GRE只是一切的开始

396857815UID：2758634

现在看到已经走完整个历程的人的发言，总觉得那头好远。。。

wdx19861106UID：2821198

希望6年之后我会有自己的感想贴在我们论坛， 希望无论何时何事自己都一直坚持下去，做最好的自己！

xingfuhbjUID：2769976

我看着周围的人，每个人都有属于自己的故事，挣扎和委屈，都有突然想把书一摔，电脑一关，对自己说，我不干了，绝望了就这样吧。结果过了一天，又不死心的对自己说，不甘心啊，一定要坚持下去之类的事情。
lingli_xiaoai 发表于 2010-7-18 09:57

!!!!!
这条路上充满着本我和超我的对峙啊...!

时间真的很奇妙啊~
初三的时候觉得研二的某个哥哥能够阅读英文文献没啥障碍是一件so强的事情...
而晃眼间5年过去大二的我也可以勉强做到这件事情了...这是当初那个自己肯定想不到的~
不知下一个5年又会发生什么.....
anyway, 不管发生什么都是由现在在做的事儿积累起来的~~~!FIGHT!


还是不习惯看一堆堆的英文...不过瞄了一下highlight的地方,很赞啊~!感谢超厚道的老版主~!
慢慢啃...!
顶一个~

追梦小木耳UID：2781857

连看两天教育和历史，受益良多啊！
今天还继续不？

lingli_xiaoaiUID：172506

连看两天教育和历史，受益良多啊！
今天还继续不？
追梦小木耳 发表于 2010-7-20 20:36

I will if I have time...I will try to add something else

追梦小木耳UID：2781857

20# lingli_xiaoai

这些文章都是在谷歌上搜的吗？还是有哪个比较好的论文网站？

lingli_xiaoaiUID：172506

20# lingli_xiaoai  

这些文章都是在谷歌上搜的吗？还是有哪个比较好的论文网站？
追梦小木耳 发表于 2010-7-20 20:52

by google...

papers would be too much for an Issue...and more often than not, really hard for outsider to understand.
I cannot even full understand papers in my own research area.
for issue, you don't have to have any expertise in the area you discuss, so you don't have to read professional articles.
But you certainly can, if you want.

lingli_xiaoaiUID：172506

想起一个issue题目 "The arts (painting, music, literature, etc.) reveal the otherwise hidden ideas and impulses of a society." 看了一些文章以后发现，罕有人讲music的。。本来想研究研究。找了一篇叫做 classic music＇s new golden age的文章，一看，每句都有很多GRE单词。。真可以拿来做GRE阅读了。这只是其中的一段.

The Early-Music Quarrel

By the mid-twentieth century, nearly all performers respected the letter of the score and dedicated themselves to realizing its spirit as well. But to the early-music advocates, the establishment musicians seriously misunderstood that spirit, at least regarding the pre-Classical repertoire.

Over the course of the twentieth century, the baroque composers—above all, Bach and Handel—had been taking on more and more weight and waddling ever more ponderously, as mainstream conductors assimilated them to late-Romantic performance styles. Early-eighteenth-century works sounded suspiciously Wagnerian—with long legato lines and a smooth, creamy sound, performed by ensembles many magnitudes larger than anything ever marshaled during the baroque or classical eras. Conductor Ivan Fischer recently recalled a Leopold Stokowski performance of Bach, after which musicians left the stage to pare down for Bruckner, the epitome of late-Romantic gigantism. While massive ensembles may have magnified the spiritual force of the music for some listeners, the orchestral inflation at the very least obscured the intricate contrapuntal writing for different instrumental voices. With a chorus of 200, no one is going to hear the flutes delicately doubling the sopranos’ line in a Bach oratorio.

In rejecting this supersized sound, the early-music acolytes (whose first modern wave included Gustav Leonhardt, Frans Brüggen, Nikolas Harnoncourt, Ton Koopman, and Christopher Hogwood) embraced a fallen historical consciousness, compared with the prelapsarian innocence of mainstream musicians. (The authenticity movement had late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century antecedents, but those early experiments never achieved critical mass.) Where the great titans of traditional twentieth-century performance—conductors such as Wilhelm Fürtwangler and Otto Klemperer—assumed a continuity between the past and the present that guaranteed the fidelity of their interpretations, the early-music advocates saw discontinuity. The essence of the music of the past was no longer intuitively available to us but required historical research to recover, they believed. A gulf separated Bach’s world from ours; we could no longer assume that modern performing traditions expressed his intentions.

The early-music movement quickly attained commercial success and just as quickly provoked a backlash, primarily from musicians who objected to the implication that their performances were inauthentic. Some objections were aesthetic: these old instruments sound weak and thin, critics said; stronger models have superseded them for good reason. We need a revival of period strings as much as we need a revival of period dentistry, one wag observed. In a 1990 interview, violinist Pinchas Zuckerman called historical performance “asinine STUFF . . . a complete and absolute farce. Nobody wants to hear that stuff.”

