essay on 6 december

My December Holiday Essay For Students

The winter holidays are an exciting time of year filled with fun traditions, tasty foods, and quality time with family and friends. Last December, my family and I took a holiday trip that I will never forget. In this essay, I will share some of the highlights from my December holiday. I will discuss our travels, the special celebrations we enjoyed, and what I learned from the experience.

Table of Contents

Short Essay On My December Holiday

Travel plans.

As part of our holiday preparations, my family researched different destinations to visit over our school break. After much debate, we settled on a one-week road trip along the coast of California (Topic Sentence). For the first part of our journey, we packed up our suitcases and snacks and embarked on an eight-hour drive from our home in Northern California down to Los Angeles (Transition). Hitting the road for long periods of time can be tiring, so we listened to Christmas music and audiobooks to pass the time and keep our energy up. Taking breaks to stretch our legs at scenic overlooks also helped the drive feel shorter.

Arrival in Los Angeles

Upon arriving in LA, our first stop was checking into our hotel for a few nights of exploring the city (Topic Sentence). We spent one afternoon at Disneyland, enjoying the festive decorations and riding our favorite attractions like the teacups (Example). On another day, we toured Hollywood Boulevard and snapped photos beside the handprints of famous movie stars at Grauman’s Chinese Theatre. Our hotel was located near the Santa Monica Pier, so one evening we strolled along the beachfront shops and played amusement park games for prizes (Example). Los Angeles was bustling with holiday cheer and offered the perfect mix of activities to start our winter getaway.

Christmas Eve in San Diego

After a few enjoyable days in Los Angeles, we packed up and continued on to San Diego for Christmas Eve (Transition). We checked into a cozy hotel downtown and walked nearby to see the iconic San Diego Zoo all lit up for the night (Topic Sentence). What really stood out was attending midnight mass at a historic Spanish church near our hotel. It was a beautiful service with traditional carols and readings about the nativity story that put me in the Christmas spirit (Example). For dinner, my family cooked up a feast of tamales, potatoes, and fruit salad in our mini kitchen before exchanging gifts by the fireplace (Example). Spending quality time together made it feel just like Christmas, even though we were on vacation in a new city.

Our December holiday trip up and down the California coast was full of wonderful new experiences and memories. I learned that holidays are about more than presents or fancy meals—they are a chance to appreciate your family through shared moments of laughter and bonding (Topic Sentence). The natural scenery, festive celebrations in cities, and time unplugged from technology refreshed my mind and spirit. Looking back, that one special week created lasting memories that I will cherish for many years to come. I am grateful that my parents planned such a meaningful getaway for our family during my winter school break.

Hello! Welcome to my Blog StudyParagraphs.co. My name is Angelina. I am a college professor. I love reading writing for kids students. This blog is full with valuable knowledge for all class students. Thank you for reading my articles.

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English Compositions

Short Essay on Christmas [100, 200, 400 Words] With PDF

Being a very popular festival worldwide, Christmas is an attractive topic for English essay writing. In this lesson, you will learn how you can write short essays on Christmas that you may find relevant for your upcoming exam. 

Short Essay on Christmas in 100 Words

Every culture has its celebrations which are important to all of us. These occasions help us to live and have fun. Christmas is one such festival. It is one of the biggest celebrations in the whole world. It is celebrated on 25th December. Christmas Eve is celebrated on 24th December. It is the day of the birth of Jesus Christ. Jesus, the god of all Christians.

He was born in a stable, in Bethlehem. Christmas is the greatest time for Christians because it is their only festival. During this time, they enjoy their vacation with family and friends. They visit the church and pray to Jesus. They bake cakes and cookies. Christmas is a time of happiness and the world rejoices at it during winter.

Short Essay on Christmas in 200 Words

What would have happened if there was no festival to celebrate? What would have happened if we had to work and study every day, with no recess? We would soon feel tired and unhappy. Thus the solution is celebrations. So it is the festivals that help us live. Festivals are important to us because it relieves us.

When we celebrate, we feel lots of energy. So celebrations are very important to all of us. Christmas is one of the biggest festivals in the world. It is celebrated worldwide. Everyone participates on this occasion. It is mainly the festival of the Christians. But today, the entire world enjoys the Christmas season. 

Christmas is the centre of all joys for Christians. This is the day to celebrate the birth of Jesus Christ. He was born on 25th December at Bethlehem, in Jerusalem, in a stable. His mother is Mary and his father is Joseph. Christ is worshipped by all Christians. On the day of this festival, they bake cakes and cookies. Everyone visits the church to pray to Christ.

They drink bread and wine to complete their prayer. Christmas is the occasion when they leave all their worries and only enjoy some days with their family and friends. The biggest attraction of Christmas is Santa Claus. He comes to distribute gifts to little kids. The winter vacation concentrates only on Christmas and then the New Year. 

Short Essay on Christmas in 400 words

Festivals are the biggest source of fun and happiness. Any upcoming festival keeps us energetic. We get all strength to work hard because we can enjoy ourselves during festivals. Christians have very few festivals. It is only during Easter and Christmas that they can have fun. So the winter is the time of their celebration. The world awaits the arrival of Christmas. They make preparations for a long period of time. So Christians rejoice the best during this festival.

Christmas is not just any festival. It is like the Janmasthami, where the Hindus celebrate the birth of Lord Krishna as a little baby. Just like Janmasthami, Christmas is the festival to celebrate the birth of Jesus Christ. Jesus is the Lord of all Christians. He was born on 25th December at Bethlehem, in Jerusalem, in a stable. His mother is mother Mary and his father is Joseph.

Jesus and Krishna have lots of similarities. Both of them were shepherds. Both were born in a very humble household. Both of them preached about peace. They taught us not to hurt others, even plants and animals. Being kind to all was their biggest teaching. So Christmas is as beautiful as Janmashtami.

On the eve of Christmas, on 24th December night, people arrange a Christmas tree. They decorate it with gifts and lights. They also bake cakes and cookies. Lots of guests are invited. Those who are rich, throw parties at their houses to celebrate Christmas. On the morning of Christmas, they visit churches and pray to Jesus for the overall peace and well-being. They are offered bread and wine to eat as the blessings of Christ. After they return, their festival starts with sharing food and serving the poor.

The saints, popes, and nuns serve the needy as part of the celebration. The biggest fun of Christmas is Sants Claus. He arrives the night before Christmas and distributes gifts to good children. The kids rejoice at the gifts, which increases their happiness.

Now Christmas is not just a festival of the Christians. It is now for all. In India, everyone enjoys the winter vacation. Kolkata is one of the biggest attractions during this time. It lights up beautifully and people come out of their houses to have fun. Eating cakes, praying to God is now the ritual of all. Christmas is the best year-end celebration that soon passes into the new year.

That was pretty much everything about writing short essays on Christmas. In the session above, I have discussed every possible aspect of this popular festival. Here also I adopted a simplistic approach of writing in a very simple language for easy understanding of all kinds of students. If anybody still has any doubts regarding this session, they can comment down below. To read more such essays on important topics keep browsing our website. 

Thank you. 

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Essay on Christmas

List of essays on christmas in english, essay on christmas – essay 1 (250 words), essay on christmas: origin, importance and conclusion – essay 2 (400 words), essay on christmas – essay 3 (500 words), essay on christmas: a cultural festivity – essay 4 (600 words), essay on christmas – essay 5 (750 words), essay on christmas: history, celebrations and decorations – essay 6 (1000 words).

Christmas is celebrated every year on 25th December. It is mainly the festival of Christians. But in today’s time, the festival of Christmas has surpassed the religious boundaries and become a symbol of the holistic culture. The winters in December carry a festive feeling.

Usually, the celebration begins much before the main day and continues for around 2 weeks after that. Men and women celebrate Christmas to honor the birth of Jesus Christ. Religious people go to church and light the candles to pray to their God, Jesus Christ.

A festival that is equally loved and cherished by adults and kids. People also bring a Christmas tree to their homes and decorate it with colorful balls, ribbons, and red socks. Market shops and showrooms display a theme of glittering red and white colors to set up the Christmas mood.

On Christmas night, folks enjoy a big feast and share gifts with each other. Homemade traditional plum cakes, cupcakes, and muffins are the special treats on Christmas. Kids are showered with lots of presents and new dresses. They also get to meet the ‘Santa Claus’, dressed in a fluffy red and white costume, who greets them with hugs and gifts.

Christmas is a festival of joy. It is about sharing and helping others. On this day, people remember Jesus Christ and his lessons of life. The festival definitely teaches us to practice kindness and love toward each other and help those who have less than us.

Introduction:

Christmas is the season of joy, peace, and happiness. It is the special season set aside to celebrate the birth of Jesus Christ. Though this was its original purpose, the celebration of Christmas has grown to become a symbolic time for living in peace and love.

Christmas is essentially a reminder of why we should stick to the deepest parts of our humanity. That is, through celebration, we are reminded that we should share, give to the less privileged, spend time with loved ones and have a positive outlook about life in general.

Origin of Christmas:

Many people assume Christmas is strictly a Christian celebration and they would be right if modern evidence is to be considered. However, with regards to its origin, this notion cannot be farther from the truth. In actual sense, Christmas originated a few decades after the birth of Jesus in the old Roman Empire.

Christmas emanated as the Pagan celebration of the concept known as Saturnalia. This celebration was aimed at celebrating the return of the sun and the end of winter. The celebration is usually a weeklong affair and is marked by lawless activity and a system of penal exemption from lawless acts such as housing breaking.

In the 4 th century, Christians adapted the last day of Saturnalia to be the celebration of Christmas. The aim was to get the pagans to associate this period with positive things. Consequently, lots of pagans converted to Christianity on the promise that they could still celebrate their tradition in this day. Whether Jesus was actually born on the 25 of December is not substantiated by historical evidence.

Importance of Christmas:

Why do we celebrate Christmas? Why do we go the extra mile to celebrate, give and create an atmosphere of merriment? The answers to these questions are numerous but we would mention a few.

1. Christmas reminds us of the importance of giving and sharing with friends and family.

2. Christmas shows the importance of joy and happiness.

3. Through Christmas, we know that Jesus birth is the beginning of great things in the world.

4. It is also an opportunity to correct actions we aren’t proud of in our lives.

5. It is generally an opportunity to think about nature and the reason for our existence.

Conclusion:

Whether you’re Christian or not, Christmas is an opportunity for you to put your biases and ill thought behind in the celebration of a great cause.

Christmas is a well-known Christian holiday set in December, celebrated the world over and famed for its decorations and Santa Clause. Christmas is celebrated on the 25 th of December, on the occasion of the birth of Jesus Christ. One can write for ages about the many wonders that Christmas inspires in people. This holiday is also famous for the different customs that are associated with it and even though Christmas is celebrated in all Christian countries there are differences in the way each nation commemorates this date.

Christmas Traditions:

One of the more famous symbols of this holiday is the Christmas tree. Most people do not think about it and just maintain that this custom has been around for ages, while in fact, it is in use for the past 150 years. The idea originated in Germany and later on, it was spread to the rest of the western world by Queen Victoria and Prince Albert. This event was meant for the entire family to enjoy a day before the 25 th of December.

The famous Santa Clause celebrated in many movies and made famous by Coca-Cola commercials is actually Saint Nicholas and he is traditionally celebrated on the 6 th of December. The Santa goes around town and checks if all the children were good and if they were, he left them a present, but if a child misbehaved often the Krampus would come to punish them by leaving a whip for the parents. This myth was taken on by the movie industry and transformed into the white beard and red-coated child hero of today.

Traditionally Christmas is celebrated by a Church mass in the morning and then by a family meal later on in the day. That is if you are a religious person, otherwise, most people have some sort of Christmas dinner where they sing the appropriate songs and drink special drinks, somewhere its egg- nock and in other places its sweetened cooked red wine. Whatever the tradition the point of the holiday is to spend some quality time with your loved ones eating and resting.

Modern Christmas:

Christmas is also famous as the time of the year when we give gifts to each other and appropriately this is also the time when companies try to sell everything they can. Marketing experts know how to use the traditional symbols of Christmas to make you want to buy something that you do not actually need. Not to mention that every gift that Santa brings has to be bought somewhere and every child wants a visit from their favorite imagined gift giver. The consumer society has transformed this holiday and made it part of its cosmology, the basic elements are still here but everything is set around decoration, gifts, and movies.

Whatever the backdrop of the holiday it still remains one of the coziest times of the year, at least form me. Spending time at home with the people we love, embraced, watching movies and surrounded by flickering lights is the image I have in my head when I think about Christmas. This is also an image that brings warmth to my heart.

Christmas is a Christian holiday that is celebrated all over the world on December 25 th . Christmas is the time of the year when people commemorate the birth of Jesus Christ. It is a cultural festivity that brings families together in a celebratory mood. Every Christian loves Christmas because it is full of joy, full of gifts, family gets together and beautiful Christmas carols are sang all over.

Preparations for Christmas:

Christmas is a cultural festivity that entails a lot of preparations. It is a public holiday and so people get a Christmas break to celebrate it. Preparations for Christmas start early for most people so that celebrations begin on the eve of Christmas. Preparations for Christmas involves a lot of activities.

Plans on who you are spending the Christmas together must be made before any preparations begin because you want to be considerate on their preferences and way of doing things. Shopping for Christmas is done as art of the preparations and people usually buy decorations, food and gifts mostly for children in the family and friends. Some families shop for matching Christmas outfits for everyone.

The common preparations include decorations of the place with Christmas trees, lighting. Before decorations begin, the house must be deep cleaned. The Christmas tree brings the Christmas spirit in homes because it is all glittery and shiny with all the decorations. Presents are placed under the Christmas tree in wrapped gift boxes and are not to be opened till Christmas day.

Churches and Sunday schools make their own preparations for Christmas through practicing songs and skits to be performed on Christmas day. The songs and skits are usually about the stories of the birth of Jesus Christ from the Bible. The church is also decorated for the special event. Thorough cleaning of the churches is also done to usher in Christmas.

Travel plans are also made for families and friend who would lie to spend their Christmas holiday in a nice place. People usually spend a lot on Christmas and so saving money for these plans should be the earliest preparation among all these.

As tradition for most families across the world, turkey is the common meal. Turkey orders have to be made early to avoid missing on the traditional Christmas meal. Christmas cards are also written to friends and family to wish them a happy holiday and to show love.

What happens on Christmas Eve?

Activities done on the Christmas Eve are still preparations. Christmas dinner is prepared, the tables are set, and gifts that had not been wrapped are wrapped and placed under the Christmas tree. Families come together in a Christmas spirit and share in the spirit of Christmas and the excitement for the day that is to come.

What happens on Christmas day?

The activities on Christmas day are usually few because everything was prepared in advance. The day begins with a countdown at 11:59 pm at night whereby people shout in celebration when it gets to 12:00 midnight. Christmas carols are played on radios and televisions to mark the day. Most families start by going to church where performances and songs are done. Then later, they join their families to exchange gifts and celebrate with food and music. Happiness during Christmas is like no other.

During exchange of gifts, children believe that they are from Santa Claus. Santa Claus or Father Christmas is a figure originating from the western Christian culture who is believed to bring gifts to disciplined children during Christmas. Children tend to behave well as they anticipate gifts from Santa.

In conclusion, Christmas is basically the best time of the year for both children and adults.

Christmas is a yearly celebration marking Jesus Christ’s birth; it is observed on the 25 th of December as a cultural and religious celebration among a lot of people all over the world. Christmas is basically a short form for Christ’s mass. It is gotten from the word ‘cristmasse’ which is a Middle English word gotten from the old English word, a phrase that was first heard around 1038. Apart from Christmas, the day and holiday has also been called by some other names like midwinter, nativity and so on.

The history of Christmas is one that dates back to a very long time; the first Christmas that was celebrated was done in 336 in Rome. It played a very important role during the famed Arian controversy that took place in the 300s. During the early years of the middle age, epiphany overshadowed it. Christmas was brought back to limelight around 800 when the emperor Charlemagne received the crown on Christmas day.

During the 17 th century, the Puritans had Christmas banned because it was associated with drunkenness and different other misbehaviour. It was made a proper holiday around 1660 but was still quite disreputable. Around the early 1900s, the Oxford movement of the Anglican Communion church started and this led to the revival of Christmas. A lot of writers including Charles Dickens did their best to reinvent Christmas through emphasising it as being a period for family, gift giving, religion and social reconciliation as against the historically common revelry it was known for.

Christmas is celebrated as a key festival in a lot of countries all over the world and some of the countries are countries with a non-Christian population. In a lot of the non-Christian regions, the celebration of Christmas is largely influenced by the colonial rule like in Hong Kong, in some other regions; the celebration of Christmas is due to cultural influence of other foreign nations. There are some countries where Christmas isn’t celebrated and there is no public holiday, examples of such countries are Israel, Afghanistan, North Korea, the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, Japan, China, Bhutan, Vietnam, Turkey, Libya, Algeria, Morocco, Tunisia, etc.

There are parades and religious processions in countries that are majorly catholic in the days before Christmas. In regions that are largely secular, there are also parades that feature the Santa Claus and some other seasonal characters. A very important feature of Christmas all over the world is the act of gift sharing and giving that takes place on the day of Christmas, there are a few countries that practice the act of gift giving and gift sharing on January 6 and also on Saint Nicholas Day.

There is the practice of special decoration being put up during Christmas and this practice has a very long history. In London around the 15 th century, it was the tradition for every home and church building to be decorated with items that were judged to be green and worthy of the season including ivy, holm and bays. The colours traditionally for Christmas are gold, red and green. Red is said to symbolise Jesus’ blood that he shed during the crucifixion, green stands for eternal life, and especially the tree that is evergreen and doesn’t lose the leaves on it during winter, the very first colour associated with Christmas is gold as it was one of the gifts that the magi gave Jesus and it symbolises royalty.

A special family Christmas meal is also a very traditionally important feature of Christmas celebration, and the type of food served depends on the country and varies from region to region. The United Kingdom with the countries that have been influenced by its culture and traditions have a proper meal for Christmas that includes goose, turkey or any other big bird, potatoes, gravy, bread, vegetables and cider. There are also unique desserts that are prepared during Christmas including Yule log cake, mince pies, Christmas pudding and fruit cake. It is important to note that in most eastern European countries like Poland and in the Scandinavia, the main traditional course is fish but there has been an increase in the use of richer meat like lamb.

Christmas card are greeting messages in form of illustrations that family members and friends exchanges during the Christmas period. Traditionally, Christmas greeting cards was first produced for commercial purpose in London around 1843 by a Sir Henry Cole. Christmas is probably the most beautiful time of the year with family, love and gift giving the theme of the season.

Christmas is a yearly festival which is celebrated on the birth of Jesus Christ, on December 25 by most people in the world. A few parts of Eastern Christians use the Julian system which marks it on January 7 on the Gregorian calendar, which is December 25 as indicated by their calendar. Armenian Churches have been celebrating Christmas on January 6 even before the Gregorian calendar started. Most Armenian Christians still use the Gregorian calendar and observe Christmas on January 6. In spite of all the controversies around the date, Christmas is regarded as a religious and social festival among the people all over the world. It is the major Christian festival of the year.

The Nativity accounts of Matthew and Luke are noticeable in the accounts and early Christian authors recommended different dates for the start of this festival. The first recorded Christmas festivity was in Rome in the year 336. Christmas assumed a job in the Arian debate of the fourth century. In the early Middle Ages, it was dominated by Epiphany. However, it regained its popularity after the year 800, when Charlemagne was delegated as the head on Christmas Day.

Today, most Christians celebrate on December 25 in the Gregorian calendar, which has been received generally in the common calendars used by nations all through the world. Be that as it may, some Eastern Christian Churches observe this festival on December 25 of the more seasoned Julian timetable, which right now relates to January 7 in the Gregorian calendar. This isn’t a difference over the date of Christmas all things considered, but instead, an inclination of which schedule should be used to decide the day that is December 25. In the Council of Tours of 567, the Church, with its craving to be general announced the twelve days among Christmas and Epiphany to be one bound together festal cycle.

Celebrations:

Christmas Day is associated with a number of celebrations all over the world including numerous people who are generally non-Christian. In some non-Christian regions, times of previous provincial guideline presented the festival such as Hong Kong. In others, Christian minorities or remote social impacts have driven people to celebrate this festival. Nations, for example, Japan, where Christmas is prevalent in spite of there being just a few Christians, have embraced huge numbers of the common parts of Christmas, for example, present giving, decorations, and Christmas trees.

Countries which do not celebrate It:

Countries in which Christmas is certainly not a formal festival include Afghanistan, Bahrain, Bhutan, Cambodia, China, with the exception of Hong Kong and Macau, North Korea, Oman, Pakistan, Thailand, Tunisia, Turkey, Turkmenistan, the United Arab Emirates among others. However, with the changing times, even people from these countries have started to celebrate this festival.

Christmas in India:

India has a substantial population of Christians. Moreover, being a secular country, festivals of all religions are celebrated with equal charm and anxiety. Christmas is not different from festivals celebrated in India. People from all religions and faith celebrate it. Schools organise special assemblies in order to make children aware of the importance of this festival. People decorate their homes and give gifts to children.

Decorations:

The activity of decorating the trees on this day has a long history. In the fifteenth century, it was recorded that in London it was the custom at Christmas for each house and all the area temples to be “decked with holm, coves and ivy which at all the period of the year stood to be green”. The heart-moulded leaves of ivy were said to symbolize the coming to earth of Jesus, while holly was viewed as a defence against witches. Its red berries and thistles represent the Crown of Thorns worn by Jesus at the execution and the blood he shed.

The Christmas tree was first used by German Lutherans in the sixteenth century, with records demonstrating that such a tree was put in the Cathedral of Strassburg in 1539, under the administration of the Protestant Reformer, Martin Bucer. The Moravians put lit candles on those trees. When finishing the Christmas tree, numerous people put a star at the highest point of the tree symbolizing the Star of Bethlehem, a reality recorded by The School Journal in 1897.

In the nineteenth century, it wound up prominent for individuals to likewise place an angel on the top of a tree. This was intended to symbolize the angels referenced in the records of the Nativity of Jesus. The Christmas tree is considered by some as Christianisation of agnostic convention and custom surrounding the Winter Solstice, which combined the use of evergreen limbs, and an adjustment of agnostic tree worship.

Traditional Cuisine:

Depending on the regions, there are different traditional cuisines on this day. A few regions have exceptional suppers for Christmas Eve, for example, Sicily, where 12 sorts of fish are served. In the United Kingdom and nations impacted by its customs, a standard dinner incorporates turkey, goose or other expansive flying creature, sauce, potatoes, vegetables, now and again bread and juice. Extraordinary treats are likewise arranged, for example, pudding, mince pies, nutty surprise and Yule log cake

Santa Claus:

Santa Claus is one of the key parts of the celebrations of Christmas. As per the legend, Santa Claus gives gifts to good children on the eve of Christmas which is the night of the 24 th December. Children sleep early on this day hoping to get a gift from Santa Claus when they get up the next morning. They also keep cookies and milk near their beds for the Santa and a carrot for the reindeer of the Santa on which he rides as a part of the tradition. The popular poem Jingle Bells celebrates the coming of Santa to give away the gifts.

Christmas is such a festival which is celebrated by people from all religions and faith worldwide despite it being a Christian festival. It is the essence of this festival which unites the people so much. We should learn the importance of such unity from this festival and despite our religious differences; we should all celebrate the festivals together. Festivals are probably a medium which has the power to keep people united for the betterment of mankind.

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In the Shadow of the Holocaust

Berlin never stops reminding you of what happened there. Several museums examine totalitarianism and the Holocaust; the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe takes up an entire city block. In a sense, though, these larger structures are the least of it. The memorials that sneak up on you—the monument to burned books, which is literally underground, and the thousands of Stolpersteine , or “stumbling stones,” built into sidewalks to commemorate individual Jews, Sinti, Roma, homosexuals, mentally ill people, and others murdered by the Nazis—reveal the pervasiveness of the evils once committed in this place. In early November, when I was walking to a friend’s house in the city, I happened upon the information stand that marks the site of Hitler’s bunker. I had done so many times before. It looks like a neighborhood bulletin board, but it tells the story of the Führer’s final days.

In the late nineteen-nineties and early two-thousands, when many of these memorials were conceived and installed, I visited Berlin often. It was exhilarating to watch memory culture take shape. Here was a country, or at least a city, that was doing what most cultures cannot: looking at its own crimes, its own worst self. But, at some point, the effort began to feel static, glassed in, as though it were an effort not only to remember history but also to insure that only this particular history is remembered—and only in this way. This is true in the physical, visual sense. Many of the memorials use glass: the Reichstag, a building nearly destroyed during the Nazi era and rebuilt half a century later, is now topped by a glass dome; the burned-books memorial lives under glass; glass partitions and glass panes put order to the stunning, once haphazard collection called “Topography of Terror.” As Candice Breitz, a South African Jewish artist who lives in Berlin, told me, “The good intentions that came into play in the nineteen-eighties have, too often, solidified into dogma.”

Podcast: The Political Scene Masha Gessen talks with Tyler Foggatt.

Among the few spaces where memory representation is not set in apparent permanence are a couple of the galleries in the new building of the Jewish Museum, which was completed in 1999. When I visited in early November, a gallery on the ground floor was showing a video installation called “Rehearsing the Spectacle of Spectres.” The video was set in Kibbutz Be’eri , the community where, on October 7th, Hamas killed more than ninety people—almost one in ten residents—during its attack on Israel, which ultimately claimed more than twelve hundred lives. In the video, Be’eri residents take turns reciting the lines of a poem by one of the community’s members, the poet Anadad Eldan: “. . . from the swamp between the ribs / she surfaced who had submerged in you / and you are constrained not shouting / hunting for the forms that scamper outside.” The video, by the Berlin-based Israeli artists Nir Evron and Omer Krieger, was completed nine years ago. It begins with an aerial view of the area, the Gaza Strip visible, then slowly zooms in on the houses of the kibbutz, some of which looked like bunkers. I am not sure what the artists and the poet had initially meant to convey; now the installation looked like a work of mourning for Be’eri. (Eldan, who is nearly a hundred years old, survived the Hamas attack.)

Down the hallway was one of the spaces that the architect Daniel Libeskind, who designed the museum, called “voids”—shafts of air that pierce the building, symbolizing the absence of Jews in Germany through generations. There, an installation by the Israeli artist Menashe Kadishman, titled “Fallen Leaves,” consists of more than ten thousand rounds of iron with eyes and mouths cut into them, like casts of children’s drawings of screaming faces. When you walk on the faces, they clank, like shackles, or like the bolt handle of a rifle. Kadishman dedicated the work to victims of the Holocaust and other innocent victims of war and violence. I don’t know what Kadishman, who died in 2015, would have said about the current conflict. But, after I walked from the haunting video of Kibbutz Be’eri to the clanking iron faces, I thought of the thousands of residents of Gaza killed in retaliation for the lives of Jews killed by Hamas. Then I thought that, if I were to state this publicly in Germany, I might get in trouble.

