Below are the 11 most recent journal entries recorded in smartblog's InsaneJournal:

Friday, September 9th, 2011
12:17 pm	The rules The rules and best practices for preparing your resume have changed in the last few years; what you learned when you graduated may be outdated, and costing you the opportunity for interviews and getting that next job.Anne Landon and Maryjo Campana, both certified resume writers through the Professional Association of Resume Writers, will offer a workshop to help you improve your resume as part of the James V. Brown Library’s Business Breakfast series on Friday, May 6. The presenters will cover the basics of preparing your resume, then encourage questions and review participants’ resumes, if you wish.Anne Landon, CPRW, is Assistant Director and Internship Coordinator at Lycoming College’s Institute for Management Studies. Maryjo Campana, CPRW, is Director of Career Services at Lycoming.The session will be held at 8 AM in the Lowry Room on the Third Floor of the Welch Wing. Business Breakfasts are free and open to the public, but registration is strongly encouraged. (Comment on this)
12:17 pm	Diagnostic Writing Service The Diagnostic Writing Service (DWS) is available for students and teachers to assess current writing skills against college-level expectations. The essay writing services allows individual students to write an essay in response to an actual EPT essay prompt and to submit the essay via the Internet. A university English Placement Test (EPT) reader uses the scoring rubric of the EPT test and assesses student writing against the standards expected of entering college students. Specific diagnostics statements are provided to the student in a timely manner via the Internet. In addition to an overall assessment of the essay, the diagnostic statements inform the student about the strengths and weaknesses of the student's writing. Students can work independently to improve their writing in response to the diagnostic feedback. The DWS is also intended as a teacher-mediated program that encourages high school teachers to become familiar with college-level expectations for writing, to have access to the relevant diagnostic information for their class as a whole, and to incorporate the DWS and related materials into their curricula. (Comment on this)
12:16 pm	Using field-tested strategies dissertation writers need strong, practical advice, as well as someone to assure them that their struggles aren't unique. Joan Bolker, midwife to more than one hundred dissertations and co-founder of the Harvard Writing Center, offers invaluable suggestions for the graduate-student writer. Using positive reinforcement, she begins by reminding thesis writers that being able to devote themselves to a project that truly interests them can be a pleasurable adventure. She encourages them to pay close attention to their writing method in order to discover their individual work strategies that promote productivity; to stop feeling fearful that they may disappoint their advisors or family members; and to tailor their theses to their own writing style and personality needs. Using field-tested strategies she assists the student through the entire thesis-writing process, offering advice on choosing a topic and an advisor, on disciplining one's self to work at least fifteen minutes each day; setting short-term deadlines, on revising and defending the thesis, and on life and publication after the dissertation. Bolker makes writing the dissertation an enjoyable challenge. (Comment on this)
12:16 pm	After wrestling with material For all who have taken history courses in college, the experience of writing a college research papers is etched indelibly in memory: late nights before the paper is due, sitting in pale light in front of a computer monitor or typewriter, a huge stack of books (most of them all-too-recently acquired) propped next to the desk, drinking endless cups of coffee or bottles of Jolt cola. Most of all, we remember the endless, panicked wondering: how on earth was something coherent going to wind up on the page - let alone fill eight, or ten, or twelve of them? After wrestling with material for days, the pressure of the deadline and level of caffeine in the body rise enough, and pen is finally put to paper. Many hours later, a paper is born - all too often something students are not proud to hand in, and something professors dread grading. "Whatever does not kill us makes us stronger." While Nietzsche may sometimes have been right, he likely did not have writing history papers in mind. On the contrary, I sometimes wonder if students' bad experiences writing papers does not drive some them away from history. How can we make this process less traumatic, more educational, and ultimately more rewarding for all concerned? (Comment on this)
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Sunday, August 1st, 2010
