Storytelling
Storytelling describes the social and cultural activity of sharing stories, sometimes with improvisation, theatrics, or embellishment. Every culture has its own stories or narratives, which are shared as a means of entertainment, cultural preservation or instilling moral values. Crucial elements of stories and storytelling include plot and narrative point of view; the term "storytelling" can refer in a narrow sense to oral storytelling and in a looser sense to techniques used in other media to unfold or disclose the narrative of a story. Storytelling predates writing; the earliest forms of storytelling were oral combined with gestures and expressions. In addition to being part of religious rituals, some archaeologists believe rock art may have served as a form of storytelling for many ancient cultures; the Australian aboriginal people painted symbols from stories on cave walls as a means of helping the storyteller remember the story. The story was told using a combination of oral narrative, rock art and dance, which bring understanding and meaning of human existence through remembrance and enactment of stories.
People have used the carved trunks of living trees and ephemeral media to record stories in pictures or with writing. Complex forms of tattooing may represent stories, with information about genealogy and social status. With the advent of writing and the use of stable, portable media, stories were recorded and shared over wide regions of the world. Stories have been carved, painted, printed or inked onto wood or bamboo and other bones, clay tablets, palm-leaf books, bark cloth, silk and other textiles, recorded on film and stored electronically in digital form. Oral stories continue to be created, improvisationally by impromptu storytellers, as well as committed to memory and passed from generation to generation, despite the increasing popularity of written and televised media in much of the world. Modern storytelling has a broad purview. In addition to its traditional forms, it has extended itself to representing history, personal narrative, political commentary and evolving cultural norms.
Contemporary storytelling is widely used to address educational objectives. New forms of media are creating new ways for people to record and consume stories. Tools for asynchronous group communication can provide an environment for individuals to reframe or recast individual stories into group stories. Games and other digital platforms, such as those used in interactive fiction or interactive storytelling, may be used to position the user as a character within a bigger world. Documentaries, including interactive web documentaries, employ storytelling narrative techniques to communicate information about their topic. Self-revelatory stories, created for their cathartic and therapeutic effect, are growing in their use and application, as in Psychodrama, Drama Therapy and Playback Theatre. Storytelling is used as a means by which to precipitate psychological and social change in the practice of transformative arts. Oral traditions of storytelling are found in several civilisations. Storytelling was used to explain natural phenomena, bards told stories of creation and developed a pantheon of gods and myths.
Oral stories passed from one generation to the next and storytellers were regarded as healers, spiritual guides, cultural secrets keepers and entertainers. Oral storytelling came in various forms including songs, poetry and dance. Albert Bates Lord examined oral narratives from field transcripts of Yugoslav oral bards collected by Milman Parry in the 1930s, the texts of epics such as the Odyssey and Beowulf. Lord found that a large part of the stories consisted of text, improvised during the telling process. Lord identified two types of story vocabulary; the first he called "formulas": "rosy-fingered dawn", "the wine-dark sea" and other specific set phrases had long been known of in Homer and other oral epics. Lord, discovered that across many story traditions 90% of an oral epic is assembled from lines which are repeated verbatim or which use one-for-one word substitutions. In other words, oral stories are built out of set phrases which have been stockpiled from a lifetime of hearing and telling stories.
The other type of story vocabulary is a set sequence of story actions that structure a tale. Just as the teller of tales proceeds line-by-line using formulas, so he proceeds from event-to-event using themes. One near-universal theme is repetition, as evidenced in Western folklore with the "rule of three": Three brothers set out, three attempts are made, three riddles are asked. A theme can be as simple as a specific set sequence describing the arming of a hero, starting with shirt and trousers and ending with headdress and weapons. A theme can be large enough to be a plot component. For example: a hero proposes a journey to a dangerous place / he disguises himself / his disguise fools everybody / except for a common person of little account / who recognizes him / the commoner becomes the hero's ally, showing unexpected resources of skill or initiative. A theme does not belong to a specific story, but may be found with minor variation in many different stories. Themes may be no more than handy prefabricated parts for constructing a tale, or they may represent universal truths – ritual-based, religious truths, as James Frazer saw in The Golden Bough, or archetypal, psychological truths, as Joseph Campbell describes in The Hero With a Thousand Faces.