On November 9th, to mark the eighty-fifth anniversary of Kristallnacht, a Star of David and the phrase “ Nie Wieder Ist Jetzt! ”—“Never Again Is Now!”—was projected in white and blue on Berlin’s Brandenburg Gate. That day, the Bundestag was considering a proposal titled “Fulfilling Historical Responsibility: Protecting Jewish Life in Germany,” which contained more than fifty measures intended to combat antisemitism in Germany, including deporting immigrants who commit antisemitic crimes; stepping up activities directed against the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (B.D.S.) movement; supporting Jewish artists “whose work is critical of antisemitism”; implementing a particular definition of antisemitism in funding and policing decisions; and beefing up coöperation between the German and the Israeli armed forces. In earlier remarks, the German Vice-Chancellor, Robert Habeck, who is a member of the Green Party, said that Muslims in Germany should “clearly distance themselves from antisemitism so as not to undermine their own right to tolerance.”

Germany has long regulated the ways in which the Holocaust is remembered and discussed. In 2008, when then Chancellor Angela Merkel spoke before the Knesset, on the sixtieth anniversary of the founding of the state of Israel, she emphasized Germany’s special responsibility not only for preserving the memory of the Holocaust as a unique historical atrocity but also for the security of Israel. This, she went on, was part of Germany’s Staatsräson —the reason for the existence of the state. The sentiment has since been repeated in Germany seemingly every time the topic of Israel, Jews, or antisemitism arises, including in Habeck’s remarks. “The phrase ‘Israel’s security is part of Germany’s Staatsräson ’ has never been an empty phrase,” he said. “And it must not become one.”

At the same time, an obscure yet strangely consequential debate on what constitutes antisemitism has taken place. In 2016, the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (I.H.R.A.), an intergovernmental organization, adopted the following definition: “Antisemitism is a certain perception of Jews, which may be expressed as hatred toward Jews. Rhetorical and physical manifestations of antisemitism are directed toward Jewish or non-Jewish individuals and/or their property, toward Jewish community institutions and religious facilities.” This definition was accompanied by eleven examples, which began with the obvious—calling for or justifying the killing of Jews—but also included “claiming that the existence of a State of Israel is a racist endeavor” and “drawing comparisons of contemporary Israeli policy to that of the Nazis.”

This definition had no legal force, but it has had extraordinary influence. Twenty-five E.U. member states and the U.S. State Department have endorsed or adopted the I.H.R.A. definition. In 2019, President Donald Trump signed an executive order providing for the withholding of federal funds from colleges where students are not protected from antisemitism as defined by the I.H.R.A. On December 5th of this year, the U.S. House of Representatives passed a nonbinding resolution condemning antisemitism as defined by the I.H.R.A.; it was proposed by two Jewish Republican representatives and opposed by several prominent Jewish Democrats, including New York’s Jerry Nadler.

In 2020, a group of academics proposed an alternative definition of antisemitism, which they called the Jerusalem Declaration . It defines antisemitism as “discrimination, prejudice, hostility or violence against Jews as Jews (or Jewish institutions as Jewish)” and provides examples that help distinguish anti-Israel statements and actions from antisemitic ones. But although some of the preëminent scholars of the Holocaust participated in drafting the declaration, it has barely made a dent in the growing influence of the I.H.R.A. definition. In 2021, the European Commission published a handbook “for the practical use” of the I.H.R.A. definition, which recommended, among other things, using the definition in training law-enforcement officers to recognize hate crimes, and creating the position of state attorney, or coördinator or commissioner for antisemitism.

Germany had already implemented this particular recommendation. In 2018, the country created the Office of the Federal Government Commissioner for Jewish Life in Germany and the Fight Against Antisemitism, a vast bureaucracy that includes commissioners at the state and local level, some of whom work out of prosecutors’ offices or police precincts. Since then, Germany has reported an almost uninterrupted rise in the number of antisemitic incidents: more than two thousand in 2019, more than three thousand in 2021, and, according to one monitoring group, a shocking nine hundred and ninety-four incidents in the month following the Hamas attack. But the statistics mix what Germans call Israelbezogener Antisemitismus —Israel-related antisemitism, such as instances of criticism of Israeli government policies—with violent attacks, such as an attempted shooting at a synagogue, in Halle, in 2019, which killed two bystanders; shots fired at a former rabbi’s house, in Essen, in 2022; and two Molotov cocktails thrown at a Berlin synagogue this fall. The number of incidents involving violence has, in fact, remained relatively steady, and has not increased following the Hamas attack.

There are now dozens of antisemitism commissioners throughout Germany. They have no single job description or legal framework for their work, but much of it appears to consist of publicly shaming those they see as antisemitic, often for “de-singularizing the Holocaust” or for criticizing Israel. Hardly any of these commissioners are Jewish. Indeed, the proportion of Jews among their targets is certainly higher. These have included the German-Israeli sociologist Moshe Zuckermann, who was targeted for supporting the B.D.S. movement, as was the South African Jewish photographer Adam Broomberg.

In 2019, the Bundestag passed a resolution condemning B.D.S. as antisemitic and recommending that state funding be withheld from events and institutions connected to B.D.S. The history of the resolution is telling. A version was originally introduced by the AfD, the radical-right ethnonationalist and Euroskeptic party then relatively new to the German parliament. Mainstream politicians rejected the resolution because it came from the AfD, but, apparently fearful of being seen as failing to fight antisemitism, immediately introduced a similar one of their own. The resolution was unbeatable because it linked B.D.S. to “the most terrible phase of German history.” For the AfD, whose leaders have made openly antisemitic statements and endorsed the revival of Nazi-era nationalist language, the spectre of antisemitism is a perfect, cynically wielded political instrument, both a ticket to the political mainstream and a weapon that can be used against Muslim immigrants.

The B.D.S. movement, which is inspired by the boycott movement against South African apartheid, seeks to use economic pressure to secure equal rights for Palestinians in Israel, end the occupation, and promote the return of Palestinian refugees. Many people find the B.D.S. movement problematic because it does not affirm the right of the Israeli state to exist—and, indeed, some B.D.S. supporters envision a total undoing of the Zionist project. Still, one could argue that associating a nonviolent boycott movement, whose supporters have explicitly positioned it as an alternative to armed struggle, with the Holocaust is the very definition of Holocaust relativism. But, according to the logic of German memory policy, because B.D.S. is directed against Jews—although many of the movement’s supporters are also Jewish—it is antisemitic. One could also argue that the inherent conflation of Jews with the state of Israel is antisemitic, even that it meets the I.H.R.A. definition of antisemitism. And, given the AfD’s involvement and the pattern of the resolution being used largely against Jews and people of color, one might think that this argument would gain traction. One would be wrong.

The German Basic Law, unlike the U.S. Constitution but like the constitutions of many other European countries, has not been interpreted to provide an absolute guarantee of freedom of speech. It does, however, promise freedom of expression not only in the press but in the arts and sciences, research, and teaching. It’s possible that, if the B.D.S. resolution became law, it would be deemed unconstitutional. But it has not been tested in this way. Part of what has made the resolution peculiarly powerful is the German state’s customary generosity: almost all museums, exhibits, conferences, festivals, and other cultural events receive funding from the federal, state, or local government. “It has created a McCarthyist environment,” Candice Breitz, the artist, told me. “Whenever we want to invite someone, they”—meaning whatever government agency may be funding an event—“Google their name with ‘B.D.S.,’ ‘Israel,’ ‘apartheid.’ ”

A couple of years ago, Breitz, whose art deals with issues of race and identity, and Michael Rothberg, who holds a Holocaust studies chair at the University of California, Los Angeles, tried to organize a symposium on German Holocaust memory, called “We Need to Talk.” After months of preparations, they had their state funding pulled, likely because the program included a panel connecting Auschwitz and the genocide of the Herero and the Nama people carried out between 1904 and 1908 by German colonizers in what is now Namibia. “Some of the techniques of the Shoah were developed then,” Breitz said. “But you are not allowed to speak about German colonialism and the Shoah in the same breath because it is a ‘levelling.’ ”

The insistence on the singularity of the Holocaust and the centrality of Germany’s commitment to reckoning with it are two sides of the same coin: they position the Holocaust as an event that Germans must always remember and mention but don’t have to fear repeating, because it is unlike anything else that’s ever happened or will happen. The German historian Stefanie Schüler-Springorum, who heads the Centre for Research on Antisemitism, in Berlin, has argued that unified Germany turned the reckoning with the Holocaust into its national idea, and as a result “any attempt to advance our understanding of the historical event itself, through comparisons with other German crimes or other genocides, can [be] and is being perceived as an attack on the very foundation of this new nation-state.” Perhaps that’s the meaning of “Never again is now.”

Some of the great Jewish thinkers who survived the Holocaust spent the rest of their lives trying to tell the world that the horror, while uniquely deadly, should not be seen as an aberration. That the Holocaust happened meant that it was possible—and remains possible. The sociologist and philosopher Zygmunt Bauman argued that the massive, systematic, and efficient nature of the Holocaust was a function of modernity—that, although it was by no means predetermined, it fell in line with other inventions of the twentieth century. Theodor Adorno studied what makes people inclined to follow authoritarian leaders and sought a moral principle that would prevent another Auschwitz.

In 1948, Hannah Arendt wrote an open letter that began, “Among the most disturbing political phenomena of our times is the emergence in the newly created state of Israel of the ‘Freedom Party’ (Tnuat Haherut), a political party closely akin in its organization, methods, political philosophy, and social appeal to the Nazi and Fascist parties.” Just three years after the Holocaust, Arendt was comparing a Jewish Israeli party to the Nazi Party, an act that today would be a clear violation of the I.H.R.A.’s definition of antisemitism. Arendt based her comparison on an attack carried out in part by the Irgun, a paramilitary predecessor of the Freedom Party, on the Arab village of Deir Yassin, which had not been involved in the war and was not a military objective. The attackers “killed most of its inhabitants—240 men, women, and children—and kept a few of them alive to parade as captives through the streets of Jerusalem.”

The occasion for Arendt’s letter was a planned visit to the United States by the party’s leader, Menachem Begin. Albert Einstein, another German Jew who fled the Nazis, added his signature. Thirty years later, Begin became Prime Minister of Israel. Another half century later, in Berlin, the philosopher Susan Neiman, who leads a research institute named for Einstein, spoke at the opening of a conference called “Hijacking Memory: The Holocaust and the New Right.” She suggested that she might face repercussions for challenging the ways in which Germany now wields its memory culture. Neiman is an Israeli citizen and a scholar of memory and morals. One of her books is called “ Learning from the Germans: Race and the Memory of Evil .” In the past couple of years, Neiman said, memory culture had “gone haywire.”

Germany’s anti-B.D.S. resolution, for example, has had a distinct chilling effect on the country’s cultural sphere. The city of Aachen took back a ten-thousand-euro prize it had awarded to the Lebanese-American artist Walid Raad; the city of Dortmund and the jury for the fifteen-thousand-euro Nelly Sachs Prize similarly rescinded the honor that they had bestowed on the British-Pakistani writer Kamila Shamsie. The Cameroonian political philosopher Achille Mbembe had his invitation to a major festival questioned after the federal antisemitism commissioner accused him of supporting B.D.S. and “relativizing the Holocaust.” (Mbembe has said that he is not connected with the boycott movement; the festival itself was cancelled because of COVID .) The director of Berlin’s Jewish Museum, Peter Schäfer, resigned in 2019 after being accused of supporting B.D.S.—he did not, in fact, support the boycott movement, but the museum had posted a link, on Twitter, to a newspaper article that included criticism of the resolution. The office of Benjamin Netanyahu had also asked Merkel to cut the museum’s funding because, in the Israeli Prime Minister’s opinion, its exhibition on Jerusalem paid too much attention to the city’s Muslims. (Germany’s B.D.S. resolution may be unique in its impact but not in its content: a majority of U.S. states now have laws on the books that equate the boycott with antisemitism and withhold state funding from people and institutions that support it.)

After the “We Need to Talk” symposium was cancelled, Breitz and Rothberg regrouped and came up with a proposal for a symposium called “We Still Need to Talk.” The list of speakers was squeaky clean. A government entity vetted everyone and agreed to fund the gathering. It was scheduled for early December. Then Hamas attacked Israel . “We knew that after that every German politician would see it as extremely risky to be connected with an event that had Palestinian speakers or the word ‘apartheid,’ ” Breitz said. On October 17th, Breitz learned that funding had been pulled. Meanwhile, all over Germany, police were cracking down on demonstrations that call for a ceasefire in Gaza or manifest support for Palestinians. Instead of a symposium, Breitz and several others organized a protest. They called it “We Still Still Still Still Need to Talk.” About an hour into the gathering, police quietly cut through the crowd to confiscate a cardboard poster that read “From the River to the Sea, We Demand Equality.” The person who had brought the poster was a Jewish Israeli woman.

The “Fulfilling Historical Responsibility” proposal has since languished in committee. Still, the performative battle against antisemitism kept ramping up. In November, the planning of Documenta, one of the art world’s most important shows, was thrown into disarray after the newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung dug up a petition that a member of the artistic organizing committee, Ranjit Hoskote, had signed in 2019. The petition, written to protest a planned event on Zionism and Hindutva in Hoskote’s home town of Mumbai, denounced Zionism as “a racist ideology calling for a settler-colonial, apartheid state where non-Jews have unequal rights, and in practice, has been premised on the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians.” The Süddeutsche Zeitung reported on it under the heading “Antisemitism.” Hoskote resigned and the rest of the committee followed suit. A week later, Breitz read in a newspaper that a museum in Saarland had cancelled an exhibit of hers, which had been planned for 2024, “in view of the media coverage about the artist in connection with her controversial statements in the context of Hamas’ war of aggression against the state of Israel.”

This November, I left Berlin to travel to Kyiv, traversing, by train, Poland and then Ukraine. This is as good a place as any to say a few things about my relationship to the Jewish history of these lands. Many American Jews go to Poland to visit what little, if anything, is left of the old Jewish quarters, to eat food reconstructed according to recipes left by long-extinguished families, and to go on tours of Jewish history, Jewish ghettos, and Nazi concentration camps. I am closer to this history. I grew up in the Soviet Union in the nineteen-seventies, in the ever-present shadow of the Holocaust, because only a part of my family had survived it and because Soviet censors suppressed any public mention of it. When, around the age of nine, I learned that some Nazi war criminals were still on the loose, I stopped sleeping. I imagined one of them climbing in through our fifth-floor balcony to snatch me.

During summers, our cousin Anna and her sons would visit from Warsaw. Her parents had decided to kill themselves after the Warsaw Ghetto burned down. Anna’s father threw himself in front of a train. Anna’s mother tied the three-year-old Anna to her waist with a shawl and jumped into a river. They were plucked out of the water by a Polish man, and survived the war by hiding in the countryside. I knew the story, but I wasn’t allowed to mention it. Anna was an adult when she learned that she was a Holocaust survivor, and she waited to tell her own kids, who were around my age. The first time I went to Poland, in the nineteen-nineties, was to research the fate of my great-grandfather, who spent nearly three years in the Białystok Ghetto before being killed in Majdanek.

The Holocaust memory wars in Poland have run in parallel with Germany’s. The ideas being battled out in the two countries are different, but one consistent feature is the involvement of right-wing politicians in conjunction with the state of Israel. As in Germany, the nineteen-nineties and two-thousands saw ambitious memorialization efforts, both national and local, that broke through the silence of the Soviet years. Poles built museums and monuments that commemorated the Jews killed in the Holocaust—which claimed half of its victims in Nazi-occupied Poland—and the Jewish culture that was lost with them. Then the backlash came. It coincided with the rise to power of the right-wing, illiberal Law and Justice Party, in 2015. Poles now wanted a version of history in which they were victims of the Nazi occupation alongside the Jews, whom they tried to protect from the Nazis.

This was not true: instances of Poles risking their lives to save Jews from the Germans, as in the case of my cousin Anna, were exceedingly rare, while the opposite—entire communities or structures of the pre-occupation Polish state, such as the police or city offices, carrying out the mass murder of Jews—was common. But historians who studied the Poles’ role in the Holocaust came under attack . The Polish-born Princeton historian Jan Tomasz Gross was interrogated and threatened with prosecution for writing that Poles killed more Polish Jews than Germans. The Polish authorities hounded him even after he retired. The government squeezed Dariusz Stola, the head of POLIN , Warsaw’s innovative museum of Polish Jewish history, out of his post. The historians Jan Grabowski and Barbara Engelking were dragged into court for writing that the mayor of a Polish village had been a collaborator in the Holocaust.

When I wrote about Grabowski and Engleking’s case, I received some of the scariest death threats of my life. (I’ve been sent a lot of death threats; most are forgettable.) One, sent to a work e-mail address, read, “If you keep writing lies about Poland and the Poles, I will deliver these bullets to your body. See the attachment! Five of them in every kneecap, so you won’t walk again. But if you continue to spread your Jewish hatred, I will deliver next 5 bullets in your pussy. The third step you won’t notice. But don’t worry, I’m not visiting you next week or eight weeks, I’ll be back when you forget this e-mail, maybe in 5 years. You’re on my list. . . .” The attachment was a picture of two shiny bullets in the palm of a hand. The Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum, headed by a government appointee, tweeted a condemnation of my article, as did the account of the World Jewish Congress. A few months later, a speaking invitation to a university fell through because, the university told my speaking agent, it had emerged that I might be an antisemite.

Throughout the Polish Holocaust-memory wars, Israel maintained friendly relations with Poland. In 2018, Netanyahu and the Polish Prime Minister, Mateusz Morawiecki, issued a joint statement against “actions aimed at blaming Poland or the Polish nation as a whole for the atrocities committed by the Nazis and their collaborators of different nations.” The statement asserted, falsely, that “structures of the Polish underground state supervised by the Polish government-in-exile created a mechanism of systematic help and support to Jewish people.” Netanyahu was building alliances with the illiberal governments of Central European countries, such as Poland and Hungary, in part to prevent an anti-occupation consensus from solidifying in the European Union. For this, he was willing to lie about the Holocaust.

Each year, tens of thousands of Israeli teen-agers travel to the Auschwitz museum before graduating from high school (though last year the trips were called off over security issues and the Polish government’s growing insistence that Poles’ involvement in the Holocaust be written out of history). It is a powerful, identity-forming trip that comes just a year or two before young Israelis join the military. Noam Chayut, a founder of Breaking the Silence, an anti-occupation advocacy group in Israel, has written of his own high-school trip, which took place in the late nineteen-nineties, “Now, in Poland, as a high-school adolescent, I began to sense belonging, self-love, power and pride, and the desire to contribute, to live and be strong, so strong that no one would ever try to hurt me.”

Chayut took this feeling into the I.D.F., which posted him to the occupied West Bank. One day he was putting up property-confiscation notices. A group of children was playing nearby. Chayut flashed what he considered a kind and non-threatening smile at a little girl. The rest of the children scampered off, but the girl froze, terrified, until she, too, ran away. Later, when Chayut published a book about the transformation this encounter precipitated, he wrote that he wasn’t sure why it was this girl: “After all, there was also the shackled kid in the Jeep and the girl whose family home we had broken into late at night to remove her mother and aunt. And there were plenty of children, hundreds of them, screaming and crying as we rummaged through their rooms and their things. And there was the child from Jenin whose wall we blasted with an explosive charge that blew a hole just a few centimeters from his head. Miraculously, he was uninjured, but I’m sure his hearing and his mind were badly impaired.” But in the eyes of that girl, on that day, Chayut saw a reflection of annihilatory evil, the kind that he had been taught existed, but only between 1933 and 1945, and only where the Nazis ruled. Chayut called his book “ The Girl Who Stole My Holocaust .”

I took the train from the Polish border to Kyiv. Nearly thirty-four thousand Jews were shot at Babyn Yar, a giant ravine on the outskirts of the city, in just thirty-six hours in September, 1941. Tens of thousands more people died there before the war was over. This was what is now known as the Holocaust by bullets. Many of the countries in which these massacres took place—the Baltics, Belarus, Ukraine—were re-colonized by the Soviet Union following the Second World War. Dissidents and Jewish cultural activists risked their freedom to maintain a memory of these tragedies, to collect testimony and names, and, where possible, to clean up and protect the sites themselves. After the fall of the Soviet Union, memorialization projects accompanied efforts to join the European Union. “Holocaust recognition is our contemporary European entry ticket,” the historian Tony Judt wrote in his 2005 book, “ Postwar .”

In the Rumbula forest, outside of Riga, for example, where some twenty-five thousand Jews were murdered in 1941, a memorial was unveiled in 2002, two years before Latvia was admitted to the E.U. A serious effort to commemorate Babyn Yar coalesced after the 2014 revolution that set Ukraine on an aspirational path to the E.U. By the time Russia invaded Ukraine, in February, 2022, several smaller structures had been completed and ambitious plans for a larger museum complex were in place. With the invasion, construction halted. One week into the full-scale war, a Russian missile hit directly next to the memorial complex, killing at least four people. Since then, some of the people associated with the project have reconstituted themselves as a team of war-crimes investigators.

The Ukrainian President, Volodymyr Zelensky, has waged an earnest campaign to win Israeli support for Ukraine. In March, 2022, he delivered a speech to the Knesset, in which he didn’t stress his own Jewish heritage but focussed on the inextricable historical connection between Jews and Ukrainians. He drew unambiguous parallels between the Putin regime and the Nazi Party. He even claimed that eighty years ago Ukrainians rescued Jews. (As with Poland, any claim that such aid was widespread is false.) But what worked for the right-wing government of Poland did not work for the pro-Europe President of Ukraine. Israel has not given Ukraine the help it has begged for in its war against Russia, a country that openly supports Hamas and Hezbollah.

Still, both before and after the October 7th attack, the phrase I heard in Ukraine possibly more than any other was “We need to be like Israel.” Politicians, journalists, intellectuals, and ordinary Ukrainians identify with the story Israel tells about itself, that of a tiny but mighty island of democracy standing strong against enemies who surround it. Some Ukrainian left-wing intellectuals have argued that Ukraine, which is fighting an anti-colonial war against an occupying power, should see its reflection in Palestine, not Israel. These voices are marginal and most often belong to young Ukrainians who are studying or have studied abroad. Following the Hamas attack, Zelensky wanted to rush to Israel as a show of support and unity between Israel and Ukraine. Israeli authorities seem to have other ideas—the visit has not happened.

While Ukraine has been unsuccessfully trying to get Israel to acknowledge that Russia’s invasion resembles Nazi Germany’s genocidal aggression, Moscow has built a propaganda universe around portraying Zelensky’s government, the Ukrainian military, and the Ukrainian people as Nazis. The Second World War is the central event of Russia’s historical myth. During Vladimir Putin’s reign, as the last of the people who lived through the war have been dying, commemorative events have turned into carnivals that celebrate Russian victimhood. The U.S.S.R. lost at least twenty-seven million people in that war, a disproportionate number of them Ukrainians. The Soviet Union and Russia have fought in wars almost continuously since 1945, but the word “war” is still synonymous with the Second World War and the word “enemy” is used interchangeably with “fascist” and “Nazi.” This made it that much easier for Putin, in declaring a new war, to brand Ukrainians as Nazis.

Netanyahu has compared the Hamas murders at the music festival to the Holocaust by bullets. This comparison, picked up and recirculated by world leaders, including President Biden, serves to bolster Israel’s case for inflicting collective punishment on the residents of Gaza. Similarly, when Putin says “Nazi” or “fascist,” he means that the Ukrainian government is so dangerous that Russia is justified in carpet-bombing and laying siege to Ukrainian cities and killing Ukrainian civilians. There are significant differences, of course: Russia’s claims that Ukraine attacked it first, and its portrayals of the Ukrainian government as fascist, are false; Hamas, on the other hand, is a tyrannical power that attacked Israel and committed atrocities that we cannot yet fully comprehend. But do these differences matter when the case being made is for killing children?

In the first weeks of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, when its troops were occupying the western suburbs of Kyiv, the director of Kyiv’s museum of the Second World War, Yurii Savchuk, was living at the museum and rethinking the core exhibit. One day after the Ukrainian military drove the Russians out of the Kyiv region, he met with the commander-in-chief of the Ukrainian armed forces, Valerii Zaluzhnyi, and got permission to start collecting artifacts. Savchuk and his staff went to Bucha, Irpin, and other towns and cities that had just been “deoccupied,” as Ukrainians have taken to saying, and interviewed people who had not yet told their stories. “This was before the exhumations and the reburials,” Savchuk told me. “We saw the true face of war, with all its emotions. The fear, the terror, was in the atmosphere, and we absorbed it with the air.”

In May, 2022, the museum opened a new exhibit, titled “Ukraine – Crucifixion.” It begins with a display of Russian soldiers’ boots, which Savchuk’s team had collected. It’s an odd reversal: both the Auschwitz museum and the Holocaust museum in Washington, D.C., have displayed hundreds or thousands of shoes that belonged to victims of the Holocaust. They convey the scale of loss, even as they show only a tiny fraction of it. The display in Kyiv shows the scale of the menace. The boots are arranged on the floor of the museum in the pattern of a five-pointed star, the symbol of the Red Army that has become as sinister in Ukraine as the swastika. In September, Kyiv removed five-pointed stars from a monument to the Second World War in what used to be called Victory Square—it’s been renamed because the very word “Victory” connotes Russia’s celebration in what it still calls the Great Patriotic War. The city also changed the dates on the monument, from “1941-1945”—the years of the war between the Soviet Union and Germany—to “1939-1945.” Correcting memory one monument at a time.

In 1954, an Israeli court heard a libel case involving a Hungarian Jew named Israel Kastner. A decade earlier, when Germany occupied Hungary and belatedly rushed to implement the mass murder of its Jews, Kastner, as a leader of the Jewish community, entered into negotiations with Adolf Eichmann himself. Kastner proposed to buy the lives of Hungary’s Jews with ten thousand trucks. When this failed, he negotiated to save sixteen hundred and eighty-five people by transporting them by chartered train to Switzerland. Hundreds of thousands of other Hungarian Jews were loaded onto trains to death camps. A Hungarian Jewish survivor had publicly accused Kastner of having collaborated with the Germans. Kastner sued for libel and, in effect, found himself on trial. The judge concluded that Kastner had “sold his soul to the devil.”

The charge of collaboration against Kastner rested on the allegation that he had failed to tell people that they were going to their deaths. His accusers argued that, had he warned the deportees, they would have rebelled, not gone to the death camps like sheep to slaughter. The trial has been read as the beginning of a discursive standoff in which the Israeli right argues for preëmptive violence and sees the left as willfully defenseless. By the time of the trial, Kastner was a left-wing politician; his accuser was a right-wing activist.

Seven years later, the judge who had presided over the Kastner libel trial was one of the three judges in the trial of Adolf Eichmann. Here was the devil himself. The prosecution argued that Eichmann represented but one iteration of the eternal threat to the Jews. The trial helped to solidify the narrative that, to prevent annihilation, Jews should be prepared to use force preëmptively. Arendt, reporting on the trial , would have none of this. Her phrase “the banality of evil” elicited perhaps the original accusations, levelled against a Jew, of trivializing the Holocaust. She wasn’t. But she saw that Eichmann was no devil, that perhaps the devil didn’t exist. She had reasoned that there was no such thing as radical evil, that evil was always ordinary even when it was extreme—something “born in the gutter,” as she put it later, something of “utter shallowness.”

