1/28/07

The last several chapters of A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court brought about an interesting conclusion to the story. The way Mark Twain wrapped up the novel did not answer some of my questions, but it also did not leave things available to be doubted.
It turns out the Yankee’s scientific advancements of the sixth century resulted in the total destruction of the society and kingdom he was working to create. He overcame the large numbers of opponents, but his group of followers were killed by the amount of death and decay. It is somewhat ironic that it turned out this way, but it answered my question as to how history was not going to be altered by the Yankee’s implementation of thirteen hundred years of invention and scientific achievement. All of the inventions that were ahead of their time were bound to change history, but if no one remembers them, the course of history will not change in the slightest. In addition, the enemy he wanted most to overcome, the Church, ended up being behind the Yankee’s downfall. Another interesting thing I noticed was that the spoken languages of Clarence and the Yankee were switched. By the end of the book, Clarence spoke just about perfect 1800’s English, and as the first and last chapters of the book indicate, the Yankee speaks in the English of King Arthur’s time. His view on where he belongs also changes by the end of the book. For a time after first being transported to the sixth century, he feels that he is either in a dream or has time traveled away from his home. In the postscript, the Yankee indicates that he now believes his time travel and the fight at the end were all a dream and that his true home was with Sandy and Hello Central in the time of King Arthur. One thing that does not make sense to me is that Merlin’s magic, which failed to work every other time throughout the book, seems to have worked in the end sending the Yankee back to the 19th century. His time travel is the only concept from the book that physically does not make sense, but at least Twain is consistent.

1/18/08

The readings and discussions of this week were more interesting than those of last week. I believe this is due to the addition of the Mark Twain reading titled A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court. This novel seems to grab my attention more than previous readings because its story is intriguing and always has questions that are unanswered. These questions without answers keep me reading because I do not like leaving something without a conclusion.
Robert McMath’s History by a Graveyard: The Fulton Bag and Cotton Mills Records was a short, interesting read because it shed some light on the life of factory workers and the below par working and sometimes living conditions. This work was also intriguing since the records, paperwork, and photos that were included in it are now here in the Georgia Tech archives for students and faculty to investigate. This fact makes me want to go search the rest of the archives for similar information in that and other time periods because who knows what kind of other stuff has been buried with time. I believe I made an interesting connection between History by a Graveyard and A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court when it comes to each of the works descriptions of managing factories. The factory manager in Robert McMath’s work, Oscar Elsas, hired a company to place agents in the midst of the workplace to spy on and hear out the employees in order to figure out how rebellious they were feeling. In Mark Twain’s novel, the man who has been transposed to the sixth century does a very similar thing when he is building up the civilization around him. He places men he believes to be loyal inside the new factories and workshops, so he does not lose control over the population that he commands.

1/11/08

The essay “Engineer’s and the New South Creed: The Formation and Early Development of Georgia Tech” by James E. Brittain and Robert C. McMath, Jr. is an interesting piece of writing that traverses the history of the founding of the Georgia Institute of Technology. There were many aspects and opinions that were considered when decisions about what kind of role the school would play were made. The results of these decisions determined how the school would contribute to the city of Atlanta and the New South.
Initially, the Georgia Institute of Technology was modeled after the Worcester Institute because of Worcester’s great success as a town after the installment of the school. The state of Georgia wanted similar success for the city of Atlanta so that it could be seen as a contributor to the industrialization of the South. The curriculum that resulted was one that taught all classes of people the benefit of work. This system seemed to break down the barrier between the two major classes and allowed lower class individuals to enter the world of engineering the same as their educated counterparts. Georgia Tech’s students in the institute’s first decade were given most of their engineering experience in the shop. However, after a fire destroyed that building, their studies were more directed to learning theories and concepts of how things work rather than to work those things. Georgia Tech succeeded in aiding the industrialization of the South and this is evident by the number of graduates that stayed in Georgia or in other southern states to work. The main point of the South’s motivation to have a technical school built was to help it compete with and become less dependent on the North.