The story was described by Reynolds
Manhattan
Manhattan referred to locally as the City, is the most densely populated of the five boroughs of New York City and its economic and administrative center, cultural identifier, historical birthplace. The borough is coextensive with New York County, one of the original counties of the U. S. state of New York. The borough consists of Manhattan Island, bounded by the Hudson and Harlem rivers. S. mainland, physically connected to the Bronx and separated from the rest of Manhattan by the Harlem River. Manhattan Island is divided into three informally bounded components, each aligned with the borough's long axis: Lower and Upper Manhattan. Manhattan has been described as the cultural, financial and entertainment capital of the world, the borough hosts the United Nations Headquarters. Anchored by Wall Street in the Financial District of Lower Manhattan, New York City has been called both the most economically powerful city and the leading financial center of the world, Manhattan is home to the world's two largest stock exchanges by total market capitalization: the New York Stock Exchange and NASDAQ.
Many multinational media conglomerates are based in Manhattan, the borough has been the setting for numerous books and television shows. Manhattan real estate has since become among the most expensive in the world, with the value of Manhattan Island, including real estate, estimated to exceed US$3 trillion in 2013. Manhattan traces its origins to a trading post founded by colonists from the Dutch Republic in 1624 on Lower Manhattan. Manhattan is documented to have been purchased by Dutch colonists from Native Americans in 1626 for 60 guilders, which equals $1038 in current terms; the territory and its surroundings came under English control in 1664 and were renamed New York after King Charles II of England granted the lands to his brother, the Duke of York. New York, based in present-day Manhattan, served as the capital of the United States from 1785 until 1790; the Statue of Liberty greeted millions of immigrants as they came to the Americas by ship in the late 19th and early 20th centuries and is a world symbol of the United States and its ideals of liberty and peace.
Manhattan became a borough during the consolidation of New York City in 1898. New York County is the United States' second-smallest county by land area, is the most densely populated U. S. county. It is one of the most densely populated areas in the world, with a census-estimated 2017 population of 1,664,727 living in a land area of 22.83 square miles, or 72,918 residents per square mile, higher than the density of any individual U. S. city. On business days, the influx of commuters increases this number to over 3.9 million, or more than 170,000 people per square mile. Manhattan has the third-largest population of New York City's five boroughs, after Brooklyn and Queens, is the smallest borough in terms of land area. Manhattan Island is informally divided into three areas, each aligned with its long axis: Lower and Upper Manhattan. Many districts and landmarks in Manhattan are well known, as New York City received a record 62.8 million tourists in 2017, Manhattan hosts three of the world's 10 most-visited tourist attractions in 2013: Times Square, Central Park, Grand Central Terminal.
The borough hosts many prominent bridges, such as the Brooklyn Bridge. Chinatown incorporates the highest concentration of Chinese people in the Western Hemisphere, the Stonewall Inn in Greenwich Village, part of the Stonewall National Monument, is considered the birthplace of the modern gay rights movement; the City of New York was founded at the southern tip of Manhattan, the borough houses New York City Hall, the seat of the city's government. Numerous colleges and universities are located in Manhattan, including Columbia University, New York University, Cornell Tech, Weill Cornell Medical College, Rockefeller University, which have been ranked among the top 40 in the world; the name Manhattan derives from the Munsee dialect of the Lenape language'manaháhtaan'. The Lenape word has been translated as "the place where we get bows" or "place for gathering the bows". According to a Munsee tradition recorded in the 19th century, the island was named so for a grove of hickory trees at the lower end, considered ideal for the making of bows.
