British Policy and The American Colonies Essay - 1247 Words

Changes in British policies toward the colonies between 1750 and 1776 played paramount in the evolution of relations between British North America and Mother England. Tension between England and the colonies mounted from the conclusion of the Seven Years’ War to the signing of the Declaration of Independence as a result of the several implemented changes imposed by Parliament for the purpose of increasing income and tightening the grip on America. During the Seven Years’ War, William Pitt was enlisted to take over command of the British forces from the failing Earl of Londoun. Pitt realized the advantage of employing the help of the colonies to bolster the war effort for the British; to appeal to them, Pitt ensured the colonists they†¦show more content†¦The Proclamation line would forbid colonists from settling west of the Appalachians. This new measure infuriated colonists who felt cheated because the land they had fought so hard for had been given away to the Indians. The frustrations amongst colonists did not stop with the Proclamation Line. In 1764 the Revenue Act, more commonly known as the Sugar Act was passed cutting the duty on molasses in half. Though the reduction in duty was favorable, the act also meant that ships carrying cargo were very closely monitored and those who breached laws regarding duty were tried in juryless admiralty courts. Following the Revenue Act was the Currency act of 1764, which prohibited colonies from producing their own currency; the reasoning was to restrict colonists from paying off debt with currency that was worth less than face value. The British government’s legislation to increase revenue continued beyond the Revenue and Currency Acts. In 1765 the Quartering Act and Stamp Act were enacted. The Quartering Act required colonists to house troops who were stationed in their vicinity. The British reasoned that this would help with the cost of keeping British troops in America. To further boost England’s suffering economy, the Stamp Act was made effective putting tax on paper goods such as legal documents, newspapers, almanacs, playing cards, college diplomas, etc. Violators of the Stamp Act, like the Revenue Act, were tried in admiralty courts. The enforcement ofShow MoreRelated Evolution of British Policy in the Colonies: 1750 to 1776 Essay1428 Words   |  6 PagesEvolution of British Policy in the Colonies: 1750 to 1776 The relations between England and the British North American colonies could always be considered precarious. Prior to 1750 British essentially followed a policy of benign neglect and political autonomy in the American colonies. (Davidson p.97) The colonies were for the most part content with benign neglect policy, relishing in a â€Å"greater equality and representative government†(Davidson p.95) within the colonies. Competition among EuropeanRead MoreSalutary Neglect Essay1040 Words   |  5 Pagesthat the British began to colonize the Americas, and, by the early 1700s, just a couple hundred years later, there were an estimated 250,900 people living in the American colonies. As the colonies grew more autonomous and a number of political issues developed in Britain, the British government began neglect their control of the day-to-day function of the colonies, the result of which was that between the years of about 1690 to 1763, the British employed a policy towards the Amer ican colonies knownRead MoreColonial Response to British Policies 1763-17761265 Words   |  6 Pagescolonial resistance began between the years 1763-1776. The policies of Britain toward their American colonies over this time period escalated tension between the two, and finally led to the rejection of Royal power by the colonies. The British policies caused this outcome because they threatened the colonists’ republican values. These were ideals adapted from the early classical Greek and Roman republics, as well as from laws established by the British. These core beliefs centered strongly on God-given inalienableRead MoreBritish Taxation On The American Revolution956 Words   |  4 PagesBritish Taxation on the Colonies were a series of laws passed between 1763-1775 that regulated trade and taxes. This caused tensions between America and Britain. These laws brought on the American Revolution faster. The British government ended in the Seven Years’ War also known as t he French and Indian War with a lot of heavy debts which led to putting taxes on the colonies. Britain felt they also had a problem maintaining order in America. The British Taxation of the Colonies involved Britain increasingRead MoreDifferences Between Britain And Spanish Colonization778 Words   |  4 Pagescolonization, but their colonies were vastly different in many aspects due to differences in their own government and policies. Both countries created colonies to increase their wealth and expand their economies, but religious freedom played a factor in British colonization. The fundamental differences between the two countries led to a difference in the way the colonies of each country interacted with its government. The relationship of British and Spanish colonists with Native Americans also reflected theRead MoreAmerican Of British Policies After 1775764 Words   |  4 Pagesnformative Writing American Resistance to British Policies before 1775 There were several ways in which the American Colonies resisted Imperial policy before 1775, which led to the American Revolution. Britain’s taxation and infringement of basic rights of the colonists