Arendt also took issue with the prosecution’s story that Jews were the victims of, as she put it, “a historical principle stretching from Pharaoh to Haman—the victim of a metaphysical principle.” This story, rooted in the Biblical legend of Amalek, a people of the Negev Desert who repeatedly fought the ancient Israelites, holds that every generation of Jews faces its own Amalek. I learned this story as a teen-ager; it was the first Torah lesson I ever received, taught by a rabbi who gathered the kids in a suburb of Rome where Jewish refugees from the Soviet Union lived while waiting for their papers to enter the United States, Canada, or Australia. In this story, as told by the prosecutor in the Eichmann trial, the Holocaust is a predetermined event, part of Jewish history—and only Jewish history. The Jews, in this version, always have a well-justified fear of annihilation. Indeed, they can survive only if they act as though annihilation were imminent.

When I first learned the legend of Amalek, it made perfect sense to me. It described my knowledge of the world; it helped me connect my experience of getting teased and beaten up to my great-grandmother’s admonitions that using household Yiddish expressions in public was dangerous, to the unfathomable injustice of my grandfather and great-grandfather and scores of other relatives being killed before I was born. I was fourteen and lonely. I knew myself and my family to be victims, and the legend of Amalek imbued my sense of victimhood with meaning and a sense of community.

Netanyahu has been brandishing Amalek in the wake of the Hamas attack. The logic of this legend, as he wields it—that Jews occupy a singular place in history and have an exclusive claim on victimhood—has bolstered the anti-antisemitism bureaucracy in Germany and the unholy alliance between Israel and the European far right. But no nation is all victim all the time or all perpetrator all the time. Just as much of Israel’s claim to impunity lies in the Jews’ perpetual victim status, many of the country’s critics have tried to excuse Hamas’s act of terrorism as a predictable response to Israel’s oppression of Palestinians. Conversely, in the eyes of Israel’s supporters, Palestinians in Gaza can’t be victims because Hamas attacked Israel first. The fight over one rightful claim to victimhood runs on forever.

For the last seventeen years, Gaza has been a hyperdensely populated, impoverished, walled-in compound where only a small fraction of the population had the right to leave for even a short amount of time—in other words, a ghetto. Not like the Jewish ghetto in Venice or an inner-city ghetto in America but like a Jewish ghetto in an Eastern European country occupied by Nazi Germany. In the two months since Hamas attacked Israel, all Gazans have suffered from the barely interrupted onslaught of Israeli forces. Thousands have died. On average, a child is killed in Gaza every ten minutes. Israeli bombs have struck hospitals, maternity wards, and ambulances. Eight out of ten Gazans are now homeless, moving from one place to another, never able to get to safety.

The term “open-air prison” seems to have been coined in 2010 by David Cameron, the British Foreign Secretary who was then Prime Minister. Many human-rights organizations that document conditions in Gaza have adopted the description. But as in the Jewish ghettoes of Occupied Europe, there are no prison guards—Gaza is policed not by the occupiers but by a local force. Presumably, the more fitting term “ghetto” would have drawn fire for comparing the predicament of besieged Gazans to that of ghettoized Jews. It also would have given us the language to describe what is happening in Gaza now. The ghetto is being liquidated.

The Nazis claimed that ghettos were necessary to protect non-Jews from diseases spread by Jews. Israel has claimed that the isolation of Gaza, like the wall in the West Bank, is required to protect Israelis from terrorist attacks carried out by Palestinians. The Nazi claim had no basis in reality, while the Israeli claim stems from actual and repeated acts of violence. These are essential differences. Yet both claims propose that an occupying authority can choose to isolate, immiserate—and, now, mortally endanger—an entire population of people in the name of protecting its own.

From the earliest days of Israel’s founding, the comparison of displaced Palestinians to displaced Jews has presented itself, only to be swatted away. In 1948, the year the state was created, an article in the Israeli newspaper Maariv described the dire conditions—“old people so weak they were on the verge of death”; “a boy with two paralyzed legs”; “another boy whose hands were severed”—in which Palestinians, mostly women and children, departed the village of Tantura after Israeli troops occupied it: “One woman carried her child in one arm and with the other hand she held her elderly mother. The latter couldn’t keep up the pace, she yelled and begged her daughter to slow down, but the daughter did not consent. Finally the old lady collapsed onto the road and couldn’t move. The daughter pulled out her hair … lest she not make it on time. And worse than this was the association to Jewish mothers and grandmothers who lagged this way on the roads under the crop of murderers.” The journalist caught himself. “There is obviously no room for such a comparison,” he wrote. “This fate—they brought upon themselves.”

Jews took up arms in 1948 to claim land that was offered to them by a United Nations decision to partition what had been British-controlled Palestine. The Palestinians, supported by surrounding Arab states, did not accept the partition and Israel’s declaration of independence. Egypt, Syria, Iraq, Lebanon, and Transjordan invaded the proto-Israeli state, starting what Israel now calls the War of Independence. Hundreds of thousands of Palestinians fled the fighting. Those who did not were driven out of their villages by Israeli forces. Most of them were never able to return. The Palestinians remember 1948 as the Nakba, a word that means “catastrophe” in Arabic, just as Shoah means “catastrophe” in Hebrew. That the comparison is unavoidable has compelled many Israelis to assert that, unlike the Jews, Palestinians brought their catastrophe on themselves.

The day I arrived in Kyiv, someone handed me a thick book. It was the first academic study of Stepan Bandera to be published in Ukraine. Bandera is a Ukrainian hero: he fought against the Soviet regime; dozens of monuments to him have appeared since the collapse of the U.S.S.R. He ended up in Germany after the Second World War, led a partisan movement from exile, and died after being poisoned by a K.G.B. agent, in 1959. Bandera was also a committed fascist, an ideologue who wanted to build a totalitarian regime. These facts are detailed in the book, which has sold about twelve hundred copies. (Many bookstores have refused to carry it.) Russia makes gleeful use of Ukraine’s Bandera cult as evidence that Ukraine is a Nazi state. Ukrainians mostly respond by whitewashing Bandera’s legacy. It is ever so hard for people to wrap their minds around the idea that someone could have been the enemy of your enemy and yet not a benevolent force. A victim and also a perpetrator. Or vice versa. ♦

An earlier version of this article incorrectly described what Jan Tomasz Gross wrote. It also misstated when Anna’s parents decided to kill themselves and Anna’s age at the time of those events.

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Essay on Christmas

Christmas Essay in English for Students

Essay writing is an important part of the curriculum. Students are asked to write essays in the exam to check their imagination and how well they can weave their thoughts into words. Essays also evaluate a kid’s knowledge of language and grammar. Christmas is the favorite festival of many kids and writing an essay on this festival is often enjoyed by young kids. Refer to the free essay on Christmas at Vedantu’s site.

Vedantu offers free tutorials on many things such as courses of all the grades, it offers tested material of several competitive exams, and there are essays on the trending topics, festivals, and informational stuff available on the Vedantu website. For whichever topic we offer information on, we aim to turn it hassle-free for the students to get a complete list. Let’s get ready to read a detailed essay on the Christmas festival that is celebrated all over the world by people of varied beliefs and religions. Here you go: 

Christmas is celebrated every year on December 25 . The festival marks the celebration of the birth anniversary of Jesus Christ . Jesus Christ is worshipped as the Messiah of God in Christian Mythology. Hence, his birthday is one of the most joyous ceremonies amongst Christians. Although the festival is mainly celebrated by the followers of Christianity, it is one of the most enjoyed festivals all over the globe. Christmas symbolizes merriment and love. It is celebrated with a lot of zeal and enthusiasm by everyone, no matter what religion they follow. 

The season of Christmas that begins from Thanksgiving brings festivity and joy to everyone’s lives. Thanksgiving is the day when people thank the almighty for blessing them with harvest and also show gratitude towards all the good things and people around. On Christmas, people wish each other Merry Christmas and pray that the day takes away all the negativity and darkness from people’s life. 

Christmas is a festival full of culture and tradition. The festival entails a lot of preparations. Preparations for Christmas start early for most people. Preparations for Christmas involve a lot of things including buying decorations, food items, and gifts for family members and friends. People usually wear white or red coloured outfits on the day of Christmas. 

The celebration begins with decorating a Christmas tree . Christmas tree decoration and lighting are the most important part of Christmas. The Christmas tree is an artificial or real pine tree that people adorn with lights, artificial stars, toys, bells, flowers, gifts, etc. People also hide gifts for their loved ones. Traditionally, gifts are hidden in socks under the tree. It is an old belief that a saint named Santa Claus comes on the night of Christmas eve and hides presents for well-behaved kids. This imaginary figure brings a smile to everyone’s face. 

Young children are especially excited about Christmas as they receive gifts and great Christmas treats. The treats include chocolates, cakes, cookies, etc. People on this day visit churches with their families and friends and light candles in front of the idol of Jesus Christ. Churches are decorated with fairy lights and candles. People also create fancy Christmas cribs and adorn them with gifts, lights, etc. Children sing Christmas carols and also perform various skits marking the celebration of the auspicious day. One of the famous Christmas carols sung by all is “Jingle Bell, Jingle Bell, Jingle all the way”.

On this day, people tell each other stories and anecdotes related to Christmas. It is believed that Jesus Christ, the son of God, came to the Earth on this day to end people’s sufferings and miseries. His visit is symbolic of goodwill and happiness and it is depicted through the visit of the wise men and the shepherds. Christmas is, indeed, a magical festival that is all about sharing joy and happiness. For this reason, it is also my most favorite festival. 

Apart from the religious beliefs, the festival is known as sharing gifts with family as well as friends. The cute kids wait for the whole year to receive gifts from Santa. The craze of receiving gifts increases so much that they get up at midnight and start asking what they are going to get from Santa. They share their wishes with their parents and their parents try to accomplish them on the behalf of Santa. 

The wheel of imparting knowledge to the students at Vedantu is designed in a manner that the students can grab it without facing any sort of challenge. Vedantu has designed both a website and an application considering the digital requirement of today’s era. Thus, you can either access the website or can download the application today only!

Also Check: Christmas Speech for Students in English

Christmas Essay for Kids in English

Christmas is a super-duper special day filled with laughter, twinkling lights, and the warmth of love. It's like a magical adventure where everyone gets to be a part of something incredible!

Imagine waking up on Christmas morning, and the air is filled with the sweet scent of gingerbread cookies and the sound of jingle bells. It's a day when even the snowflakes seem to dance with joy. So, what makes Christmas so special?

Firstly, let's talk about Santa Claus! He's the jolly old man with a big, white beard who lives at the North Pole. Santa and his team of reindeer travel all around the world on Christmas Eve, delivering presents to good boys and girls. Can you believe he squeezes down chimneys to leave gifts under the Christmas tree? It's like a magical game of hide-and-seek with Santa!

Now, speaking of trees, have you ever seen a Christmas tree ? They are like giant, sparkling towers of happiness. Families decorate them with shiny baubles, twinkling lights, and a sparkly star on top. It's like turning your living room into a festive wonderland!

And oh, let's not forget about the delicious Christmas dinner! Families gather around the table to enjoy a feast of roast turkey, crispy potatoes, and yummy mince pies, telling stories . It's a time for sharing and caring, just like Santa does.

Christmas is not just about gifts and decorations; it's also about spending time with family and friends. Whether you're playing in the snow, singing carols , or wrapping presents, the joy of Christmas spreads like a warm, cosy blanket.

But wait, there's more! On Christmas morning, you might find stockings hanging by the fireplace. These are special socks where Santa leaves little surprises. It's like a treasure hunt right in your own home!

In the end, Christmas is a day where kindness and joy fill the air. It's a time to be grateful for the people we love and the magical moments we share. So, let's celebrate this wonderful day with laughter, love, and a sprinkle of Christmas magic!

Merry Christmas, everyone!

FAQs on Essay on Christmas

1. Why is Christmas such a special day?

Christmas is special because it's a time of joy, love, and sharing. Families come together, and there's a magical feeling in the air. It's also when Santa Claus brings gifts to children around the world.

2. What are the key things to include in an essay about Christmas?

In your essay, make sure to talk about traditions like decorating the Christmas tree, the excitement of Santa Claus, the delicious Christmas dinner, and the joy of spending time with family and friends. Share the magic of the holiday!

3. Who is Santa Claus, and why is he important on Christmas?

Santa Claus is a jolly man with a white beard who lives at the North Pole. On Christmas Eve, he travels in a sleigh pulled by reindeer, delivering gifts to children. He brings happiness and surprises, making Christmas a time of wonder and excitement.

4. What makes a Christmas tree special, and how do families decorate it?

A Christmas tree is special because it turns your home into a festive wonderland. Families decorate it with shiny baubles, twinkling lights, and a sparkly star on top. It's a way to create a magical atmosphere and celebrate the holiday spirit.

5. Why is spending time with family and friends important during Christmas?

Christmas is not just about decorations and gifts; it's about being together with loved ones. Whether playing in the snow, singing carols, or enjoying a delicious dinner, these moments create memories and warmth. Christmas is a time to share love and happiness with those we care about.

31 December Writing Prompts

by Sue Weems | 0 comments

Start Your Story TODAY! We’re teaching a new LIVE workshop this week to help you start your next book. Learn more and sign up here.

As the days get shorter and short this month here in the U.S., more time indoors means more time to write! Today we have a month's worth of December writing prompts to keep your pen moving across the page. 

December in the Northern Hemisphere means cooler temps and shorter days as the fall winds down and winter begins. But it might also be the perfect time to get a little more writing in each day. In fact, how about a little month long writing challenge? 

Use the daily writing prompts below to keep you working through December, whether you're developing ideas for a new book or just practicing your writing skills. 

Ready? Let's go!

Journal Prompt Ideas

Here's some questions to use in your daily writing practice this December.

1. Write about your favorite winter activity.

2. Make a survival list of all you need to make it through the winter. 

3. What is your favorite winter holiday and why?

4. Describe the way the weather changes in winter, including as many specific descriptive details as you can. 

5. What is the funniest gift (or best gift or worst gift) you've ever received in December. How did you react?

6. Describe your favorite drink in winter, include all five senses if possible. 

7. Write about your ideal day of winter.

8. What are the five things you are most grateful for in December? Why?

9. How do you like to close out the year? With family? At a big party? Write about your ideal December 31. 

10. What have you accomplished this year? Don't limit yourself to big things—write about those small triumphs too. 

Creative Writing Prompts for the Busy Holiday Season

December holds a number of holidays to celebrate. Try one of these prompts if you're feeling like getting into the festive spirit.

11. Describe your favorite family holiday traditions (December or otherwise).

12. What was a happy memory you have from a celebration in December? 

13. What is your favorite holiday decoration? What do you love about it?

14. If you could plan an idea holiday party, what would it include?

15. What is your favorite holiday treat, edible or otherwise? Tell us about it. 

16. Rewrite your favorite holiday story from another perspective. For example, tell the story of Rudolph from the point-of-view of one of the other reindeer. 

17. If you watched holiday cartoons growing up, which was your favorite holiday character? Who is your favorite now? 

18. Imagine that you had to create a new favorite holiday tradition, what would you do and why?

19. Make a list of your favorite holiday movies. (Bonus points if you watch one with someone you love this month!)

20. Write a short funny story about Santa Claus or someone who is mistaken for Santa. 

Story Starters for the Winter Season

Finally, we have a few story starters to inspire that creative side to finish the month. 

21. Write a short poem about winter. Start with an image from nature or use an acrostic poem method, with one word next to each letter of the word WINTER.

22. Many children have a winter break that begins in December. Write a story about the first day of winter break where something wildly out of the ordinary happens. 

23. Imagine you are a bear about to hibernate with your family. Write a list of rules for hibernating. 

24. Create a scene where your characters visit their favorite tree in December, but something is strangely different. 

25.  Imagine you've been gifted a pet reindeer. What do you do on your first day together? 

26. Legend has it that the first snowfall brings wishes with it. Write a story about a child's wish and what happens. 

27. A big winter race is delayed, stranding all the participants together in the lodge, until…

28. A grandmother keeps a festive journal in December, but one day, her granddaughter discovers its magic, and…

29. A small town hosts a winter celebration on the first day of winter, but this year, the tradition might be ruined…

30. A child finds a set of warm mittens at the park, and can't find their owner. When they put them on…

31. On her final walk of the year, a woman discovers the path has been changed, and… 

December Writing Prompts

December is an opportunity to finish the year strong, to celebrate the year past, and set a new course for the coming year. Try a prompt each day this month and see what you discover!

Now you try! Choose one of the prompts above and set your timer for 15 minutes . Write without stopping. When finished, share your practice in the Pro Practice Workshop , and leave feedback for a few other writers. 

Not a member? Join us ! Happy December writing! 

Sue Weems is a writer, teacher, and traveler with an advanced degree in (mostly fictional) revenge. When she’s not rationalizing her love for parentheses (and dramatic asides), she follows a sailor around the globe with their four children, two dogs, and an impossibly tall stack of books to read. You can read more of her writing tips on her website .

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Today in History - December 6

The washington monument.

On December 6 , 1884, workers placed the 3,300-pound marble capstone on the Washington Monument and topped it with a nine-inch pyramid of cast aluminum, completing construction of the 555-foot Egyptian obelisk. Nearly fifty years earlier, the Washington National Monument Society chose Robert Mills ‘ design to honor first American president and founding father George Washington . The privately funded organization laid the monument’s cornerstone on Independence Day, 1848, in Washington, D.C.

For twenty years, lack of funds and loss of support for the Washington National Monument Society left the obelisk incomplete at a height of about 156 feet. Finally, in 1876, President Ulysses Grant authorized the federal government to finish construction. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers took over the project two years later.

Day and night , spring through winter , the Washington Monument is a focal point of the National Mall and a center of celebrations including concerts and the annual Independence Day fireworks display. The observation deck affords spectacular panoramic views of the nation’s capital.

When construction was completed in 1884, the Washington Monument was the world’s tallest masonry structure. Today, the approximately 36,000-stacked blocks of granite and marble compose the world’s tallest freestanding masonry structure. In a city of monuments, locals refer to the obelisk as “The Monument.” By law—District of Columbia building code–it will remain the tallest structure in Washington, D.C., dominating the skyline and accenting Pierre-Charles L’Enfant’s plan for the city .

• There are many images of Washington, D.C. in the collections. Search across the pictorial collections on Washington Monument to locate such photographs.
• Search on Washington Monument in the Cornell Making of America External collection to retrieve documents pertaining to the monument’s design, completion, statistics, and its history .
• Read a selection of newspaper articles about the planning, construction, and dedication of the Washington Monument as found in the collection of historic newspapers, Chronicling America . Start with the online research guide, Washington Monument: Topics in Chronicling America .
• A Century of Lawmaking for a New Nation contains a wide variety of congressional information associated with the early history of Washington, D.C. Search on Washington Monument to find congressional materials related to the monument.
• There are 192 commemorative stones that line the interior walls of the Washington Monument. Read President Calvin Coolidge’s speech at the Dedication of the New Mexico Stone in the Washington Monument on December 2, 1927—one of many Coolidge addresses available in Prosperity and Thrift: The Coolidge Era and the Consumer Economy, 1921-1929 .
• Take a spin to the strains of the “Washington Monument Waltz,” published in Washington D.C. in 1885. Search the collection Music for the Nation: American Sheet Music, ca. 1870 to 1885 on Washington Monument .
• Read the feature Worthy of Washington from the American Treasures from the Library of Congress exhibition to view the Washington Monument as it stood incomplete for twenty-five years.
• To find additional resources related to the history of Washington, D.C., consult Washington, D.C.: Resource Guide .

Salmon P. Chase

On December 6 , 1864, Abraham Lincoln nominated Salmon P. Chase for chief justice of the U.S. Supreme Court; he was sworn in on December 15. A graduate of Dartmouth College, Chase studied law under Attorney General William Wirt .

He championed Sunday schools and temperance in the 1830s, and by the 1840s was an active member of the abolitionist movement . Chase defended fugitive slaves in Ohio and played a key role in creating the Free Soil Party, which opposed the expansion of slavery into the territories. With Free Soil support, Chase was elected to the Senate early in 1849.

Chase founded the Ohio Republican party and next served as the state’s first Republican governor from 1855 to 1859. In office, he vigorously opposed the Kansas-Nebraska Act and defended the rights of African Americans.

At the 1860 Republican convention, Chase permitted delegates pledged to support him to cast decisive votes for Abraham Lincoln . As a reward, in 1861–just two days after beginning his second term as senator, Chase left the Senate to serve as Lincoln’s secretary of the treasury.

Chase continued to support African Americans. He drafted the first two clauses of the Fourteenth Amendment . Signed into law in 1868, the amendment extended citizenship rights to all people born or naturalized in the United States.

In a letter to the Colored People’s Educational Monument Association, Chase asserted:

Our national experience has demonstrated that public order reposes most securely on the broad basis of universal suffrage. It has proved, also, that universal suffrage is the surest broad basis of universal guarantee and most powerful stimulus of individual, social, and political progress. May it not prove, moreover, in that work of re-organization which now engages the thoughts of all patriotic men, that universal suffrage is the best reconciler of the most comprehensive lenity with the most perfect public security and the most speedy and certain revival of general prosperity? Letter from Hon. Salmon P. Chase, Chief Justice of the United States. Wakefield, R.I., August 16, 1865. [To Williams Syphax and J.F. Cook, Committee]. In Celebration by the Colored People’s Educational Monument Association in Memory of Abraham Lincoln on the Fourth of July, 1865… . Washington, D.C.: McGill & Witherow, printers 1865. p. 9 African American Perspectives: Materials Selected from the Rare Book Collection . Rare Book and Special Collections Division

During his time as chief justice of the United States Supreme Court—where he served until his death–Chase presided over the Senate’s impeachment trial and acquittal of President Andrew Johnson . Chase suffered a stroke and died on May 7, 1873. He was honored with a formal state funeral. Originally buried in Oak Hill Cemetery in Washington, D.C., he was later reinterred in Spring Grove Cemetery in Ohio, the state that he served.

• Explore the Salmon P. Chase Papers to learn more about the life of this man who served in many significant positions from governor of Ohio to a justice on the Supreme Court of the United States. A Timeline highlights notable events.
• Read The Address and Reply on the Presentation of A Testimonial to S. P. Chase .” This 1845 document from African American Perspectives: Materials Selected from the Rare Book Collection records a ceremony honoring Chase for his defense of escaped slave Samuel Watson.
• View the feature on Chase in the January This Month in Business History .
• For a less-than-flattering review of Chase’s performance on the campaign trail read page 92 of H.P. Hall’s Observations: being more or less a history of political contests in Minnesota from 1849 to 1904 . A prominent Minnesota journalist, Harlan Page Hall’s memoir is available through the collection Pioneering the Upper Midwest: Books from Michigan, Minnesota, and Wisconsin, ca. 1820 to 1910 .
• Abraham Lincoln Papers at the Library of Congress includes approximately 20,000 online documents. Search on Salmon P. Chase to view correspondence regarding the statesman.
• Read a letter from Chase to Mrs. Abraham Lincoln on the occasion of Lincoln’s taking the oath of office during his second inauguration.
• Search the phrase Salmon P. Chase in Chronicling America: Historic American Newspapers to find newspaper articles throughout his career.

• All Days 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31
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• All Types Events Birthdays Deaths Weddings

Historical Events on December 6

• Film & TV
• 963 Leo VIII elected Pope
• 1060 Béla I of Hungary is crowned king of Hungary
• 1160 Jean Bodels "Jeu de St Nicholas" premieres in Arras
• 1196 Northern Dutch coast flooded, "Saint-Nicolas Flood"

Mongol Siege of Kyiv

1240 Mongols led by Batu Khan occupy and destroy Kyiv after an 8 day siege; out of 50,000 people in the city only 2,000 survive

Aquinas' Divine Revelation

1273 Thomas Aquinas , thought to have had a mystical experience in Naples, refuses to continue his work "I cannot, because all that I have written seems like straw to me"

Barcelona Right to Expel Jews

1424 Don Alfonso V of Aragon grants Barcelona the right to exclude Jews

Pope Clement VII Flees

1527 Pope Clement VII escapes imprisonment in the Castel Sant'Angelo in Rome, fleeing to Orvieto disguised as a peddler

• 1534 Quito, Ecuador, founded by Spanish colonists on the ruins of an Inca city
• 1631 1st predicted transit of Venus (Kepler) is observed
• 1641 Don Francisco de Mello appointed land guardian of South Netherlands
• 1648 Pride's Purge: Thomas Pride prevents 96 presbyterians from sitting in English parliament

Charles VI's Pragmatic Sanction

1723 Holy Roman Emperor Charles VI 's Pragmatic Sanction with the Diet of Hungary recognizes the King's daughters as successors

• 1732 1st play in American colonies acted by professional players in New York
• 1735 First recorded appendectomy performed by Claudius Amyand at St George's Hospital in London

Jacobite Army Retreats

1745 Bonnie Prince Charlie 's Jacobite army retreats to Scotland

• 1756 British troops under Robert Clive occupy Fulta, India
• 1787 Laurens Pieter van de Speigel is appointed Dutch pension advisor
• 1790 The U.S. Congress moves from New York City to Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
• 1822 Veterinary school in Utrecht opens

US National Observatory Proposed

1825 US President John Quincy Adams suggests establishment of a national observatory

Schumann's 4th Symphony

1841 Robert Schumann 's 4th Symphony in D minor premieres

• 1843 Amsterdam-Utrecht railway opens
• 1845 Alpha Sigma Phi Fraternity is founded at Yale College.