It was first recorded in writing as Manna-hata, in the 1609 logbook of Robert Juet, an officer on Henry Hudson's yacht Halve Maen. A 1610 map depicts the name as Manna-hata, twice, on both the west and east sides of the Mauritius River. Alternative folk etymologies include "island of many hills", "the island where we all became intoxicated" and "island", as well as a phrase descriptive of the whirlpool at Hell Gate; the area, now Manhattan was long inhabited by the Lenape Native Americans. In 1524, Florentine explorer Giovanni da Verrazzano – sailing in service of King Francis I of France – became the first documented European to visit the area that would become New York City, he entered the tidal strait now known as The Narrows and named the land around Upper New York
Andrew Carnegie
Andrew Carnegie was a Scottish-American industrialist, business magnate, philanthropist. Carnegie led the expansion of the American steel industry in the late 19th century and is identified as one of the richest people in history, he became a leading philanthropist in the British Empire. During the last 18 years of his life, he gave away about $350 million to charities and universities – 90 percent of his fortune, his 1889 article proclaiming "The Gospel of Wealth" called on the rich to use their wealth to improve society, stimulated a wave of philanthropy. Carnegie was born in Dunfermline and immigrated to the United States with his parents in 1848. Carnegie started work as a telegrapher, by the 1860s had investments in railroads, railroad sleeping cars and oil derricks, he accumulated further wealth as a bond salesman. He built Pittsburgh's Carnegie Steel Company, which he sold to J. P. Morgan in 1901 for $303,450,000, it became the U. S. Steel Corporation. After selling Carnegie Steel, he surpassed John D. Rockefeller as the richest American for the next couple of years.
Carnegie devoted the remainder of his life to large-scale philanthropy, with special emphasis on local libraries, world peace and scientific research. With the fortune he made from business, he built Carnegie Hall in New York, NY, the Peace Palace and founded the Carnegie Corporation of New York, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, Carnegie Institution for Science, Carnegie Trust for the Universities of Scotland, Carnegie Hero Fund, Carnegie Mellon University, the Carnegie Museums of Pittsburgh, among others. Andrew Carnegie was born to Margaret Morrison Carnegie and William Carnegie in Dunfermline, Scotland in 1835, in a typical weaver's cottage with only one main room, consisting of half the ground floor, shared with the neighboring weaver's family; the main room served as a living room, dining bedroom. He was named after his legal grandfather. In 1836, the family moved to a larger house in Edgar Street, following the demand for more heavy damask, from which his father benefited, he was educated at the Free School in Dunfermline, a gift to the town by the philanthropist Adam Rolland of Gask.
Carnegie's uncle, George Lauder, Sr. a Scottish political leader influenced him as a boy by introducing him to the writings of Robert Burns and historical Scottish heroes such as Robert the Bruce, William Wallace, Rob Roy. Lauder's son named George Lauder, grew up with Carnegie and would become his business partner; when Carnegie was thirteen, his father had fallen on hard times as a handloom weaver. His mother helped support the family by assisting her brother, by selling potted meats at her "sweetie shop", leaving her as the primary breadwinner. Struggling to make ends meet, the Carnegies decided to borrow money from George Lauder, Sr. and move to Allegheny, Pennsylvania, in the United States in 1848 for the prospect of a better life. Carnegie's migration to America would be his second journey outside Dunfermline – the first being an outing to Edinburgh to see Queen Victoria. In September 1848, Carnegie arrived with his family at their new prosperous home. Allegheny was populating in the 1840s, growing from around 10,000 to 21,262 residents.
The city was industrial and produced many products including wool and cotton cloth. The "Made in Allegheny" label used on these and other diversified products was becoming more and more popular. For his father, the promising circumstances still did not provide him any good fortune. Dealers were not interested in selling his product, he himself struggled to sell it on his own; the father and son both received job offers at the same Scottish-owned cotton mill, Anchor Cotton Mills. Carnegie's first job in 1848 was as a bobbin boy, changing spools of thread in a cotton mill 12 hours a day, 6 days a week in a Pittsburgh cotton factory, his starting wage was $1.20 per week. His father quit his position at the cotton mill soon after, returning to his loom and removing him as breadwinner once again, but Carnegie attracted the attention of John Hay, a Scottish manufacturer of bobbins, who offered him a job for $2.00 per week. In his autobiography, Carnegie speaks of his past hardships. Soon after this Mr. John Hay, a fellow Scotch manufacturer of bobbins in Allegheny City, needed a boy, asked whether I would not go into his service.