Other objections were normative. “Musical archaism may be a symptom of a disintegrating civilization,” musicologist Donald Grout wrote at the start of the modern period-instrument movement. A composer of early music, if he came back to life today, would be astonished by our interest in how music was performed in his own times, Grout asserted. “Have we no living tradition of music, that we must be seeking to revive a dead one?” the composer would ask.

The most interesting challenges to the historical-performance movement, however, have been philosophical. Historically accurate performance is unattainable, critics like Richard Taruskin of the University of California at Berkeley charged. There are too many stylistic unknowns, too many variables regarding tempo and phrasing, to think that treatises on technique or illustrations of musicians playing an instrument can lead to the movement’s Holy Grail: the way a piece sounded at its creation. Further, the very idea of an authentic performance is incoherent, the skeptics said: Which performance of a work should we view as authentic? Its premiere? But what if that performance—or every subsequent one during a composer’s lifetime—failed to realize the composer’s conception because of inadequate rehearsals or mediocre musicians, as Berlioz so frequently experienced? [seems like sentence people using in argument]

The naysayers pointed out that the context of musical performance has changed so radically from the pre-Romantic era that we cannot hope to re-create its original meaning. For most of European history, music belonged to social ritual, whether it accompanied worship, paid homage to a king, or provided background for a feast. A large concert hall filled with silent listeners, focused intently on an ensemble of well-fed professionals still in possession of most of their teeth, has no counterpart in early-music history. Early-music proponents, the detractors added, are highly selective in their use of historical evidence. No one today conducts the operas of Jean-Baptiste Lully, for example, by pounding a staff on the floor, as conductors did in the court of Louis XIV to try to keep time in an ensemble of less-than-perfectly trained musicians.

Taruskin launched the intended coup de grâce. The predominant early-music style has nothing to do with historical evidence, he charged, and everything to do with the modernist aesthetic. The style’s fleet rhythms and transparent textures are a reaction against the excesses of subjectivity and expression characteristic of Romanticism; the shaky historical arguments on its behalf are just after-the-fact window dressing.
Several of the arguments against the period-instrument movement had bite. They reflect the skepticism regarding the possibility of knowing the past that dominates today’s universities and that gets used (improperly) to justify junking the study of history, philology, and literary tradition. The proponents of period performance heard and considered these sophisticated objections. Then something wonderful happened. They responded, in essence: “Yeah, whatever.” They tweaked their rhetoric, junked the term “authenticity” and anything else that sounded too authoritarian—and went right on doing what they had been doing all along. That is because their hunger for the past—for discovering how the musicians at the Esterházy palace interpreted crescendi or how much vibrato a cellist performing Bach’s cello suites in the 1720s would have used—was so great that no amount of hermeneutical skepticism could extinguish it.

The influential restorer of French baroque opera, conductor William Christie, exemplifying this attitude, lamented in 1997 how little we know about the hand gestures used in ballets and operas in pre-Revolutionary France. Gestural art is “a field that is painful for me right now,” he told Bernard Sherman in Inside Early Music. Christie’s pain is precious. It comes from an instinct in short supply in the rest of the culture: the belief that the past contains lost worlds of expression that would enrich us if we could just recover them. The desire to learn how a shepherdess in a Rameau opera may have inclined her hand to Cupid is an attribute of an enlightened humanity. (Unfortunately, Christie has since abandoned the project of re-creating baroque opera stagings and choreography, leaving the Boston Early Music Festival and Opera Lafayette as the sole ensembles committed to courtly theatrical sensibility as well as musical practice.)

An early informal truce between modern-instrument ensembles and the historicists has long since broken down. According to this unwritten understanding, the historicists would claim the pre-1800 repertoire, while leaving nineteenth-century works to the modern symphony orchestra. It was not long, however, before the proponents of historical “authenticity” marched all the way into the twentieth century, blithely piling one historical anachronism onto another, as if to confirm Taruskin’s skepticism regarding the evidentiary basis for their work. Period-instrument groups such as the Philharmonia Baroque and the Orchestre Révolutionnaire et Romantique use the evocative Waldhorn in Brahms’s works, for example, even though Brahms himself could not persuade his contemporary brass players to give up their spiffy new valved horn for that difficult ancient instrument. In addition to adopting “historical” practices that didn’t exist, the historicists ignore widespread nineteenth-century performance traditions that did exist. There has been no movement to revive “preluding,” for example, in which a pianist improvised chords and arpeggios before breaking into the actual published score of a work, because such behavior would too forcefully violate contemporary concert norms. Nor has the habit of teleologically updating scores been adopted. This paradox points to the conceptual meltdown point of the authenticity movement, where it becomes clear that the most unhistorical practice in the history of music is the concern for authenticity.

Such conundrums do not subtract from the enormous contribution that the early-music movement has made to our experience of music. Traditional orchestras, especially in Europe, have subtly changed their sound and approach to the standard repertoire in response to the competition. Sadly, we will never know whether the period-instrument movement has come close to past performance style (though Taruskin is wrong that historical materials cannot provide meaningful guidance). But the effort to recover our musical past remains a noble one.

