What are the historical time periods discussed in Guns, Germs, and Steel?

Jared Diamond discusses many different historical time periods in Guns, Germs, and Steel.  It would be very difficult to list them all.  However, you could say that the time period in which he is most interested is the time period (or periods) when agriculture was being developed and spread in various parts of the world.

In this book, Diamond discusses many time periods.  He talks in Chapter 1 of the time leading up to the year 11,000 BC.  In Chapter 2, he talks about a fight that happened in 1835, but he also talks about the peopling of the islands of Polynesia, which took place over a very long period of time, starting around 1200 BC and only being “mostly complete” (as Diamond says on p. 55) by 500 AD.  In Chapter 3, Diamond talks about the Spanish conquest of the Incas in 1532.  The list of time periods that are discussed in this book goes on and on.

However, Diamond is mostly interested in prehistory and, more importantly, the time period before and during the rise of agriculture.  Diamond is trying to explain why Europeans had come to dominate the world by modern times.  He thinks that this happened because people in Eurasia achieved agriculture before other people and because their agricultural societies spread out across their landmass more effectively.  He therefore asks two main questions.  First, he wants to know why Europeans got agriculture before other people did.  This forces him to look at the historical time period before agriculture was developed in the various regions of the world.  Second, he wants to know how agriculture helped Europeans come to dominate the world.  This forces him to look at the historical time period when Europe (and Eurasia more generally) was developing agriculture.  He has to look at how societies changed during this time and how that helped them dominate the world.

Thus, while Diamond talks about all kinds of different historical time periods in Guns, Germs, and Steel, the most important of these periods are 1) the period before agriculture arises and 2) the period as the rise of agriculture leads to the rise of civilization.

What kind of house is described in the poem "The Listeners" by Walter de la Mere?

Not much of the actual house is described, but it seems creepy. The mood and tone of the entire poem lends itself to making the reader think the house is unnerving.  

The poem's speaker gives the reader some information regarding the kind of house that is in the poem. First, the house is not in a neighborhood. Readers are told the house stands alone in a forested area.  

But only a host of phantom listeners   

   That dwelt in the lone house then 

The reader knows the house is in a forested area because of lines three and four.  

And his horse in the silence champed the grasses   

   Of the forest’s ferny floor.

I picture the house being at least two stories tall. I think that for two specific reasons. The first reason is because of the following lines:

Stood thronging the faint moonbeams on the dark stair,   

   That goes down to the empty hall.

I'm not sure how the man on the horse can see into the dark house, but he clearly sees stairs that empty out into a hallway. The second reason I think the house is a two-story house is because we are told the house has a "turret." I have never seen a one-story house with a turret.

I've attached a link to a picture of a house with a turret. A turret hearkens back to old castles, and the design gained popularity again during the Victorian era. A turret will make the house look quite imposing during the day, and—I would imagine—quite foreboding at night.  

Lastly, the house is one of those houses that is covered in creeping vines. Readers know this because we are told the windows are "leaf-fringed."  

No head from the leaf-fringed sill 

Leaned over and looked into his grey eyes. 

That means some kind of plant life is growing all around the windows. That image also gives the house the creepy feeling I spoke about at the beginning of my response because it's as if nature is taking back and enveloping the entire house.   

Why was a form of writing important to civilizations?

We may not think very much about how people know what they know, but when we stop and do think about this, it is easy to see what a difference writing has made. Writing was a quantum leap for civilization.  It saved people from having to reinvent the wheel, it allowed people to share ideas, facts, and great beauty through time and space, and it even aided commerce.   

Imagine, if you will, a world without writing in which someone discovered an antibiotic a thousand years ago.  There are bound to be rumors through the years about a discovery like this, but without the knowledge being written down, millions of people who could have been saved will die.  We would all have to wait around for someone else to stumble upon this antibiotic again.  There is no history of much of anything without writing.  We would stumble around making the same mistakes over and over again, a sort of dreadful Fifty First Dates scenario in which we didn't know which tribes were historically our enemies and which were our friends or in which we did not know that those weeds we keep finding are actually edible and can save us from starvation.  And whatever lessons we glean, with writing, we can transmit them to others and transmit them to the future, too.

