Like So Many Feathers In An Eagles Wings :: Personal Narrative Immigration America Papers

Like So Many Feathers In An Eagle's Wings My life as an American didn't really begin until I was five years old, had caught a fever, and almost died. About a week before, my parents had decided to clean out our small cottage home in Thatcham, England, and put our few lovely possessions into boxes stamped for America. My father had accepted a job in Indianapolis, which meant that my parents, sister, and I would be the first and only of our family to become American immigrants. Our relatives simply couldn't understand it, and to be quite honest, at the time neither could I. They thought my parents irresponsible for wanting to take my sister and me away from all we knew and all that could ever love us. "All for what?" They would protest. "To chase some silly dream? To call yourselves American?" I was young. I was confused and couldn't understand. I even thought my parents were selfish. Then began a time of heart wrenched good-byes, which in my case occurred while clasped between my nanny's large pale hands and soft chest. I didn't really know that I was about to be torn from her and that the rest of my life would be spent wanting to belong. I only knew that something horrible was about to happen, and I didn't want to face it alone. She said, "You be a good lad. Be brave, my sunshine. Don't you go forgetting your old Nan." My mother walked my sister and me out of her bungalow. As we climbed into the car, I could hear Nan let the tears flow. " Goodbye, my darlings," and as though Granddad had not died last spring, "Don't let them take my grandbabies, George." It was then that I realized I might never see my nanny again. I did what I promised my mother I would not. I cried. I had no previous knowledge of America, only what I had heard from Blaine Sutton. He lived next door, and said his armies of toy soldiers were blue because they were American Yanks.

Carmen Boullosa Essay

My mother and father are both Mexican and so is basically my whole family. That would make my heritage to be Mexican or Mexican-American since I was born here in the U.S. In Mexico there are various types of writers. Some are authors, poets, journalists, play writers, script writers, song writers, etc. Carmen Boullosa was born on September 4, 1954 and is still alive today. She was born in Mexico City, Mexico. She started writing during her teens; at first did not like it but then grew up to love it. She has published many novels, poems and plays. As her writing became getting famous, her book have been translated into six different languages. Carmen has also won many awards for her great writing. Premio Xavier Villaurrutia, the Frankfurt Literaturpreis, and the Cafà © Gijà ³n Prize in Madrid are just some of the awards that Carmen has received for her writing. All of them reward her for her great writing. Feminism and the life of Latin Americans is what Carmen mostly focuses on in her writing. She likes to write about things she knows/likes about. When she first started to write as a teenage; she liked to write about girls being protagonisits. Carmen liked to be creative, so she always tried many writing styles. She would also visit the setting of other boks to get ideas or just to go to her happy place. That helped her a lot and also helped create many of her novels. There are many authors from Mexico. Many times, authors might come to Mexico to get inspiration for a new novel,poem, script or to just relax. Carmen sometimes likes to mention real world problems into her writing. Like in her novel Their Cows, We’re Pigs ; she mentions two different social and politic system that just can meet on the same page. Religion status is another thing she writes about in her novels. She mentions how many people are not the same reglion and how it is very important in many parts of Mexico. Carmen Boullosa seems like a great writer from all her biographies on her. She has written numerous of novels, poems, scripts, etc. She mentions a lot of real life problems if her writing and that is what I like about her. She writes about real thigns and mixes it with fiction and still makes if understandable and interesting. Carmen has won many awards for her writing which shows that she is a great writer and that why I chose her as the literary figure related to my heritage.

The Fierce Warrior-Slaves Known as the Mamluks

The Mamluks were a class of warrior-slaves, mostly of Turkic or Caucasian ethnicity, who served between the 9th and 19th century in the Islamic world. Despite their origins as slaves, the Mamluks often had higher social standing than free-born people. In fact, individual rulers of Mamluk background reigned in various countries, including the famous Mahmud of Ghazni in Afghanistan and India, and every ruler of the Mamluk Sultanate of Egypt and Syria (1250-1517). Slaves of High Standing The term mamluk means slave in Arabic, and comes from the root malaka, meaning to possess. Thus, a mamluk was a person who was owned.  It is interesting to compare Turkish Mamluks with Japanese geisha or Korean gisaeng, in that they were technically considered women of pleasure, yet they could hold a very high status in society. No geisha ever became Empress of Japan, however. Rulers valued their slave-warrior armies because the soldiers often were raised in barracks, away from their homes and even separated from their original ethnic groups.  Thus, they had no separate family or clan affiliation to compete with their military esprit de corps. However, the intense loyalty within the Mamluk regiments sometimes allowed them to band together and bring down the rulers themselves, installing one of their own as sultan instead. The Mamluks Role in History Its not a surprise that the Mamluks were key players in several important historical events.  In 1249, for example, the French king Louis IX launched a Crusade against the Muslim world.  He landed at Damietta, Egypt, and essentially blundered up and down the Nile for several months, until he decided to besiege the town of Mansoura.  Instead of taking the city, however, the Crusaders ended up running out of supplies and starving themselves  The Mamluks wiped out Louiss weakened army shortly thereafter at the Battle of Fariskur on April 6, 1250.  They seized the French king and ransomed him off for a tidy sum. A decade later, the Mamluks faced a new foe.  On September 3, 1260, they triumphed over the Mongols of the Ilkhanate at the Battle of Ayn Jalut.  This was a rare defeat for the Mongol Empire and marked the south-western border of the Mongols conquests.  Some scholars have suggested that the Mamluks saved the Muslim world from being erased at Ayn Jalut; whether or not that is the case, the Ilkhanates themselves soon converted to Islam. Egypts Fighting Elite More than 500 years after these events, the Mamluks were still Egypts fighting elite when Napoleon Bonaparte of France launched his 1798 invasion.  Bonaparte had dreams of driving overland through the Middle East and seizing British India, but the British navy cut off his supply routes to Egypt and like Louis IXs earlier French invasion, Napoleons failed.  However, by this time the Mamluks were outmatched and outgunned.  They were not nearly as decisive a factor in Napoleons defeat as they had been in earlier battles.  As an institution, the Mamluks days were numbered. The Mamluks End The Mamluks finally ceased to be in the later years of the Ottoman Empire. Within Turkey itself, by the 18th century, the sultans no longer had the power to collect young Christian boys from Circassia as slaves, a process called, and train them as Janissaries. Mamluk corps survived longer in some of the outlying Ottoman provinces, including Iraq and Egypt, where the tradition continued through the 1800s.