上面这段比较难懂一点 后门讲了一些比较容易的音乐教育的介绍(include China)。



The caliber of musicianship also marks our age as a golden one for classical music. “When I was young, you knew when you heard one of the top five American orchestras,” says Arnold Steinhardt, the first violinist of the recently disbanded Guarneri Quartet. “Now, you can’t tell. Every orchestra is filled with fantastic players.” Steinhardt is ruthless toward his students when they’re preparing for an orchestra audition. “I’ll tell them in advance: ‘You didn’t get the job. There are 250 violinists competing for that place. You have to play perfectly, and you sure didn’t play perfectly for me.’ ”


The declinists who proclaim the death of classical music might have a case if musical standards were falling. But in fact, “the professional standards are higher everywhere in the world compared to 20 or 40 years ago,” says James Conlon, conductor of the Los Angeles Opera. A vast oversupply of students competing to make a career in music drives this increase in standards.

Much of that student oversupply comes from Asia. “The technical proficiency of the pianists from Asia is staggering,” says David Goldman, a board member at New York’s Mannes College of Music, where applications are at a record high. “They arrive here with these Popeye arms, and never miss a note.” Asia has fallen in love with classical music; many parents believe that music training is an essential part of their children’s development. “The only way to survive when you’re in a pool of literally hundreds of thousands of other Asian kids is to outwork your competition,” says Tom Vignieri, the music producer of the effervescent NPR show From the Top, which showcases school-age classical musicians.

Far Eastern countries are trying to build up their own conservatory system to meet the demand for music training—Robert Dodson, head of the Boston University School of Music, recalls with awe the Singapore Conservatory’s 200,000 square feet of marble—but so far, demand outstrips supply. When Lang Lang, today an internationally acclaimed pianist, was admitted to Beijing’s Central Conservatory in the early 1990s, he was one of 3,000 students who had applied for just 12 fifth-grade spots. And those 3,000 were the cream of the 50 million children who study music in China, including 36 million young pianists.

For now, the West’s conservatories continue to attract Asia’s top talent. Nineteen-year-old Meng-Sheng Shen, a slender freshman at Juilliard, dreamed of a concert career while still a piano student in Taiwan. “In Taiwan, I felt: ‘It’s not that hard to win,’ ” he says. In New York, however, “you see a lot of people who play really well,” Shen marvels, and so this acolyte of Chopin, Liszt, and Rachmaninoff has recalibrated his plans to include the option of teaching as well as concertizing.

Plenty of young Americans, too, are pursuing training in the nation’s 600-plus college music programs, whose unlikely locations, such as at California State University, Fresno, testify to the far-flung desire for musical sublimity. An efficient talent-spotting machine vacuums up promising young oboists and violinists from every Arkansas holler and Oregon farm town and propels them to ever-higher levels of instruction and competition.



classical music 失去观众的问题。

But however vibrant classical music’s supply side, many professionals worry that audience demand is growing ever more anemic. Conlon calls this imbalance the “American paradox”: “The growth in the quantity and quality of musicians over the last 50 years is phenomenal. America has more great orchestras than any country in the world. And yet I don’t know of a single orchestra, opera company, or chamber group that isn’t fighting to keep its audience.” The number of Americans over the age of eight who attended a classical-music performance dropped 29 percent from 1982 to 2008, according to the League of American Orchestras (though attendance at all leisure activities plummeted during that period as well, including a 36 percent drop in attendance at sporting events).

Recent conservatory graduates, struggling for work, find their commitment to a music career tested almost daily. “The culture seems to have a shrinking capacity for what I love,” says Jennifer Jackson, a 30-year-old pianist who studied at the Peabody Institute in Baltimore. The audience has a limited ability to follow serious music, Jackson says. “To make a profit, you have to intersperse lots of things that people can handle musically.”

古典音乐是不是从来不是为了大众而演奏的？

These perceptions, however valid, should be kept in historical perspective. Much of today’s standard repertoire was never intended for a mass audience—not even an 1820s Viennese “mass audience,” much less a 2010 American one. Nineteenth-century performers regarded the music that constitutes the foundation of today’s repertoire with trepidation, since they feared—rightly at the time—that it would prove too challenging for the public.


Composers wrote sonatas and chamber works either for students or for private performance in aristocratic salons, not for public consumption. True public concerts—those intended to make a profit—resembled The Ed Sullivan Show, not the reverential communing with greatness that we take for granted today. Light crowd-pleasers—above all, variations on popular opera themes—leavened more serious works, which were unlikely to be performed in their entirety or without a diverting interruption. At the 1806 premiere of Beethoven’s Violin Concerto in Vienna, the violinist played one of his own compositions between the concerto’s first and second movements—on one string while holding his violin upside down. Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony premiered at Paris’s leading concert venue in 1832 with romances and tunes by Weber and Rossini spliced between the third movement and the choral finale, according to James Johnson in Listening in Paris.


