Angelou essays

Angelou essays When Angelou was three and her brother Bailey was four, their parents divorced. They sent the children to live with their paternal grandmother, Annie Henderson, and her son Willie in Stamps, Arkansas. Annie, whom the children soon began to call "Momma," was the proprietor of the only store in the black section of Stamps. During the cotton harvest season, Momma awoke at four in the morning to sell lunches to the crowd of cotton laborers before they began the day's grueling work. In the morning, the laborers were full of hope and energy, but, by the end of the day, they barely had energy to drag themselves home. They always earned less than they hoped, and they often voiced suspicions about weighted scales. For her whole life, the stereotype of happy, singing cotton pickers enraged Angelou. The laborers never earned enough to pay their debts, much less enough to save anything. . What is the significance of the sermon delivered at the annual revival? The black Southern church constituted an avenue for subversive resistance. At the revival, the preacher gave a sermon that criticized white power without directly naming it. He never mentions white people, but his diatribe against greedy, self-righteous employers was clearly an attack on the miserable wages white farmers paid to black field labor. He criticized people who give charity with the expectation that the recipient would be humble and self-belittling. The implicit meaning of his statement was a diatribe on so-called white charity. Often, white people would expect the black recipients of their "charity" to avoid all signs of having pride in themselves or their identity. The people at the revival could entertain fantasies of their oppressors burning in hell with the support of divine will. For the most part, they shouldered the burden of their disadvantages of poverty and discrimination with resignation, attributing their suffering to God's will. However, the black church pro vi...

How to Find the Andromeda Constellation

How to Find the Andromeda Constellation The night skies of September and October herald the return of the constellation Andromeda. While not the showiest constellation in the sky, Andromeda harbors a fascinating deep-sky object and is the source of intriguing historical tales. Finding the Andromeda Constellation To find constellation Andromeda, first look for the W-shaped constellation Cassiopeia in the northern part of the sky. Andromeda is located directly next to Cassiopeia, and is also connected to a boxy shape of stars that make up the constellation Pegasus. Andromeda is visible to all northern hemisphere viewers and many, but not all, viewers south of the equator.   Andromeda constellation is attached to Pegasus the flying horse in the sky. The constellation Pisces lies at her feet. Each one of these constellations has deep-sky objects nearby for observers to search out. Carolyn Collins Petersen   The History of Andromeda In ancient Greece and Rome, the stars of Andromeda were seen in combination with the stars of Pisces to form a goddess of fertility. The Arabic astronomers saw Al Hut - a fish. In ancient China, stargazers saw various figures of legend in Andromedas stars, including a famous general and palaces for their emperors. In the south Pacific, where these constellations are low on the horizon, stargazers saw the stars of Andromeda, Cassiopeia, and Triangulum joined together as a porpoise.   The Brightest Stars of Andromeda Andromeda Constellation has four bright stars and numerous dimmer stars. The brightest is called ÃŽ ± Andromedae, or Alpheratz. Alpheratz is a binary star located less than 100 light-years away from us. It is shared with Pegasus, although its not formally part of that constellation The official IAU chart outlines the area that contains Andromeda constellation. It also shows nearby deep-sky objects. IAU/Sky Telescope   The second-brightest star in Andromeda is called Mirach, or ÃŽ ² Andromedae. Mirach is a red giant lying about 200 light-years away, located at the foot of a trio of stars that appear to lead to Andromedas most famous deep-sky object: the Andromeda Galaxy.   Deep Sky Objects in Constellation Andromeda The most famous deep sky object in the northern hemisphere sky is the Andromeda Galaxy, also known as M31. This object is a spiral galaxy that lies about 2.5 million light-years away from us. It is heavily populated with up to 400 billion stars and is thought to have two black holes at its heart.   The Andromeda Galaxy is the most distant object that can be spotted from Earth with the naked eye. To find it, head out to a dark observation location, then locate the star Mirach. From Mirach, trace a line out to the next stars. M31 will look like a faint smudge of light. The best way to look at it is through binoculars or a telescope, you will be able to make out the oval shape of the galaxy. It will appear to be facing you edge-on. At 2.5 million light-years, the Andromeda Galaxy is the closest spiral galaxy to the Milky Way. The term light-year was invented to handle the immense distances between objects in the universe. Later, parsec was developed for truly huge distances. Adam Evans/Wikimedia Commons. In the 1920s, the Andromeda Galaxy was known as the Andromeda Nebula, and for a long time, astronomers thought it was a nebula inside our own galaxy. Then, a young astronomer named Edwin Hubble took a look at it through the 2.5-meter Hooker telescope at Mount Wilson in California. He observed Cepheid variable stars in Andromeda and used Henrietta Leavitts period-luminosity relation to determine their distance. It turned out that the distance was too great for the so-called nebula to be in the Milky Way. The stars had to be located in a different galaxy. It was a discovery that changed astronomy.   More recently, the orbiting Hubble Space Telescope (named in Hubbles honor) has been studying the Andromeda Galaxy, taking detailed images of its billions of stars. Radio astronomers have mapped sources of radio emissions within the galaxy, and it remains an object of intense observation.   Andromeda and the Milky Way colliding, as seen from the surface of a planet inside our galaxy. Credit: NASA; ESA; Z. Levay and R. van der Marel, STScI; T. Hallas; and A. Mellinger In the far future, the Milky Way and Andromeda galaxies will collide. The collision will form a massive new galaxy that some have dubbed Milkdromeda.