unified the colonies. Many significant events, including the Stamp Act, the Intolerable Acts, the Boston Massacre and the Boston Tea Party, occurred before 1775. In 1764, the British Parliament, under Prime Minister George GrenvilleRead MoreOut Break of the American Revolution1076 Words   |  5 Pagesthe American Revolution 2 The connection between Britain and the English colonies was that of the ruling of the colonies by the king of Britain, King George III and his parliament. The king’s ruling was very unfavorable for the colonists because of his tyrannic dictatorship and unjustly taxations. The mere thought of an island ruling an entire continent thousands of miles away with poor communication and lack of supervision of the colonies by the king, did not work in favor of the colonies norRead MoreA Lot Happened Between 1760 And 1776 Essay1371 Words   |  6 Pagesideals crystallized and economics policies were the essence of many debates. The British found the colonists unwilling to pay their fair share for the administration of the Empire. After all, citizens residing in England paid more in taxes than was asked of any American during the entire time of crisis. Between 1760 and 1776, British formulated some policies that would make the colonist pay their fair share for the administration of the Kingdom. Some of these policies were; the Sugar Act of 1764, theRead MoreAmerican Revolutionary War781 Words   |  4 PagesAMERICAN REVOLUTIONARY WAR It all started at Jamestown when people first started to colonize America. When the 13 colonies were formed America wanted to separate from Great Britain. The former King George III wouldn’t allow this though. With the onset of the ministry, Britain increased its political power in the colonies in more direct ways. Colonists were bombarded with such policies that many considered to be unjust. Policies such as the Sugar Act of 1764 brought an increased awareness of BritishRead MoreMercantilism Essay1456 Words   |  6 PagesThe several colonies under British control in America were all ruled and governed by the same political and economic policy. Mercantilism is a policy where wealth is equivalent to power. It is the economic theory that a country’s wealth was measured in the amount of bullion it accumulated. Even though this policy was official by the British crown and Parliament, often a different policy advanced into society. Salutary neglect, a concept first written by Edmund Burke and first used by Prime Minister

Financial Crisis And Its Effects On Public Debt - 2487 Words

Blyth defines austerity as â€Å"the ‘common sense’ on how to pay for the massive increase in public debt caused by the financial crisis†, which comes primarily through the elimination of government services. People knowingly take on debt with the intention to then pay it off-- before the financial crisis of 2008 people took on debt to pay bills and banks took on debt to make money by leveraging. When the crisis hit, the government felt the banks were â€Å"too big to fail† (because a crucial part of economic activity in the US is tied up in liquidity of the largest banks) and bailed them out. When a person’s debt becomes too high they pay it down with income rather than continuing to spend and pump money into the economy, or â€Å"deleveraging†. In†¦show more content†¦When entities (households, firms, governments, banks, etc.) believe it is positive all pay off their debt at once. However, many countries’ governments are deci ding to encourage this because no one wants to pay off the huge amount of debt they owe, and rather than increasing taxes they are cutting government services through consolidation under the excuse of not raising taxes. The result, however, is that those at the bottom of the income hierarchy are affected and continue paying their usual taxes anyway which ceasing to receive the benefits they rely on. Professor Mariana Mazzucato describes Europe’s desire to foster places like the US’s Silicon Valley and create empires similar to Amazon and Google. She explains their belief that withdrawing from the state and encouraging things like venture capital will promote growth- but she challenges that assumption. For her, a myth exists that there are two parts to innovation: on the one hand there exists a dynamic, innovative, creative, fast and interesting private sector, and on the other a slow, inertial, bureaucratic, state sector which is believed to at best contain the busines s cycle and create infrastructure for projects. She names three characteristics of innovation: it is collective, uncertain, and cumulative, and believes that the â€Å"entrepreneurial state† has a greater capacity than the private sector to foster innovation not because the it provides fiscal stimulus, builds important infrastructure, or

Meditation, attention and well-being of college students Free Essays