By the end of the nineteenth century, public concert practice more closely resembled the norm today, with symphonies and sonatas usually performed in their entirety and without other works spliced into them. Many soloists began performing marathon recitals of highly demanding works. This programming of exclusively serious music for public consumption in the late nineteenth century was no more consistent with how that music was originally performed than it is now, and it represented as much of an unforeseen advance in the listening capacities of the public.



[让我想起好象题目是提到arts 之类的appealing to general public的话题,如果深奥的艺术从一开始就没有为了appealling 观众而存在，而是观众为了欣赏这样的艺术而提高了品位。

追梦小木耳UID：2781857

楼主好爱你啊！
今天正准备找找艺术类的文章来读一读呢~雪中送炭！
昨天自己试着在谷歌上找了些浅显易懂的科技类的文章，对写作思路的开拓大有裨益，比看那些例子有用多了

lingli_xiaoaiUID：172506

楼主好爱你啊！
今天正准备找找艺术类的文章来读一读呢~雪中送炭！
昨天自己试着在谷歌上找了些浅显易懂的科技类的文章，对写作思路的开拓大有裨益，比看那些例子有用多了
追梦小木耳 发表于 2010-7-21 20:48

en..you're right...remember the famous saying "google knows everything...."

acutally the article is very long... if you are interested, you can have the link

http://www.city-journal.org/2010/20_3_urb-classical-music.html



then there is another paragraph talking about lang lang and China:

The other source of future classical-music demand is China. “I’m very hopeful,” says Robert Sirota, head of the Manhattan School of Music. “If China graduates 100,000 pianists a year, it changes everything.” The best predictor of attendance at classical concerts is playing an instrument. Asia’s passionate pursuit of music training for its children will create not just tomorrow’s professional musicians, of whom there is no dearth, but tomorrow’s audiences as well. And like El Sistema, the phenomenon of countless poor young Asians practicing fanatically for the privilege of a career performing Scarlatti and Rachmaninoff torpedoes the image of classical music as the bastion of wealthy white elites. When the 12-year-old Lang Lang competed for the first time with Europeans, he worried that their heritage would give them an interpretive advantage. “It’s your native music as well,” his father reminded him. “It belongs to anyone who loves it.”

his father really knows how to encourage his child.

追梦小木耳UID：2781857

en..you're right...remember the famous saying "google knows everything...."

acutally the article is very long... if you are interested, you can have the link

http://www.city-journal.org/2010 ...
lingli_xiaoai 发表于 2010-7-21 21:58

话说这篇文章好难，前面完全没看懂~后面看了两遍，在小哀的提示下才明白啥意思~

lingli_xiaoaiUID：172506

话说这篇文章好难，前面完全没看懂~后面看了两遍，在小哀的提示下才明白啥意思~
追梦小木耳 发表于 2010-7-22 21:04

yes...it is hard...that's why I think it too hard for casual reading but maybe good for GRE verbal reading section ...haha

never mind if you didn't understand, it's indeed hard....

lingli_xiaoaiUID：172506

[之前看到有同学用工业革命做例子，好久没想起过这个词了，找了一篇英文文章，顿时回到了高中时代，我在想，是不是高中的时候考GRE，英语不是问题的话，找例子应该不费工夫了。果然知识都还给老师了。]

The Industrial Revolution
by
Joseph A. Montagna

Introduction

The era known as the Industrial Revolution was a period in which fundamental changes occurred in agriculture, textile and metal manufacture, transportation, economic policies and the social structure in England. [This period is appropriately labeled “revolution,” for it thoroughly destroyed the old manner of doing things; yet the term is simultaneously inappropriate, for it connotes abrupt change. ]The changes that occurred during this period (1760-1850), in fact, occurred gradually. The year 1760 is generally accepted as the “eve” of the Industrial Revolution. In reality, this eve began more than two centuries before this date. The late 18th century and the early l9th century brought to fruition the ideas and discoveries of those who had long passed on, such as, Galileo, Bacon, Descartes and others.

Advances in agricultural techniques and practices resulted in an increased supply of food and raw materials, changes in industrial organization and new technology resulted in [increased production, efficiency and profits], and the increase in commerce, foreign and domestic, were all conditions which promoted the advent of the Industrial Revolution. Many of these conditions were so closely interrelated that increased activity in one spurred an increase in activity in another. Further, this interdependence of conditions creates a problem when one attempts to delineate them for the purpose of analysis in the classroom. Therefore, it is imperative that the reader be acutely aware of this when reading the following material.

The narrative portion of this unit is intended for the teacher’s use as a guide to teaching about this subject. It does not purport to include all that is needed to teach about the Industrial Revolution. It does provide a basis for teaching about the subject, leaving room for the teacher to maneuver as his/her style of teaching permits. One manner of capitalizing on any shortcomings in this material is to design individual or small group student activities which will enhance their study skills (reference materials, library use, research reports, etc.), while at the same time locating specific information. Also included are suggestions for utilizing this material in class. In the final analysis it is the teacher who will determine the manner in which this material is used, so it is his/her’s to modify as deemed necessary.