3:03 pm	Funeral customs Even more telling were many of the seventeenth-century graves of the praying Indians of Natick, Massachusetts, John Eliot's first and most successful Christian reservation. As the objects of Eliot's obdurate brand of Protestant proselytizing, the Natick Indians might have been expected to quickly and permanently forgo their "pagan" funeral customs. But when numerous graves were disturbed or removed by the town's growth in the late eighteenth century, wampum and glass beads, spoons, a bottle "nearly half full of some kind of liquor," and "several other Indian curiosities" were found mixed among the bones of their "converted" owners. Equally revealing were the twenty-one graves in the Indian cemetery of the Jesuit headquarters at Ste. Marie-among-theHurons. While all the burials were made in wooden coffins and solemnized according to the rites of the Church, only some of the bodies were extended and nearly all were surrounded by native and European grave goods--pewter and clay pipes, seeds, wampum, copper and clay pots, and iron knives as well as rosaries. One grave even contained the jawbone of a dog, this in the teeth of Jesuit opposition to such offerings. The professional essay writing services – all you desire to have your essay done today European proximity fostered a number of other changes in Indian funerals, some the result of native emulation of colonial practices, others of Christian pressure for reform. When the technology was available, Indians in the Northeast sometimes resorted to wooden coffins. But coffins required not only sawn planks but forged nails, which were often in short supply in frontier settlements, so the natives bent on colonialstyle burials often made do with split-log imitations, like that of Ninigret's sister. Typical were ten Oneidas wearing medals with the likeness of King George I who were buried in the eighteenth century "in logs hollowed out by burning." (Comment on this)
3:02 pm	The first grave More effective in abolishing the practice was self-interest. The French, including traders such as Nicolas Denys, worked hard to persuade the Indians of the "uselessness of this display" and the economic "harm done by it," even to the extent of opening a grave to show them that the offerings had not gone west with the soul of the deceased. But the law of supply and demand was more persuasive. "Since they cannot now obtain the things which come from us with such ease as they had in obtaining robes of Marten, of Otter, or of Beaver, [or] bows and arrows," wrote Denys, "and since they have realised that guns and other things were not found in their woods or in their rivers, they have become less devout" in the observance of their mortuary customs. Online custom term papers are original, composed by educated writers, and delivered on time It would be easy to conclude from the written record that grave offerings shrivelled in quantity and cultural importance with the advent of widespread European settlement and missionization. But we would be misled, for the archaeological record documents the remarkable persistence of traditional customs even in spheres of the heaviest Christian influence. The first grave in the specially designated "Sachem's Cemetery" in Charlestown, Rhode Island, was that of Weunquesh, the sister of the second sachem named Ninigret. She was laid to rest about 1686 in an extended, supine position in a hollow log, split, hinged, and chained (to deter grave robbers?) to resemble an English coffin. Her dress, too, was English--a green silk robe and matching bonnet--save for a pair of dainty moccasins, soled in copper. Yet this person of "royal blood" was accompanied by a rich profusion of grave goods--kettles, pottery, beads, broaches, coins, spoons, and porringers around the coffin, Dutch metal pipes and spoons, thimbles, a bottle of brandy, stone pestles, and much wampum within. (Comment on this)
3:02 pm	New France By contrast, in the eastern parts of New France, where trade goods were less abundant and more costly, many natives reduced or omitted grave offerings less because of Jesuit pressure than the efforts of French traders, the example of French habitants, and the need for French goods that had become "indispensable necessities." Indeed, the Jesuits condoned the use of grave offerings as a vital sign of respect for the dead and "convincing proof of [the natives'] belief that souls survive the decay of the tomb." In matters of death as of life, the Jesuit missionaries concentrated their energies on the essentials of religion and allowed their neophytes a wide latitude in the rest of their lives. As the missionary at Lorette explained in 1675, "after removing from them all the superstitions which they had learned in paganism, we have left them the remainder, which serves but to maintain the mutual union which exists between them, and even to inspire devotion in those who witness the ceremonies." The most the Jesuits did to alter the practice of grave offerings was to promote the substitution of religious items--rings, crosses, and rosaries--for native goods or the donation of potential grave goods to the poor who would in return offer prayers for the dead. Only the burial of pet dogs was condemned outright. Do you seek to evaluate if your resume fits formatting of cv services? (Comment on this)