I went, received two dollars per week. I had to fire the boiler in the cellar of the bobbin factory, it was too much for me. I found myself night after night, sitting up in bed trying the steam gauges, fearing at one time that the steam was too low and that the workers above would complain that they had not power enough, at another time that the steam was too high and that the boiler might burst. In 1849, Carnegie became a telegraph messenger boy in the Pittsburgh Office of the Ohio Telegraph Company, at $2.50 per week following the recommendation of his uncle. He was a hard worker and would memorize all of the locations of Pittsburgh's businesses and the faces of important men, he made many connections this way. He paid close attention to his work, learned to distinguish the differing sounds the incoming telegraph signals produced, he developed the ability to translate signals by ear, withou
Carnegie library
A Carnegie library is a library built with money donated by Scottish-American businessman and philanthropist Andrew Carnegie. A total of 2,509 Carnegie libraries were built between 1883 and 1929, including some belonging to public and university library systems. 1,689 were built in the United States, 660 in the United Kingdom and Ireland, 125 in Canada, others in Australia, South Africa, New Zealand, Belgium, the Caribbean, Mauritius and Fiji. At first, Carnegie libraries were exclusively in places where he had a personal connection - namely his birthplace in Scotland and the Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania area, his adopted home-town. Yet, beginning in the middle of 1899, Carnegie increased funding to libraries outside these areas. In years few towns that requested a grant and agreed to his terms were refused. By the time the last grant was made in 1919, there were 3,500 libraries in the United States, nearly half of them built with construction grants paid by Carnegie; the first of Carnegie's public libraries, Dunfermline Carnegie Library was in his birthplace, Scotland.
It was first commissioned or granted by Carnegie in 1880 to James Campbell Walker and would open in 1883. The locally quarried sandstone building displays a stylized sun with the carved motto "Let there be light" at the front entrance; the first library in the United States to be commissioned by Carnegie was in 1886 in his adopted hometown of Allegheny, Pennsylvania. In 1890, it became the second of his libraries to open in the USA; the building contained the first Carnegie Music Hall in the World. The first Carnegie library to open in the United States was in Braddock, about 9 miles up the Monongahela river from Pittsburgh, home to one of the Carnegie Steel Company's mills in 1889, it was the second Carnegie Library in the United States to be commissioned, 1887, was the first of just four libraries that he endowed. An 1893 addition doubled the size of the building and included the third Carnegie Music Hall in the United States. Carnegie limited his support to a few towns in which he had an interest.
These would be in the Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania area. In America, 6 out of the first 7, 7 of the first 10, 9 of the first 13 libraries he commissioned are all found in Southwestern Pennsylvania. Architectural critic Patricia Lowry wrote "to this day, Carnegie's free-to-the-people libraries remain Pittsburgh's most significant cultural export, a gift that has shaped the minds and lives of millions."Until 1898, only one library was commissioned in America outside Southwestern Pennsylvania—a library in Fairfield, commissioned in 1892. As the first time that Carnegie had funded a library in which he had no personal ties, it helped initiate the funding model that would be used by Carnegie for thousands of additional libraries. Beginning in 1899, his foundation funded a dramatic increase in the number of libraries; this coincided with the rise of women's clubs in the post-Civil War period, which were most responsible for organizing efforts to establish libraries, including long-term fundraising and lobbying within their communities to support operations and collections.
They led the establishment of 75–80 percent of the libraries in communities across the country. Carnegie believed in giving to ambitious. Under segregation black people were denied access to public libraries in the Southern United States. Rather than insisting on his libraries being racially integrated, Carnegie funded separate libraries for African Americans. For example, in Houston he funded a separate Colored Carnegie Library; the Carnegie Library in Savannah, opened in 1914 to serve black residents, excluded from the public library. The organized Colored Library Association of Savannah had raised money and collected books to establish a small Library for Colored Citizens. Having demonstrated their willingness to support a library, the group petitioned for and received funds from Carnegie. Future U. S. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas wrote in his memoirs that he used it as a boy, before the library system was desegregated. Most of the library buildings were unique, constructed in a number of styles, including Beaux-Arts, Italian Renaissance, Classical Revival, Spanish Colonial.
Scottish Baronial was one of the styles used in Carnegie's native Scotland. Each style was chosen by the community, although as the years went by James Bertram, Carnegie's secretary, became less tolerant of designs which were not to his taste. Edward Lippincott Tilton, a friend recommended by Bertram, designed many of the buildings; the architecture was simple and formal, welcoming patrons to enter through a prominent doorway, nearly always accessed via a staircase. The entry staircase symbolized a person's elevation by learning. Outside every library was a lamppost or lantern, meant as a symbol of enlightenment. Carnegie’s grants were large for the era and his library philanthropy is one of the largest philanthropic activities, by value, in history. Small towns received grants of $10,000 that enabled them to build large libraries that were among the most significant town amenities in hundreds of communities. Books and libraries were important to Carnegie, beginning with his early childhood in Scotland and his teen years in Allegheny/Pittsburgh.
