Home » Posts tagged 'Research'
Tag Archives: Research
Conservative Talk Radio and Its Impact on Heightened Partisanship
By Carl Guo, VI Form
Conservative Talk Radio and Its Impact on Heightened Partisanship
“[Obama is] a veritable rookie whose only chance of winning [the 2008 election] is that he’s black.”
“If any race of people should not have guilt about slavery, it’s Caucasians.”
“Women should not be allowed on juries where the accused is a stud.”
Jason Silverstein, “Rush Limbaugh now has a Presidential Medal of Freedom. Here are just 20 of the outrageous things he’s said,” CBS News, last modified February 6, 2020, accessed January 12, 2022, https://www.cbsnews.com/news/rush-limbaugh-presidential-medal-of-freedom-state-of-the-union-outrageous quotes/.
Rush Limbaugh, the renowned conservative talk radio host, made the above statements. Appalled by these comments and other similar ones, some liberals posted similarly incendiary remarks on Twitter when Limbaugh died on February 17, 2021. Music producer Finneas wrote, “Feeling very sorry for the people of Hell who now have to deal with Rush Limbaugh for the rest of eternity.” “God has canceled Rush Limbaugh,” said Crooked Media host Erin Ryan. Comedian Paul F. Tompkins reacted with: “I’m glad Rush Limbaugh lived long enough to get cancer and die.”
While liberals condemn Limbaugh, conservatives respect him as a conservative media pioneer and a lovable host whose shows they listened to every day. Former President Donald Trump even awarded Limbaugh the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the highest civilian award the President can bestow to recognize “an especially meritorious contribution to the security or national interests of the United States, world peace, cultural or other significant public or private endeavors.”3 Trump announced the award in perhaps the most grandiose way: during the 2020 State of the Union Address.4 In Trump’s words, this award honors Limbaugh’s “decades of tireless devotion to our country” and “the millions of people a day that [he] speaks to and inspires.”5 Even without presidential recognition, however, Rush Limbaugh cemented his legacy by reviving dying AM radio stations during the 1980s and amassed a large and loyal audience since. Talkers Magazine ranked The Rush Limbaugh Show as the most-listened-to talk radio show from 1987 to 2021, with an average of 15 million listeners per week.6
(more…)The Evolution of Jane Austen
By Sydni Williams, VI Form
The Evolution of Jane Austen
“It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.”1
Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice, upplaga (ex pbk ed.). ed. (New York: Penguin Books, 2009).
This opening line from Jane Austen’s most famous novel, Pride and Prejudice, is a summation of the time period in which Austen lived and wrote. The quote proves that, in eighteenth century England, an economically stable, unmarried man should pursue an agreeable, unmarried woman to acquire as a wife. After courtship, proposals, and financial negotiations with the woman’s father, a man and woman would be married through a process devoid of love. From the perspective of an eighteenth-century woman, Pride and Prejudice’s opening line demonstrates that a woman’s marital status decided her economic security and quality of life. Women had little to no opportunity to advance in society, beyond the man they married. Therefore, proposals, marriage negotiations, and weddings were an important landmark in the lives of many women; the landmark that decided their future.
Jane Austen, living among the eighteenth-century gentry, witnessed these events in her everyday life and wrote novels about this world: about marriage, love, hate, family, relationships, and humanity. Unlike many women of her time, Austen never married and spent her life dedicated to a writing career. Austen’s stories have transcended centuries, influenced the film industry, and remained on bookshelves and in classrooms. Although Austen’s “universally acknowledged truth” may no longer be true after the women’s rights movement, Austen and her novels have somehow remained relevant.
There is not much information existing on Austen’s personal life. Historians, biographers, and writers have theorized about her sexuality, gender identity, political views, and career goals. For almost a century after her death, Austen’s family members rewrote her life in biographies, profiting off of her successes. When remembering Jane, they manipulated her image to fit into society’s standards of a spinster, creating “Aunt Jane,” a caricature of Austen since used in many accounts and biographies. As a result of this image, Austen was an ideal conservative icon used in support of marriage.