La Damnation de Faust

1846 Hector Berlioz 's dramatic oratorio "La Damnation de Faust" premieres, conducted by the composer at the Opéra-Comique, Paris

Harriet Tubman Escapes

1849 Harriet Tubman escapes from slavery in Maryland for the 2nd and final time

Lincoln Orders Santee Sioux Hanged

1862 US President Abraham Lincoln orders hanging of 39 Santee Sioux Indians

• 1864 Battle of Deveaux's Neck, South Carolina
• 1865 13th Amendment of the United States Constitution is ratified, abolishing slavery (except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted) [1]
• 1866 Chicago water supply tunnel 3,227 m into Lake Michigan completed
• 1869 Colored National Labor Union, 1st Black labor convention meets at Union League Hall in Washington, D.C.
• 1873 1st international football game in US: Yale 2, Eton (England) 1 in New Haven, Connecticut
• 1875 44th Congress (1875-77) convenes
• 1876 1st crematorium in US begins operation, Washington, Pennsylvania

Hayes, Tilden Election

1876 US Electoral College casts their votes in the disputed election between Rutherford B. Hayes and Samuel J. Tilden; two sets of conflicting results are returned to Congress the next day

Edison's Phonograph

1877 Thomas Edison enters the offices of Scientific American and turns the crank on his cylinder phonograph, astonishing those present with the recording, "Good morning. How do you do? How do you like the phonograph?" [1]

• 1877 Washington Post publishes 1st edition
• 1882 Atmosphere of Venus detected during transit
• 1884 Aluminum capstone set atop Washington Monument, Washington, D.C., making it the tallest human-built structure in the world (overtaking Cologne Cathedral)
• 1896 D T Suzuki found the awakening at Engakuji temple, in Kamakura
• 1897 London becomes the world's first city to host licenced taxicabs
• 1903 Sumatra Atjehs guerilla leader Panglima Polim surrenders

Monroe Doctrine Confirmed

1904 Theodore Roosevelt confirms Monroe Doctrine (Roosevelt Corollary)

• 1906 The British grant Transvaal self-government
• 1907 Coal mine explosions in Monongah, West Virginia kills 361
• 1912 China votes for universal human rights
• 1913 White Sox beat Giants 9-4 in exhibition game in Tokyo
• 1914 German troops over run Lodz
• 1916 World War I: The Central Powers under General Mackensen capture Bucharest
• 1917 French munition ship SS Mont Blanc collides with Norwegian SS Imo in Halifax harbour, Canada, resulting explosion kills at least 1,700 and injures more than 9,000 people - world’s largest pre-atomic explosion [1]
• 1917 Taking advantage of the temporary relaxation of authority in Russia, Finland declares itself a republic, following the Ukraine on 20 November

Anglo-Irish Treaty Signed

1921 Anglo-Irish Treaty signed; Ireland receives dominion status; partition creates Northern Ireland

Liberal Party Victory

1921 Canada's Liberal Party and its leader Mackenzie King defeats Arthur Meighen 's Conservative Party and Thomas Crerar' Progressive Party in general election, goes on to form a minority government

• 1922 1st constitution of Irish Free State comes into operation
• 1922 1st electric power line commercial carrier in US, Utica, NY

First US Presidential Radio Address

1923 1st US Presidential address broadcast on radio by President Calvin Coolidge

• 1925 Italy, Britain & Egypt sign Jaghbub accord (Italy)
• 1925 Record 73,000 pay to watch Chicago Bears beat NY Giants 19-7
• 1929 Turkey introduces female suffrage

Ulysses Ban Lifted

1933 Ban on James Joyce 's "Ulysses" in US lifted

• 1938 117 Spanish knights under capt Piet Laros return to Netherlands
• 1938 French-German friendship treaty drawn up ( Ribbentrop -Bonnet Pact)
• 1939 5th Heisman Trophy Award: Nile Kinnick, Iowa (HB)
• 1940 Gestapo arrest German resistance fighter/poster artist Helen Ernst

Pietro Badoglio Resigns

1940 Pietro Badoglio resigns as viceroy of Ethiopia

• 1941 Dutch & British pilots see Japanese invasion fleet at Singapore
• 1941 NYC Council agrees to build Idlewild (Kennedy) Airport in Queens

Dutch Commonwealth Begins

1942 Queen Wilhelmina announces Dutch Commonwealth

• 1942 RAF bombs Philips factory (150 die)
• 1944 US 95th Infantry division reaches Westwall

Everglades National Park

1947 The Everglades National Park in Florida is dedicated by President Harry S. Truman

Mirabile Illud

1950 Pope Pius XII publishes encyclical Mirabile illud

• 1952 Czech government tells Israeli ambassador that he is persona non grata
• 1953 Brown's Lou "Toe" Groza kicks 8 PATs, beating Giants 62-14

Beauvoir Receives Prix Goncourt

1954 Simone de Beauvoir receives the Prix Goncourt prize in French literature

• 1955 New York psychologist Joyce Brothers wins "$64,000 Question" with topic of boxing
• 1956 Against the background of the Soviet invasion of Hungary the nations square off at the Melbourne Olympics in a famous water polo match; game called off with Hungary leading 4-0 and near riot halted by police; Hungary goes on to win gold medal
• 1956 Australian swimmer David Theile sets world record 1:02.2 to win the 100m backstroke gold medal at the Melbourne Olympics

Australian Win Swim Relay

1956 Australian women's 4 × 100m freestyle relay team of Dawn Fraser , Faith Leech, Sandra Morgan & Lorraine Crapp swim world record 4:17.1 and beat powerful US team to win the gold medal at the Melbourne Olympics

• 1956 German WWII prisoner of war Helmut Bantz and Soviet gymnast Valentin Muratov tie for the vault gold medal with 18.85 points at the Melbourne Olympics

Mandela Arrested

1956 Nelson Mandela & 156 others arrested for political activities in South Africa

• 1956 Randhir Singh Gentle scores the winner as India beats Pakistan, 1-0 in the Melbourne Olympics field hockey final to win it's 6th consecutive gold medal in the sport
• 1956 Soviet gymnast Viktor Chukarin follows his parallel bars gold medal with the individual all-round title and teams gold at the Melbourne Olympics
• 1957 1st US attempt to launch a satellite fails-Vanguard rocket blows up
• 1957 AFL-CIO votes to expel Teamsters (readmitted in October 1987)
• 1957 Indonesia begins nationalizing Dutch possessions

Sessions' 3rd Symphony

1957 Roger Sessions ' 3rd Symphony premieres in Boston with Charles Munch conducting the Boston Symphony

• 1958 US lunar probe Pioneer 3 reaches 107,269 km, falls back
• 1960 MLB American League grants American entertainer and businessman Gene Autry a franchise: Los Angeles Angels

Davis 1st African American Winner

1961 27th Heisman Trophy Award: Ernie Davis , Syracuse RB; 1st African American to win)

• 1962 US abandons Skybolt ballistic missile program

Johnson's 31 Medal Recipients

1963 President Lyndon B. Johnson confers Presidential Medal of Freedom on 31 recipients selected by JFK , including: contralto Marian Anderson ; diplomat Ralph Bunche ; cellist Pablo Casals; Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter; labor leader George Meaney; architect Mies van der Rohe; pianist Rudolf Serkin; writers E. B. White and Thorton Wilder; and painter Andrew Wyeth; as well as posthumously to JFK himself, and Pope John XXIII

• 1963 Test Cricket debut of Graeme Pollock at the Gabba
• 1963 The Beatles begin a tradition of releasing a Christmas record for fan club members
• 1964 "Rudolph The Red-Nosed Reindeer" 1st airs on TV
• 1964 KTVR TV channel 13 in La Grande, OR (PBS) begins broadcasting

Antonio Segni Resigns

1964 President Antonio Segni of Italy resigns

• 1965 2 trucks crash into a crowd of dancers in Sotouboua Togo, kills 125
• 1965 Pakistan's Islamic Ideology Advisory Committee recommends that Islamic Studies be made a compulsory subject for Muslim students from primary to graduate level.
• 1967 USSR performs nuclear test at Sary Shagan USSR

Beggar's Banquet

1968 Decca Records releases Rolling Stones album "Beggar's Banquet" in UK, the last during Brian Jones ' lifetime (US release the next day)

• 1968 Major League Baseball dismisses Commissioner William Eckert after 3 years
• 1968 PBA National Bowling Championship won by Wayne Zahn (29)
• 1968 WKID (WSCV) TV channel 51 in Fort Lauderdale, Florida (IND) 1st broadcast

Rolling Stones at Altamont

1969 300,000 attend free concert featuring The Rolling Stones in Altamont, California; the event is marred by violence and four deaths

• 1969 USSR performs nuclear test
• 1970 Cleveland Cavaliers 1st NBA home victory, beating Buffalo Braves 108-106
• 1971 A woman dies trying to salvage property from the Salvation Army Citadel in Belfast after bomb which started a large fire in an adjoining building
• 1971 Lewis Franklin Powell confirmed as US Supreme Court justice
• 1973 Bahrain's constitution goes into effect

Gerald Ford VP

1973 Gerald Ford sworn-in as first unelected Vice President, succeeds Spiro Agnew who resigned over corruption allegations

• 1973 NL votes to move San Diego Padres to Washington, D.C. (doesn't happen)

Ding Dong, Ding Dong

1974 George Harrison releases single "Ding Dong, Ding Dong"

• 1975 41st Heisman Trophy Award: Archie Griffin, Ohio State (RB)
• 1975 Balcombe Street Siege: for 6 days, four Provisional Irish Republican Army volunteers hold two hostages at an apartment in London, England

Pieter Menten Arrested

1976 Dutch war criminal Pieter Menten arrested in Zurich, Switzerland

• 1977 South Africa grants Bophuthatswana independence
• 1978 Spain adopts constitution
• 1980 NASA launches Intelsat V satellite, no. 502
• 1981 Rob de Castella of Australia sets Marathon record at 2:08:18
• 1982 Droppin Well bombing: 11 British soldiers and 6 civilians are killed by an Irish National Liberation Army (INLA) time bomb at the Droppin’ Well Bar in Ballykelly, County Londonderry
• 1983 A bomb planted on a bus in Jerusalem explodes, kills 6 Israelis
• 1984 France performs nuclear test
• 1984 Hijackers aboard Kuwaiti jetliner kill 2nd hostage
• 1986 52nd Heisman Trophy Award: Vinny Testaverde, Miami Fla (QB)
• 1986 France performs nuclear test at Mururoa Atoll
• 1987 3 satanist Missouri teenagers bludgeon comrade to death for "fun"
• 1987 Christa Rothenburger skates female world record 500m (39.39 sec)
• 1988 Agnes Neil Williams purchases Baltimore Orioles for $70 million Eli Jacobs becomes CEO of Baltimore Orioles
• 1988 Carlos Andres Perez re-elected president of Venezuela
• 1988 Merv Hughes takes 13 wickets v WI at the WACA but Australia lose
• 1988 Milwaukee Bucks win their 1,000th NBA game (2nd fastest)
• 1988 Nelson Mandela is transferred to Victor Vester Prison, Capetown
• 1988 STS-27 Atlantis lands in California after secret mission

Arafat Meets US Jews

1988 Yasser Arafat meets prominent American Jews in Stockholm, Sweden

• 1989 Mafia drug kingpin bombs security force at Bogota, kills 52
• 1989 Worst Canadian mass murder: Marc Lepine kills 14 women at U Montreal
• 1990 NHL grants conditional membership to Tampa Bay Lightning

Hussein Releases Hostages

1990 Saddam Hussein announces release of all foreign hostages

• 1990 Shoeless Joe Jackson's signature sells, at aucton, for $23,100
• 1991 "Star Trek VI-Undiscovered Country" premieres
• 1992 300,000 hindus destroy mosque of Babri India, 4 die

Jerry Rice's Record Touchdown

1992 San Francisco 49ers wide receiver Jerry Rice catches NFL record 101st touchdown in a 27-3 win over Miami Dolphins at Candlestick Park

Bonds' $43M Pact

1992 San Francisco Giants sign record $43million USD pact with Pirates MLB outfielder Barry Bonds

• 1993 Gunda Niemann skates ladies world record 5 km 7:13.29
• 1994 Maltese Falcon auctioned for $398,590
• 1994 Orange County California files for bankruptcy
• 1994 Warner Brothers announces a 5th TV network to begin on Jan 11, 1995

Michael Jackson Collapses

1995 Michael Jackson collapses while rehearsing for an HBO special

• 1996 Mashonaland defeat England in first-class tour match

Hugo Chávez Elected

1998 Hugo Chávez is elected President of Venezuela

British Museum's Great Court

2000 Great Court of the British Museum redesigned with the largest covered courtyard in Europe by Foster & Partners opened by Queen Elizabeth II [1]

• 2001 The Canadian province of Newfoundland is renamed Newfoundland and Labrador

2002 "Adaptation" directed by Spike Jonze, starring Nicolas Cage and Meryl Streep premieres

• 2005 Several villagers are shot dead during protests in Dongzhou, China
• 2006 NASA reveals photographs taken by Mars Global Surveyor suggesting the presence of liquid water on Mars

Bettie Page Hospitalized

2008 American pin-up model Bettie Page (85) is hospitalized in critical condition after suffering a heart attack

A Steady Rain

2009 Final Broadway performance of "A Steady Rain", starring Hugh Jackman and Daniel Craig

Birds of America's Record Price

2010 Record price for a printed book when a first edition of "The Birds of America" by John James Audubon auctioned at Sotheby's, London, England, for £7,321,250

• 2012 7 people are killed and 770 injured during Egyptian protests
• 2012 A 243 million year old Nyasasaurus fossil is discovered in Tanzania
• 2012 Typhoon Bopha’s death toll rise to 418 with 318 missing and 179,000 displaced
• 2013 A 2-year old boy dies from Ebola in Meliandou, Guinea

New Post for Abuse Cases

2013 Pope Francis gives his ascent to a proposal to create a permanent post on the Pontifical Commission on cases of sin and sexual abuse of minors

• 2017 "Supermassive" most distant black hole discovery announced by astronomers in journal "Nature", 13 billion light-years away, 800 x bigger than the Sun

Andrej Babiš Sworn In

2017 Andrej Babiš is sworn as Prime Minister of the Czech Republic

• 2017 Brazilian drug lord Rogério da Silva arrested in Rio
• 2017 Britain's top Brexit negotiator David Davis admits there has been "no systematic impact assessment" on effects of Brexit
• 2017 Skirball wildfire near Los Angeles closes the Interstate 405 as thousands forced to evacuate
• 2017 Starbucks opens its largest cafe in the world in Shanghai, 30,000 square-feet, 1/2 size of a football field
• 2017 Time Magazine names their Person of the Year "The Silence Breakers", people who came forward to report sexual misconduct

Trump Recognizes Jerusalem

2017 US President Donald Trump officially recognizes Jerusalem as Israel's capital, announcing plans to move US embassy there

• 2018 Luxembourg is the first country to make all public transport free
• 2018 Oldest-known plague sample found in 4,900-year-old remains of 20-year old woman in Gökhem, southern Sweden published in "Cell"
• 2018 Senegal's new Museum of Black Civilisations is opened in Dakar by President Macky Sall

Henry's Record-breaking Game

2018 Tennessee Titans running back Derrick Henry explodes for franchise-record 238 yards & 4 touchdowns in 30-9 win v Jacksonville Jaguars in Nashville; 99-yard TD run ties Dallas Cowboys HOF RB Tony Dorsett's longest run in NFL history

• 2020 Japanese space capsule Hayabusa-2 lands safely back on earth in Australia, carrying first significant rock samples from an asteroid, the Ryugu
• 2020 US President Donald Trump orders about 700 troops withdrawn from Somalia

Aung San Suu Kyi Sentenced

2021 Former Myanmar leader Aung San Suu Kyi sentenced to four years (later reduced to two) for inciting public unrest and breaching Covid-19 protocols [1]

• 2021 New York Mayor Bill de Blasio announces a COVID-19 mandate for all private employers effective December 27, to combat Omicron, 1st in the country
• 2022 Argentine Vice-president Cristina Fernández de Kirchner found guilty of fraud, sentenced to six years in prison and banned from holding office [1]
• 2022 Donald Trump 's real estate company Trump Organization convicted of tax fraud in New York [1]
• 2022 Indonesia passes a new criminal code outlawing sex outside marriage, even for foreigners [1]

Avatar: The Way of Water

2022 James Cameron 's sci-fi film sequel "Avatar: The Way of Water" starring Sam Worthington and Zoe Saldaña premieres in London

• 2022 The 1,574th - and last - Boeing 747 jumbo jet rolls off of production line in Everett, Washington [1]
• 2023 South Fork Wind, the first large-scale offshore wind farm begins supplying electricity to the US, 35 miles off Montauk [1]

Music History

2023 Taylor Swift is named Time's Person of the Year [1]

• Historical Events Calendar

December in History

Mozart, the Incomparable Musical Genius

St Nicholas – The Man Behind Santa Claus

'Infamy' as Japanese Attack Pearl Harbor

Real-life Tragedy for Theatrical Family

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US charges Chinese dissident with allegedly spying for Beijing

US prosecutors have filed criminal charges against a Chinese dissident living in the US, accusing him of being an agent of Beijing's intelligence service.

Yuanjun Tang, 67, was arrested on Wednesday in the New York City, the US department of justice (DOJ) said in a statement.

He is alleged to have spied on US-based Chinese democracy activists and dissidents.

Mr Tang, now a naturalised US citizen, is also accused of making false statements to the FBI.

The BBC could not immediately identify a lawyer for Mr Tang.

In Wednesday's statement, the DOJ said Mr Tang "was charged by criminal complaint with acting and conspiring to act in the United States as an unregistered agent of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) and making materially false statements to the FBI".

It also alleged that between 2018 and 2023 he acted as China's agent on the orders of the country's ministry of state security (MSS) - China's principal civilian intelligence agency.

Mr Tang is accused of regularly receiving instructions via email, encrypted chats and other means of communications from the agency.

It is also alleged that he "regularly received instructions from and reported to an MSS intelligence officer regarding individuals and groups viewed by the PRC as potentially adverse to the PRC’s interests, including prominent US-based Chinese democracy activists and dissidents."

"He also travelled at least three times for face-to-face meetings with MSS intelligence officers and helped the MSS infiltrate a group chat on an encrypted messaging application used by numerous PRC dissidents and pro-democracy activists to communicate about pro-democracy issues and express criticism of the PRC government," the DOJ alleges.

He apparently agreed to work for China's intelligence agency in a bid to see his family living in mainland China, according to CBS, the BBC's US news partner, which cites US prosecutors.

According to court documents, Mr Tang was imprisoned in China for opposing the Chinese government.

He protested against the Chinese Communist Party during the 1989 Tiananmen Square demonstrations, CBS reports.

In about 2002, he managed to defect to Taiwan, and was later granted political asylum in the US, the DOJ said.

China’s spy threat is growing, but the West has struggled to keep up

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Biographies on This Day in History: December 6

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Christmas Essay for Class 6

Christmas is celebrated worldwide on 25th December every year. This was the day when Jesus Christ, known as the ‘Child of God’, was born. Although a Christian festival, people of all religion celebrate Christmas. Also known as the ‘Feast Day of Christ’, Christmas is a cultural holiday and is enjoyed by everyone.

We are providing two essay samples for students of class 6 on the topic ‘Christmas’ for reference.

Short Essay on Christmas of 100 Words

Christmas marks the birth anniversary of Jesus Christ on 25th December. The celebration of Christmas starts from a week ago. People decorate their houses and set up a Christmas tree with lights, candles, artificial stars, flowers, bells and toys. They give gifts to others and celebrate the festival with a lot of enthusiasm.

The festival is celebrated worldwide traditionally and religiously. People visit churches. They light up candles and sing Christmas carols in the honour of Jesus Christ. Kids get excited about the celebrations, and they eagerly wait for gifts from Santa Claus. Christmas is a time for family get-togethers.

Engage your kid into diverse thoughts and motivate them to improve their English with our  Essay for Class 6  and avail the Simple Essays suitable for them.

Long Essay on Christmas of 150 Words

Christmas is a religious and holy festival of the Christians, but people from all religions celebrate together. Jesus Christ was born on this day and Christmas is the celebration of his birth. It is a happy festival and people become joyous and cheerful. The shops and the streets are decorated with lights. Various fairs and carnivals are held at places.

Preparations for Christmas start before a week or two. On Christmas eve, people visit churches which are decorated with lights, candles and flowers. A miniature setup of Jesus’s birth is created at churches. People light candles, sing carols and pray to Jesus.

Christian people decorate their homes with lights, artificial stars, toys, etc. and set up a Christmas tree. They bake various cakes, pies, cookies and have dinner together. There is a practice of giving gifts on this occasion. Kids keep their socks below their pillows and are excited to open the gifts from Santa Claus in the morning.

10 Lines on Christmas in English

• Christmas is a Christian festival but is celebrated by all.
• It marks the birth anniversary of Jesus Christ on 25th December.
• It is a cultural holiday and people are in a festive mood.
• Different events, shows and carnival are organised at places.
• People cook various dishes and bake different types of cakes and biscuits.
• People decorate their houses and set up Christmas trees with lights, bells, artificial stars, etc.
• Churches are decorated, and carols are sung in the honour of Christ.
• People generally give gifts to each other and spend time with family.
• Kids get excited to receive gifts from Santa Claus.
• Many churches organise performances to make the day more eventful and fun.

Frequently Asked Questions on Christmas Essay

Question: Why is Christmas celebrated?

Answer:  Christmas is a holy and religious festival which is celebrated on the occasion of the birth of Jesus Christ. Christian families come together and celebrate the festival joyously.

Question: Who started the celebration of Christmas?

Answer:  Many believe that in 336 A.D., a Roman emperor called Constantine started celebrating Christmas with the Roman people.

Question: How do Christian people celebrate Christmas?

Answer:  Christians decorate their houses with colourful lights and candles. They cook delicacies and have family dinners. Various cakes, chocolates and biscuits are made. They even set up a Christmas tree decorated with colourful flowers, stars on top, bells, toys and lights. They visit churches, sing carols, especially in midnight and pray to Jesus. They give gifts to friends and families.

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Christmas Essay in English for Students

Table of Contents

Christmas Essay in English: Christmas is celebrated on 25 th December every year by the world Christian community. The day holds much significance for Christians as they believe that Jesus Christ was born on the same day at Bethlehem. It is observed as a public holiday in several Christian majority countries. Also, in some countries where Christians are in minority, it is still observed as a holiday.

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Short and Long Essay on Christmas for Children in English

We have provided below short and long essay on Christmas for children in English for your information and knowledge. The essays have been written in simple yet effective English language to make them easily memorable and presentable on need.

After going through these Christmas essays you will know when and why is Christmas celebrated; was Jesus actually born on Christmas; how is Christmas celebrated in India; what is the meaning of merry Christmas; what celebrations are included on Christmas Eve; what is the meaning of Christmas etc.

Following Christmas essay will be extremely useful for Christmas celebrations in your school or college.

Christmas Essay in 100 Words

Christians around the world celebrate Christmas on 25 th December. It is observed to celebrate the birth of Jesus Christ, whom the Christians believe to be the son of God. The festival calls for a grand celebration and is one of the major festivals.

The preparations begin much in advance with the people shopping enthusiastically for gifts and other articles. Children are happiest around the festival as they get lots of gifts and cakes. Families sing, dance and eat together with family and friends on Christmas.

Essay on Christmas 150 Words

Every year on 25 th December, Christmas is celebrated by the world Christian community to commemorate the birth of Jesus Christ. It is the most important festival of the Christians and also the most awaited one.

The popularity of the festival could well be ascertained from the fact that every year in the month of December, gifts and other items worth billions are sold across the world, mostly in western countries.

Christmas is a time to remember Jesus and take out some time for his worship. It is a time to introspect on his teachings and what he tried to teach humanity. Therefore, Christmas is celebrated with a spirit of togetherness and compassion for the poor and needy. People give money and food to the needy, supporting them in whatever way they can.

Christmas Essay 200 Words

Christmas is a major festival celebrated by the Christian community on 25 th December every year. It is celebrated to commemorate the date of birth of Jesus Christ, the son of God. Christmas is observed as a public holiday in many countries and as an optional holiday in some.

In America, Christmas is celebrated as a long holiday in schools, colleges, and even offices. Christmas preparations begin with the purchasing of a pine tree known as the Christmas tree. Families spend hours shopping for a Christmas tree that suits their requirements and house.

This Christmas tree is decorated with lights, lamps and other small articles. Gifts for the children and family are also hanged from its branches as surprises.

Another most important attraction of Christmas is a bonfire and the midnight feats. On the festival day, the family arranges for a large bonfire in the open, where they celebrate with family and friends. They feast, dance and sing Christmas carols around the fire.

The most important aspect of Christmas is giving and sharing. People take time and money to distribute gifts and food to the poor and needy. The festival calls for making an effort to celebrate together, leaving no one behind.

Christmas Essay 250 Words

Christmas is celebrated on 25 th December by the world Christian community. It commemorates the birth of Jesus Christ and is thus celebrated with religious fervor.

Christmas is being celebrated for thousands of years and has mostly evolved from an old pagan festival celebrating the winter solstice. People celebrated the arrival of long sunny days and the exit of winter. The arrival of hotter days meant that people could now go out to earn money and do a lot of things.

The most important rituals of Christmas involve decorating the house, distributing gifts and feasting with the family and friends. People start preparing for the festival months in advance. Children love to shop for the Christmas tree, which is the most important thing around Christmas.

Elders hide several gifts for the children in stocking in the Christmas tree. Children wait for the day when the gifts will be revealed to them and they will happily celebrate with the family.

Many workers in shopping malls and market places are dressed as Santa Clause for the entertainment of the customers and the children accompanying them. Special events are organized in the schools/colleges and offices before they close for the holiday.

It is also the time of the year when people meet their relatives and friends and make sure that they eat Christmas feast together.

Essay on Christmas for Children 300 Words

Christmas is a festival celebrated throughout the world by the Christian community on December 25 th . Not only the Christian community but lately also the non-Christian communities are starting to celebrate it in some way or the other. The festival commemorates the birth of Jesus Christ.

Was Jesus Really Born on Christmas?

There is no historical reference to the date of birth of Jesus being 25 th December; neither in the Gospels nor any other religious text. However, theologians believe that he was born sometime between 6 BC and 4 BC. The early Christian Churches weren’t celebrating the birth of Jesus.

It was only around 440 A.D. that the church officially declared December 25 th as the birthday of Jesus Christ. This proclamation was however based on an old pagan festival, rather than any documented proof of Jesus’ birth.

In the bible itself, it is indicated that December 25 th is unlikely to be the birth date of Jesus Christ as December in Palestine is a very cold month and the shepherds around this month are not out on the fields but inside the house.

Christmas in India

Christmas is observed as a public holiday in India. Many schools, colleges, and offices are closed on Christmas. Indian Christians begin the day by visiting church in the morning. Churches are especially decorated and special sermons are read.

People decorate their houses, greet each other and dine together with family and friends. Gifts are also given to children and other family members.

Christmas is nonetheless a festival of joy and calls for a grand celebration. Another most significant aspect of Christmas is that it is a secular festival that is it promotes giving, sharing and caring across any demographic division.

Christmas Essay for Children 350 Words

Every year on 25 th December, Christmas is celebrated by the Christian community. The festival is celebrated on the day when Jesus Christ was born. The tradition and custom of Christmas are billions of years old and are celebrated with great festive fervor.

Christmas as a Holiday

Christmas is observed as a public holiday in several countries throughout the world. Gradually the celebration has become more popular by every passing year and today also the non-Christian communities throughout the world are eagerly celebrating Christmas together with the Christian community.

Countries, where Christmas isn’t celebrated as a public holiday, include Libya, Maldives, Kuwait, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, Somalia, The United Arab Emirates and Pakistan among others.

Tradition and Gifts

Traditions of Christmas dates back to thousands of years and have their roots in a mid-winter festival observed to celebrate the arrival of long sunny days. Thereby it signifies the going of long, harsh winter and the arrival of more productive hot days. Therefore, Christmas is celebrated as a festival of joy throughout the world.

There is a tradition of decorating the houses with the Christmas tree, lights, and other decorative articles. Christmas trees are also decorated with lights and stuffed with small gifts for the children and family.

Elders of the family place gifts in the Christmas tree as a surprise for the children. Children eagerly wait for the night of the Christmas when they are allowed to open their gifts. Family and friends also visit each other and often dine together during the Christmas month.

Christmas – A Pagan Holiday

The traditions of Christmas have often been speculated to being pagan or non-Christian. The tradition of giving gifts and stuffing stockings with them reflects an ancient tradition that has been in existence, even thousands of years before Christianity.

In the past couple of centuries the modern Christmas the festival has evolved as the mix of original celebrations around the birth of Jesus and old pagan midwinter celebrations.

Christmas is one of Christianity’s most significant holiday and most celebrated in this World. It is the festival of sharing, decorating, and happiness. It is also the day when the divide between the poor and rich is diminished and a smile is brought to the face of everyone.

Christmas Essay 7 400 Words

The festival of Christmas is celebrated on December 25 th by the Christian community throughout the world. The festival has been largely accepted by the non-Christian community also and is celebrated together as a secular event.