There he listened to readings and discussions of books from the Tradesman's Subscription Library, which his father helped create. In Pennsylvania, while working for the l
Brooklyn Public Library
The Brooklyn Public Library is the public library system of the borough of Brooklyn, in New York City. It is the fifth largest public library system in the United States. Like the two other public library systems in New York City, it is an independent nonprofit organization, funded by the New York City and State governments, the federal government, private donors. In Fiscal Year 2009, Brooklyn Public Library had the highest program attendance of any public library system in the United States; the library promotes itself as Bklyn Public Library. In 1852, several prominent citizens established the "Brooklyn Athenaeum and Reading Room" for the instruction of young men, it was as was the practice in those times, a private, subscription library for members, who were recruited and encouraged by the up-rising mercantile and business class of young men, to continue by constant reading whatever formal education they had received through a university, high school/private academy, or trade school. Its collections focused on the liberal arts and the humanities such as biography, history, literature and other applications labeled social studies.
Five years in 1857, another group of young men, along with businessmen and merchants, founded the "Brooklyn Mercantile Library Association of the City of Brooklyn", with holdings more pronounced in the business, economics, mathematical and technical fields. The Librarian-in-Charge was Stephen Buttrick Noyes, who went to the Library of Congress in 1866 but returned to Brooklyn three years in 1869, he commenced developing the extensive catalog for the collections which he completed in 1888. The two collections were merged in 1869 and moved to a headquarters building on Montague Street. In 1878, the Library Associations were renamed the "Brooklyn Public Library"; the first free public library in Brooklyn was that of Pratt Institute, a collegiate institute founded by Charles Pratt in 1888. Available not only for its own students and faculty, the library was open to the general public at that early time; the Brooklyn Public Library system was approved by an Act of Legislature of the State of New York on May 1, 1892.
The Brooklyn Common Council passed a resolution for the establishment of the Brooklyn Public Library on November 30, 1896, with Marie E. Craigie as the first director; the library was re-incorporated in 1902. The first main branch moved among various buildings, including a former mansion at 26 Brevoort Place. Between 1901 and 1923, the famous Scotsman, steel industrialist and philanthropist Andrew Carnegie donated $1.6 million, assisting in the future development and construction of 21 Carnegie Library additional neighborhood branches. Carnegie had been earlier inspired by the bequest and maintenance by local merchant and financier who became a famous philanthropist in his adopted city of Baltimore in Maryland. Enoch Pratt, entertained Mr. Carnegie at his mansion/townhouse on West Monument Street and Park Avenue, during the mid-1880s and toured him around his new public library and its four regional branches, presented to the City in 1886 after four years of planning and construction, along with an endowment to continue its support if supplemented in perpetuity by the City of Baltimore, which it agreed and thus was born the Enoch Pratt Free Library, the oldest public library system in America and affected and inspired many others around America by the examples of Pratt and Carnegie.
There are 60 neighborhood branches throughout the borough. The library has four bookmobiles, including the Kidsmobile, which carries children's materials, the Bibliobús, which carries a Spanish language collection. Located at Flatbush Avenue and Eastern Parkway on Grand Army Plaza near the Prospect Heights, Crown Heights and Park Slope neighborhoods, Brooklyn Public Library's Central Library contains over a million cataloged books and multimedia materials; the Brooklyn Collection holds the manuscripts and archives for the Brooklyn Public Library and is located at the Central Branch. The Brooklyn Collection holds over a million individual items including Brooklyn Dodgers memorabilia, a collection for the Brooklyn Eagle, which Walt Whitman edited, maps and other ephemeral items; the Bookmobile is a 32-foot -long, 11.5-foot -high vehicle housing a mobile library. Carrying up to 6,000 books, the Bookmobile serves communities whose local branches are closed for renovation; the Bookmobile offers many of the services available at other branches.
