to do with immigrants arriving in America. The sculptor who created the enormous statue, Fredric-Auguste Bartholdi, never intended the statue to evoke the idea of immigration. In a sense, he viewed his creation as something nearly opposite: as a symbol of liberty spreading outward from America. So how and why did the statue become an iconic symbol of immigration? The Statue is now always linked in the public mind with arriving immigrants thanks to the words of Emma Lazarus. Lady Liberty took on deeper meaning  because of the sonnet written in its honor, The New Colossus. Poet Emma Lazarus Was Asked to Write a Poem Before the Statue of Liberty was completed and shipped to the United States for assembly, a campaign was organized by newspaper publisher Joseph Pulitzer to raise funds to build the pedestal on Bedloe’s Island. Donations were very slow in coming, and in the early 1880s it appeared that the statue might never be assembled in New York. There were even rumors that another city, perhaps Boston, could wind up with the statue. Fundraising events were organized, one of which was an art show. The poet Emma Lazarus, who was known and respected in the artistic community in New York City, was asked to participate. Lazarus was a 34-year-old native New Yorker, the daughter of a wealthy Jewish family with roots going back to the colonial era in New York City. She had become very concerned about the plight of Jews being persecuted in a pogrom in Russia. Newly arrived Jewish refugees from Russia were being housed on Wards Island, in New York Citys East River. Lazarus had been visiting them, and had gotten involved with charitable organizations helping the destitute new arrivals get a start in their new country. The writer Constance Cary Harrison asked Lazarus to write a poem to help raise money for the Statue of Liberty pedestal fund. Lazarus, at first, was not interested in writing something on assignment. Emma Lazarus Applied Her Social Conscience Harrison later recalled that she encouraged Lazarus to change her mind by saying, â€Å"Think of that goddess standing on her pedestal down yonder in the bay, and holding her torch out to those Russian refugees of yours that you are so fond of visiting at Ward’s Island.† Lazarus reconsidered and wrote the sonnet, â€Å"The New Colossus.† The opening of the poem refers to the Colossus of Rhodes, an ancient statue of a Greek titan. But Lazarus then refers to the statue which â€Å"shall† stand as a â€Å"mighty woman with a torch† and the â€Å"Mother of Exiles.† Later in the sonnet are the lines which eventually became iconic: Give me your tired, your poor,Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,The wretched refuse of your teeming shore,Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me,I lift my lamp beside the golden door! Thus in the mind of Lazarus the statue was not symbolic of liberty flowing outward from America, as Bartholdi envisioned, but rather a symbol of America being a refuge where those oppressed could come to live in liberty. Lazarus was no doubt thinking of the Jewish refugees from Russia she had been volunteering to assist at Wards Island. And she surely understood that had she been born somewhere else, she may have faced oppression and suffering herself. The Poem â€Å"The New Colossus† Was Essentially Forgotten On December 3, 1883, a reception was held at the Academy of Design in New York City to auction off a portfolio of writings and artwork to raise funds for the statue’s pedestal. The next morning the New York Times reported that a crowd which included J. P. Morgan, the famous banker, heard a reading of the poem â€Å"The New Colossus† by Emma Lazarus. The art auction did not raise as much money as the organizers had hoped. And the poem written by Emma Lazarus seems to have been forgotten. She tragically died of cancer on November 19, 1887, at the age of 38, less than four years after writing the poem. An obituary in the New York Times  the following day praised her writing, with the headline calling her An American Poet of Uncommon Talent. The obituary quoted some of her poems yet  did not mention â€Å"The New Colossus.† Thus, the sonnet was generally forgotten not long after it was written. Yet over time the sentiments expressed in words by Lazarus and the massive figure crafted of copper by  Bartholdi would become inseparable in the public mind. The Poem Was Revived by a Friend of Emma Lazarus In May 1903, a friend of Lazarus, Georgina Schuyler, succeeded in having a bronze plaque containing the text of â€Å"The New Colossus† installed on an interior wall of the pedestal of the Statue of Liberty. By that time the statue had been standing in the harbor for nearly 17 years, and millions of immigrants had passed by it. And for those fleeing oppression in Europe, the Statue of Liberty did seem to be holding a torch of welcome. Lady Libertys Legacy Over the following decades, especially in the 1920s, when the United States began to restrict immigration, the words of Lazarus took on deeper meaning. And whenever there is talk of closing Americas borders, relevant lines from The New Colossus are always quoted in opposition. Still, the poem and its connection to the statue unexpectedly became a contentious issue in the summer of 2017. Stephen Miller, an anti-immigrant adviser to President Donald Trump, sought to denigrate the poem and its connection to the statue. Two years later, in the summer of 2019, Ken Cuccinelli, the acting director of the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services in the Trump administration, sparked a controversy by suggesting that the classic poem be edited. In a series of interviews on August 13, 2019, Cuccinelli said the poem should be changed to refer to immigrants who can stand on their own two feet. He also noted that the Lazarus poem referred to people coming from Europe, which critics interpreted as a sign of current bias toward non-white immigrants.