Agricultural Changes

Agriculture occupied a prominent position in the English way of life of this period. [Not only was its importance rooted in the subsistence of the population, but agriculture was an indispensable source of raw materials for the textile industry. ]Wool and cotton production for the manufacture of cloth increased in each successive year, as did the yield of food crops.

The improved yield of the agricultural sector can be attributed to the enclosure movement and to improved techniques and practices developed during this period. A common practice in early agriculture was to allow the land to lie fallow after it had been exhausted through cultivation. Later it was discovered that the cultivation of clover and other legumes would help to restore the fertility of the soil. The improved yields also increased the amount of food available to sustain livestock through the winter. This increased the size of herds for meat on the table and allowed farmers to begin with larger herds in the spring than they had previously.

Other advances in agriculture included the use of sturdier farm implements fashioned from metal. Up until this period most farming implements were made entirely out of wood. We do not find much technical innovation beyond the slight improvements made on existing implements. We do find increased energy being placed into the breeding of livestock, control of insects, improved irrigation and farming methods, developing new crops and the use of horsepower in the fields to replace oxen as a source of power.

These changes which have occurred in agriculture made it possible to feed all of the people that were attracted to the industrial centers as factory workers.[ By providing enough food to sustain an adequate work force, England was preparing the way for expansion of the economy and industry.]

In 18th century England, the enclosure of common village fields into individual landholdings, or the division of unproductive land into private property was the first significant change to occur. This concentrated the ownership of the land into the hands of a few, and made it possible to institute improved farming techniques on a wider scale. Students may engage in a debate over the question of enclosure, concerning its effect on the rural poor. Historians are not in complete agreement on the effects of enclosure on the poor, some arguing that it contributed to swelling the numbers of poor, while others argue that their plight was only marginally related to the enclosure movement. An excellent resource for the teacher’s use in this section is Chapter Seven of E. P. Thompson’s book, The Making of the English Working Class.
[所谓的圈地运动 below is forming Wikipedia
圈地运动的意义到现在还有巨大的争议。对于中国人基本上，这东西是不是标志着资本主义，私有财产的产生，什么自由工人之类的。]

[The process of enclosure has sometimes been accompanied by force, resistance, and bloodshed, and remains among the most controversial areas of agricultural and economic history in England. Marxist and neo-Marxist historians argue that rich landowners used their control of state processes to appropriate public land for their private benefit. This created a landless working class that provided the labour required in the new industries developing in the north of England. For example: "In agriculture the years between 1760 and 1820 are the years of wholesale enclosure in which, in village after village, common rights are lost".[1] "Enclosure (when all the sophistications are allowed for) was a plain enough case of class robbery".[2]
[3]

W A Armstrong argued that this is perhaps an oversimplification, that the better-off members of the European peasantry encouraged and participated actively in enclosure, seeking to end the perpetual poverty of subsistence farming. "We should be careful not to ascribe to (enclosure) developments that were the consequence of a much broader and more complex process of historical change".[4] "...[T]he impact of eighteenth and nineteenth century enclosure has been grossly exaggerated[...]".[5]

Textiles

Prior to 1760 the manufacture of textiles occurred in the homes, by people who gave part of their time to it. It was a tedious process from raw material to finished product. In the case of woolen cloth, the wool had to be sorted, cleaned and dyed. Then the wool was carded and combed. Next, it was spun into thread which was woven into cloth. Subsequent processes were performed upon the cloth to change the texture or the color of the woolen cloth. Many of these stages of production were performed by women and children. The supply of raw material for the woolen industry was obtained domestically. In the cases of silk and cotton, the raw materials were obtained from foreign sources, such as, China, the West Indies, North American and Africa.

The organization of the textile industry was complicated and grossly inefficient before the age of mechanization. Differences existed from one locality to another; generally, a merchant employed putters-out to distribute the raw materials to spinners and weavers who were scattered throughout the countryside.

Changes in the textile industry were already occurring in the early 1700s; however, these changes were not easily accepted as evidenced by the workers’ riots which broke out in response to these new machines. John Kay’s flying-shuttle, which enabled one weaver to do the work of two, and Lewis Paul’s roller spinner, which was to make spinning more efficient (later to be perfected by Richard Arkwright), were the precursors of the inventive spirit and the application of new technology to the textile industry.
In the mid-1760s the textile industry began to experience rapid change. James Hargreaves’ jenny, a device which enabled the operator to simultaneously spin dozens of threads, was readily adopted. By 1788 nearly 20,000 of them were being employed in England. Arkwright and others developed the water frame. This device performed similarly to Paul’s roller spinner, though its use demanded greater power than could be applied by muscle.

Arkwright enlisted the financial support of Samuel Need and Jedidiah Strutt to set up a water-powered factory that utilized his invention. This factory, located in Cromford, employed more than 600 workers, many of whom were women and children. The adage “necessity is the mother of invention” is quite appropriate here, for this machine spun the cotton thread faster than human hands could supply the carded and combed raw material. This led to Arkwright’s development of a machine which would perform that function.