(more…)Joseph Stalin’s Purge of the Soviet Military and Its Subsequent Consequences
By Ewan Leslie, VI Form
Joseph Stalin’s Purge of the Soviet Military and Its Subsequent Consequences
In November, 1935, the five Marshals of the Soviet Union, the highest military rank in the Red Army, posed for a photograph.2 These marshals made up a diverse group of military leadership. On the far left, 42 year old Marshal Mikhail Tukhachevksy was a young, innovative officer who was proposing groundbreaking military tactics.3 Next to him, Marshals Semyon Budyonny and Kliment Voroshilov were steady, veteran leaders who served in the Russian Civil War almost two decades earlier. On the far right, Marshals Vasily Blyukher and Alexander Yegorov served important positions within the Red Army hierarchy, mainly concerning the running of the Red Army apparatus and its various military fronts.4 With these five Marshals anchoring the Red Army leadership, the future of the Red Army and the Soviet Union seemed promising. However, Joseph Stalin, the dictatorial General Secretary of the Soviet Union, would disrupt this situation by instituting a series of purges that led to the executions of Marshals Tukhachevsky, Blyukher, and Yegorov, damaging the Red Army’s capabilities for years to come.
In February 1937, Stalin spoke to key government and military officials in a plenum of the Central Committee.5In his speech, Stalin addressed the impending danger to the Soviet Union posed by numerous counter-revolutionary groups who had supposedly infiltrated the Red Army. The rise of Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy in Europe had led to Soviet fears of fascists in the Red Army. Domestically, Stalin warned of the rise of a new and dangerous “fifth column,” a group made up of anyone who dared to oppose Stalin’s iron grip on power.6 Specifically, Stalin feared that his historic rival, Leon Trotsky, had gained substantial influence amongst both Soviet politicians and Red Army officers, and that now he threatened Stalin’s power. To combat this perceived threat (and to assuage his growing paranoia), Stalin advocated for and implemented a series of purges against various sectors of Soviet society, including the Red Army, trying to eliminate any potential threats to his regime. These purges are known collectively as the “Great Purge” and the “Great Terror,” and they led to the disgracement of over 25,000 Red Army officers, many of whom were executed or sent to the infamous Soviet Gulag work camps.7 The Great Purge also claimed the lives of hundreds of thousands of Soviet civilians who were deemed “counterrevolutionary”.
(more…)An Analysis of Modern Chinese Economic Policy Progression and Reform
By Thomas Li, VI Form
An Analysis of Modern Chinese Economic Policy Progression and Reform
In the fall of 1944, a boy was born in Guizhou, China, one of the most impoverished parts of the war-torn country. His father had secretly joined the Chinese Communist Party while in college. However, he worked in a Kuomintang (KMT), which was China’s ruling party before the communist takeover in 1949, enterprise in Nanjing before escaping to rural Guizhou due to KMT spies’ suspicions about his communist affiliation. In Guizhou, he became a math teacher and eventually a head of school. In 1958, the Great Leap Forward began. It was a political movement centered around economic collectivization, but it resulted in widespread famine. In the boy’s family of nine, his father strictly rationed food for every meal so that, although nobody was free from hunger, everybody survived. Things were so desperate that the boy and his siblings searched for tree bark and plant roots for the family to eat.
Relief finally came in 1963 when the boy, who did well in school, went off to study engineering in a Chongqing college. But this relief was short-lived. Upon the onset of the Cultural Revolution (an anti-capitalist political campaign), he received news that the Red Guards, a youth group that enforced the Cultural Revolution, searched his home and labeled his father a “capitalist-roader” due to his past KMT ties, despite seeing that the family was so impoverished that everyone slept on rice straw. The Red Guards paraded his father down the streets so people could publicly humiliate him. With colleges shutting down due to the Cultural Revolution, the boy, hoping to support his father in person, boarded a train back home. Yet, the Red Guards on the train ordered him off and had him walk back home simply because his father was a teacher–who had knowledge as opposed to the working class–thus a man with a “capitalist background.”
(more…)
20th Century Psychiatric Hospitals and the Lasting Impacts of Deinstitutionalization
By Skylar Davis, VI Form
20th Century Psychiatric Hospitals and the Lasting Impacts of Deinstitutionalization
Editor’s Note: This paper was completed as a part of the History Research Fellowship, a one-semester course available to sixth form students.
I. Introduction
Few institutions evoke greater horror than the “insane asylums” of the 19th and 20th centuries. Given the stigmatizing media portrayals of such hospitals, most people believe that they had uniformly poor living conditions, practiced barbaric treatments, and employed abusive staff. As a consequence, society now views historic asylums as torturous and inhumane places. This image, however, hides a more complex truth about the value of state mental hospitals.
Prior to the asylum era, the only hospitals in America were general hospitals. During the early 18th century, most individuals diagnosed with mental illnesses lived at home under their families’ care. At the time, communities were reasonably tolerant of individuals who exhibited mild symptoms of mental illness. Those deemed violent and disorderly were sent to either public almshouses or private hospitals, depending on their family’s finances, for professional medical care. This was the beginning of institutionalized mental health care.
