The Linguistic Culture-12 (American Science) (1157938), страница 3
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Therevolutionary inventions and developments, which have been made in this«Valley», affect the daily life and it is hard to imagine high-tech society withoutthem.The story of the “Silicon Valley” starts with Stanford University, which hasbeen of fundamental importance in the rise of the electronics industry in SantaClara County. In 1887, Leland Stanford, a wealthy railroad magnate who owned alarge part of the Pacific Railroad, decided to built a university and dedicate it tothe memory of his son who died very young. The university was opened in 1891and became later one of the world’s greatest academic institutions.Frederick Terman who is known today as a godfather of the Silicon Valleychanged the position of this university fundamentally. After graduation fromStanford University he decided to go east to the Massachusetts Institute ofTechnology (MIT), but after receiving his doctorate in 1924 he turned to Palo Altoand became the head of the engineering department in 1937.Terman establishedstrong cooperation between Stanford and the surrounding electronics industry tostop the brain drain among the university graduates, as they could not find goodjobs in California at that time.
Thanks to him many companies endowed theuniversity with gifts, which Terman used to hire qualified professors from all overthe USA. Thus, he created a mechanism, which increased the settlement of theelectronics industry.During World War II, after the Japanese attack at Pearl Harbor in 1942, agreat deal of the US military forces and of the military production was moved toCalifornia. Within a few years, California became a booming industrial state andthe military center of the USA.
After World War II, the Stanford ResearchInstitute (SRI) was founded to provide the industry with more skilled specialistsand increase the number of companies in Santa Clara County. More firms among them Hewlett-Packard as one of the first residents - settled theirdepartments in this park.Military funding for high-tech products was responsible for the rapid growth ofSilicon Valley. A lot of firms (Such firms as FMC, GTE, Varian Associates,Westinghouse, and finally Lockheed) opened their R&D departments in theStanford Research Park and started Lockheed Missiles and Space Company(LMSC).
The invention of the microprocessor in the early 1970s represented thenext step towards the modern way of computing, providing the basis for thesubsequent personal computer revolution.I’ll just call the companies Intel Corporation (Integrated Electronics),that designedthe first microprocessor, IBM (International Business Machines) that has becomethe world’s leading company in the big mainframe computers since the 1950s.,The Apple Company, the Sun workstation, and Microsoft Corporation.CULTURAL LIFEAlthough it is a generalization, it is useful to divide the US cultural historyinto three broad stages.The first stage stretches from colonial times until about the Civil war. Inthis period, American art, architecture, music and literature were stronglyinfluenced by European ideas and traditions.
What was fashionable or popularin London, Paris, Rome or Vienna usually set the pattern for Boston, NewOrleans, New York, and Philadelphia. Some of the colonial painters, like othercraftsmen, came across the sea to try their luck.The period after the Civil War saw two new genres in American painting,the creation of works, which described American landscapes and the everydaylife of people, depicted mostly by a Russian artist Pavel Svirin. Scores of streetscenes, gathering in village taverns, political rallies, poor women’s kitchens,factory workers, Black slaves were already on canvases.If genre art was nourished by political and social forms, landscapepaintings owed much to romantic poetry of William Cullen Bryant and booksby James Fennimore Cooper. Landscape were merged with scenes of themigrants crossing the plains and mountains in their wagons, with Indians,buffalo and death often in the background.
Among the American artists of thatperiod one can mark Winslow Homer and Thomas Eakins..A landmark in the history of American painting was made by the ArmoryShow of 1913 Sixteen hundred paintings by more than 300 Americans artistswere shown there, representing some new genres like the Impressionists, PostImpressionists and the Cubists. Later on with the Depression, many Americanartist of different sties depicted the strikers, the unemployed, the Blacks, allthose whose lives were crushed by the economic desaster. R.
Marsh wasdealing with urban poor, Ch. Burchfield and E. Hopper with dreary workingclass identical houses.Like scientists many of highly creative artists were driven to America bythe Second World War. In the 1950-60s abstract expressionism, pop art,minimal art and photo-realism became quite common in the USA. Some of theartists associated with such movements are Close, Davis, de Kooning, Demuth,Dine, Estes, Hanson, Johns, Kline, Lichtenstein, Motherwell, Oldenburg,Pollock, Rauschenberg, Rosenquist, Rothko, Segal and Warhol..By the 60-70s New York had become one of the art capitals of theworld. Now in New York alone there are around 12000 artists and sculptors,around 400 art galleries and hundreds of exhibitions and shows each season.Among the great New York museums there are the Museum of Modern Art(MOMA) which houses the most complete collection of modern art in theworld, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Guggenheism, The Cloisters withits fine medieval collection, the Brooklyn Museum, the Frick Collection, theNation Museum of Design, the Museum of American Indian, the Americanraft Museum and the Whitney Museum of Modern Art.
Besides New YorkChicago is often associated with art and modern architecture. Chicago is thecity where several important artists live. Some of them, like Mies van der Roheor Philip Johnson, did much to influence modern design. In Chicago there isalso the museum of Louis Sullivan, called “the father of the skyscraper”.LiteratureLike in art, American literature of the first generations was stronglydependent on British traditions and books brought from there. Before theRevolution and after it many revolutionary-minded Americans viewedliterature and art as the means of independence and demanded to lay thefoundations of national American literature. The progenitor of American shortstory was Washington Irving (1783-1859), the author of “The Sketch-Book”(1819) and “Alhambra”(1832).