[The changes that took place in the textile industry must certainly center about the inventions and their inventors, though not necessarily be limited to them. These inventions that were perfected and employed led to tremendous change in the world of work. ][Gone were the days of the Domestic System, yielding to the new ways of the Factory System.] These factories which were to spring up throughout the countryside were large, dusty, poorly illuminated and ventilated and dangerous. The employment of women and children was commonplace and desired, for they were paid lower wages than their male counterparts. Working conditions in these factories were not subject to much regulation.

A strategy similar to the one that was suggested in the previous section may easily be employed here also. Discussions may center around today’s textile industry, before moving on to the methods of preindustrial and industrialized England. Today, blue jeans are often referred to as “America’s national dress.” Some interesting discussions may develop around the manufacture of blue jeans, from the cotton fields to the finished product.

[By comparing and contrasting conditions of work today and in days gone by, the students should begin to grasp the magnitude of impact that technological change has had on societies. ]The modern-day factory bears very little resemblance to Arkwright’s factory at Cromford. Students may be assigned to write letters to the U.S. Department of Labor and its related agencies to request materials on factories today. Letters may also be written to representatives of the textile industry, as well as to labor unions within the industry. Students may also gather information concerning governmental regulation related to work in the textile industry. An excellent resource which should be used by the teacher is E. Royston Pike’s, Hard Times: Human Documents of the Industrial Revolution.

Coal Mining

[One finds the working conditions and practices of coal mining in the l8th and l9th centuries to be risky, at best, and suicidal at worst.] This industry, even today, provokes thoughts of hazards at every turn. During the l8th and 19th centuries one even finds specific jobs in mining which required the employee to have a “death wish” of sorts. For example, a fireman employed in a colliery had the duty of ridding a mine tunnel of dangerous, flammable gases. His job entailed crawling through the tunnel holding a long stick. Attached to the end of the stick was a lighted candle which exploded any gases that might be accumulated ahead of him. All of the jobs that existed in coal mining were not as dangerous as the fireman’s,; however, every one of them could be termed hazardous. [现在肯定没有法律会允许任何工厂让人去干这种工作，技术的发展是不是带来了对人权的保护，和劳工待遇的提升。]

Different methods of mining coal were employed in various locales throughout England. All coal mining had one trait in common; the movement of coal was accomplished solely by muscle power—animal, man, woman and child, the latter being the most desirable for their size. The process of removing the coal was obviously as slow as it was dirty. Coal was moved along horizontal tunnels by the basketful and hauled up a vertical shaft to the surface. Later, the underground movement of coal was speeded up by the utilization of ponies and carts on rail. The production of coal increased steadily, from 2 1/2 million to more than 15 million tons by 1829.

Improvements in coal mining came in the form of improved tunnel ventilation, improved underground and surface transportation, the use of gunpowder to blast away at the coal seams, and improved tunnel illumination through the use of safety lamps.

[Coal mining today continues to be a hazardous job, though modern machinery and safety equipment have made the industry more efficient and safe. ]Students should better understand the difficulties of mining coal in the 19th century by studying modern-day coal mining. Several modern-day issues related to the use of coal (strip-mining, air pollution, etc.) should make for some lively discussions in class. Discussions may also touch upon the question of health-related problems of this industry (black lung disease).

It was not uncommon in the 19th century for women to be employed in the mining of coal. Entire families could be found working side by side in the mines. Several sections of Pike’s book, Hard Times, are an excellent teacher resource for material related to women and children working in England’s coal mines. All of these short stories, as well as the illustrations, should be sufficient to help the students to understand the harsh conditions that were endured by these people.

Iron

Improvements in the iron industry came in the early l8th century. Abraham Darby successfully produced pig iron smelted with coke. This was a significant breakthrough, for prior to this discovery pig iron was smelted with the use of charcoal. Charcoal, derived from the charring of wood in a kiln, was an excellent source of energy to smelt the iron; however, its widespread use caused a serious depletion of England’s forests. Darby’s technique was gaining popularity within the industry, though problems still existed due to its use. Iron produced through this method was impure and brittle, making it unsuitable for the forgemaster to be able to fashion in into implements, so its use was limited to castings. Later, improvements would occur which produced high quality material and improved techniques in fashioning it.

Transportation

As an integral part of determining the cost and availability of manufactured products and as a means of improved communications, and as an industry unto itself, the improvement of transportation stimulated the course of the Industrial Revolution. [Finished products, raw materials, food and people needed a reliable, quicker and less costly system of transportation. Canals and rivers had long been used as a means of internal transportation.][交通运输的便利，也是工业革命最大的推动力之一。]

The mid-1700s began the first construction of canals between industrial districts. The construction of trunk lines opened the central industrial districts in the 1770s. The major thurst of financial backing came from the merchants and industrialists, who had a great stake in their construction. The problem of moving bulk goods overland was addressed, at least for the time being, by canals. However, their days were numbered, for the coming of the railroads was imminent.