Without writing, we would have little of the riches we have now in our lives.  Philosophy has come down to us in writing.  Our works of literature have come to us in writing.  Beowulf probably emerged from an oral tradition, but had someone not written it down, it seems quite unlikely that we would be able to study and enjoy it today.  Our appreciation for the heavens is thanks to ancient astronomers who wrote down what they knew.  Music is handed down through the ages through writing now.  We can look at scores of music that are hundreds of years old and play them.  Mathematics is a form of writing, too, one that comes to us via Indian and Arabic cultures.  Most of the religions in the world are based upon one or more holy texts that encouraged and solidified membership in their respective religious communities.  And say what you will about the divisive aspect of religion, there is no question that its development has made substantial contributions to civilization, at the very least, creating community and building some of the most magnificent architecture ever built.

Writing helped commerce. People could create tallies, keep track of their inventories and profits, and take orders once we had writing. (Perhaps the first writing in commerce was a customer complaint!) Writing helped trade to expand, which spread civilization, as people went further afield and shared ideas.  While I'm not sure that I would consider Amazon to be the quintessence of civilization, the fact is that it could not exist at all without writing. 

There are probably hundreds more ways in which writing helped us to build civilization. It created a truly paradigmatic shift in the affairs of human beings.  But certainly, at the very least, it saved us from having to invent or discover things over and over again, it allowed beauty and wisdom to be broadcast through time and space, and it was crucial in the development of trade and commerce. 

What is the difference between British and American Romanticism?

The differences between English Romanticism and American Romanticism are largely due to the national context in which these works were written. England had been a country for over a thousand years by the time its Romantic movement started in the late 18th century. The English people had a long national history and had been a powerful force militarily and culturally for several hundred years. This history, along with the often negative social effects of the scientific and industrial revolutions, sparked a change in their artistic focus. Poets like William Blake, William Wordsworth, and Samuel Coleridge had tired of the rationalistic, scientifically motivated writing of the Enlightenment, and wanted to probe the emotional lives of common people, as well as marvel at the mysteries of nature in terms of its beauty, rather than its physical laws. Poems like Blake's “Chimney Sweeper” and Wordsworth's “She Dwelt Among the Untrodden Ways” looked at how life treated ordinary people, and sometimes it was not a happy thing to see. Shelley's “Ozymandias” questioned England's imperialistic, empire building foreign policy. Coleridge's poetry, particularly Rime of the Ancient Mariner, presented a supernatural vision.

In America, things were different. The country was young, having been colonized and settled less than two centuries before Europe's Romantic Era began. Unlike England, America had no long, well-established cultural history to shape its literature—so America tended to follow what it read from Europe. So why did its Romantic period evolve differently? If America didn't have a lot of history, what did it have a lot of? In 1800 America still had only 16 states and less than six million people (almost a million of which were slaves)--so most of America was undeveloped and unsettled. What America had in abundance was territory, an almost mythological frontier that seemed to stretch out infinitely. America also had more of something than almost any other country in the history of civilization—freedom (although obviously not for those million slaves—theirs would come as the Romantic Era was giving way to the next movement, Realism).

So, as a result of this frontier and freedom, American Realism went down a somewhat different literary path. Writers like James Fenimore Cooper wrote about exploration and the beauty of the continent. Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau helped begin an intellectual movement called Transcendentalism, that espoused the idea that every man was imprinted with the keys to the universe in his own being—you didn't need a scientist to explain life to you, it was there already, provided by your maker, in your own soul. This idea reflected the freedom Americans felt to be their own people.