What is Special about Christmas?

The most special thing about Christmas is that it celebrates the birth of Jesus Christ, the son of God. The date 25 th December had been a very special date for the world Christian community for billions of years.

The day stirs up many emotions of joy, caring and giving among billions across the globe. It is also a time to worship, visit the church and to introspect into your soul. Community feasting is also held for the poor and needy.

Christmas becomes more special when it brings a smile to the faces of millions of faces including the rich and the poor. Those who find it hard to buy a gift or celebrate due to financial constraints are overwhelmed by the affluent and helped by giving gifts and sharing food.

Meaning of “Merry Christmas”

The term Merry Christmas is popularly used during Christmas celebrations throughout the world. Though the festival of Christmas is billions of years old, the term “Merry” was only recently added to it in the 19 th century.

The term “Merry Christmas” originated in England, and was introduced by the authors like Charles Dickens and Washington Irving, who used the term in several of their writings.

The term Merry Christmas signifies the tradition of being merry and make merry. In other words, it is a festival of joy, staying joyful and making others happy.

How Christians Celebrate Christmas Festival?

Christian community celebrates Christmas with exception religious fervor, fun, and joy. The preparations for the holiday begin weeks before Christmas, sometimes even months. People start making arrangements well in advance, for the festive events.

Families go out to purchase, a Christmas tree, which is an important attraction during Christmas. Gifts are brought for the children, family, and friends and also for the poor. Children are the most excited and happy around Christmas, for they get many surprises and gifts.

On the night of Christmas, an open feast is organized, in which the family and friends feed around a bonfire. The food is also distributed among the poor and underprivileged.

Christmas is a special festival in more than one way. It is the day when Jesus Christ was born, however, it is also the day when the divide between the poor and rich is diminished and a smile is brought to the face of everyone. The festival teaches to tend to the needy and be considerate towards humanity as a whole.

Essay on Christmas for Children 500 Words

Christmas is a major festival celebrated by the worldwide Christian community on 25 th December, commemorating the birth of Jesus Christ. It involves weeks-long festive preparations, exchanging gifts, community get together and feasting. It is also a public holiday in many of the world’s countries.

Meaning of Christmas

Christmas celebrates the birth of Jesus Christ, whom the Christians consider as the son of God. The name Christmas has been derived from Christ’s Mass or the Mass of the Christ. The term Mass is used to indicate an act of worship that culminates in celebration.

Traditionally “Masses” include reading sermons and offering bread and wine to the poor and other members of the community. Therefore, the true meaning of Christmas is to give and take care of the needs of those who can’t look for themselves.

Brief and Real History of Christmas

Even before the birth of Jesus Christ, the middle of the winter season had long been a time of celebration throughout the world. Civilizations had been celebrating the winter solstice for long as the arrival of sunny days and the exit of long harsh winter.

However, in Rome, where the winter was not so cold after all, a festival named Saturnalia, to honor Saturn, the God of Agriculture was observed. Beginning on the winter solstice, the festival continued for a complete month. The festival was celebrated grandly and schools and colleges were closed for a complete month for everyone to thoroughly enjoy the festival.

Christmas Eve

The term Christmas Eve is used for the evening or the day before Christmas Day. Christmas Eve is also observed as a holiday in many parts of the world. Both Christmas Eve and Christmas Day together constitute a significant part of the Christmas holidays.

The celebration of Christmas in western Christianity begins the day before Christmas that is on 24 th December. This has possibly its roots in the ancient Jewish celebrations and also in the story of creation in the Book of Genesis which states that “And there was evening and there was morning- the first day”.

Christmas Celebration

Christmas Day is celebrated as a public holiday in many countries around the world, even in the countries where the Christian community is in minority. Many countries with a low population of Christians also celebrate the day as a secular event. Gift and other articles are distributed among the poor and also a feast is organized. Anyone from any background is invited in the feast which is especially meant for the poor.

Christmas tree is another most significant part of the celebrations. In western countries, there couldn’t be a Christmas celebration without the Christmas tree. People spend hours choosing the best Christmas tree for their house and requirements. The tree is brought home and decorated with lights, gifts, and other articles.

Though Christmas celebrates the birth of the son of God Jesus Christ, the main spirit of the festival lies in giving and sharing. It is a festival when the poor are fed, gifts are exchanged and no one is left hungry without a smile on his/her face.

More on Christmas:

• Christmas Speech
• Slogans on Christmas
• Christmas Rhymes

Visit IL website for more study resource.

FAQs on Christmas Essay

What is christmas.

Christmas is a holiday that celebrates the birth of Jesus Christ.

What day is Christmas?

Christmas is a Christian holiday commemorating the birth of Jesus Christ. It is celebrated on December 25th by Christians around the world.

When is Christmas?

Christmas is observed on December 25th in many countries around the world.

What is the meaning of Christmas?

What is meaning of merry christmas.

The term Merry Christmas is popularly used during Christmas celebrations throughout the world. It signifies the tradition of being merry and make merry. In other words, it is a festival of joy, staying joyful and making others happy.

Who is Jesus Christ?

Jesus Christ was a Jewish teacher and religious leader who was born in the first century AD. He is the central figure of Christianity, and Christians believe that he is the Son of God and the savior of humanity.

Who is Santa Claus?

The legend of Santa Claus is said to live at the North Pole, and he is often depicted as a jolly old man with a white beard and red suit. He is said to travel around the world on a sleigh pulled by a team of reindeer, and he delivers presents to children who have been good throughout the year.

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Announcing the NeurIPS 2023 Paper Awards 

Communications Chairs 2023 2023 Conference awards , neurips2023

By Amir Globerson, Kate Saenko, Moritz Hardt, Sergey Levine and Comms Chair, Sahra Ghalebikesabi 

We are honored to announce the award-winning papers for NeurIPS 2023! This year’s prestigious awards consist of the Test of Time Award plus two Outstanding Paper Awards in each of these three categories: 

• Two Outstanding Main Track Papers 
• Two Outstanding Main Track Runner-Ups 
• Two Outstanding Datasets and Benchmark Track Papers  

This year’s organizers received a record number of paper submissions. Of the 13,300 submitted papers that were reviewed by 968 Area Chairs, 98 senior area chairs, and 396 Ethics reviewers 3,540  were accepted after 502 papers were flagged for ethics reviews . 

We thank the awards committee for the main track: Yoav Artzi, Chelsea Finn, Ludwig Schmidt, Ricardo Silva, Isabel Valera, and Mengdi Wang. For the Datasets and Benchmarks track, we thank Sergio Escalera, Isabelle Guyon, Neil Lawrence, Dina Machuve, Olga Russakovsky, Hugo Jair Escalante, Deepti Ghadiyaram, and Serena Yeung. Conflicts of interest were taken into account in the decision process.

Congratulations to all the authors! See Posters Sessions Tue-Thur in Great Hall & B1-B2 (level 1).

Outstanding Main Track Papers

Privacy Auditing with One (1) Training Run Authors: Thomas Steinke · Milad Nasr · Matthew Jagielski

Poster session 2: Tue 12 Dec 5:15 p.m. — 7:15 p.m. CST, #1523

Oral: Tue 12 Dec 3:40 p.m. — 4:40 p.m. CST, Room R06-R09 (level 2)

Abstract: We propose a scheme for auditing differentially private machine learning systems with a single training run. This exploits the parallelism of being able to add or remove multiple training examples independently. We analyze this using the connection between differential privacy and statistical generalization, which avoids the cost of group privacy. Our auditing scheme requires minimal assumptions about the algorithm and can be applied in the black-box or white-box setting. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our framework by applying it to DP-SGD, where we can achieve meaningful empirical privacy lower bounds by training only one model. In contrast, standard methods would require training hundreds of models.

Are Emergent Abilities of Large Language Models a Mirage? Authors: Rylan Schaeffer · Brando Miranda · Sanmi Koyejo

Poster session 6: Thu 14 Dec 5:00 p.m. — 7:00 p.m. CST, #1108

Oral: Thu 14 Dec 3:20 p.m. — 3:35 p.m. CST, Hall C2 (level 1) 

Abstract: Recent work claims that large language models display emergent abilities, abilities not present in smaller-scale models that are present in larger-scale models. What makes emergent abilities intriguing is two-fold: their sharpness, transitioning seemingly instantaneously from not present to present, and their unpredictability , appearing at seemingly unforeseeable model scales. Here, we present an alternative explanation for emergent abilities: that for a particular task and model family, when analyzing fixed model outputs, emergent abilities appear due to the researcher’s choice of metric rather than due to fundamental changes in model behavior with scale. Specifically, nonlinear or discontinuous metrics produce apparent emergent abilities, whereas linear or continuous metrics produce smooth, continuous, predictable changes in model performance. We present our alternative explanation in a simple mathematical model, then test it in three complementary ways: we (1) make, test and confirm three predictions on the effect of metric choice using the InstructGPT/GPT-3 family on tasks with claimed emergent abilities, (2) make, test and confirm two predictions about metric choices in a meta-analysis of emergent abilities on BIG-Bench; and (3) show how to choose metrics to produce never-before-seen seemingly emergent abilities in multiple vision tasks across diverse deep networks. Via all three analyses, we provide evidence that alleged emergent abilities evaporate with different metrics or with better statistics, and may not be a fundamental property of scaling AI models.

Outstanding Main Track Runner-Ups

Scaling Data-Constrained Language Models Authors : Niklas Muennighoff · Alexander Rush · Boaz Barak · Teven Le Scao · Nouamane Tazi · Aleksandra Piktus · Sampo Pyysalo · Thomas Wolf · Colin Raffel

Poster session 2: Tue 12 Dec 5:15 p.m. — 7:15 p.m. CST, #813

Oral: Tue 12 Dec 3:40 p.m. — 4:40 p.m. CST, Hall C2 (level 1)  

Abstract : The current trend of scaling language models involves increasing both parameter count and training dataset size. Extrapolating this trend suggests that training dataset size may soon be limited by the amount of text data available on the internet. Motivated by this limit, we investigate scaling language models in data-constrained regimes. Specifically, we run a large set of experiments varying the extent of data repetition and compute budget, ranging up to 900 billion training tokens and 9 billion parameter models. We find that with constrained data for a fixed compute budget, training with up to 4 epochs of repeated data yields negligible changes to loss compared to having unique data. However, with more repetition, the value of adding compute eventually decays to zero. We propose and empirically validate a scaling law for compute optimality that accounts for the decreasing value of repeated tokens and excess parameters. Finally, we experiment with approaches mitigating data scarcity, including augmenting the training dataset with code data or removing commonly used filters. Models and datasets from our 400 training runs are freely available at https://github.com/huggingface/datablations .

Direct Preference Optimization: Your Language Model is Secretly a Reward Model Authors: Rafael Rafailov · Archit Sharma · Eric Mitchell · Christopher D Manning · Stefano Ermon · Chelsea Finn

Poster session 6: Thu 14 Dec 5:00 p.m. — 7:00 p.m. CST, #625

Oral: Thu 14 Dec 3:50 p.m. — 4:05 p.m. CST, Ballroom A-C (level 2)  

Abstract: While large-scale unsupervised language models (LMs) learn broad world knowledge and some reasoning skills, achieving precise control of their behavior is difficult due to the completely unsupervised nature of their training. Existing methods for gaining such steerability collect human labels of the relative quality of model generations and fine-tune the unsupervised LM to align with these preferences, often with reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF). However, RLHF is a complex and often unstable procedure, first fitting a reward model that reflects the human preferences, and then fine-tuning the large unsupervised LM using reinforcement learning to maximize this estimated reward without drifting too far from the original model. In this paper, we leverage a mapping between reward functions and optimal policies to show that this constrained reward maximization problem can be optimized exactly with a single stage of policy training, essentially solving a classification problem on the human preference data. The resulting algorithm, which we call Direct Preference Optimization (DPO), is stable, performant, and computationally lightweight, eliminating the need for fitting a reward model, sampling from the LM during fine-tuning, or performing significant hyperparameter tuning. Our experiments show that DPO can fine-tune LMs to align with human preferences as well as or better than existing methods. Notably, fine-tuning with DPO exceeds RLHF’s ability to control sentiment of generations and improves response quality in summarization and single-turn dialogue while being substantially simpler to implement and train.

Outstanding Datasets and Benchmarks Papers

In the dataset category : 

ClimSim: A large multi-scale dataset for hybrid physics-ML climate emulation

Authors:  Sungduk Yu · Walter Hannah · Liran Peng · Jerry Lin · Mohamed Aziz Bhouri · Ritwik Gupta · Björn Lütjens · Justus C. Will · Gunnar Behrens · Julius Busecke · Nora Loose · Charles Stern · Tom Beucler · Bryce Harrop · Benjamin Hillman · Andrea Jenney · Savannah L. Ferretti · Nana Liu · Animashree Anandkumar · Noah Brenowitz · Veronika Eyring · Nicholas Geneva · Pierre Gentine · Stephan Mandt · Jaideep Pathak · Akshay Subramaniam · Carl Vondrick · Rose Yu · Laure Zanna · Tian Zheng · Ryan Abernathey · Fiaz Ahmed · David Bader · Pierre Baldi · Elizabeth Barnes · Christopher Bretherton · Peter Caldwell · Wayne Chuang · Yilun Han · YU HUANG · Fernando Iglesias-Suarez · Sanket Jantre · Karthik Kashinath · Marat Khairoutdinov · Thorsten Kurth · Nicholas Lutsko · Po-Lun Ma · Griffin Mooers · J. David Neelin · David Randall · Sara Shamekh · Mark Taylor · Nathan Urban · Janni Yuval · Guang Zhang · Mike Pritchard

Poster session 4: Wed 13 Dec 5:00 p.m. — 7:00 p.m. CST, #105 

Oral: Wed 13 Dec 3:45 p.m. — 4:00 p.m. CST, Ballroom A-C (level 2)

Abstract: Modern climate projections lack adequate spatial and temporal resolution due to computational constraints. A consequence is inaccurate and imprecise predictions of critical processes such as storms. Hybrid methods that combine physics with machine learning (ML) have introduced a new generation of higher fidelity climate simulators that can sidestep Moore’s Law by outsourcing compute-hungry, short, high-resolution simulations to ML emulators. However, this hybrid ML-physics simulation approach requires domain-specific treatment and has been inaccessible to ML experts because of lack of training data and relevant, easy-to-use workflows. We present ClimSim, the largest-ever dataset designed for hybrid ML-physics research. It comprises multi-scale climate simulations, developed by a consortium of climate scientists and ML researchers. It consists of 5.7 billion pairs of multivariate input and output vectors that isolate the influence of locally-nested, high-resolution, high-fidelity physics on a host climate simulator’s macro-scale physical state. The dataset is global in coverage, spans multiple years at high sampling frequency, and is designed such that resulting emulators are compatible with downstream coupling into operational climate simulators. We implement a range of deterministic and stochastic regression baselines to highlight the ML challenges and their scoring. The data (https://huggingface.co/datasets/LEAP/ClimSim_high-res) and code (https://leap-stc.github.io/ClimSim) are released openly to support the development of hybrid ML-physics and high-fidelity climate simulations for the benefit of science and society.   

In the benchmark category :

DecodingTrust: A Comprehensive Assessment of Trustworthiness in GPT Models

Authors: Boxin Wang · Weixin Chen · Hengzhi Pei · Chulin Xie · Mintong Kang · Chenhui Zhang · Chejian Xu · Zidi Xiong · Ritik Dutta · Rylan Schaeffer · Sang Truong · Simran Arora · Mantas Mazeika · Dan Hendrycks · Zinan Lin · Yu Cheng · Sanmi Koyejo · Dawn Song · Bo Li

Poster session 1: Tue 12 Dec 10:45 a.m. — 12:45 p.m. CST, #1618  

Oral: Tue 12 Dec 10:30 a.m. — 10:45 a.m. CST, Ballroom A-C (Level 2)

Abstract: Generative Pre-trained Transformer (GPT) models have exhibited exciting progress in capabilities, capturing the interest of practitioners and the public alike. Yet, while the literature on the trustworthiness of GPT models remains limited, practitioners have proposed employing capable GPT models for sensitive applications to healthcare and finance – where mistakes can be costly. To this end, this work proposes a comprehensive trustworthiness evaluation for large language models with a focus on GPT-4 and GPT-3.5, considering diverse perspectives – including toxicity, stereotype bias, adversarial robustness, out-of-distribution robustness, robustness on adversarial demonstrations, privacy, machine ethics, and fairness. Based on our evaluations, we discover previously unpublished vulnerabilities to trustworthiness threats. For instance, we find that GPT models can be easily misled to generate toxic and biased outputs and leak private information in both training data and conversation history. We also find that although GPT-4 is usually more trustworthy than GPT-3.5 on standard benchmarks, GPT-4 is more vulnerable given jailbreaking system or user prompts, potentially due to the reason that GPT-4 follows the (misleading) instructions more precisely. Our work illustrates a comprehensive trustworthiness evaluation of GPT models and sheds light on the trustworthiness gaps. Our benchmark is publicly available at https://decodingtrust.github.io/.

Test of Time

This year, following the usual practice, we chose a NeurIPS paper from 10 years ago to receive the Test of Time Award, and “ Distributed Representations of Words and Phrases and their Compositionality ” by Tomas Mikolov, Ilya Sutskever, Kai Chen, Greg Corrado, and Jeffrey Dean, won. 

Published at NeurIPS 2013 and cited over 40,000 times, the work introduced the seminal word embedding technique word2vec. Demonstrating the power of learning from large amounts of unstructured text, the work catalyzed progress that marked the beginning of a new era in natural language processing.

Greg Corrado and Jeffrey Dean will be giving a talk about this work and related research on Tuesday, 12 Dec at 3:05 – 3:25 pm CST in Hall F.  

Related Posts

2023 Conference

Announcing NeurIPS 2023 Invited Talks

Reflections on the neurips 2023 ethics review process, neurips newsletter – november 2023.

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Essay on Winter Vacation ✍️: Samples in 150, 250 Words

• Updated on  
• Jan 16, 2024

24th December marks the beginning of winter vacation for school students, which is a time of joy and celebration with friends and families. Winter vacation usually lasts for 2 to 3 weeks for elementary students, where they actively participate and vibe in Christmas and New Year shopping and celebrations. Students are excited about their Christmas presents, hoping Santa will gift them their favourite toys, such as racing cars, barbie dolls, gaming consoles, etc.

However, once the winter vacations are over and schools resume, you will have to write an essay on winter vacation as part of your academics, where you are required to share your experiences, how you spent your time, ways of celebration, what was there on your shopping lists or where did you go for a trip, etc. Today, we are delighted to present some sample essays on winter vacation which will provide students with different ideas.

Master the art of essay writing with our blog on How to Write an Essay in English .

Also Read: Essay on Peer Pressure: 100, 200 and 450 Word Samples in English

Essay on Winter Vacation in 150 Words

‘My winter vacation started right after Christmas, which was a two-week long vacation. Winter Vacation is my favourite time of the year, as we go New Year shopping, plan a trip to a hill station, and enjoy feasts like homemade cakes, cookies, pastries sweets, etc. On this winter vacation, I went to the city market to buy winter clothes with my parents. My father bought a denim jeans and a dungarees jacket for me, as were planning a trip to Mussoorie, the famous hill station.

Before me and my family left for our winter vacation trip, I completed all my winter homework and school assignments, so that I don’t have to worry about them after returning from our vacation. I took my brother’s help with mathematics homework and completed the remaining homework myself.

After that, we went on a 4-day family trip to Mussoorie, where we had quality time and played a lot. We were lucky enough to witness snowfall and my brother made a large snowman and snowballs and played for hours. Later, we went back to the hotel, where we had our tasty lunch and a bonfire. This was my this year’s winter vacation, which was full of excitement and surprises.’

Also Read: 10 Lines on Christmas Day for Students

Also Read: Essay on Winter Season

Also Read: Idioms for Winter

Essay on Winter Vacation in 300 Words

‘Winter and summer vacations are my favourite time of the year, as we are free from academic pressure and don’t have to worry about school for the next couple of weeks. This year, my winter vacation started with an exciting activity, as I attended a wedding with my family in a different city. It was a short un-planned family trip where we had a lot of fun. Me and sister were excited to dine out at a highway restaurant, which was one of the memorable moments of my winter vacation. On our way to the wedding, I and my sister requested our father to stop at a highway restaurant, as were hungry.

Me and my sister ate a pizza and ice cream. After finishing our food, we were back on our way to the wedding. We greeted all our relatives and some of them gave us gifts. After returning from the wedding, I and my sister wanted to work on extracurricular activities, so our father enrolled us in dance classes. For the next 10 days, we were continuously working on our dancing skills, which was physically exhausting but interesting. As soon as we hit the dance floor, all we could do was wave our hands in the air and vibe with the music.

Another fun activity I did during this winter vacation was helping my mother with household chores. Our family has a custom of making Gajar ka Halwa every winter. I wanted to learn from my mother how it is prepared and the ingredients she uses to make it. Gajar ka halwa is one of my favourite sweets. Eating Gajar ka Halwa on a chilled January morning is one of my loving memories. I wish I could enjoy I little more of those family moments, where there is no school pressure, just fun and love. Now, I will plan for next year’s winter vacations, where me and my family can have a great time together.’

Also Read: Objectives of Education Technology

Also Read: 10 Ways to Make Your Summer Break Productive

Related Articles

Winter vacation is a relaxing holiday that happens from mid-December to January. Christmas and New Year are celebrated during the winter vacation. School students and children wait for these vacations for a year as they will get to enjoy 15-day holidays at home with their friends and family.

Winter vacations are the most awaited time of the year. Here is how I celebrated my Winter vacation: I decorated my house with fairy lights; My mother taught me to bake gingerbread for the gingerbread house; I and my father bought a Christmas tree; I along with my family and neighbours decorated a Christmas tree in my drawing room; We also wore Santa caps and enjoyed the winters wishing each other a Merry Christmas; My parents gave me a gift for Christmas. They had hidden the gift under my pillow to surprise me in the morning; I played badminton with my friends; My mother also taught me how to knit a sweater during this winter vacation; We burst crackers on 31 December at 12 in the night to celebrate the New Year; My New Year resolution is to stay self-motivated and work hard to do good in academics.

Winter vacation is the most happening time of the year associated with festivities. Everyone meets each other during Christmas and New Year and enjoys warm beverages to cope with the extreme cold weather. Some families also plan a short weekend at the hill station in winter vacation. Watching movies, sitting at home, enjoying sweets and cakes, and resting is the most appropriate things to do in winter vacation.

Now that you have read all the samples in essay on winter vacation listed above, you might have understood how you have to share your ideas on this topic. For more information on such interesting topics, visit our essay writing page and follow Leverage Edu .

Kajal Thareja

Hi, I am Kajal, a pharmacy graduate, currently pursuing management and is an experienced content writer. I have 2-years of writing experience in Ed-tech (digital marketing) company. I am passionate towards writing blogs and am on the path of discovering true potential professionally in the field of content marketing. I am engaged in writing creative content for students which is simple yet creative and engaging and leaves an impact on the reader's mind.

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Ghana Presidential Hopeful Targets 6% Growth for Debt-Hit Nation

• Innovative plan to save $1.9 billion in annual expenditure
• West African nation will hold presidential election on Dec. 7

Mahamudu Bawumia, on Aug. 18.

Ghana’s Vice President Mahamudu Bawumia , the underdog for the top job in December’s elections, outlined ambitious plans to lift economic growth to an average of 6% and reduce the debt-hit nation’s spending.

Unveiling his party’s manifesto Sunday in Takoradi, northwest of the capital, Accra, the 60-year-old highlighted infrastructure projects and a more efficient procurement process to save 30 billion cedis ($1.9 billion) a year. The plans are geared toward helping sustain the West African nation’s post-debt restructuring recovery.

How to Write Dates Correctly in English

If writing dates has you stymied at times, it is probably for one of two reasons. The first is that date formats vary the world over, and we come across these different styles frequently in our reading. The second may be that you aren’t quite sure how to write dates with commas .

The key to overcoming your struggle with dates is to understand the prevailing conventions and then apply them clearly—and consistently.

Here’s a tip: Want to make sure your writing shines? Grammarly can check your spelling and save you from grammar and punctuation mistakes. It even proofreads your text, so your work is polished wherever you write.

Your writing, at its best Grammarly helps you communicate confidently Write with Grammarly

How to write the date in English

There are many different ways to write the date in both British and American English, and most are correct. Here are a few of the most common ways to write the date: 

American English

• February 1, 2023
• Feb. 1, 2023
• 2/1/23 or 2-1-23
• Wednesday, February 1, 2023
•  February 1st
• 1st of February

Notice how, when writing the date in numbers in American English, the month comes before the day. 

British English

• 1 February 2023
• 1/2/23 or 1-2-23
• Wednesday, 1 February 2023
• 1st February 2023
• 1st of February, 2023

How to write the year

Years should be expressed as numerals except at the beginning of a sentence. Most style guides agree that beginning a sentence with a numeral is poor style, so years placed at the beginning of a sentence should be written out as words.

American writers tend not to use and after thousand when expressing a year after 2000 in words, but it is common in British English. Both are correct.

The year 1929 brought the Great Depression, the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre, and an influenza epidemic.

Nineteen twenty-nine brought the Great Depression, the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre, and an influenza epidemic.

Much happened in the political arena in 2016.

Two thousand and sixteen was an eventful year in politics.

Two thousand sixteen was an eventful year in politics.

How to write the month and day

When referring to a specific date in the month-day date format , use cardinal numbers (one, two, three) rather than ordinal numbers (first, second, third). This may feel counterintuitive because we normally use ordinal numbers when we “speak” of dates. For example, one would say January first two thousand seventeen but write January 1, 2017 . In British English, ordinals can sometimes be used—it is acceptable to use them when writing dates, although it is not required, as our example shows.

Daniel was born on May 13 .

Many people get confused about how to write dates with commas , so here is a rule of thumb: in the month-day-year format (used in the United States), place commas after the day and year. In the day-month-year format (used in the UK and other countries), do not use commas at all.

On May 13th, 2007 Daniel was born.

On May 13, 2007, Daniel was born.

On 13 May, 2007, Daniel was born.

On 13 May 2007 Daniel was born.

If you use a construction using of , it is fine to use an ordinal number. It is also fine to use an ordinal number when referring to a specific day without reference to the month.

Daniel was born on the 13th of May .

Daniel was born on the thirteenth .

How to write dates with days of the week

When writing a long-form date, use a comma after days of the week to ensure readability.

How fortunate that the world did not end on Friday, December 21, 2012!

Monday, May 5, is my last day of work.

How to write Centuries

Here’s a tip: When writing about whole centuries, do not use an apostrophe before s . Centuries are plurals, not possessives.

For example, when we write the 1800s , we are referring to all the years from 1800 to 1899. Within that range are one hundred discrete years; that is, more than one: a plural. We can also refer to those years collectively as the nineteenth century in all lowercase letters.

Women often wore bonnets in the 1800’s.

Women often wore bonnets in the 1800s.

Women often wore bonnets in the eighteen hundreds.

Women often wore bonnets in the Nineteenth Century.

Women often wore bonnets in the nineteenth century.

How to write decades

Here’s a tip: Decades should be written as two-digit numbers with an apostrophe before them and an s after them (e.g., ’90s ). When in doubt, write it out. You can write the entire decade in numerals with an s after it (e.g., 1990s ), or write out the words (e.g., the nineties ).