James Fennimore Cooper (1789-1851) wrotethe number of novels about American frontier. His novels “The Spy”(1821) and“Last of the Michigan’s”(1926) became the first American bestsellers,translated into many world languages.. A poet and prose-writer Edgar Poe(1809-49), the author of “The Murders in the Rue Morgan” (1841), “The Fall ofthe House of Usher” and “The Gold Bug”, initiated. the detective genre.Herman Melville’s masterpiece “Moby Dick”was published in 1850.
Poet HenryLongfellow (1807-82) in his poems of “The Song of Hiawatha” (1855), “PaulRevere’s Ride” and “The Courtship of Miles Standish” (1858) created images ofcourageous Indian heroes.Walt Whitman’s(1819-92) “Leaves of the Grass” (1855) glorified peopleand opposed slavery. It was a tribute to the Civil War soldiers who had laid onthe battlefields and whom he had seen while serving as an army nurse. Thebook went through numerous editions during the author’s lifetime, swelling incontent from a thin volume to the voluminous work it is today. Walt Whitman’spoem “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom” (1865) was dedicated to thememory of Abraham Lincoln.
The strong rhythms and unusual style ofWhitman’s verses, the brightness and impressiveness of his images madeWhitman the greatest poet of the USA.Travel was also a favorite subject. When F. Parkman (1823-93) publishedhis work “The California and Oregon Trail or Life on the Prairies and in theWigwam” (1849) and Ralph Waldo Emerson composed his memorable essay,glorifying the spirit of the youthful and vigorous United States, they.
becameimmediately popular..Whitman, Longfellow, Whittier, Oliver Wendell Holmes, James Lowell toa greater or lesser degree stood against the slavery. But their influence wasrelatively smaller compared to that of Harriet Beecher Stowe (1811-96), theauthor of “Uncle Tom’s Cabin or Life Among the Lowly”. Like many novels ofthe time, it first appeared serialized in “The National Era” and copies could notbe printed fast enough to keep up with the demand of the readers.
“So you’rethe little woman who started the big war”- said Abrahams Lincoln when he metH. Stowe at first time in 1882.Joel Chandler Harris (1848-1908) composed a great number of Blackfolklore and published his collections of tales “Uncle Remus Stories” (1880) and“Nights with Uncle Remus” (1883).The period after the Civil War is associated with the second stage of theUS literature. The leading prose writer of the end of the 19PthP century wasMark Twain (Samuel Langhorne Clemens) (1835-1910). Twain was born in thestate near the Mississippi River His work as a riverboat pilot steering boats upand down the river made the most important influence on him and his books.One of Twain’s first books is called “Life on the Mississippi” (1883). His “TheAdventures of Tom Sawyer” (1976) and “Huckleberry Finn” (1884) tell aboutthe lives of young heroes on the Mississippi river. Together with Twain’sromantic tale “The Prince and the Pauper” (1889) they are still read by childrenall over the world.
At the same time his “Golden Age” (1873) and “AConnecticut Yankee at King Arthur’s Court” (1889), exposing American vanity,corruption and hypocrisy, are full of strong satire. Incomparable depiction ofcolloquial speech, peculiarities of paradox, humor and wit are characteristicfeatures of Mark Twain’s writing..The third and present stage is marked by a tremendous surge ofAmerican creativity in all areas, by a steady self-confidence and by growinginternational influence of American literature.
The American literature of the20PthP century as a mirror of society was opened by Theodore Dreiser (18711945). In his firstrealistic novel “Sister Carrie” Dreiser challengedtheAmerican myth that honesty and hard work inevitably lead to success. Hefollowed the novel with several other strong social-critical works of fiction“Jennie Gerhard” (1911), “The Financier”(1912), “The Titan”(1914), “AnAmerican Tragedy” (1925).Later T. Dreiser published two collections of stories“Free and Other Stories”(1918) and “Chains: Lesser Novels and Stories”(1927).Many of these stories dramatized the theme of love as the most powerful forcein life.O.
Henry (Porter William Sidney) (1862-1910) created a great number ofshort stories about the life of simple, poor Americans, collected in his books“CabbagesandKings”(1904),”TheFourMillion”(1906),“TheGentleGrafter”(1908).The Northern stories by Jack London (1876-1916) were extremelypopular both in the USA and abroad. His novels “The Son of Wolf” (1900), “ TheSea-Wolf”(1904), “Martin Eden”(1909) and many others were translated andpublished in Europe and Russia.The horrors of World War I and the period following it in the 1920ssparkled the imagination of some of the greatest writers in American literary.They include Francis Scott Fitzgerald (1896-1940), the author of short storiesand novels “The Great Gatsby” (1925), “Tender is the Night”(1934), “The LastTycoon”(1941) about so-called “lost generation” and Gertrude Stein (18741946). Her most widely read book “The Autobiography of Alice B.
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