The Kidsmobile is a smaller, more colorful version of the Bookmobile. During the school year, the Kidsmobile visits schools, day care centers, Head Start, after-school programs and community events. In the summer, the Kidsmobile travels to parks and camps. In addition to books, the Kidsmobile crafts; the Bibliobús is a mobile Spanish-language library. It brings other media to Spanish-speaking communities in Brooklyn; the Bibliobús serves sites such as schools, community-based organizations, senior centers, nonprofit organizations, community events. The Shelby White and Leon Levy Information Commons opened at Central Library on January 15, 2013, it features an open workspace with 25 computers and seating and outlets for more than 70 laptop users. The Library's Learning Centers provide adult literacy and adult education services for free; the Brooklyn Public Library has a Free Speech Zone. This was created in response to the attempt to ban several 20th century texts; the increase
Humanities
Humanities are academic disciplines that study aspects of human society and culture. In the Renaissance, the term contrasted with divinity and referred to what is now called classics, the main area of secular study in universities at the time. Today, the humanities are more contrasted with natural, sometimes social, sciences as well as professional training; the humanities use methods that are critical, or speculative, have a significant historical element—as distinguished from the empirical approaches of the natural sciences, unlike the sciences, it has no central discipline. The humanities include ancient and modern languages, philosophy, human geography, politics and art. Scholars in the humanities are humanists; the term "humanist" describes the philosophical position of humanism, which some "antihumanist" scholars in the humanities reject. The Renaissance scholars and artists were called humanists; some secondary schools offer humanities classes consisting of literature, global studies and art.
Human disciplines like history and cultural anthropology study subject matters that the manipulative experimental method does not apply to—and instead use the comparative method and comparative research. Anthropology is a science of the totality of human existence; the discipline deals with the integration of different aspects of the social sciences and human biology. In the twentieth century, academic disciplines have been institutionally divided into three broad domains; the natural sciences seek to derive general laws through verifiable experiments. The humanities study local traditions, through their history, literature and arts, with an emphasis on understanding particular individuals, events, or eras; the social sciences have attempted to develop scientific methods to understand social phenomena in a generalizable way, though with methods distinct from those of the natural sciences. The anthropological social sciences develop nuanced descriptions rather than the general laws derived in physics or chemistry, or they may explain individual cases through more general principles, as in many fields of psychology.
Anthropology does not fit into one of these categories, different branches of anthropology draw on one or more of these domains. Within the United States, anthropology is divided into four sub-fields: archaeology, physical or biological anthropology, anthropological linguistics, cultural anthropology, it is an area, offered at most undergraduate institutions. The word anthropos is from the Greek for "human being" or "person". Eric Wolf described sociocultural anthropology as "the most scientific of the humanities, the most humanistic of the sciences"; the goal of anthropology is to provide a holistic account of human nature. This means that, though anthropologists specialize in only one sub-field, they always keep in mind the biological, linguistic and cultural aspects of any problem. Since anthropology arose as a science in Western societies that were complex and industrial, a major trend within anthropology has been a methodological drive to study peoples in societies with more simple social organization, sometimes called "primitive" in anthropological literature, but without any connotation of "inferior".
Today, anthropologists use terms such as "less complex" societies, or refer to specific modes of subsistence or production, such as "pastoralist" or "forager" or "horticulturalist", to discuss humans living in non-industrial, non-Western cultures, such people or folk remaining of great interest within anthropology. The quest for holism leads most anthropologists to study a people in detail, using biogenetic and linguistic data alongside direct observation of contemporary customs. In the 1990s and 2000s, calls for clarification of what constitutes a culture, of how an observer knows where his or her own culture ends and another begins, other crucial topics in writing anthropology were heard, it is possible to view all human cultures as part of one large. These dynamic relationships, between what can be observed on the ground, as opposed to what can be observed by compiling many local observations remain fundamental in any kind of anthropology, whether cultural, linguistic or archaeological.
