Skip to main content

I need your help to answer for the questions below from the book Sam Patch, the Famous Jumper by Paul E. Johnson. ISBN: ISBN-10: 0809083884,...

Sam Patch was a daredevil/stuntman who grew up in extreme poverty, working as a child in a textile mill alongside other family members and friends. Many textile factories in the early 1800s used water falls to provide the power necessary to run the machinery. The factory where Sam Patch worked as a boy was located near Pawtucket Falls in Rhode Island. The boys dared each other to jump into the falls from the top of the mill. It was a pass time for bored child laborers, but they perfected the jumping craft. 


In his 20s, Sam Patch moved to Paterson, New Jersey, taking a job in a textile mill there. He began jumping into the Passaic Falls, where Paul E. Johnson speculates his first two jumps were of a socio/political nature, i.e., class consciousness. His first jump was purportedly to protest the opening of a private park for the upper middle class and elite to enjoy without having the working class in their midst. Sam's jump drew attention from the aristocrats opening the bridge to the park as people watched him instead of paying attention to the elitist opening ceremony. His second jump was also a supposed political statement in support of factory workers protesting a change in their lunch hour. 


Whatever the reasons for Sam Patch’s jumping, he became famous as a hero of the working man after his first two jumps into the Passaic Falls. He used that fame to make his stunts into a commercial enterprise.  However, his career as a stuntman ended after a few short years when he jumped to his death at Genesee Falls in New York in November, 1829. He turns up as a legendary hero for the working class in children’s books and literature as well as poetry. Most notably, he was a subject in the works of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Herman Melville, and Nathaniel Hawthorne.


Some may say the overarching theme of Sam Patch’s life was the struggle of the working class versus the middle class and elites. As a poor, uneducated millworker, Patch likely could never have been anything but a poor working class American without his stuntman feats. There was little hope for upward mobility in the small, impoverished factory towns of early 19th century America.


At the time, however, factions in the Democrat-Republican party were calling for more democracy for the common man. Opposition to elitist politics was championed by Andrew Jackson who promoted equal rights for white men in America. Jacksonian Democracy is pitted against the monied interests of corporations, commercial banks, and private interest. In the Northeast, where Sam Patch lived and worked, the yeoman farmer and artisan economy was being squashed by cash-crop farming and capitalist factories. Sam’s father was supposedly an artisan shoemaker who was forced out of business and into the factories by capitalists. 


The story of Sam Patch delves into American socio-economic culture and history so that American history becomes a personal story, not just the story of a nation.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Is there a word/phrase for "unperformant"?

As a software engineer, I need to sometimes describe a piece of code as something that lacks performance or was not written with performance in mind. Example: This kind of coding style leads to unmaintainable and unperformant code. Based on my Google searches, this isn't a real word. What is the correct way to describe this? EDIT My usage of "performance" here is in regard to speed and efficiency. For example, the better the performance of code the faster the application runs. My question and example target the negative definition, which is in reference to preventing inefficient coding practices. Answer This kind of coding style leads to unmaintainable and unperformant code. In my opinion, reads more easily as: This coding style leads to unmaintainable and poorly performing code. The key to well-written documentation and reports lies in ease of understanding. Adding poorly understood words such as performant decreases that ease. In addressing the use of such a poorly ...
Post a Comment
Read more

A man has a garden measuring 84 meters by 56 meters. He divides it into the minimum number of square plots. What is the length of the square plots?

We wish to divide this man's garden into the minimum number of square plots possible. A square has all four sides with the same length.Our garden is a rectangle, so the answer is clearly not 1 square plot. If we choose the wrong length for our squares, we may end up with missing holes or we may not be able to fit our squares inside the garden. So we have 84 meters in one direction and 56 meters in the other direction. When we start dividing the garden in square plots, we are "filling" those lengths in their respective directions. At each direction, there must be an integer number of squares (otherwise, we get holes or we leave the garden), so that all the square plots fill up the garden nicely. Thus, our job here is to find the greatest common divisor of 84 and 56. For this, we prime factor both of them: `56 = 2*2*2*7` `84 = 2*2*3*7` We can see that the prime factors and multiplicities in common are `2*2*7 = 28` . This is the desired length of the square plots. If you wi...
Post a Comment
Read more

What warning does Chuchundra issue to Rikki?

Chuchundra, the sniveling, fearful muskrat who creeps around walls because he is too terrified to go into the center of a room, meets Rikki in the middle of the night. He insults Rikki by begging him not to kill him. He then insults him by suggesting that Nag might mistake Chuchundra for Rikki. He says, "Those who kill snakes get killed by snakes."  He issues this warning to Rikki not to help keep Rikki safe but as a way of explaining why Rikki's presence gives him, Chuchundra, more reason to fear.  Chuchundra starts to tell Rikki what Chua the rat told him--but breaks it off when he realizes he might be overheard by Nag. He says, "Nag is everywhere, Rikki-Tikki." Rikki threatens to bite Chuchundra to get him to talk. Even then, Chuchundra won't overtly reveal any information. But he does say, "Can't you hear, Rikki-Tikki?" This is enough of a clue for the clever mongoose. He listens carefully and can just make out the "faintest scratch-s...
Post a Comment
Read more