The principles of rail transport were already in use in the late 1700s. Tramways, using cast iron rails, were being employed in a number of mines in England. By 1800 more than 200 miles of tramway served coal mines. It is not surprising, then, to find a number of engineers connected with coal mines searching for a way to apply the steam engine to railways.

A number of men were involved in experimentation concerning the development of railroads in England. Between 1804 and 1820 we find a few partially successful attempts at developing a practical means of rail transport: Richard Trevithick’s “New Cast1e,” a steam locomotive that proved to be too heavy for the rails, John Blenkinsop’s locomotive, which employed a toothed, gear-like wheel, and William Hedley’s “Puffing Billy,” which was used for hauling coal wagons from the mines.

A pioneer in railroads that bears mentioning here is George Stephenson. Stephenson was invited by the Stockton and Darlington Railway to build the railroad between those two towns. The Stockton to Darlington line was the first public railroad to use locomotive traction and carry passengers, as well as freight. The equipment on this line proved to be too expensive to maintain. This was not the last to be heard from Stephenson.

In 1829 the Liverpool and Manchester Railway sponsored a competition to determine the best type of locomotive. This contest took place on the Rainhill level at Lancashire from October 6 to 14, 1829. Three steam locomotives participated in the Rainhill Trials; Timothy Hackworth’s “Sans Pareil,” John Braithwaite and John Ericsson’s “Novelty,” and Stephenson’s “Rocket.” The “Rocket” won the Rainhill Trials. It is interesting and ironic to note here that the first railroad accident death occurred at these trials.

Railroads dominated the transportation scene in England for nearly a century. Railroads proliferated in England, from 1,000 miles in 1836 to more than 7,000 miles built by 1852. Here again is another example of economic necessity producing innovation. The development of reliable, efficient rail service was crucial to the growth of specific industries and the overall economy.

By researching the railroad industry in the United States, students will find them to have been neglected over the years. Railroads have been superceded by modern forms of transport and superhighways. Perhaps a renaissance is due for the railroads in this country. Students will also find that the railroads are a reliable means of transportation for passengers and freight in Europe. Some interesting discussions may evolve around the railroads’ role in mass transit in an energy-conscious world.

===part 1 of 2========

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Steam
[The development and subsequent application of steam power was undoubtedly the greatest technical achievement of the Industrial Revolution.] A number of industries needed the ability to apply the enormous power produced by the steam engine, in order to continue their advancement in production. James Watt is credited with the invention of the steam engine. In fact, Watt improved upon a design which was developed by Thomas Savery and Thomas Newcomen. Watt’s engine improved the efficiency of Newcomen’s engine fourfold, and he utilized the latest technology in gunmaking, where precision was absolutely necessary. The transfer of one technology to another is evident here, in that Watt used John Wilkinson’s device for boring cannon to accurately bore the large cylinder for his engine.

The development of a practical, efficient steam engine and its application to industry and transportation caused a great leap for industrialization.[ Its application was virtually limitless, and it was responsible for lifting industries from infancy to adolescence. ]Obviously, the study of steam power can be a course of study unto itself, and it is included in various sections within this unit. H. W. Dickinson and H. P. Vowles book, James Watt and the Industrial Revolution, is an excellent teacher resource for use in the classroom. This book contains a number of drawings of early designs of steam engines, as well as a complete history of the search for the practical design.

The Human Aspect

In the l8th century the population grew at a faster rate than ever before. There are four primary reasons which may be cited for this growth: a decline in the death rate, an increase in the birth rate, the virtual elimination of the dreaded plagues and an increase in the availability of food. The latter is probably the most significant of these reasons, for English people were consuming a much healthier diet.

One can find a myriad of reasons for the growth of the population, in addition to those above. Industry provided higher wages to individuals than was being offered in the villages. This allowed young people to marry earlier in life, and to produce children earlier. [The old system of apprenticeship did not allow an apprentice to marry. ]City life provided young people with a greater choice of prospective partners, in contrast to the limited choices in some isolated village. Finally, industry provided people with improved clothing and housing, though it took a long time for housing conditions to improve.

With the adoption of the factory system, we find a shift in population. Settlements grew around the factories. In some cases, housing was provided to workers by their employers, thus giving the factory owners greater control over the lives of his workers. In some cases factories started in existing towns, which was desirable because a labor pool was readily available. The prime consideration for locating a factory was the availability of power. The early form of power was derived directly from moving water. Thus, we find factories cropping up in the hills near streams and rivers. Later, when steam power was developed, factories could be located near any source of water. Other factories, such as those involved in the manufacture of iron, had considerations of a different kind involving their location. Due to the great difficulty in moving bulk materials, such as iron ore, these mills had to be located close to the mineral source. In such situations, large communities grew directly above the seams of ore in the earth.

The development of the steam engine to drive machinery freed the mill owners from being locked into a site that was close to swiftly moving water. The steam powered mill still had to be located near a source of water, though the field of choice was much wider. Also, factories could be located closer to existing population centers or seaports, fulfilling the need for labor and transportation of materials.