Archaeology is the study of human activity through the analysis of material culture. The archaeological record consists of artifacts, biofacts or ecofacts, cultural landscapes. Archaeology can be considered a branch of the humanities, it has various goals, which range from understanding culture history to reconstructing past lifeways to documenting and explaining changes in human societies through time. Archaeology is thought of as a branch of anthropology in the United States, while in Europe, it is viewed as a discipline in its own right, or grouped under other related disciplines such as history. Classics, in the Western academic tradition, refers to the studies of the cultures of classical antiquity, namely Ancient Greek and Latin and the Ancient Greek and Roman cultures. Classical studies is considered one of the cornerstones of the humanities; the influence of classical ideas on many humanities disciplines, such as philosophy and literature, remains strong. History is systematically collected information about the past.
When used as the name of a field of study, history refers to the study and interpretation of the record of humans, societies and any to
Grand Army Plaza
Grand Army Plaza known as Prospect Park Plaza, is a public plaza that comprises the northern corner and the main entrance of Prospect Park in the New York City borough of Brooklyn. It consists of concentric oval rings arranged as streets, with the namesake Plaza Street comprising the outer ring; the inner ring is arranged as an ovoid roadway that carries the main street – Flatbush Avenue – with eight radial roads connecting Vanderbilt Avenue. The only streets that penetrate to the inner ring are Flatbush Avenue, Vanderbilt Avenue, Prospect Park West, Eastern Parkway, Union Street; the plaza includes the Soldiers' and Sailors' Arch. C. Skene and Henry W. Maxwell; the grounds of the Grand Army Plaza was a battleground of the Battle of Long Island, the first major battle of the American Revolutionary War to take place after the promulgation of the United States Declaration of Independence. The 1861 plan for Prospect Park included an elliptical plaza at the intersection of Flatbush and Ninth avenues.
In 1867, the plaza was designed by Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux as a grand entrance to the Park to separate the noisy city from the calm nature of the Park. Olmsted and Vaux's design included only the Fountain of the Golden Spray and the surrounding earth embankments covered in heavy plantings; the berms still shield the local apartment buildings and the main branch of the Brooklyn Public Library from the noisy traffic circle that has developed. By 1869 the Abraham Lincoln statue by Henry Kirke Brown was north of the plaza fountain's stairs, the statue was moved to the lower terrace of the park's Concert Grove in 1895; the original 1867 fountain was successively replaced by an 1873 lighted fountain, an 1897-1915 fountain for exhibitions, the 1932 Bailey Fountain renovated in 2006. In 1895, three bronze sculpture groups were added to the 1892 Soldiers' and Sailors' Arch; when the New York City Subway's BMT Brighton Line was being built in the 1920s, it was hoped that a station could be built directly under the site of the Brooklyn Central Library, but the $1 to 3 million cost was too much.
In 1926, the plaza known as Prospect Park Plaza, was renamed Grand Army Plaza to commemorate the sixtieth anniversary of the foundation of the Grand Army of the Republic, a fraternal organization composed of veterans of the Union Army and other military services who served in the American Civil War. In 1975, Grand Army Plaza became a National Historic Landmark. In 2008, a competition was held for designs to reorganize Grand Army Plaza to make it a more integral part of Prospect Park and more accessible to pedestrians. At the same time, the New York City Department of Transportation made improvements in accessibility, putting sidewalks and planters in many of the striped areas; these improvements made it somewhat easier and safer for pedestrians and cyclists to cross from the park to the library and to the plaza. The changes made by the NYCDOT were modest in comparison to those in the designs in the competition, most of which called for the rerouting of some of the vast traffic flow; the area around the Arch forms the largest and busiest traffic circle in Brooklyn, being the convergence of Flatbush Avenue, Vanderbilt Avenue, Eastern Parkway, Prospect Park West, Union Street.
In 1927, Brooklyn's "Death-O-Meter", a sign admonishing drivers to "Slow Up" and displaying a continually updated tally of traffic accident deaths in the borough, was installed. For the past several years a popular green market/farmers market is held on the plaza in front of Prospect Park every Saturday from 8 a.m. to 4 p.m.. The station is served by multiple bus routes; the Grand Army Plaza station, built in 1920 on the IRT Eastern Parkway Line, is on the north end of the Plaza, while the Seventh Avenue station on the BMT Brighton Line is several blocks northwest. The B67 and B69 buses stop at Union Street and 7th Avenue, two blocks north, while the B41 bus stops on Flatbush Avenue. New York City portal Notes Media related to Grand Army Plaza at Wikimedia Commons