(more…)
The Portrayal of Russian Military Intervention in Ukraine (2014-current) in Russian Media Outlets
By Yevheniia Dubrova, VI Form
The Portrayal of Russian Military Intervention in Ukraine (2014-current) in Russian Media Outlets
Editor’s Note: This paper was completed as a part of the History Research Fellowship, a one-semester course available to sixth form students.
- Introduction
On April 13, 2014, following the Russian occupation of Crimea, pro-Russian activists seized the City Council building in Makiivka, located in the Donetsk region of Eastern Ukraine. They proclaimed the area part of a newly formed proto-state, the Donetsk People’s Republic. Almost immediately, the Republic’s government restricted public access to all Ukrainian and international TV channels and print media. As Dmytro Tkachenko, an adviser at Ukraine’s Ministry of Information Policy, noted, “Russia [was] doing everything it [could] to cut those people off.” Controlling TV towers in the two regions allowed the separatists to broadcast their propaganda, exaggerating Ukraine’s failures and glorifying their self-declared government. From that day forward, the population of occupied Donbas, including Makiivka, received all of their news solely from local Republican or state-owned Russian media outlets.
I remember that day clearly because it marked the beginning of the aggressive attitudes of pro-Russian supporters, who constituted the vast majority of people in my hometown of Makiivka, towards those supporting Ukraine and its reunification with the region. Never before had I witnessed the propaganda machine working so effectively and disinformation campaigns executed so brilliantly. Russia’s state-controlled media outlets unanimously denied the presence of Russian troops in the region and stated that it was ultra-nationalist Ukrainian government financed by Western politicians who started the war in Donbas for its own benefit. Branding the Ukrainian government a “fascist junta,” the Kremlin portrayed it and the Ukrainian state as “purveyors of fascism, xenophobia,” and violent racism. The horrifying tales of the violence of Ukrainian soldiers that appeared in the news, such as the infamous story about the public crucifixion of a three-year-old boy in Slovyansk, removed any traces of sympathy from the local population towards Ukraine, its government, and its army.
(more…)
Decades of Deceit: Bernie Madoff’s Effect on SEC Regulation
By Blake Gattuso, VI Form
Decades of Deceit: Bernie Madoff’s Effect on SEC Regulation
Editor’s Note: This paper was completed as a part of the History Research Fellowship, a one-semester course available to sixth form students.
Seventeen billion dollars lost. Decades of deceit. Bernie Madoff’s fraud forever changed the lives of thousands and impacted the lives of millions.
“It’s a proprietary strategy, I can’t go into great detail,” said Bernie Madoff when he was asked to explain how he made such strong and consistent returns for his investors. This quote from his 2001 interview with Barron’s Magazine held true. Madoff would never go into “great detail” on this topic with anyone. Madoff did not tell investors about the strategy. Not even the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) examiners would get “great detail” about Madoff’s multibillion-dollar hedge fund. For more than thirty years, Madoff ran this scheme. And for more than thirty years, Madoff never went into “great detail” with anyone because his hedge fund was a sixty-five billion-dollar Ponzi scheme, not the top-performing hedge fund which it claimed to be.
Trusted capital markets are fundamental to the functioning of the American economy. Stock markets are places where companies raise capital from investors who buy corporate shares. Without these markets, it would be difficult, if not impossible, for the American economy to efficiently allocate capital to productive uses represented in many American, world-leading companies, such as Apple, Google, General Motors, and Boeing. If investors lose faith in these markets and see them as fraudulent, the American economy will suffer.
(more…)
Campaign Finance Deregulation and the Rise of the NRA as a Political Power
By Louis Lyons, VI Form
Campaign Finance Deregulation and the Rise of the NRA as a Political Power
Editor’s Note: This paper was completed as a part of the History Research Fellowship, a one-semester course available to sixth form students.
Gavin Aronsen, Asawin Suebsaeng, and Deanna Pan, “What Happened in the Newtown School Shooting,” Mother Jones, December 14, 2012, accessed January 6, 2020
Twenty young children and six adults lay dead in a Connecticut schoolhouse. The culprit: a 20-year-old, heavily armed man wielding an AR-15, two semi automatic pistols, and a shotgun.
Eight years ago on December 14, Adam Lanza perpetrated the shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School, which was among the most deadly school massacres in American history. It shook the American public to its core, and many demanded action to curtail gun violence. American politicians, however, did little in response. Such is the power of the National Rifle Association (NRA) and its ability to curtail the United States democratic process during the twenty first century.
(more…)
LEO 