Of course, Americans also enjoyed the titillating thrill of a good romantic horror story, and Edgar Allan Poe's work echoed Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, but with an important difference. Shelley's Victor Frankenstein had good intentions as he created his disaster—but Poe's characters, perhaps reflecting the darker side of personal freedom, got themselves into trouble in other, less altruistic ways.

That's a lot, isn't it? Break it down to this: Romanticism's development in England was largely influenced by its national history and industrial/cultural/military might. In America, Romanticism was shaped by the frontier and personal freedom.

How useful do you find Durkheim’s notion of a “social fact”? Does he do an adequate job of defending this concept, or does it still overlap...

Durkheim's concept of a "social fact" is a tremendously powerful one, and frankly one I wish more people talked about. The core notion is that social facts are those which don't exist in any particular individual, nor in any particular physical object, but are created by the aggregate behavior of whole societies. Social facts can in some sense be real facts that control our actions, despite not existing in any particular place at any particular time.

Durkheim's goal was to carve out a particular space for sociology as distinct from other disciplines, but the idea of a social fact has wider applicability, essentially to all the social sciences. "The British pound has recently been devalued relative to the US dollar" is a social fact that is of interest to economists; "herders typically establish norms of honor-based violence" is a social fact that is of interest to anthropologists.

It may not be possible to really separate social facts from psychological facts or economic facts, but this does not mean the concept is useless, only that it doesn't quite achieve the hard-edged distinction between different disciplines that Durkheim himself was aiming for. (Where does psychology end and sociology begin? Well, where does physics end and chemistry begin? Does it matter?) Social facts can be distinguished on a fundamental level from both physical facts on the one hand and fictions on the other.

Physical facts just are. A particular configuration of matter exists in space, and it's there whether or not anyone believes it. "The Earth's mass is 6*10^24 kilograms" is a physical fact.

Fictions just are not. They make claims about the universe that simply fail to hold, again whether or not anyone believes them. "Harry Potter is a wizard" is a fiction.

But social facts are if we believe they are, or more precisely are if a critical mass in society acts as though they are. "The British pound is worth more than the US dollar" is a social fact. The British pound and the US dollar have no inherent value; they are slips of paper or numbers on a spreadsheet. But they take on value when we use them as though they have value, and that is not purely a fiction. It is not imaginary that a British pound will buy you more things than a US dollar---it really will buy you more things. But that is only true because millions of people in the US and Britain believe and act as though it is true, and if they ever started acting differently, it wouldn't be true anymore.

Describe the town using details from the novel.

Maycomb is an old, sleepy southern town during the Great Depression. It is described as the kind of place in which rains turn the roads to red mud and "the courthouse sags in the square" (page 5). In other words, its buildings exist in a state of disrepair. It is often a hot place, where everything wilts and people have to move slowly. People aren't in a rush because, as Lee writes, "there is nowhere to go, nothing to buy and no money to buy it with" (page 6). Maycomb is an Alabama farm town in which most people have very little money, particularly during the Great Depression, and in which people know very little beyond the boundaries of the town.

In addition, it is a town in which everyone knows each other and each other's business. For example, everyone knows that the Ewells are a disgraceful family. It is also a town in which people often help each other; for example, during the fire at Miss Maudie's house, the men of the town help carry the furniture out of her house. Finally, it is a segregated town in which most white people subscribe to racist beliefs and in which a white woman's word--for example, that of Mayella Ewell--always counts more than that of a black man such as Tom Robinson. 

How could you compare The Importance of Being Earnest by Oscar Wilde and C Above C Above High C by Ishmael Reed?

We can compare both plays by analyzing the importance of appearances and the constraints of morality within the plays.

1) The deception of surface appearances.

In The Importance of Being Earnest, Jack Worthing uses his alter ego to escape the constraints of Victorian morality; with his alter ego, Earnest, Jack is able to keep up appearances before his ward, Cecily Cardew. The notion of hypocrisy as a form of self-preservation and personal agency was a means to an end within the structure of Victorian society. Keeping up appearances allowed one to preserve one's image of respectability and integrity before one's servants, family, and community.

