Doctorow's Ragtime

The decade of the 1920’s was a busy grouping of ten years in America. The power of women’s desire to vote won them suffrage while uncertainty sprouted from government actions such as prohibition and especially the Scopes Trial of 1925. Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee’s play Inherit the Wind is a depiction of this unsettling event that took place in 1925. The four main characters of the play are Bertram Cates, Rachel Brown, Henry Drummond, and Matthew Harrison Brady. The friendships between these four main characters are used to show that friendship is a powerful bond, and how the bonds protected Bertram Cates from a larger punishment in court.

Ragtime always gives people the instant feeling of caper and joyfulness when it is heard anywhere. It reminds us of Chaplin. The Sting sets story in the Great Depression. It tells about two grifters and their group swindling the rich mob boss Lonnegan. The whole film remains a very easy and entertaining atmosphere, well expressed by the rhythmical, brisk and naughty ragtime and delightful jazz. What’s more, the ragtime tracks are mostly played by jazz instruments, and even the sound of whistling, creating a more euphoric and easy mood of the film. In fact, the plot plays a joke on all the audience. We all think the ending of the film would be unsatisfying if we do not realise that it could be a double-con well played by Gondorff’s lot. The

Anthony’s thesis for Nellie Taft: The Unconventional First Lady of Ragtime is to show us the life and personality of Nellie Taft and how she made a lasting impact on America. He does this by using Nellies personal diaries, interviews, stories from her family, and other primary sources.

Statement of intent: The purpose of this piece of writing is to engage the audience through writing an essay about the novel The Things They Carried by author Tim O’Brien. I have chosen to talk about the importance of storytelling throughout his novel and how it is able to make the text more successful. In the captivating novel The Things They Carried written by Tim O’Brien, many complex situations are created through the use of storytelling such as decision making, the importance of fact and fiction and horrific experiences that soldiers went through at the Vietnam war. These situations make his novel successful as he is able to get the audience to relate to him and to see deeper meanings that are behind the stories that he tells throughout.

There are many ways in which an individual can study history, but for most reading a textbook describing events and dates does not give them a clear picture of what life was like for the people of the time. Although, textbook reading can allow an individual to know a lot of facts about historical events, which can be helpful, it lacks the ability to touch the readers emotions and allow them to relate to the people of the time. However, these emotions and comparisons can be elicited through the reading of fictional and nonfictional primary sources. Also, modern textbooks give biased historical accounts based on modern principles, which can change what certain historical events truly meant. Reading primary works of both fiction and nonfiction can help people better understand the past through many avenues.

Ragtime is a musical about three families from three different backgrounds and their stories that intersect in some areas. One family is white, one is black, and one is jewish. Around that time, the white were disgusted by the music the blacks were playing called Ragtime. The jews at this time were immigrants, and people didn’t like them along with other immigrants because there weren’t a lot of jobs at that time. This was time in america where racism was prevalent.

In the novel, Ragtime author, El Doctorow, depicts America during the Gilded Age. Jacob Riis, one of the characters in the book, is a journalist who exposed the condition that immigrants lived in during the 19th century. Jacob Riis photographed the tenements that immigrants settled in and how they were all clustered into one small apartment. During this era, Robber Barons such J.P Morgan controlled the financial industry and resources in the United States. Despite that El Doctorow creates an appearance that the 19th century is a place where business is thriving and the public is living a decent life, Doctorow’s actual intention is to reveal the hidden story where people are suffering due long work hours and unsafe conditions. Doctorow uses

In the early 1900 's, America was the great "melting pot" of the world. Immigrants from all over the world came to the United States in search of the American dream, but many never found it. Immigrants were greeted with a harsh welcome, being hated for the simple fact that they were not "true-blooded" citizens. In Ragtime, the family of Tateh embodies these citizens. Doctorow also follows Father, a character of middle class America with a family and passion for exploration. Both of these paternal figures and their families have their share of problems to deal with, whether they have an advantage of social and ethnic background or not. The differences between these Father and Tateh, whether ethnic, social, financial, and even

From the eyes of the narrator, the novel presents a spectrum of changes and possibilities for the 19th century audience. Plagued by the social chaos of the Gilded Age, Julian West falls asleep with difficulty in 1887 to wake up to the Boston of year 2000, and finds out that all the evils bothering him in the 19th century have been cast aside.

Understanding the perspective of someone other than yourself is an important lesson for a young reader, as well as incorporating cross-curricular learning in one lesson for peak instructional efficiency. In an article titled “Why and How I Teach With Historical Fiction”, by author, Tarry Lindquist, she expresses the significant role that historical fiction literature has for young adult readers and students. This genre introduces readers to more serious topics and situations, that include both fact, such as actual events, but also fiction, such as characters and incidents that are not real but could have very well happened. This article applies to the novel “The Birchbark House,” by Louise Erdrich as well as “Salt to the Sea” by Ruta Sepetys.

The injustice in Ragtime parallels the injustice scene throughout America during this time, even with a positive spin shown by E.L. Doctorow’s desire to show the American dream during the Vietnam War, it’s easy to see the influence of historical accuracy through the injustices. The passage of time is an incredibly interesting part of this novel as well. It moves linearly, not really vacillating from the traditional movement of time, mostly just going forward, even if they’re following multiple story lines. As each story line convalesces however, the timing becomes even simpler, contrary to the plot lines which become even more violent. Most fascinating is the death of the ragtime era itself, “And by that time the era of Ragtime had run out, with the heavy breath of the machine, as if history was no more than a tune on a player piano. (40.24)” The book follows the rise and fall of the era, and all that happens in between the two points by following these different characters and how their lives come

Even after Houdini’s death

The renowned image of the Ragtime era is principally based on the exclusion of large portions of reality. This idea is explained in Jesus Benito Sanchez’s “A Breach in the Frame of History”, an article strongly focused on the relationship between fiction and history in E. L. Doctorow’s Ragtime. Sanchez expands on different examples of popular culture of the Ragtime era that frequently recurs in the novel, and how they produce a misrepresentation of the past. The misrepresentation of the Ragtime era shown in Doctorow’s Ragtime is supported by false images of popular culture including photographs, Tateh’s silhouettes and films- which come together to reach the novel’s goal- to unmask the fictional construction of the past.

Up until the late 1900?s, the American populace on the whole had assumed a very optimistic view of American history. Glossing over disgraceful events, emphasizing the brighter points in our history, our culture has attempted to ignore the obvious fact that we have had, and still have, our fair share of problems. In Ragtime, E.L. Doctorow unabashedly exposes some of the worst aspects of American life in our more recent history. Doctorow doesn?t hold back anything, providing detailed examples of human cruelty and sacrifice, and the evolution of American society. While critiquing American society was not the sole purpose of his novel, Doctorow does expose and examine many issues that people tended to ignore like

New Historicism is a modern literary theory that focuses on how events, culture, and places within a society influence a written work. New Historicists analyze allusions to characteristics of the time period in which the work was written. By definition, new historicism seeks to discover the significance in a text by taking into account the work within the construction of the established ideas and assumptions of its historical era. Literary texts are entrenched with historical context and the author is seen as subject to the forces of the culture that he or she works within. New Historicists reject the New Critical principle that texts are autonomous and should be read without any comparison to history, and instead argue that texts are