3:01 pm	Theft-related changes Theft-related changes could obviously not alter native practices and attitudes or subject the Indians to colonial authority fast enough to suit European tastes, so the colonial missionaries--religious and lay, English and French--sought to speed the process. The first major target, as the Pilgrim episode indicated, was the widespread offering of grave goods to souls bound for a pagan "heaven." Different national and interest groups advocated different methods for dealing with the practice. The English missionaries in seventeenth-century New England and the Moravians in eighteenth-century Pennsylvania and Ohio advocated the complete abolition of grave offerings and every other mortuary custom that smacked of "paganism"--which, of course, condemned nearly everything the Indians did to honor their dead. When the missionaries were able to establish their authority over the Indians in segregated praying towns, they were able to curb the interment of grave goods with some success. But the number of Indians living in Protestant praying towns was minuscule compared to that of those who maintained their tribal independence and continued to bury their dead in traditional ways. Even the rare itinerant missionary could do nothing to change those ways, especially when the Indians were aided and abetted by English traders who profited from their rapid and non-recyclable consumption of trade goods. As a longtime trader among the Cherokees confessed, "all that is of royal descent buries a good quantity of goods with him. Likewise all the other common people has vast quantities of all sorts of goods buried with them which is a great advantage to the merchants of South Carolina and especially to the Indian traders that uses [trades] amongst them." Whether you work with educated professional writers, it does not secure excellent outcome. (Comment on this)
3:00 pm	The New England Indians Two changes in native mortuary practices may have occurred as a result of grave robbing, one in New England and one over a larger area. I have found no proof for the first, yet it seems likely that once the New England Indians measured the probability of having their leaders' graves internally defiled and externally denuded of their furry monuments by a sanctimoniously "theevish people," they, began to disguise them by omitting telltale palisades, mounds, posts, and hangings, and perhaps to dig them not in common cemeteries but in wooded places "where people seldom go." The shift in burial location--if such occurred--may not have significantly altered the Indians' attitudes toward death. But certainly the democratization of grave exteriors--whether the result of furtive traditionalism or Christian conversion--would have upset the social assumptions of most woodland tribes. For like most societies, they accorded their dead treatment commensurate with their social roles and statuses in life. Their burials, therefore, reflected "a great difference betweene persons of noble, and of ignoble, or obscure, or inferior discent." So marked was this social consciousness, wrote Thomas Morton, that the New England Indians "marvell to see no monuments over our dead, and therefore thinke no great Sachem is yet come into those parts [ Massachusetts]: or not as yet deade, because, they see the graves all alike." To be reduced in death to an unmarked or a uniformly crossed grave was the final step in the loss of one's identity, the goal so eagerly sought by the European missionaries. If I order custom research papers, I am sure I will receive authentic written papers without delay! (Comment on this)
2:57 pm	Feast of the Dead A year later, however, the Pilgrims again desecrated an Indian grave, but for a new reason. Like most groups, the Indians of southern New England were socially differentiated in death as in life. One distinguishing mark of the graves of "noble" figures was a large fur "hearse cloath" propped over the grave or hung from a nearby tree. Accordingly, Pasonayessit, the Massachusett sachem's mother, was covered by "two great Beares skinnes sowed together at full length"--that is, until the Plymouth planters purloined them to eradicate a sign of pagan "superstition." Only luck and matchlocks saved them from the vengeful wrath of the sachem's warriors, who considered it "impious, and inhumane, to deface the monuments of the dead." The motives of most colonial grave robbers, however, were not as mixed. Simple avarice prompted "the robbing of Pesiccush his sisters grave, & mangling of her flesh" in 1654 by an infamous Rhode Island quartet in search of royal "bootie," as it did the opening of Canadian graves "in order to strip the dead of their robes of beaver skins." Understandably, the Indians were doubly "scandalized," not only that anyone would commit so barbarous a crime against their nations, risking death, the loss of trade, and all-out war, but that the newcomers would stoop so low for a few dirty grave goods when they seemed to possess material riches that far surpassed anything the Indians enjoyed in life or in death. But when prominent Indian men--most likely in the great "Feast of the Dead"--took as much as a ton of "Moose, Otter, and Beaver" robes to the grave with them, we can appreciate the consuming "envy" if not the Christian "pity" aroused in European breasts. Certainly after the fur trade put a premium on the possession of wampum and furs, the Indians, too, could understand the colonists' feelings sufficiently to commit on occasion a serious breach in their own funeral etiquette. As Lafitau and several of our archaeological colleagues have noticed, the Indians' sometimes desperate need for European goods drove "some unscrupulous people to rummage in their ancestors' ashes" for still-usable trade items and wampum with which to purchase others. The emotional effect of native and European grave robbing on the Indians' sense of sanctity of the dead must have been appalling. I do not know how to do school essays and I pay for essays online because I have no other solution (Comment on this)