In the story, Jack becomes Earnest when he wants to have a bit of fun in London. It's a convenient excuse that works splendidly, until he realizes that his deceptive alter ego could cost him Gwendolyn's love. Meanwhile, his best friend, Algernon, has his own alter ego as well, the hypochondriac Bunbury. Bunbury allows Algernon to bypass his social obligations, responsibilities he finds boring and uninspiring. Two other characters in the play, Lady Bracknell and Miss Prism, also have to keep up appearances in order to appear virtuous and morally unassailable.

The aristocratic Lady Bracknell's rejection of Jack Worthing/ Earnest as a desirable suitor for her daughter, Gwendolen, is predicated on Jack's lack of an acceptable pedigree. As a daughter from an aristocratic family, Gwendolen is expected to conform to particularly restrictive social norms. Honor and reputation must be preserved at all costs. Meanwhile, Miss Prism, Cecily's governess, must teach her young charge all the expected virtues the ward of a respectable man must have.

In The C above C above High C, appearances are a form of deception as well. All must conform to required expectations in order to fit into a narrow and restrictive culture. In the play, J. Edgar Hoover appears in drag and he's black, quite a stunning and unconventional portrayal of the ebullient and combative FBI director. According to Mamie Eisenhower (in the play), Hoover has never been accepted as a white man; as a form of self-preservation, he tells people that he has a tan so they will trust him to fulfill his prescribed role in society.

Meanwhile, President Eisenhower is portrayed as a lecher and adulterer in the play. His lover is Kay Summersby, who uses embarrassingly poetic language to describe her sexual ecstasies during trysts with her presidential lover. Meanwhile, General Douglas MacArthur is described as a sex-obsessed and abusive philanderer. In the play, Mamie tells Lil (Louis Armstrong's wife) that MacArthur had abused a Chinese teenager "into bad health." Louis Armstrong himself does not escape unscathed; his wife, Lil, describes him as a man sexually fixated on his mother.

The commonality between both plays is the importance of appearances as a tool of self-preservation and personal aggrandizement. In C above C above High C, respected men in political and military circles must conform to outward expectations of manhood, masculinity, and respectability. Their material success depends on this. Likewise, in The Importance of Being Earnest, members of the aristocracy and the lower classes must adhere to outward conventions of morality, honor, and dignity. Any variation from the norm threatens to disrupt the hierarchical equilibrium so prized by Victorian society.

2) The definition of morality is in the eye of the beholder.

In The Importance of Being Earnest, Gwendolen exemplifies the perfect Victorian young lady. She is dignified, virtuous, and cosmopolitan; in short, a young lady beyond reproach. Her ideas about morality are vastly antithetical to true happiness, however; Wilde satirizes her fixation on the name "Earnest" as a way to comment on the hypocrisy of Victorian morality, a morality encased in sanctimonious piety and patronizing noblesse oblige (an implied social responsibility by the aristocratic class to demonstrate nobility and compassion towards the lower classes).

Despite the social obligations of the upper classes, the lower classes also have to fulfill certain expectations. They sometimes fail desperately in this area. In the play, it is revealed Miss Prism left Jack in a leather handbag in the cloakroom of the Victoria Station when he was a baby. As Cecily's governess, however, she maintains an outward appearance of primness, integrity, and civility. Yet, the truth is that Miss Prism is a repressed woman, a caricature of the respectable working-class employee in an aristocratic household. She pines after the priest, Dr. Chasuble, but must hide her less-than-savory desires from the public eye. This she does through pompous diction and supposedly didactic discourse.

In C above C above High C, we find the definition of morality is again in the eye of the beholder. As described in (1), the perception of an individual's morality can vary depending on who is doing the judging. Characters from both plays demonstrate a fear for exposing their individual desires, personalities, and ambitions. Perhaps the natural propensity for humans to judge each other cruelly distorts truth and prevents genuine self-contemplation.