Ask any college student today and they would probably say that being in college is one of the most difficult and consuming endeavor that they have had in their lifetime. College life is not only about going to classes, meeting deadlines, writing papers and completing courses. College life is also about developing analytical and critical minds, learning life-skills, building knowledge and applying it to real-life situations. We will write a custom essay sample on Meditation, attention and well-being of college students or any similar topic only for you Order Now College students need all the help they could get to make their academic lives a little lighter or more manageable. Many self-help books have advocated changing one’s attitude, thinking positively, time-management, building relationships and other methods that one gets a feeling that they do not really provide solutions but just state the obvious. One that has received less attention is in the area of meditation. Literature has found that meditation has positive effects in reducing stress as a relaxation technique. However, meditation has been associated with new age thinking and referred to as spooky stuff that the present generation of college students may not be aware of. Meditation have existed since man first begun creative thinking, it is often referred in religious and spiritual practices. In the early years of psychological investigation, meditation became a popular subject in terms of the experiences that people have when they meditated as well as how it can be an effective relaxation technique. Meditation is being able to become more attuned with one’s inner self and this takes a great deal of directed attention. Attention refers to the ability of the mind or consciousness to attend to a specific area, event, information or thing. Studies on attention have highlighted the detrimental effects of not being able to hold one’s attention, and of how fleeting and short a person’s attention span can be especially in a very complex and stimulus overloaded  environment we have. Directing attention to a single object or thought can be relaxing since it allows the person to be present in the here and now, it was also espoused that training oneself to become more attentive can develop cognitive functioning and thus help in academic performance. College students can benefit in learning and being able to use meditation techniques to cope with the many stresses and anxiety of college life and developing attention skills to further enhance academic performance. It is therefore hypothesized that college students who practice meditation will have a longer attention span and will have higher grades and a more positive mental health and hence increased feelings of well-being. This study will determine if college students who practice meditation techniques on a regular basis have higher attention skills as measured by a behavioral experiment and whether they have more positive feelings of well-being as determined by a well-being inventory. A discussion of meditation and its application into the enhancement of attention, creativity and consciousness is presented to demonstrate the far reaching effects of meditation as a means of aiding college student’s performance in school and their mental health. Meditation Meditation has been defined as process wherein the person achieves an altered sate of consciousness by performing certain rituals and exercises. These exercises include controlling and regulating breathing, sharply restricting one’s field of attention, eliminating external stimuli,  assuming yogic body positions and forming mental images of an event or symbol. The result is a pleasant, mildly altered subjective state in which the individual feels mentally and physically relaxed. Some individuals after extensive meditation practice may have mystical experiences in which they lose self-awareness and gain a sense of being involved in a wider consciousness, however defined. That such meditative techniques may cause a change in consciousness goes back to the ancient times and is represented in every major world religion. Buddhists, Hindus, Sufis, Jews and Christians all have literature describing rituals that induce meditative states (Arambula, Kawakami, Gibney, 2001). Traditional forms of meditation follow the practices of yoga, a system of thought based on the Hindu religion, or Zen which is derived from Chinese and Japanese Buddhism. The two common techniques of meditation are an opening up meditation and concentrative meditation.  Ã‚   In opening-up meditation the subject clears his/her mind for receiving new experiences while in concentrative meditation the benefits are obtained through actively attending to some object, word, or idea. Experimental studies of meditation provide only limited insight into the alterations of consciousness that a person can achieve when meditative practice and training extend over many years. In his study of the Matramudra, a centuries old Tibetan Buddhist text, Brown (1977) has described the complex training required to master the technique. He has shown that cognitive changes can be expected at different meditative levels. A somewhat commercialized and popular form of meditation has been promoted as transcendental meditation or TM ( Hanley Spates, 1978) ). The technique is easily learned from a qualified teacher who gives the novice mediator a mantra and instructions on how to repeat it over and over to produce the deep rest and awareness  characteristic of TM. In TM a person develops a reduced state of physiological arousal; feelings such as peace of mind, a feeling of being at peace with the world and a sense of well-being are reported after engaging in TM. In a now classic study on the effect of TM to college students by Hanley Spates (1978), it was reported that those who were practicing meditation had more positive personalities. In this study, meditation in the form of transcendental meditation (TM) will be used as the meditative process which will be given to college students who will participate in this study. The TM is much easier to learn and practice than the traditional forms of mediation and since it produces feelings of peace and well-being that it suits the purpose