This is the way to think about writing decades using numbers: they are both abbreviations and plurals. A shorter way of saying “My mother was born in the 1940s” is “My mother was born in the ’40s.” The apostrophe (not an opening single quotation mark) indicates where the two century digits would be, had they been included. There is no need to put an apostrophe between the zero and the s —that would incorrectly indicate a possessive.

In the 80’s, I had a haircut like the lead singer of A Flock of Seagulls.

In the ’80s, I had a haircut like the lead singer of A Flock of Seagulls.

In the eighties, I had a haircut like the lead singer of A Flock of Seagulls.

Writing dates as numerals

All-numeral date styles should not be used in formal writing, but there may be times when it is appropriate to use them. When you do, be aware that not all countries express dates with numerals in the same way. American usage calls for a month/day/year date format , the United Kingdom and much of Europe use a day/month/year format , and most countries in Asia use the year/month/day format . Some countries use a combination of these depending on context (Canada, for example, uses all three, depending on who is the recipient of the communication).

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A Silent Song and Other Stories - Essays with Answers

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Incident in the Park Question

Lack of courtesy between the police and civilians leads to lethal conflicts. Justify the validity of this statement using illustrations from Meja Mwangi’s incident in the park.

Lack of courtesy between the police and civilians leads to lethal conflicts. justify the validity of thisstatement using illustrations from meja mwangi’s incident in the park. (20 marks).

• Across the world, over centuries, the behaviour of some of the police officers has caused dire repercussions. Sometimes this happens due to excessive use of force or simply wrongful application of the law and policies, but majorly this occurs as a result of impolitel interactions between the two parties.
• Incident in the Park shows how city dwellers, hawkers and loafers find themselves in conflicts with the police over flimsy and petty reasons often ending unpleasantly. When the two constables accost the fruit peddler, he gets startled and confused. They demand for his licence and identity card which he obviously doesn’t have. Then he offers five shillings which doesn’t seem good enough as one constable shrugs. This means that at times if the offer were attractive, they would have accepted it and left him.
• The police refuse to listen to the fruit merchant and harshly shove him along the street to the city telling him he will explain to the judge. This complicates matters even more because the fruit- seller fears the judge more, It throws him into more panic as he has a case that is coming up the following week and the judge is a “tyrant”. He explains further that he is selling this time so that he can afford a fine but all his entreaties fall on deaf ears They remain unimpressed saying nothing until he breaks away and flees into the crowded city.
• The situation escalates when the constables chase the fleeing man shouting for help from the passers-by. They actually betroth him unto the mob. A city man intercepts him and another man lunges for him as shouts increase. Tossed here and there as a suspect, the desperate fruit peddler stumbles and falls into a ditch, No one seems to care to find out what really is happening before taking action. No one listens as he pleads for mercy, This is where he meets his Verdict’ which is death. According to the crowd, ‘justice’ is administered. The mob universally condemn him without plausible evidence.
• ​By the time the police arrive at the scene, it is too late. Their action is irreversible and fatal. The mob has already killed him for being a “thief”. They who are supposed to ensure public safety and security have aided the killing of a hardworking hawker by their silly mistake. This should not have happened if they had treated the man politely. An innocent life is so unnecessarily lost. This makes the public lose confidence in the police. After investigations the truth will come out and it will be hard to trust the police.
• ​In a nutshell, wanton conflicts and deaths of innocent citizens could be averted if the police handled matters with courtesy and sobriety

Drawing illustrations from Meja Mwangi's an incident in the park, write an essay to discuss the problems of urbanization

Points of interpretation

• Unemployment
• Overpopulation
• Social injustice/mob justice
• Conflict between the constables and the hawkers
• Unhygienic condition

A man of Awesome Power Question

“When one is given power, he/she should use it only for good but more often than not, people use it for wrong purpose.” Support this statement basing your argument from Nagulb  Mahfouz’s A man of Awesome Power.

• When one is given power, he/she should use it only for good but more often than not people us it f or wrong purposes. Support this statement basing your argument from Naguib Mahfouz’s ‘A Man of Awesome Power’ Many people who are in powerful positions or who have been gifted with some sort of power tend to abuse it. Instead of utilizing it for improvement of the society at large, they use if for their own selfish interests or to punish those that have wronged them, scenario is seen it ‘A Man of Awesome Power through a number of illustrations. We see Tayyib al-Mahdi utilizing the power given to him for revenge. This is not a good a way of power utilization as it causes harm to others. Tayyib realizes that he has power to order things to be and he sets out to utilize the power to change’ his country. However, the first episode where he utilizes this power shows that he is utilizing it to hit back at a person who offends him. The driver of the taxi that he hails suffers his wrath for refusing to stop. When Tayyib is on his way to the heart of the town, he hails a taxi but the driver simply waves a hand at him in haughty refuses. Tayyib’s irritation makes him stare at the rear wheels of the taxi and the two explode suddenly.
• Revenge:   He ignores the voice that reminds him that he should only use his power for good and lets his anger control him. This act of revenge was deliberate since as Tayyib bypasses the driver he feels that he has taught the man a lesson. By utilizing his power to hit back at the taxi driver. Tayyib shows that people with power use it for wrong purposes .
• Stomach pain:  We further see wrong utilization of power where Tayyib causes the man in the bus to suffer stomach pains. Although the man had physically attacked a woman, causing him to suffer stomach cramps not justified. Tayyib encounters a confrontation between the man and a woman in a public bus and the man ends up slapping the woman. Just like the incident with the taxi driver. Tayyib lets his anger control him where he focused it on the man’s stomach and immediately the man suffers severe cramps that cause him to moan and scream in pain. The pain is so intense that an ambulance had to be called to fetch him.
• Slap paisn: Allowing his anger to control him and causing pain to the man who had slapped a woman is a vengeful act which is wrong thus showing how people with power use it for wrong purposes.
• Radio: Beside. Tayyib uses the power bestowed on him to interfere with the radio presentation by causing the presenter to start sneezing. While seated in the café, he hears a radio announcer expounding on the developments that were to be expected in the future. Tayyib feels that the announce should report on what has been achieved yet instead of giving false hopes to the people. Tayyib thus decided to cause some sneezing to attack the announcer since it was the only way to stop him. Soon after, the announcer develops massive sneezes that prevent him from carrying on with the presentation. Tayyib feels happy and victorious after the unexpected conclusion of the announcement. Although his desire is to purify the broadcasting sector, the approach of causing massive sneezing to the presenter is harmful and thus wrong.
• Passion: Lastly , Tayyib is seen to sue the power given to him to satisfy his sexual passion and desires Tayyib utilizes the power to make a woman that he is attracted to notice him. While he is seated at the tea garden planning how to effectively use his power Tayyib notices a beautiful woman approaching the entrance of the garden. The woman does not notice him at first and Tayyib thinks of how through his powers he can cause her to be head-over-heels with him. He then send her a hidden message and she responds to him. He sees nothing wrong with satisfying his desires as a way of repairing himself. He closes his note book and they surrender to fate. This is an immoral act since Tayyib is married to Haniya whom he had remained faithful to throughout their marriage. People gifted with power should strive to use it only for good purposes and not to cause pain suffering to others or for immoral deeds like Tayyib did.

The Neighbourhood Watch

People living on the streets apply wisdom in order to survive the difficult conditions. Write an essay to qualify this statement citing illustrations from Rem'y Ngamije’s The Neighbourhood Watch.

On the streets, conditions are challenging. One needs experience, knowledge, and sound judgment in addition to dedication and effort to survive.

To endure the harsh conditions on the streets, Neighbourhood Watch members use wisdom.

They  are  shrewd  enough  to  get  up  early  in  the  morning  to  go  food  hunting.  Before  the  full  dawn,  Elias,  Lazarus,  and  Omagano  leave.  They  depart  early  so  they  can  find  the  overflowing  trash  cans  behind  eateries,  which  are  the  true  rewards. One  can  purchase  palatable,  semi-fresh  morsels  in  the  early  morning. The  food  begins  to  spoil  in  the  late  morning.  "The  early  bird  does  not  catch  the  worm,"  the  neighborhood  watch  is  aware.  Elias,  Lazarus,  and  Omagano  prolong  their  strides  in  order  to  arrive  on  time. They  are  aware  that  in  the  streets,  time  is  of  the  importance.

The crew is aware that maintaining strong relationships with other people is essential to their survival. The vast majority of the city's kitchen personnel like working with Elias. They call him "Soldier" or "Captain," respectively. For him and his crew, they occasionally leave produce that is nearly rotting away. Elias occasionally found himself lucky enough to receive rotting mangoes, wrinkled carrots, and potatoes with broken skins due to the positive relationship. The employees would be kind enough to provide them the night before's smushed leftovers, such as half-eaten burgers, sauce-drenched chips, or salads. Since the majority of the kitchen staff is underpaid, they frequently have to carry leftovers home to their own families. It is It is amazing that Elias manages to get some food from them.

Because the Neighbourhood Watch team is so clever, they have divided into specialized units. While Silas and Martin are charged with looking for additional necessities, Elias, Lazarus, and Omagano are always on duty. Elias had previously been living alone, but when he met Lazarus, he suggested that they form a partnership because it was exhausting to scavenge for food and other necessities of life on the streets. Lazarus first resisted. The chilly evenings compelled him to cooperate. Since two individuals could cover more ground, it worked for them.

When not out on a foraging mission, the crew is wise enough to secure a safe haven where they can sleep or simply hide. The Neighbourhood Watch considers the underside of the bridge to be valuable real estate. When it rains and on chilly winter evenings, it provides a crucial shelter. The letters NW painted on the columns have the same impact as a leopard's territory bordering musty pee.Other crews are wise to avoid intruding there for fear of bloody vengeance. Additionally, it provides a secure location to store their supplies so they won't have to carry their sparse belongings with them wherever they go. They would move more slowly if they had more luggage while they searched their neighborhoods for food and other necessities. Elias dials their regional command center. He wakes up the rest of the team in the morning, and they all share a can of water to wash their faces. A safe area is essential to a street family.

They might accomplish more in a day if one searched for food and the other for other necessities. They are aware now that women and children make excellent recruits. Some obstinate guards demand a 10 or 20 dollar bribe before allowing them to go through gated containers. Elias typically pays them, but when he is strapped for cash, Omagano takes care of business alongside a guard behind the garbage. On the other hand, the treasures team offers discarded blankets, beds, clothes, reusable shoes, trolleys, etc. While trolleys are practical, they can also be exchanged for more helpful items. Separately working, the two crews come together in the late afternoon. Bread, mashed potatoes, grapes, and water are shared as food. The valuables crew brings newspapers, plastic piping and poorboy caps.

Additionally, the Neighbourhood Watch is familiar with the city and its neighborhoods. Elias requests the group's rest because they will be going foraging in Ausblick tonight. Right now, it's too hot to be outside. The Neighbourhood Watch is better and more profitable at night. The crew is aware that by hitting the bins early, they may be able to find some useful items in Ausblick, such as broken toasters, blenders, water bottles, teflon pots or pans, flat-screen TV cardboard boxes, and even some food. In Ausblick, people still know how to dispose of stuff.

While Martin and Omagano push the cart, Elias, Lazarus, and Silas will scan the area in front of them for valuables. They are aware that Ausblick, like Olympia and Suiderhof, will soon be congested. Previously, Pionierspark was worthwhile, but not any longer. Presently, the Neighbourhood Watch are dissuaded by ocular prowls, canine barking, and patrol vehicles manned by irate, screaming individuals. They are aware that the faster they can arrive at Ausblick, the better.

The neighborhood watch is aware that living on the streets requires a present-focused mindset rather than one that is preoccupied with the past or the future. Each person enters the streets with a history. Lazarus' tattoos are proof of his time spent in jail. Since he was shot at by the South African Defense Forces, Elias does not fear him. They don't have time to reflect on the past because of their hunger or need for food on the streets. Lazarus and Elias both have some street smarts. He claims that there is only now and no future for the streets. "You must eat today. Your need for refuge today. You have today's needs to attend to.

The staff stays away from the streets on Fridays and Saturdays and makes a secure retreat to Headquarters. They take this action to prevent scuffles with police on patrol. Martin can't go with Silas, despite his desire to do so. Elias and Lazarus make fun of the fools who wait by the side of the road in Klein Windhoek and Eros to fix a window, paint a room, install a sink, or lay some tiles because they are too proud to go scavenging for food. They ultimately return home hungry. Martin believes that if those "fools" could occasionally find employment, perhaps things might improve. There is only now, says Elias, and "maybe is tomorrow." To survive on the streets, one must pay attention to the here and now. "Today is every day."

The rest of the team hears Elias and Lazarus' observations from the streets, including how they came to their decision to switch directions. The group discovered that being near people who are striving to survive is not a good way to survive. When foraging in the underprivileged areas, you only find what people don't require to survive.

The Neighbourhood Watch is aware that poor people only discard filthy waste and useless newborns. You had to be prepared to find shit in the impoverished areas: expired food, condoms that had been used, women's items that had been stained with blood, and broken items. Once, while searching for newspapers to start a fire, Elias and Lazarus were horrified to discover a dead infant. They realized that an upgrade was necessary. Only because they had to survive did they go there.

You do everything and travel everywhere to survive. Being picky is impossible. But now they are aware that they need to advance and visit locations where there is enough trash to go around. Such people live in neighborhoods where there are both white people and black people attempting to pass for white. They finally make the wise decision to leave the impoverished who have nothing to discard on their own.

Finally, the Neighbourhood Watch is astute enough to recognize that some neighborhoods must be avoided. They stay away from Khomsadal because it is busy and overly drunken there. Due of his pride and drunkenness, they lost their friend Amos there. He formerly called people names, used foul language, and never asked for forgiveness. Then he was fatally stabbed.

The neighborhood watch is aware of the problem of dead bodies on the streets. Police would essentially ask witnesses to provide explanations. They beat people with batons, caused paperwork headaches, and detained innocent people. Everyone, including Elias and Lazarus, understood they had to flee when Amos died. When the police caught up with them, they had the good sense to stay with their original explanation that they had nothing to do with the murder. They had fractured ribs, swollen eyes, bruises, bleeding, damaged skin, and injured limbs, but that was better than dying. They know enough to stay far away from Khomsadal.

In conclusion, adversity teaches people how to adapt and survive. Survival depends on acuity.

People with admirable traits stand out. Basing your illustrations on Vrenika Pather's Ninema , write an essay to validate this assertion.

Exemplary attributes arouse respect and approval. Ninema is a young beautiful woman whose praiseworthy character makes her the embodiment of magnificence. She stands out from the pack at the market place.

First, Ninema is industrious. She rises early at 4:00 AM to reap her herbs from her garden. She has green fingers and her crops are healthy. She is also an enterprising businesswoman. To earn a living, she sells fresh produce at the Indian market. She learned the trade from her parents. Her business makes good profit. At the end of a long working day, her hanky bulges with notes and coins. Her diligence makes her remarkably superior to others.

Secondly, Ninema is resilient. She is as tough as old boots. She is contented and accepts her situation but does not resign to it. She faces many challenges and wins. She is thus respected.

Ninema is also focused. She does not pay heed to the trifles when people admire her for her physical beauty. She is indeed a beautiful woman with long black hair. Her beauty turns heads. As she walks balancing her baskets on her head, her hips sway from side to side. Her sari drapes around her perfect body kept in place by her high, firm breasts. Her long, toned arms and cinched waist cause men to stop and stare. She faces them with piercing black eyes. Women admire her high cheekbones. She does not pay heed to the attention. She has laser-like focus on earning a living. She doesn’t waste time chatting with other women at the market because she has no time to waste. Indeed Ninema is focused.

Ninema is good-natured and she treats her customers well. She is wise enough to provide genial customer service. She takes extra care of her first and last customer. She says they bring luck. She learned her trade from her parents and thus she believes in the grace and power of generational knowledge. She is also good at accounting. She can count faster than you can utter the word “herb”. She treats all her loyal customers with respect and appreciation. She masterfully handles the stubborn Mrs. Singh and respectfully calls her auntie.

Furthermore, Ninema is affable and the clients like her. Mr. Chimran is always the first to support her. The other women joke that he is in love with Ninema. He is a rich lawyer from the high Brahmin caste. Nonetheless, he is infatuated with Ninema a poor girl from the low caste. She makes his days. He buys too much from her until the mother complains. He cannot fathom the idea of an arranged marriage which will deny him the chance of visiting Ninema's stall. Mrs. Singh is rich but she also enjoys buying her herbs from Ninema. She haggles for lower prizes simply to spend more time with Ninema, away from the boredom of her big lonely house. She lingers bargaining in order to interact with Ninema more. Ninema also takes personal interest in the lives of her customers. She knows whose son is studying medicine in India, whose daughter just got married, and who moved into a new house and where they bought it.

Ninema is self assured and confident. She runs her business with an iron fist. She is her own person – acts independently with confidence. She does not give in to what other people expect of her. This thrills as much as it irks many people. It makes the ladies in the other stands fond of her. They often compromised themselves at work and at home. This makes them angry with themselves. They look up to Ninema. They admire her since she is different though she’s one of them. They want to learn her secret. Mrs. Singh relentlessly bargains for lower prices but Ninema does not budge.

• Ninema is organized and that is why her business flourishes. She has a steady flow of customers. She arranges her herbs appetizingly. The customers are attracted by the look and smell of her stall. There is high demand for Ninema’s herbs. She is always busy at lunchtime when the rich professionals patronize her during their lunch break.
• Ninema is also tough. When an amorous man blocks her way and tries to harass her, she stares directly at him. She defends herself by fighting him so ferociously that the shameless man is left astounded. This attracts cheers and jeers and hearty laughs of approval from the other women at the market.

Lastly, Ninema is prudent. She is a poor girl living a modest lifestyle but she has big plans. She saves part of her money with a view of buying a big house of her own. Currently her house has neither hot running water nor a kitchen inside. She has to wash her face and feet using cold water in the outside tap. However, with the money she’s saving she plans to buy a house with the running hot water and a kitchen inside. It will have a big garden where she can plant fruits.

In conclusion, Ninema is the pinnacle of magnificence. Because of her praiseworthy traits, she seems remarkably superior to her peers. Indeed, exemplary attributes attract respect and make us stand out.

Ivory Bangles by Eric Ng'maryo. Question

Love knows no bounds though it can lead one to misery if not handled cautiously', write an essay to bring out the truth in this assertion basing your illustrations from the story Ivory Bungles by Eric Ng'maryo.

Introduction.

Affection has no limits, however, it can make one suffer if not handled with care. The old man and his wife love each other too much that he fails to give his wife a ritual beating as demanded by the pebblee earning his wife an untimely demise.

• Out of Love, the old man. fails/refuses to give his wife a ritual beating as demanded by the pebbles. Pg 21, "The seer's pebble said someone was going to die. The pebbles said a wife was going to die. The pebbler said the spirits were jealous of a happy wife, a woman unmolested by her husband until old age, until she was called 'Grandmother'. He is over-whelmed by the love he has for his wife and what he can do to avert the beating. (Pg 22) He suggests they could be appeased by any number of goats. He began telling the wife where he had gone but is carried away when she offers the meals and the warmth. He says, "This was not the atmosphere for discussing the words of the pebbles. He delays this until they agree to hatch a plan to counter attack. In the end, he losesr his wife just as the pebbles had prophesied.
• Out of Love, the old man fails to heed to the advice of the ageing chief to get himself another wife.This was shortly after he was made Councillor as a reward for bravery shown in the Battle of Five Rainy Day, he answers mwith a riddle on why he cannot marry other wives. In the end he loses the wife. Pg 22, "He still was the chief's councillor, much respected, but also much talked about because he had only one wife and a councillor was a small chief and whoever heard of a chief with one wife? The old man fails to marry another wife Out of the love and satisfaction he derived from the one wife he had. In the end, he loses the wife and remains a wifeless chief.
• Out of Love, the Old Man goes out of his way to poach an elephant, extract its tusks which he uses to make coweries for his wife. Pg 23, "She is very comely in the many ivory bangles. she wears. I made them, Sir and the ivory was from the elephant I shot with a poisoned arrow. I brought one of the tusks as it is custom. "People say you bought the bangles, He pretends to a carver. The woman pleased him in the bangles. The ones on her hands were etched with mnemonic marks for a long love poem. He had presented the bangles to her when their first born child, now their only son, was given a name. She had looked like a chief's bride. She later becomes the victim of human-animal conflict when The elephants whose tusks she adorns kill her mercilessly. her. 
• The Old Man's wife out of love for the husband remarks that she knows the seer and that he once wanted to marry. She agrees to hatch a plan in order to go to her mbrother's place in pretence that she has been beaten. Then later call for reconciliation by the parents (Pg 24). She deliberately delays her going to the brother and decides to go first weed the garden, In her own words she says his son has beaten the wife to near death. "Why is my son so different ,from his father?" Pg. 25. As she plans to go while weeding her garden, a rouge elephant trumps her down. In conclusion, Love is good. It knows no limits but coupled with defiance or lack of caution can lead us to unforseen misery. This is clearly seen in the lives of the old man and his wife.

Ninema People with admirable traits stand out. Basing your illustrations on Vrenika Pather's Ninema, write an essay to validate this assertion.

•  Ninema is industrious. She rises early at 4:00 AM to reap her herbs from her garden. She has green fingers and her crops are healthy. She is also an enterprising businesswoman. To earn a living, she sells fresh produce at the Indian market. She learned the trade from her parents. Her business makes a good profit. At the end of a long working day, her hanky bulges with notes and coins. Her diligence makes her remarkably superior to others.
• Ninema is resilient. She is as tough as old boots. She is contented and accepts her situation but does not resign to it. She faces many challenges and wins. She is thus respected.
• Ninema is also focused. She does not pay heed to the trifles when people admire her for her physical beauty. She is indeed a beautiful woman with long black hair. Her beauty turns heads. As she walks balancing her baskets on her head, her hips sway from side to side. Her sari drapes around her perfect body kept in place by her high, firm breasts. Her long, toned arms and cinched waist cause men to stop and stare. She faces them with piercing black eyes. Women admire her high cheekbones. She does not pay heed to the attention. She has a laser-like focus on earning a living. She doesn’t waste time chatting with other women at the market because she has no time to waste. Indeed, Ninema is focused.
• Ninema is good-natured and she treats her customers well. She is wise enough to provide genial customer service. She takes extra care of her first and last customers. She says they bring luck. She learned her trade from her parents and thus she believes in the grace and power of generational knowledge. She is also good at accounting. She can count faster than you can utter the word “herb”. She treats all her loyal customers with respect and appreciation. She masterfully handles the stubborn Mrs. Singh and respectfully calls her auntie.
• Ninema is affable and the clients like her. Mr. Chimran is always the first to support her. The other women joke that he is in love with Ninema. He is a rich lawyer from the high Brahmin caste. Nonetheless, he is infatuated with Ninema a poor girl from the low caste. She makes his days. He buys too much from her until the mother complains. He cannot fathom the idea of an arranged marriage that will deny him the chance of visiting Ninema's stall. Mrs. Singh is rich but she also enjoys buying her herbs from Ninema. She haggles for lower prizes simply to spend more time with Ninema, away from the boredom of her big lonely house. She lingers on bargaining in order to interact with Ninema more. Ninema also takes a personal interest in the lives of her customers. She knows whose son is studying medicine in India, whose daughter just got married, and who moved into a new house and where they bought it.
• Ninema is self-assured and confident. She runs her business with an iron fist. She is her own person – acts independently with confidence. She does not give in to what other people expect of her. This thrills as much as it irks many people. It makes the ladies in the other stands fond of her. They often compromised themselves at work and at home. This makes them angry with themselves. They look up to Ninema. They admire her since she is different though she’s one of them. They want to learn her secret. Mrs. Singh relentlessly bargains for lower prices but Ninema does not budge.
• Ninema is prudent. She is a poor girl living a modest lifestyle but she has big plans. She saves part of her money with a view to buying a big house of her own. Currently, her house has neither hot running water nor a kitchen inside. She has to wash her face and feet using cold water from the outside tap. However, with the money she’s saving she plans to buy a house with running hot water and a kitchen inside. It will have a big garden where she can plant fruits.

In conclusion, Ninema is the pinnacle/embodiment of magnificence. Because of her praiseworthy traits, she seems remarkably superior to her peers. Indeed, exemplary attributes attract respect and make us stand out.

A Man of Awesome Power

Lack of sound judgment results in regret. Making reference to A Man of Awesome Power , write an essay to justify this claim.

Lack of good sense results in misguided decisions which may torment us eternally. In A Man of Awesome Power Tayyib al-Mahdi misuses and in turn loses his awesome power due to moments of rash imprudence.

Tayyib al-Mahdi uses his awesome power to punish the taxi driver who ignores him when he hails it. Tayyib al-Mahdi tries to flag down the taxi but the driver ignores him disdainfully. Unlike when this happened in the past, now Tayyib al-Mahdi is filled with greater irritation. In this moment of anger, he makes an impulsive decision to punish the man. He considers that he could make the driver suffer an accident. He decides to shatter the taxi's rear wheels instead. He knows that he should use his powers only for good but his anger results in his recklessness. As he walks by the helpless man, Tayyib al-Mahdi stares at him, resentful and enraged. He feels like he had taught the man a much needed lesson .

Tayyib al-Mahdi hastily punishes the radio announcer only because he is irritated with his views. The announcer was expounding on promising developments expected in the future this is after Tayyib al-Mahdi's memorable services were mistaken for an awakening of the state or outright renaissance. Tayyib al-Mahdi fills a gaping pothole, locks a dangerously hanging electrical box, removes a pile of rubbish and drains a sewer using his awesome power. Tayyib al-Mahdi is irked by the announcer’s promises who talks about the future instead of talking about what has been accomplished. Tayyib al-Mahdy is overcome with fury and thoughtlessly punishes the man with a bout of incessant sneezing. He sneezes uncontrollably until he cannot speak and instead plays a recorded song “Walk Around and See”. Al-Mahdi plans to censor mass media by stopping any talk that annoys him. He would make speakers that displease him to sneeze spontaneously, emit shrill cries like women at a wedding, or suffer uncontrollable diarrhoea. Tayyib al-Mahdi is drunk with happiness and joy.

Tayyib al-Mahdi also misuses his awesome power when he uses it to chase the gorgeous woman at the zoo at the expense of the righteous plans he has. Tayyib al-Mahdi visits the tea garden at the zoo purposely to properly plan how to put his new powers to greater use. However, he instead uses it to seduce a gorgeous and enticing woman that catches his eye. Tayyib al-Mahdi is filled with an inexplicable desire - one that is not ordinary and his inappropriate since he has a tremendous burden of proper planning and awareness of need. This woman does not take notice of Tayyib al-Mahdi until he sends her a hidden message using his awesome powers, instantly setting her head-over-heels. He decides to heal himself instead of repairing the world. This ill-advised move results in the loss of his powers and his vibrant mood. The miracle disappears like a dream because of his selfish imprudence. He will be haunted eternally by an awesome sadness.