The towns that grew in the North were crowded, dirty and unregulated. They grew so rapidly that no one took the time to consider the consequence of such conditions. In the areas of public sanitation and public health, ignorance reigned. No one understood the effects of these unsanitary conditions upon humans. Conditions in these densely populated areas worsened to the point of the reappearance of outbreaks of disease. In the mid-1800s there were several outbreaks of typhoid and cholera. Some attention to these conditions was accorded by Parliament in the form of Public Health Acts. These acts did improve conditions, though they were largely ineffective, for they did not grant local Boards of Health the powers to compel improvements.

E. Royston Pike’s Hard Times is literally a treasure chest brimming with short stories that document living and working conditions during the Industrial Revolution. These stories may be utilized in the classroom in a variety of ways, and they should be quite effective in conveying the reality of life during this period. Pages 43-57 of Pike’s book provide an excellent overview of typical living conditions.
Capital

[Prior to industrialization in England, land was the primary source of wealth.] The landed aristocracy held enormous powers the feudal system. However, a new source of great wealth grew from the Industrial Revolution, that which was derived from the ownership of factories and machinery. Those who invested in factories and machinery cannot be identified as belonging to any single class of people (landed aristocracy, industrialists, merchants). [Their backgrounds were quite diverse, yet they had one thing in common: the daring to seize the opportunity to invest in new ventures. It was these capitalists who gave the necessary impetus to the speedy growth of the Industrial Revolution.]
In the early years of this period we find most investments being made in a field closely related to one’s original source of capital. Manufacturers took a substantial portion of their profits to “plough back” into their business, or they invested capital in ventures that were related to their primary business. [Eventually, as opportunities to realize great profits proliferated, it was not uncommon to find these entrepreneurs investing substantially in concerns about which they knew very little.]

Two kinds of capital were needed by these industrialists; long-term capital to expand present operations, and short-term capital to purchase raw materials, maintain inventories and to pay wages to their employees. The long-term capital needs were met by mortgaging factory buildings and machinery. It was the need for short-term capital which presented some problems. The need for short-term capital for raw materials and maintaining stock was accommodated by extending credit to the manufacturers by the producers or dealers. Often, a supplier of raw materials waited from 6 to 12 months for payment of his goods, after the manufacturer was paid for the finished product.

The payment of wages was not an easily solved problem, one which taxed the creativity of employers. The problem was in finding a sufficient amount of small value legal tender to pay the wages. Some employers staggered the days on which they paid their employees, while others paid them in script. Some paid a portion of their work force early in the day, allowing them to shop for household needs. When the money had circulated through the shopkeepers back to the employer, another portion of the work force was paid. All of these methods proved to be unacceptable.

The root of the problem was the lack.of an adequate banking system in these remote industrial centers. The Bank of England, established in the late 1690s, did not accommodate the needs of the manufacturers. It concentrated its interest on the financial affairs of state and those of the trading companies and merchants of London.

The early 1700s brought with it the first country banks. These private banks were founded by those who were involved in a variety of endeavors (goldsmith, merchant, manufacturer). Many industrialists favored establishing their own banks as an outlet for the capital accumulated by their business and as a means for obtaining cash for wages. When the Bank of England tightened credit because of government demands, many of these banks failed. A great number of them had a large proportion of their assets tied up in long-term mortgages, thus leaving them vulnerable when demands for cash were presented by their depositors. From 1772 to 1825, a large number of these banks failed. Their limited resources were inadequate to meet the demands of the factory economy. A banking system was eventually set up to distribute capital to areas where it was needed, drawing it from areas where there was a surplus.

Labor

[If the conditions in which people lived in these factory towns were considered bad, then the conditions in which they worked can be appropriately characterized as being horrendous.] Inside these factories one would find poorly ventilated, noisy, dirty, damp and poorly lighted working areas. These factories were unhealthy and dangerous places in which to work. Normally, workers put in twelve to fourteen hours daily. Factory Acts that were later enacted by Parliament regulated the number of hours that men, women and children worked. Pages 58-74 of E. R. Pike’s book, Hard Times, make for interesting reading on this subject.

The factory system changed the manner in which work was performed. Unlike the domestic system the work was away from home, in large, impersonal settings. Workers were viewed by their employers merely as “hands.”

[Slowly, workers began to realize the strength they could possess if they were a unified force. ]It was a long, uphill battle for workers to be able to have the right to organize into officially recognized unions. Their lot was one of having no political influence in a land where the government followed a laissez-faire policy.

This hands off policy changed as the pressure from growing trade unions increased[. A movement was beginning to free workers from the injustices of the factory system. Political leaders called for reform legislation which would address these injustices (see lesson plans for specific legislation).]

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哇，感觉像是发现了宝藏一样～幸好看了第2、3页的内容。（当然第1页也很感人。）
刚开始写Issue正缺少例子呢，又讨厌什么albert einstei和newton的。（估计不光是我，考官也是。）
就看见这些实在太幸福了。
不愧是小哀大师～我正逐一观看你的帖子呢，每一次都有新惊喜的感觉～