of this study. Meditation is categorized under altered states of consciousness and since consciousness is the most basic cognitive function that is closely related to attention, the second part of this study is to determine if meditation enhances attention span and accuracy and in effect would lead to greater academic performance. Meditation and Attention Meditation and attention is unquestionably linked together, meditation is the process by which attention is narrowed and focused on one object or event, and without engaging one’s attention fully to the immediate task, and then nothing will come out of it. Attention must be acutely directed towards the mantra, the breathing of the individual and the experiences one will have during the meditative state. Meditation in effect enhances the ability of the person to direct attention and when attention is more keen and developed, a person can have better concentration  and can better attend to the critical thinking skills needed in college education (Shear Jevning, 1999). Attention has been the earliest subject of the study of psychology, cognitive science have provided evidence that attention is physiological, that it is limited but can be expanded to become more acute and enable the person to become more aware of his/her environment, more appreciative of nature and life and it causes a general feeling of fulfillment and satisfaction. Several studies have tried to find evidence that meditation and attention has a relationship. In a study of the effects of opening-up and concentrative mediation to attention in terms of ignoring distractions and focusing attention (Chan, 2003) found that meditation was positively correlated with the ability to direct attention but it was shown that meditation minutes per day was positively correlated with decreased distractions and mistakes, the form of mediation used or how may years a person has been meditating did not have any significant relationship with the owner. In a similar study, concentrative and mindfulness motivation was measured in terms of how effective it contributed to the task of sustained attention. The study compared the sustained attention of students who had meditation training to those who did not (Valentine Sweet, 1999). The study found that those who had meditation techniques scored better in the sustained attention task wherein those who practiced mindfulness meditation had better scores than the concentrative mediators. The practical applications of an enhanced attention that is not affected by distractions and sustained attention can be directed towards improved academic performance of students. Meditation, Attention and Well-being 7 Meditation and Creativity A new concept put forward by Sarath (2006) advocated the use of meditation techniques to mainstream classroom instruction as it enriches the learning process and enhances the creative process and consciousness of students. Creativity is highly related to the issue of meditation because the experience associated with meditation is similar to the second person approach wherein the student actually creates and produces an output that would enable him/her to have a deeper understanding of the concepts raised in class (Sarath, 2006). The author had argued that education and learning should be focused on providing actual experience of the lesson, not just learning something in books and not being able to work with it. Creative expression of one’s talent and interests should be the main thrust of the school. At the same time, a more sustained attention and inability to be distracted by external stimuli are necessary steps in the practice of creative thinking. Conclusion Meditation is not just for the spiritual and magical but it is also a positive process to develop attention and induce students to relax and communicate with their bodies and their surroundings. College students have to deal with pressures and expectations that they sometimes feel cranky, anxious and fed up. Meditation as evidenced by the studies conducted showed that it could positively affect attitudes, attention span and resistance to distractions. Meditation also has been found to be a medium that could enhance the learning process and encourage creativity. As such, this study has found evidence to support the hypothesis mentioned in the first part. Meditation, Attention and Well-being 8 References Arambula, P., Kawakami, M., Gibney, K.   (2001). The physiological correlates of Kundalini Yoga meditation: A study of a yoga master. Applied Psychophysiology and Biofeedback, 26; 2, pp. 47-53. Brown, D.P. (1977). A model for the levels of concentrative meditation. International Journal of Clinical and Experimental Hypnosis, 25; 4: 236-273. Chan, D.P. (2003). Effects of meditation to attention, Unpublished dissertation. University of California. Hanley, C. Spates, J. (1978). Transcendental meditation and social psychological   attitudes. The Journal of Psychology, 99, p121-1127. Sarath, Ed. (2006). Meditation, Creativity and Consciousness: Charting Future Terrain with Higher Education. Teachers College Record, 108; 9, pp 1816-1841. Valentine, E. Sweet, P. (1989). Meditation and Attention: A comparison of the effects of concentrative and mindfulness meditation on sustained attention. Mental Health, Religion and Culture, 2; 1, pp 59 to 70. Shear, J. Jevning, R. (1999). Pure consciousness: Scientific exploration of meditation techniques. Journal of Consciousness Studies, 6; 2, p. 3) How to cite Meditation, attention and well-being of college students, Essay examples