Tayyib al-Mahdi also makes the unwise decision of applying his power before properly planning how to use it. First, he performs random miracles. Some are memorable services like removing a pile of rubbish and draining an open sewer. Others are born out of sheer resentment and unwise personal vendetta for example shattering the taxi wheels. He later realizes that he had to consciously plan how to best utilize the powers. He obtains guides to the department of government, factories and private companies coastal among the things he plans to fix our prisons schools and universities commercial markets, then the press etc. He plans to map out every phase deliberately. He intends to quell any clamor, and deter any digression. He plans to fix his country then later the world. However, he fails to remain focused on the plan and is distracted by the beautiful woman at the zoo. He puts his plans on hold as he instead chooses to use the powers to pursue the woman. This imprudent resolve results in the loss of his power end he is forlornly tormented by an eternal sadness.

Truly, poor decisions are preceded by lack of good judgment and Tayyib al-Mahdi learns this the hard way.

Ninema serves as an example of a virtuous woman who should be emulated in the society. Using illustrations from the short story “Ninema” by Vrenika Pather, discuss this assertion.

• V1. Hardwork Ninema works very hard, selling her fresh produce at the Indian market so as to earn a living. She is Independent and does not wait for handouts from anyone but works very hard to earn herself a decent living
• V2. Resilient Ninema is as tough as old boots. Despite the challenges that Ninema faces, she has her eyes fixed on her goal which is to achieve a good lifestyle (buy her own house) after working so hard. We are told that she has never had running hot water and has to make do with washing her face and feet with cold water from the outside tap. She has to contend with boiling water on the open fire to take her weekly bath.
• V3. Generous Ninema gifts her new customers, the last customer of the day, a bunch of mint for free, which makes the customer very happy and she promiss to always shop for her herbs at Ninema’s stall.
• V4. Self-respecting and courageous Ninema does not condone being disrespected by anyone. When an arrogant man pinched her erect nipple at the market, she stood up for herself to the encouragement and cheers and jeers of the other women. She roughed up the man single-handedly for his immoral and unbecoming behaviour. The other women were so encouraged by this courage and cheered her for having stood firm against the disrespect.
• V5. Ambitious and determined Ninema dreams of owning a home so that she does not have to contend with bullying from landlords, a home where she will have hot water and the kitchen will be in the inside. She vows to work hard to single handedly achieve this.
• V6. Humble Ninema is beautiful and she knows it. Everyone admires her beauty. She however does not let the idea of her beauty get into her head or the idea of peoples’ admiration get into her heart as her chief concern is to earn a living.
• V7. Respectful and accomodative Ninema knows her place in the society, as a woman from the lower caste, she does not entertain Mr. Chinran’s infatuation. He is a rich lawyer from Brahmin caste. Ninema however treats him as she treats all other customers, with respect and appreciation. She also takes a personal intrest in each of her customers despite being very busy. In conclusion, the character of ninema as discussed in this essay is truly admirable and all women should emulate and try to be like her. (Accept any other valid conclusion)

Ivory Bangles

Write a composition to illustrate effects of human-animal conflict drawing illustrations from Eric Ng‟maryo‟s „‟ Ivory Bangles‟‟.

Introduction

Confrontation between wild animals and human being is becoming more rampant in the modern world. During such scenarios, the result becomes adverse both for humans and the animals including and destruction of property. Accept any other relevant introduction

• C1: Death of people Human-animal conflict sometimes gives rise to casualties. People may lose their lives during human-animal confrontation. The Councilors’ wife is killed by a bull elephant. As the scouts chased the elephants which invaded the village with noise and arrows, the bull elephant is wounded. Instead of following the cows into the banana grove, the he elephant picks the path up from the stream out of rage. The elephant enters the Councilors’ grove where his wife had been weeding. The bull attacked the woman, lifting her bodily. It then bashed her on trees and banana plants before putting her on the ground and stamping on her repeatedly. In this manner the woman loses her life.
• C2: Destruction of property Conflict between human and animals also leads to destruction of property. When the councilor’s wife goes to the market, she gets to learn that a herd of elephants have invaded the village. The people express fear that the beasts would be devastating to the young plants. The scouts warn people of the invasion by a herd of elephants. The elephants have invaded the area including banana groves. The animals cross river Marwe into Mtorobo village. The scouts shout to warn the people of Mtoboro that five she elephants have invaded their banana groves. The wounded bull also invades the grove where the wife of the chief’s councilor had been weeding.
• C3: Killing of animals Animals are also killed during confrontation between humans and animals. The killing of animals happens for various reasons. On one the one hand, the scouts strike to scare the animals out of their property as in the case of the wounded bull. Also, at the market, the councilor’ wife gets wind that the village has been invaded by elephants,. People however, are somehow relieved because people who know how to use poisoned arrows are already following the herd. They hope that with poisoned arrows, some can be killed. On the other hand, people kill animals for aesthetics and for money. The Chief appreciates the councilor’s wife saying she is comely in the twenty-four bangles she adorned. The chief is privy to the fact the councilor bought them but he is made to understand that the councilor carved them from the elephant he short with a poisoned arrow. This proves that people may kill animals during human- animal conflict.
• C4: Disturbance There is disturbance during conflict between human beings and animals. When the elephants invade the village, people who know how to use poisoned arrows are appointed to follow them. The scouts monitor the elephants and warn the public the whole day. They climb on top of trees and make noise relaying warning from one scout to another. They warn people as the elephants move from Sangeyo across river Marwe to Mtoboro homestead in Bware village. The elephants cause great disturbance to the people disrupting their activities.
• C5: Injuries to the animals Conflict between people and animals leads to animals being injured by people who attack with a view to driving them away. The bull elephant which eventually kills the woman is enraged because it had been wounded. The elephants are also followed by people who are trained to trained to use arrows.

Conclusion Humans and animals sometimes experience strife with far reaching effects. Animal and humans may cross each other’s paths leading to retaliation and counter-retaliation which turn calamitous as lives and property are lost in the duel.

The Sins of the Fathers

Basing your argument on ‘The Sins of the Fathers’ by Charles Mungoshi, show how Rondo’s scars are as a result of his father’s wrongdoings.

In “The Sins of the Father” by Charles Mungoshi, pain from past experiences and childhood trauma affect present lives and events. For example, Rondo's low self-esteem and bitterness emanates from how his father handled him while growing up.

{Any plausible introduction=2mks}

Points of Interpretations

• Si. Rondo at four/an old guitar/ first disappointment Mr. Rwafa destroys Rondo’s guitar when he is four which guts all the courage out of Rondo and destroys his self-esteem.( Pg. 30-31) Rondo’s uncle gives him an old guitar and his father comes home only to find him strumming tunelessly on the instrument. Out of anger, Mr. Rwafa breaks the guitar strings ultimately throwing the guitar into the fire while claiming that no child of his would be irresponsible rolling stones and idle like Mick Jagers and John Whites. The images of the burning guitar gut all the courage in him. The experience is so traumatizing that he even pees in his shorts. As a result, the incident implants fear in Rondo and he grows up scared of his father. Rondo cannot remember of a time when he was close to his father since his past makes him cry. (pg. 31, 40). His father destroying his guitar creates more rift and space between them ultimately becoming his first disappointment.
• Sii. Stammer. Additionally, Rondo develops a stammer and cannot speak freely due to his father’s harshness towards him. . (Pg. 31-32) Rondo’s father is a disappointed man based on many reasons including the fact that he only has one son. He pursues his duties zealously and fails to distinguish being a father from being a minister. Mr. Rwafa seems to be on a mission to destroy his son perhaps in the quest of searching for a duplicate heir. Rondo cannot answer his father’s questions thus develops a stammer due to his father’s angry nature.
• Siii. Rondo at eight/thrashing/neighbors garden/ripe mangoes Furthermore, Rondo grows up with the feeling of powerlessness based on his past traumatic encounter with his father at eight after helping himself to a neighbor’s ripe mangoes. . (Pg. 40) At that formative stage, Rondo is still learning what is right or wrong. As such, he does not see any problem going into a neighbor’s farm to eat ripe mangoes. His mother comes to his defense only to fail to help even after lifting her skirt in the man’s face. Disparaging names are thrown around. Unfortunately, Mr. Rwafa comes with his thick elephant-hide belt and, even without bothering to find out what the matter was, joins in to thrash his son. Although his mother desperately moves from one man to the other pleading for his release, Rondo feels completely uncomfortable. Consequently, the humiliating experience brings with it a sense of powerlessness that continually haunts him even in his old age. Therefore, his father failing to defend him when he was eight affects his personality later as he becomes powerless in handling life issues.
• Siv. Shadow/fool Also, Rondo continuously thinks of his father as his shadow and he has to rely on him on many things such as his new journalism job. He always thinks his father must be right and is too diminished to think otherwise. As such Rondo is even afraid for his mother whenever she has to oppose Rwafa. His father always does everything for him. His failure to think independently reduces him to a laughing stock at his place of work. His friends think he is a fool and he acts as one. His wife Selina also cautions him to stop being under his father’s shadow. His father finds him a job deciding for him that it is time he earned his upkeep money. Rondo also cannot talk against Mr. Rwafa’s sentiments when in the car back “duck shooting.” It is as though his father controls his every move while directing his life. As a result of remaining in his father’s shadow, Rondo feels as though Selina has always been the main decision maker in their marriage. At work, he also feels incapable of being a good journalist. . (Pg. 28, 29, 32, 41)
• Sv. Birthday party Moreover, during Yuna’s and Rhoda’s birthday party, Mr. Rwafa refers to Rondo as an effeminate spineless son of the family who marry into their enemies’ families, poisoning the pure blood of the Rwafa clan. . (Pg. 39, 40) This the watershed and defining moment in the already sour relationship between a father and son. It is like the proverbial straw that broke the camel’s back. The disrespect that his father shows him makes Rondo feel dejected and he cannot bring himself to look at his father. Rondo cannot bring himself to his feet to even bid farewell to the departing guests. His father’s rant made him feel ashamed and powerless at the same time.
• Svi. Suspicions Rondo suspects that his father Rwafa could have been the one who orchestrated the murders of his daughters Yuna, six and Rhoda, five; and his father-in-law, Basil Mzamane. Recent events have been driving Rondo insane and making him see something else that he had always taken for granted. This is when his friend, Gaston, ask him whether he knows about the Second Street accidents. (pg 33) Rondo feels trapped by this revelation. However, he now accepts what he had refused to think about why his father left the house in morning and what he did before he returned in the evenings. Consequently, the accumulation of events and the history behind them makes him so numb that he is almost a zombie when he has the butt of a gun pointing at his father.
• Svii. Wedding/ marriage/ignominy Rondo’s father fails to acknowledge his marriage to Selina. His father actually frowns and even spit at it instead thus bringing tension in the whole family. Rwafa is one bombed-out battlefield of scars and cannot forgive his ‘enemies’. He calls it an ignominy of marrying a muNdevere and further chagrins his son for having a granddaughter with Ndevere blood as first in the family. After this marriage, nothing can appease Mr. Rwafa. It is as if his son has been written out, written off, disappeared. . (Pg. 31, 34) This has always brought tears to Rondo’s eyes to see his mother and wife together. Due to this tension Rwafa conveniently leaves town ‘on State Business’ for two weeks and does not attended his son’s wedding. Not surprising, the bill for the couples wedding is met by Basil Mzamane though his mother helps in tears. Another result of this strained relationship is that Rondo has lost touch with his father. He feels more close to his father-in-law, Basil Mzamane and would choose him as his father if he had a choice. {Any 4 well developed points=3x4=12marks}

In conclusion, Rondo’s troubles, bitterness, misgivings, powerlessness and low self-esteem are as a result of what his father did or did not do while he was growing up.

‘War can cause a lot of problems in our society and should be avoided at all costs’ With close reference to ‘Boyi’ by Gloria Mwaniga , Write an essay justifying this assertion.

INTRODUCTION (2MKS)

Conflict destroys family ties and communal bonds. Family members are separated from one another, some are traumatized and others are killed as a result of conflict. In Gloria Mwaniga’s ‘Boyi’ the militia which should protect the community land ends up being the one terrorizing the community they vowed to protect. Below are illustrations showing the challenges the community faced as result of conflict within the community.(It can be general/contextual or both)

• W1 Displacement Conflict causes displacement of people who leave their homes in huge masses to Bungoma and Uganda. The family of the narrator’s friend Chemutai moves to Chwele.The villages of Kopsiro, Saromet, Chepyuk and Chebei are engulfed by a fog of fear. The did not understand the Militia’s motive anymore. The Militia took away girls to go cook for them. People’s heads were chopped off and bodies were thrown into river Cheptap-burbur. The Militia also raped their own relatives resulting to children born who were transparent as plastic bags. The narrator imagines Boyi’s children playing appearing transparent as the plastic bags. This horrifies her terribly. Since school is disrupted by the conflict such thoughts haunts the narrator and she spends most of her time idle under the flame tree at home.
• W2 Family Disintegration Most of the families are disunited from the rest of their members. The Militia demanded 40,000 land protection tax, 10,000 land protection tax and 30,000 betrayal tax. Boyi’s father could raise the amount and suggested giving away his savings, precious radio and hunting gun and promises to give his bull Mtabakaki to raise the cash but the Militia is adamant and threatens to kill his entire family. Therefore resulted to giving away Boyi who is only 15years old until he could raise the amount. Boyi’s mother falls into depression, talking in monologues. She shouts at her husband for giving their son away she tears her Kitenge head scurf and tells him that their son is not cloth that one gives away casually. Boyi’s mother and father’s relationship disintegrated as a result of them losing their son to the Militia. Baba tries to justify his action by saying that he had to give him away otherwise the entire family would have have been tortured to death. He, however, is saddened that the boys who had vowed to protect their land had turned on them like a hungry chameleon that eats its intestines. Conflict really ruined their community.
• D3 Mental anguish. Conflict causes devastation that pushes Boyi’s mother to a state of insanity. The narrator finds the mother seated alone on a kiti moto in the kitchen. She neither looks up nor respond to greetings.She screams at the narrator to leave some tea for Boyi who will return from the caves hungry. The screaming goes on for weeks ‘stupid girl you want to finish tea for your brother and he will come from the caves hungry’, she bawls. She would sit stunned gazing at the wall declaring she envisions her son returning home after escaping from the snare of the militia. After her monologues, she would sit sadly and silently. When her madness takes a walk they would brew tea together with the narrator and would nostalgically reminisce stories about Boyi; about how he saved her marriage being a testament that her womb was not tied by Djinis. Conflict drives Baba to partake in strange tradition of burying a banana stem to drive the spirit of death away and appease Boyi’s spirit. The narrator is surprised by her father turning his back on religion. The mother refuses to be part of the ritual of sending her son’s spirit away. She has lost touch with reality and lives in denial. Boyi’s family was traumatized by the militia.
• D4 Misery In her anguish, Mama is too despondent to eat. She sits muttering to herself without touching her ugali until it would form a brown crust. The narrator would take it and throw it away in the chicken coop. She sits and talks to herself for hours on end lamenting about her suffering. She asks God to tie a rope around her stomach. Boyi’s family was devasted that he had been recruited by the militia by force.
• D5 Work disruption Conflict disrupts work in the village. That December the farmers do not clear their farms for the second planting of maize. The militia steals young crops from the fields and goats from pens. Instead of working, men and women sit and exchange dreadful tales of the horrendous cruelty of the militia. The militia cut people and throw their bodies in rivers, pit latrines and wells. They recruit boys as young as ten years who are forced to kill their own relatives. Instead of protecting the land, the militia goes on an indiscriminate killing spreeand their kins are victims of the aggression instead of beneficiaries. Boyi’s sister has a terrible dream that her brother attacks her and chops her head off into small pieces. She is traumatized by this dream.
• D6 Dehumanisation As result of war, innocent children turn into savages. These young boys are forced to murder or rape their own kinsmen. Boyi has gone from a God fearing young man to a wanted criminal. Chesaina tells his parents that he is now a marked man. The distressing news crashes Boyi’s parents and reduces oth of them to tears. They cannot wrap their heads around the fact that their good son who recited Psalms devotedly is now Matwakei’s right hand man and an enemy of the state. War truly ruins families.
• D7 Killings Boyi’s family is devastated by the news of his killing. The nation newspaper headlines screams coldly ‘Ragtag militia leaders killed by Army Forces’ Baba crumples like an old coat due to shock. Mama is too stunned to cry. She simply laughs. Boyi’s sister is too gutted to cry. War has robbed them of their kin in the prime of his youth. Boyi is murdered brutally after being flung out of a helicopter which was mid air. There was no body to bury or for Mama to slap for that matter. She does not roll on the ground as is custom. She is neither bitter nor sad. She only has eyes of lunacy and a voice of death. She truly is devastated. She sits on Boyi’s bed together with the daughter who weeps uncontrollably, her tears soaking her clothes. Boyi’s family was deeply destroyed by the war.

CONCLUSION(2 MKS)

It is evident that conflict or crisis has no positive outcome. It instead destroys families and communities and should therefore be shunned.

 Essay 13

“War causes a lot of harm and thus should be avoided at any cost.” Validate this statement basing your illustrations from Chimamanda Adichie's 'Ghosts'

INTRODUCTION:

Whenever people engage in some form of conflict and fighting, there are grave implications that follow as is seen in Ghosts' where the civil war that happened from the events of July 6, 1967 causing untold suffering and pain to the people.

• (Si) Displacement of people. Many people are forced to run away from their country and their homes when the civil war broke out. Prof. James and Ikenna's meeting take James down the memory lane where he recounts how they were forced to evacuate Nsukka in a hurry in July 6, 1967 when the war began. Through their conversation, we learn that Ikenna has lived in Sweden ever since the war began and has only come back to Nsukka recently. He discloses that he was flown out on Red Cross planes just like many other children had been airlifted to Gabon. Prof. James did not escape the displacement since he and his wife, Ebere had to move to America when the war broke out. Many people are seen to have been forced to leave their motherland as a result of the civil war.
• (Sii) War leads to loss of lives. Several people had their lives cut short due to the civil war. The return of Ikenna comes as a surprise to Prof, James since Ikenna was thought to have died in the war. It is no wonder that Prof initially thought of throwing a handful of sand at him just like his people did to ensure that it was not a ghost. Actual loss of life is seen through Ikenna's family. While explaining to prof the reason why he never returned to Nsukka after the war, Ikenna tells him that his whole family was killed when Orlu was bombed during the war thus he had nobody to come back to. It is not just Ikenna who lost loved ones but Prof too. His first daughter Zik died in the war. He tells Ikenna that the war took Zik. It is no wonder they named their second daughter Nkiruka which means: what is ahead is better.
• (Siii) Massive destruction and loss of property. When Prof James and his wife first returned to Nsukka when the war ended in 1970, they noticed major destructions that had occurred. Prof recounts how they found their house and items destroyed. His books were lying in front of the gate, his Mathematical Annals torn and used as tissue paper, the bath tab used as toilet and their photos ripped and their frames broken. The massive destruction of their house was too much that they had to be assigned a different house in a different street to avoid seeing their old house. In the process of their house being destroyed, they lose their Piano that belonged to Ebere. Prof also remembers the landscape as he drove back to Nsukka after the war. The massive destruction is recounted by Prof shows how destructive war is.
• (Siv) Psychological suffering. Those who experienced and the memories of it. Prof James is seen to have lived with the memories of the war. He easily remembers every detail of the war as he recounts it to Ikenna. Ikenna has suffered psychologically as is seen from the fact that he lost all his family in Orlu hence the reason he does not return to Nsukka. His psychological suffering is further seen from the fact that he never remarries after the war took his wife. Further evidence of psychological pain is seen where Prof observes how his people avoided the topic of war and if they engaged in it, it was with some vagueness. The naming of their second daughter Nkiruka- what is ahead is better, also shows the pain that Prof and Ebere: were trying to avoid. The people also suffer physical pain. Prof.James remembers how a wounded soldier was shoved in their car on the day they returned to Nsukka.

CONCLUSION:

War causes loss of lives, displacement of people and destruction of properties among other effects. People should thus strive to live in harmony and avoid it at all costs.

A Silent Song

People living with disability may face certain limitations. Using illustrations from Leonard Kibera’s A Silent Song, write an essay to validate this statement.

People living with disability find it more difficult to do certain activities or to interact with the world around them. In the short story A Silent Song, Mbane is visually impaired and disabled, and he finds it difficult to move and to conduct other activities because of his disability. (Any other relevant introduction, 2 marks)

Mbane’s movement is inhibited because of his disability. He gropes slowly towards the door of his hut. He can only crawl weakly on his knees and elbows. He cannot go further since the pain in his spine and stomach gather violence rapidly. The pain pangs paralyze him for a short tormenting moment. The pain soon disappears but with the same savage fury of its onslaught, leaving Mbane cold with sweat. He anticipates another imminent attack. Giving up the fight, he lets go his chin and hits his forehead on the dirty flea-ridden floor. Mbane’s freedom of movement is curtailed by his visual impairment, disability and pain. He is restricted to the lonely hut.

Mbane’s perception of time, day or beauty is limited by his inability to see. Although he is hungry, he does not know what time it is. He wallows in the gloom of his eternal night. Time, day and beauty lie beyond the bitter limits of darkness. He is restricted to feeling, hearing and running away from danger. He is also limited to a world of retreat. Due to his lameness, he can only crawl away. He has no power to hit back. Surely, people living with disability suffer certain restrictions.

When his brother brings him from the streets to his home, Mbane is restricted to his new confinement, the hut. His brother says that he rescued him from the barbaric city so that he could see the light of God. The hut is serene but so suspicious. This is Mbane’s new life away from the streets of the city. His new confinement is devoid of the urban ruggedness and noise. It lacks the quick prancing footsteps of the busy city people. In his limitation, Mbane can never fathom their business. Also, he is restricted to pleading with the people to help him stay alive by offering him some coins.

Due to his disability. Mane had little comprehension or knowledge of the city, though he lived in it. He earns his living on one street only, retreating to the back lane when it was deserted. His condition inhibits him from telling the length, width, beauty or the size of the street. He is just used to the talk of bright weather, lovely morning or beautiful sunset but he cannot take part in the small talk. He feels challenged when pedestrians sing to the blue sky and whistle to the gay morning. In his impediment, he cannot perceive these senses. During the day, Mbane has to endure the overly generous heat of the sun and obstinate flies mobbing the edges of his lips. At night, he cannot escape the hostile biting cold when he retreats to the back lane unsheltered, to surrender to his vulnerability to sleep and is occasionally by some ignoble thieves.

Mbane is constrained in his ability to eke out a living since he is disabled. He is forced to beg on that lonely street of the city. Mbane has come to understand that money is the essence of urban life. He is therefore happy with gay people since they mostly answer his plea. Dull people with heavy tired footsteps and voices have empty pockets. Unlike him, the good men and women of the city have the ability to work in the buildings next to him and more up the street. He has no option but to endure the scorching sun and stubborn flies. At night, he is tempted by the strange rhythms but cannot indulge because of his condition. He is limited to hearing voices cursing and singing and bottles cracking. Mbane is restricted from joining the good men’s women’s merry making after a hard day’s work. Only pimps and whores enjoyed the proceeds of the good men’s sweat.

Mbane’s condition has restricted him from getting married. His brother Ezekiel is married to Sarah. He must have been around Mbane’s age. Mbane would never be able to reach out his hand in fullfilement of his life in the same way. He can only yearn impotently, sadly constrained because of his darkness and lameness. He is overcome by bitter self-pity and can only console himself about his own light and thus he would only smile broadly and bravely. His brother’s wife occasionally brings him some bitter medicine. His condition impedes him from getting a wife of his own and settling down.

Mbane has become accustomed to limited conversation or communication. His brother enters his hut and sits on his bed but for a long time no one speaks. Mbane cannot be expected to start a conversation. All his life, he has been speaking to himself in his thoughts while living on the streets. He had no one to address apart from himself. Occasionally, he would blurt out a mechanical plea of “Yes?”. Now, if anyone speaks to him, he carries the subject on a line of uncommunicative thought in his own mind. When his brother asks if he believes in God, Mbane replies that he does not know, since to him he does not matter.

Mbane’s condition makes him feel alienated and thus he holds a different religious view from his mother’s and his brother’s his mother views men as one stream flowing through the rocks of life. They would twist and turn the pebbles and get dirty in the muddy earth. They cry in the falls and whirlpools of life and laugh and sing when the flow is smooth and undisturbed. Some cry in the potholes of life’s valley, while others laugh triumph elsewhere. Mbane’s condition inhibits him to not only ceaselessly crying but also feeling that he is not even part of the stream. He feels like the bitter fluid in his own throat. His pain gives him no reason to believe in God. No one understands his darkness. God is white cleanliness of eternal light but his life only contains darkness and blackness. He is forgotten and unnoticed. Sometimes, he is cursed and called able-bodied, only crippled by idleness of leisurely begging.

Mbane feels trapped in his unwashed body which reeks of sweat. He craves freedom that he cannot achieve. He dreams of a glorious future away from his pangs of darkness where light lies. Right now he is restricted since his eyes are denied the light. He dreams of a future where someone would understand him and raise the innocence of his cripple life along with the chosen. It gives him hope and he sings his own happy song, silently to himself. He cannot seek refuge in the brothels like other men, so he can only find it in his silent song. His soul has a destination, or so he thinks. But for now, he has to make do with it being incarcerated in his sweaty smelly body, which is unwashed except when in the rain. Surely, disability can be limiting.

Conclusion In conclusion, people living with disability undergo many impediments and limitations that deny them some pleasures or opportunities in life/ unlike those who are not disabled, the disabled people face a lot of limitations and challenges, which deny them the opportunity to enjoy life

An incident in the park

"The efforts employed by different individuals in society barely bear fruits. " Using evidence from the story , "An Incident in the Park." by Meja Mwangi, write an essay in support of this assertion.

Ponits of intepretation

• Identification of a character.
• Explaining the efforts the character employs.
• Show the outcome whihc is inversely proportional to the input.

INTRODUCTION

In our day to day lives, we put a lot of efforts in our endeavors but the outcome sometimes demoralizing since it does not merge with the input. For instance, the Azimio leadership put in place all that is expected to win a presidential election hut the outcome was not only demoralizing but also traumatizing. This is also the case in An Incident in the Park." by Meja Mwangi as explained below.

• Ei) The second ice cream man-sales. When the floodgates open, workers swam down the hill into the park. They pass the first ice cream man but the second one, in an effort to sale, he blocks the only way on to the highway, determined to make a sale that day. The swarm swirls round him and over and away. Irrespective of his efforts, that day. just like the day before, not one bar of ice cream is bought by the hungry ones. His bell to attract customers ring lonely and unwelcome like a lost leper's warning bell. (Page 7) In addition, his cries do not yield to any sales as a few men sitting on the cement bank ignored the ice cream man's cries. (Page 8). He is criticized by the loafer and another man when he rings his bell, they say that he is crazy and that he is always hammering the bell and no one wants to buy his ice cream. In fact they suggest that he should go where children are. (Page 9)
• Eii) The shaggy thin man. From the description, the man has been selling fruits since morning but when he makes his calculation, he looks disillusioned from the returns and falls unceremoniously on his back and covers his rough bearded face with two bony hands. A shaggy thin man sat under a shrub, scratching numbers and letters on his black dry skin with a used match. By his side were the two oversize fruit baskets he had been selling from morning and which he would resume hawking after the lunch break. Now he scratched his head with the matchstick and tried to balance the morning sales. He mumbled to himself, cursed and, rolling up his trouser legs, continued writing on his thigh. Finally, he flung the stick away and, wetting his palm with saliva, violently erased what he had scribbled. Then he fell unceremoniously on his back and covered his rough bearded face with two bony hands. (Page 7-8)
• Eiii) The fishpond board markers. At the fishpond, there is a board with the words DO NOT FEED FISH-BY ORDER. However, a loafer wearing torn slippers sits on it and carelessly tosses debris, tiny bits of grass and soil at the hungry fish. The idler sniggers and throws,more rubbish into the water. (Page 8) A huge piece of rock is added and a flattened cigarette. (Page 9). This is contrary to the board markers instructions that flatly fails to achieve fish feeding.
• Eiv) The fruit-seller-pleas. When the two constables come along, they demand for a licence from him. He is first surprised, he searches himself for a few seconds, shakes his head and helplessly declares that he left it at home. He too lacks his identification card. He tries to bribe the constables with five shillings but he is shoved along. When he is told that he will explain everything to the judge, more pleas follow, "You can't take me to that judge, the man will have me hung this time... I've this other case coming up next week... he will surely have me castrated.... I've ten shillings." He swears and offers all the baskets and the cash but when it looks like the constables won't let him go, he flees. (Page 11) His efforts to save himself comes to a sad end when a mob kills him. Here lay a desperate thief, attired in the unmistakable uniform of his trade- dirty torn clothes and a mean hungry face. (Page 12)
• Ev) The two constables/police. The fellows blatantly refuses to listen to the fruit-seller's pleas and take his bribe. They are all committed to ensure that they take the man to a court of law. One says, "You will explain to the judge. No licence, no identification..." (Page 11). They shoved him even when he offers them ten shillings and offers the two baskets. When he breaks lose, the constables pursue him... The constable shot after the fleeing man across the park shouting for help from passers-by. The shouts from one of the constables instead of making passers-by arrest them and hand him to them, they lynch him thinking that he is a thief. The police feel uneasy and uncertain and leave empty-handed. (Page 12)

In conclusion, efforts put in something must be directly proportional to the output.

People commit unethical acts as a result of lack of care. Citing illustrations from Incident in the Park by Meja Mwangi, write an essay to validate this statement.

• Immorality stems from people’s indifference. Unethical acts like negligence and brutality result from lack of care. Blood thirsty city dwellers brutally murder an innocent fruit seller without batting an eyelid in Incident in the Park. Government workers go about their business ignoring the ravaging effects of the drought on the neglected park. The park is dirty and brown. There was no promise of rain that August. The ground is dusty brown, bare and parched. The ministerial offices, City Hall and parliament buildings and the ominous cathedral are a stone throw away from the pathetic looking park. The ministerial offices are modern fortresses and its occupants conveniently ignore the park which clearly lacks proper care. This is evidenced by the dry bits of grass, dry leaves and thirsty trees. Only delicate flowers, planted like oasis islands at various spots, are watered in a desperate effort to keep the dirty brown park beautiful. The sad-looking boathouse and dirty, muddy water sum up the government's lack of care for the park. Secondly, the park is filled with many idlers who have little care in the world. They waste many hours lying idle in the park. They ignore the city and parliament clocks which strike suddenly, together - reminding them of how much time they had wasted. They care less about being useful. The clocks’ pleas go unheeded. Some insolent loafers simply shake their heads defiantly, curse loudly, face the other way and go back to sleep. Only every now and then, does a misplaced idler heed the clocks nagging disapproval and accusing fingers and walk away. The park people have no intention to go anywhere else but while away. They are here to stay. They have arrived. During the afternoons, the park looks parched and almost dead, dotted with a few loungers. More idlers sit by the lake watching the rowers, day in day out. This unproductive lot is a burden to the city and to society. The neglected pond in the park is another sign of lack of care by relevant authorities. The fish pond is dangerously overgrown with weeds. Colourless weeds choke the yellow, blue and purple water lilies. An ugly mishmash of weeds has replaced the aesthetic blue-green surface of the once beautiful pond. Initially, the pond flowers stuck out buds, thick colorful fingers and proclaimed order but not anymore - the existence of these beautiful fauna has been snuffed out by a riot of unclassifiable intruders and bastard flowers. To make matters worse, the park soil has collapsed, forcing the pond’s murky, brown water and bewildered fish to the deeper, further end. The sorry state of the pond points to acute lack of attention or care. The hairy loafer who feeds the fish is defiant. He ignores the public notice on the board that cautions people against feeding the fish. He carelessly tosses debris, tiny bits of grass and soil at the hungry fish. The fish fight for the useless things but let go when they realize they are worthless. The idler throws in more rubbish and carelessly sniggers - he has no iota of empathy whatsoever. He also drops in a piece of soil at the fish. When he learns that fish feeds on insects, he tries to find some and later decides to throw in a flattened cigarette end when he cannot catch any insects. The big fish that catches the cigarette butt releases it since it is useless. At last, the uncaring idler curses after violently hurling a large rock at the confounded fish. His lack of empathy leads him to defy the order not to feed the fish and as a result he harms the fishes. The police constables are callous. They harass innocent people heartlessly, displaying no shred of sympathy. The two city constables accost the old fruit seller and demand for his license and identification. As fate would have it, he has neither. He cannot afford a licence. The old man nods uncomprehendingly and shakes his head sadly when the police demand for a license. He desperately tries to bribe the constables by offering five shillings; all he had made that day. The policeman grabs him by his old coat and remarks that he would explain it to the judge. The old man swears by his mother. He is devastated because he has another case with the cruel judge. A tyrant who would hang him this time round. The fruit seller cries that the judge is crazy and would castrate him but his pleas fall on deaf ears. He offers the constables a 10- shilling bribe and even his foot baskets. The constables remain indifferent even when he cries that he has a wife and children. They do not care. They match him right ahead. When he realizes that he is talking to a brick wall, he decides to leap and run for it but not before cursing the cops, their wives and their children. The judge is portrayed as being unjust or outrightly cruel. When the police insist on taking him to the judge, the old fruit seller cries desperately. He has no licence and identification. He swears by his mother. He already has a case with the judge and he does not want to be taken back. He believes the judge will hung him. He is selling the fruits in order to afford the fine that was earlier imposed. He pleads with the police men as brothers. He even tells them that the judge is a tyrant - a crazy man who will have him castrated. The allusion to his wife and children does not bear any fruits. He tries to bribe the police with 10 shillings and appease them with his fruit basket but the uncaring constables match him ahead. The fruit seller curses the policemen and their families and decides to bolt. He takes this desperate measure to avoid facing the evil, apathetic judge. The bloodthirsty city dwellers have no regard for human life. Realizing that the city constable were adamant about taking him to the judge, the fruit seller decides to run for it. He leaps, breaking away, leaving the policeman holding onto a piece of his one coat. He runs across the park. The policeman shouts for help. The old man hopes to get protection by disappearing into the city dwellers. That was not to be. The barbarous city dwellers lunge at him trying to nab him. The old man is savagely desperate to escape. When he stumbles and falls into a ditch, the ferocious mob stones him to death. He cries out pleading for mercy. The bloodthirsty crowd leaves him for dead, looking like a broken twisted rag doll, covered in stones and a thick red blood. The crowd mistakenly label him as a thief. Lastly, the injustice witnessed after the innocent fruit seller killed is the height of brutality and lack of care. The constable strives to shift blame. No one looks guilty enough. The constables conveniently withdraw. An inspector confirms that the man is dead. The crowd that stoned him and those that witnessed his savage murder lower their eyes. Unwilling to openly testify, some of the residents hurriedly return to their offices, indifferently. The word ‘thief’ oozes out discreetly from mouth to mouth. They mistakenly condemn the man to be a desperate thief. They judge him by the unmistakable uniform of his trade - dirty torn clothes and a mean hungry face. Even the inspector of police is uneasy and doubtful about his next course of action. The poor man finds no justice even in his death. All and sundry conclude that a thief is a thief. The twisted garbage-strewn dark alleyways are lawlessly governed by one savage unwritten law concerning the fate of apprehended thieves. Ironically, the man is killed before his identity is established. Sadly, he can only be identified by his grieving wife and children in a cold room. An innocent life is cut short due to the heartless nature of idle, uncaring city dwellers and the inept police department. In conclusion, any society that lacks benevolence disintegrates into an abyss of lawlessness and immorality.

Humans are deceitful in nature and can live in pretence before revealing their true nature. Write an essay in support of this. Use the story The Truly Married by Aboise Niol.

• Introduction: Human beings have the ability of keeping appearances without being discovered. This is the case as seen in Ajayi’s wife who keeps appearances until the moment she realized she can do without them. This is seen in the text The Truly Married Woman in the following instances. Body Ayo keeps her husband comfortable before marriage by taking her supportive role keenly. She rises up early to prepare Ajayi his favourite cup of morning tea before serving him his breakfast. After her official marriage she changes and doesn’t do this. She instead tells him to do that by himself. ‘’Get up make yourself a cup of tea’’ (p 48) Ayo is a respectful wife to Ajayi. She does not contradict her husband and does that only when it is absolutely necessary. This state of affairs changes immediately after the wedding and might be the norm as seen in her stand on the issue of making tea. (page 43,48) When told about the visit by the three white missionaries, she makes a few amends in order to disguise their actual state. She borrows a ring, changes her dressing and that of the children and replaces the things in the house and on the walls in order to create an impression of religious family. (Page 44,45) Ayo cleverly presents herself to her husband Ajayi as an innocent naïve woman. It is not until she makes a strong argument against the beating of Oju, their san that Ajayi realizes how his wife informed is. This is one the reasons for his decision to wed her. (page 44,45) Omo for long pretends to be a good friend to Ayo until she learns of Ayo’s planned wedding. When Ayo shows her wedding dress, Omo cannot hide her true nature as she is said to be filled with bitterness and anger. She criticizes Ayo and hopes to dissuade Ayo from using the dress. This instance enable Ayo to learn what type of a person Omo is. Before this Omo had presented herself to Ayo as a good realiable kind-hearted friend who offered her wedding ring to Ayo. (page 45,46) Conclusion: People can have a double appearance as it was with the characters discussed above. (any other relevant)

Life for people living with disabilities may be made better if they are accorded all the support they may need. Referring to the short story “A Silent Song” by Leonard Kibera, write an essay to show how the lives of people living with disabilities can be made worthwhile.

Introduction Life for the people living with disabilities can be traumatising to them. However, it is the duty of everyone in the society to try and make their life better by availing them with all the support and assistance they may require. The short story a silent song tries to show the support we may offer the people living with disabilities in the following ways. (Accept any other valid introduction) Points of interpretation

• Mbane had been living in the streets all his life begging in the city where there was a lot of ruggedness and noise, with quick footsteps of people who would keep him alive with a drop of copper in his hat. His brother rescues him from the streets and brings him to his hut which felt so serene. Mbane no longer had to endure hostile cold nights and the basest of thieves he encountered in the streets.
• After being ‘rescued’ from the streets where he spent his nights on the hard pavement, he recounts how no one spoke to him for a long time. He was accustomed to speaking to himself in his thoughts. Ezekiel and his wife however speaks to him despite the fact that he could not start a conversation after getting so much used to being all alone in streets.
• At his brother Ezekiel’s home, Mbane is offered a bed on which he had tried to accustom himself to since being rescued from the hard pavement he was used to in the streets.
• Mbane was convinced that it was a glorious thing to believe, to cling to a dream of a future life. It was glorious this feeling that far far away beyond the pangs of darkness lay light, bigger and more meaningful than that which his eyes were denied. There, someone would understand and raise the innocence of his crippled life along with the chosen. It gave him hope and sang his own happy song silently to himself, secretly. His soul had a destination.
• Mbane’s brother’s wife Sarah takes care of Mbane and tries to alleviate his pain by giving him medicine. She breaks into his hut, slowly and tenderly raises his head and puts the cup to his mouth. The bitter fluid explodes down Mbane’s throat and another attack of pain tears through his stomach. Sarah then assures him that he would be alright soon and god would be with him. (Accept any other relevant well illustrated point) Conclusion
• We, as the members of society should try to alleviate the pain and suffering that the people living with disabilities might be going through by availing them the necessary need they may require. (Accept any other valid conclusion). Introduction: 2 marks Content: 12 marks Conclusion: 2 marks Language: 4 marks

Some cultural practices do not add value hence should be done away with. Show the truth in this statement basing your illustrations from Eric Ng’maryo’s Ivory Bangles.

Some traditions in our societies have lost meaning and should be done away with/abandoned as seen in the story ivory bangles by Eric Ng’maryo.(accept any other relevant introduction) T1 believe in the seer.

• The only visits the seer considered as the priest of people. (pg. 21)
• He goes the seer because of his superstitious nature. He had to consult the seer since he had noted blood specks on the liver of a goat that he had slaughtered (pg. 21) Tthis is a cultural practice that has lost meaning for its meant to drive a wedge between him and his wife.

T2. Polygamy

• his monogamous state was a concern for the aging chief who told him to get another wife (pg. 23)
• he was still the chief’s counselor much respected but much talked about because he had only one wife (pg. 22)
• this shows that the old man’s society values the tradition of polygamy and one who does not engage is considered a failure.

T3. wife beating/molestation (ritual beating)

• The were jealous of a happy wife. A woman unmolested by the husband until old age. It is not acceptable for a wife to enjoy a comfortable life with her husband in this community.
• The husband is expected to molest his wife to ensure that she doesn’t enjoy happiness. Failure to do so could lead to a disastrous outcome as the pebbles foretell wife’s death.
• The pebbles demand the old man gives his wife a through beating and sent her back to her parents. (pg. 22) This is a practice that does not add any value in the marriage.

T4. Naming of children

• naming of children is seen as an essential practice. twenty-four ivory bangles that the wife wears were gifted to her when their only son was given a name.
• the value of child naming is also seen because the old man’s grandson is named after him. The writer refers to the young boy as her husband. (pg230
• this culture is long overtaken by the modernity

CONCLUSION.

• We should embrace the change and do things that do not harm others in the name of cultural practices. (Accept any other relevant conclusion)

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Policy History Conference

Policy history conference 2025.

The Institute for Political History, the Journal of Policy History and the Arizona State University Center for American Institutions are hosting the Policy History Conference in Charlotte, North Carolina at the Hilton Charlotte Uptown hotel  from Wednesday, June 4 to Saturday, June 7, 2025.

Since 2002, the Policy History Conference has provided an interdisciplinary forum for presentations and roundtable discussions on policy history topics and recent policy history research. The conferences bring together academy scholars, independent scholars and graduate students to share their research. Many of the papers presented eventually appear in academic journals and other publications.

We are currently accepting panel and paper proposals on all topics regarding American political and policy history, political development, and comparative historical analysis. Complete sessions, including two or three presenters with chair/commentator(s), and individual paper proposals are welcome. Participants may only appear once as a presenter in the program.

The deadline for submission is December 31, 2024.

Proposals for panels and papers must be submitted online at the links below, and must include the following:

2. Institutional Affiliation(s)

3. Status (i.e. ABD, Doctoral Student, Assistant/Associate/Full Professor)

4. Email address(es)

5. Mailing Address(es)

6. Panel and paper title(s)

7. One (1) 150 word abstract of panel and papers in Microsoft Word or PDF format.

8. A description of each presenter or panel participant including educational background, major publications, awards or fellowships, also in Microsoft Word or PDF format.

Submit paper proposals here

Submit panel proposals here

College of Liberal Arts and Sciences

Fall 2024: important dates and deadlines for students.

As a student at the University of Iowa in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, please be mindful of these key dates and deadlines for the fall 2024 semester. 

Here are a few tips for staying ahead of important dates: 

• Create a calendar  or planner and mark down all the important dates and deadlines for your semester. 
• Set reminders  for yourself on your phone or computer marking upcoming deadlines. 
• Be aware of your course assignments to avoid the stress of missing a deadline. 
• Talk to your academic advisor  if you have any questions about important dates and deadlines.  

Four key dates and deadlines to keep in mind: 

Census date Monday, Sept. 9, 2024

The census date is the date for enrollment in a certain number of credits to be eligible for some scholarships and financial aid. If you do not meet the census requirement, you may have to pay more tuition or lose financial aid. Be sure to check with student financial aid for more information about your specific situation if you are changing your schedule. 

Tip: Keep track of your credit hours throughout the semester so that you do not accidentally fall below the requirement. 

Add or drop deadlines Several dates

Add/drop deadlines allow you to add or drop classes without penalty. After the first add/drop deadline, you will only be able to drop classes with a W grade, which will not affect your GPA. 

Tip : If your course does not meet for the full semester, the deadlines will vary. Be sure to check your  specific course deadline .

• Last day to drop without a W (full semester-length courses only): Monday, Sept. 9, 2024
• Last day to add without collegiate approval: Monday, Sept. 9, 2024
• Last day to drop (full semester-length courses only): Monday, Nov. 18, 2024
• Last day to withdraw from the entire spring 2024 semester: Monday, Nov. 18, 2024

Winter and spring registration  Nov. 11-Dec. 6.

It’s important to register for next semester’s classes as soon as you are eligible to ensure you get the classes you need for graduation.

Tip : Schedule an appointment with your advisor about a month before registration to plan your schedule. If you get notified about a registration hold, clear it as soon as possible.

• Meet with your academic advisor to be cleared for registration, if necessary 
• Spring 2025 schedule builder open: Monday, Sept. 30, 2024
• Early registration for winter begins: Monday, Nov. 11-Friday, Dec. 6, 2024
• Early registration for spring begins: Monday, Nov. 11-Friday, Dec. 6, 2024

Final exams  Dec. 16-20, 2024

Final exams are held at the end of each semester. They are typically not during your normal course meeting time. Be sure to check your syllabus.

Tip : Start studying for your final exams early! This will help you to avoid feeling overwhelmed and stressed during finals week.

• Last day of class before final exams: Friday, Dec. 13, 2024
• Final Exam Week: Dec. 16-20, 2024

Other important deadlines

Tip : Start working on your scholarship and graduate school applications early. This will give you plenty of time to gather all of the required materials and proofread your essays.

• Deadline to apply for Fall 2024 graduation: Friday, Oct. 4, 2024
• Midterm reports: Friday, Oct. 25, 2024
• Fall break: Nov. 25-29, 2024
• CLAS Commencement: Sunday, Dec. 22, 2024
• Fall grades posted: Monday, Dec. 30, 2024

In addition to these general university and college deadlines, there are other important dates and deadlines specific to your classes or program of study. Be sure to check your syllabi and keep an eye on your uiowa e-mail.

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I was battling cancer while starring on Broadway and no one knew

I knew I wanted to be on Broadway since age 6, when I saw my first musical. Growing up, that goal informed almost every decision I made: the kind of music I listened to, the books I read, and even where I went to college. After graduating, I moved to New York City to pursue this dream.

That same year I tested positive for the BRCA1 gene . The BRCA1 mutation means you have a 50% chance of developing breast cancer by age 70, and also a higher risk of other cancers, like ovarian cancer , according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention . I got tested because my mother had recently survived her second battle with breast cancer, and my grandmother and her sister both died of ovarian cancer. When the results came back positive, I was disappointed and sad, but I adapted my lifestyle accordingly. I got screened regularly. I started exercising, and changed my diet to limit my risk. Genetically, I couldn’t do much. Epigenetically, I did everything in my power to prevent the gene from presenting itself. 

Meanwhile, I worked. Eventually I made my Broadway debut at the age of 29. It was short-lived, but then I got a role on “The Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt” on Netflix, where I remained for the next seven years. All the while, I was maintaining the healthy habits I’d established in the wake of testing positive for the BRCA1 gene, with one exception: My doctors had started advising me, as I got older, to remove my fallopian tubes, but I always came up with excuses to put the surgery off. 

When “Kimmy” was over, I realized just how much I missed the stage. As luck would have it I was soon asked to join the cast of a new musical adaptation of “The Great Gatsby” on Broadway as Myrtle Wilson. For those who haven’t read the book in a while (or ever, as was my case, though I still somehow managed to graduate high school), Myrtle is married to the poor gas station owner and dreams of a better life with Tom Buchanan. In the musical, Myrtle gets a big, splashy, musical comedy number in Act 1 and a gut-wrenching 11 o’clock ballad in Act 2. It was every Broadway fantasy I had ever dreamed of. The show was already getting a lot of attention and it hadn’t even opened.

But a month or so before rehearsals began, my doctors again recommended I go through with removing my fallopian tubes. With Broadway rehearsals starting soon, and a grueling show schedule ahead of me, I decided to just go for it.  I had the procedure 10 days before rehearsals started. Now, I thought, I could put it out of my head.

Two weeks later, I was at home practicing my lines when the phone rang. It was my doctor. They had found cancer in one of my fallopian tubes. Thankfully, it was caught early, but the standard of care was an immediate full hysterectomy, oophorectomy, and six rounds of chemotherapy every three weeks. I couldn’t believe what he was telling me. After I could compose myself, I nervously asked, “Can I still do ‘Gatsby’?”

We got out our calendars. “Gatsby” was to rehearse for two more weeks before a four-week “previews” period — a grueling process where the cast rehearses changes to the show by day and performs them for an audience that evening. Then, the big opening night. I knew I had three days off soon, so I arranged to have the surgery then, and if the pathology reports came back clean, the doctors could let me delay starting chemo until after opening night.

I went into rehearsal and didn’t tell anyone. Mostly because I was in denial. If I said it out loud, it would be true. That I have cancer. That I am rehearsing a Broadway show while being treated for cancer. Or maybe I thought someone would try and take my dream away from me.

I went into rehearsal the next morning and didn’t tell anyone. Mostly because I was in denial. If I said it out loud, it would be true. That I have cancer. That I am rehearsing a Broadway show while being treated for cancer. Or maybe I thought someone would try and take my dream away from me. Or people might treat me differently. Best to keep it to myself until absolutely necessary, I thought. Besides, the stress of creating a new Broadway show was already so palpable in the room.

I found myself living a secret double life. In the early mornings I would meet with doctors, get blood work done and then run down the street to Broadway rehearsals, stashing my hospital bracelets along the way. Two weeks after my diagnoses, I secretly got a full hysterectomy, oophorectomy and cervix removal. Four days after that, I was on stage singing and dancing in full costumes and wigs like nothing had happened. (For the record, I do not recommend this.) I hid my scars with compression garments underneath my costumes, and I hid my pain too.

As an actor opening a new Broadway show, my job was to do things like learn a whole new set of lyrics a few hours before being expected to perform them flawlessly in front of a sold-out audience. As a secret cancer patient, I had to experience one of my first hot flashes alone on stage while 1,400 people watched. I would never know if the sensations I was feeling were just nerves, a side effect of a new medication, or both. I never knew if I was crying on stage because that’s what my character would do or because I was sad knowing I would lose my eyelashes and eyebrows soon.

Thankfully, two weeks into previews, the doctors called to say the pathology reports came back clean and I could perform on opening night. I was absolutely elated. Still, as my cast and crew looked for opening night outfits, I secretly looked for wigs and scarves in case I needed them. As people were telling their friends and family about this new Broadway show they were in, I was telling friends and family about what to expect in the next coming months. My colleagues met with stylists; I met with oncologists.

Opening night finally arrived. Minutes before the show was about to start, I finally found a moment to be by myself in my dressing room. I started to sob uncontrollably. I had been so focused on getting to this night, I don’t think I had ever fully allowed myself to acknowledge all I had been going through. But the show must go on. So I pulled myself together, put my costume on, circled up with my cast backstage for our pre-show ritual, and the curtains opened.

I walked to center stage at the end of Act 2 to sing my big solo. I was alone singing on a Broadway stage, just like I had always dreamed about. I’ve heard the journey of cancer described as incredibly lonely, and I’ve found that to be true. No matter how many people I have in my corner (and I have so many wonderful people), no matter how many people applaud for me or greet me at the stage door, no matter how many incredible cast members and crew surround me, this was ultimately something I had to do by myself.

And as I stood by myself on stage, just a spotlight on me and my secret hiding in plain sight, whatever I was feeling earlier melted away and was replaced with pride.

The next week, I told my cast the truth. In the months to come, I relied heavily on understudies until I took a leave of absence to finish out treatments. Drugs have thankfully come a long way in the past 10 years, and, while my experience wasn’t fun, it was not even close to what the women in my family had to go through. I even got to keep 50% of my hair.

I’m also comforted by the fact that soon I’ll be back on stage. And this time, I know I’ll be even stronger.

Sara Chase is a Broadway actor living in New York City. She is best known for playing Cyndee Pokorny on Tina Fey’s Emmy-nominated hit Netflix series, "Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt," and "Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt: The Interactive Special." Follow her on Instagram @sarachase_.

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I have a painful condition known as the ‘suicide disease.’ This is how I got my life back

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My lung collapsed 6 times before I was finally diagnosed with a rare form of endometriosis

The College Essay Is Dead

Nobody is prepared for how AI will transform academia.

Suppose you are a professor of pedagogy, and you assign an essay on learning styles. A student hands in an essay with the following opening paragraph:

The construct of “learning styles” is problematic because it fails to account for the processes through which learning styles are shaped. Some students might develop a particular learning style because they have had particular experiences. Others might develop a particular learning style by trying to accommodate to a learning environment that was not well suited to their learning needs. Ultimately, we need to understand the interactions among learning styles and environmental and personal factors, and how these shape how we learn and the kinds of learning we experience.

Pass or fail? A- or B+? And how would your grade change if you knew a human student hadn’t written it at all? Because Mike Sharples, a professor in the U.K., used GPT-3, a large language model from OpenAI that automatically generates text from a prompt, to write it. (The whole essay, which Sharples considered graduate-level, is available, complete with references, here .) Personally, I lean toward a B+. The passage reads like filler, but so do most student essays.

Sharples’s intent was to urge educators to “rethink teaching and assessment” in light of the technology, which he said “could become a gift for student cheats, or a powerful teaching assistant, or a tool for creativity.” Essay generation is neither theoretical nor futuristic at this point. In May, a student in New Zealand confessed to using AI to write their papers, justifying it as a tool like Grammarly or spell-check: ​​“I have the knowledge, I have the lived experience, I’m a good student, I go to all the tutorials and I go to all the lectures and I read everything we have to read but I kind of felt I was being penalised because I don’t write eloquently and I didn’t feel that was right,” they told a student paper in Christchurch. They don’t feel like they’re cheating, because the student guidelines at their university state only that you’re not allowed to get somebody else to do your work for you. GPT-3 isn’t “somebody else”—it’s a program.

The world of generative AI is progressing furiously. Last week, OpenAI released an advanced chatbot named ChatGPT that has spawned a new wave of marveling and hand-wringing , plus an upgrade to GPT-3 that allows for complex rhyming poetry; Google previewed new applications last month that will allow people to describe concepts in text and see them rendered as images; and the creative-AI firm Jasper received a $1.5 billion valuation in October. It still takes a little initiative for a kid to find a text generator, but not for long.

The essay, in particular the undergraduate essay, has been the center of humanistic pedagogy for generations. It is the way we teach children how to research, think, and write. That entire tradition is about to be disrupted from the ground up. Kevin Bryan, an associate professor at the University of Toronto, tweeted in astonishment about OpenAI’s new chatbot last week: “You can no longer give take-home exams/homework … Even on specific questions that involve combining knowledge across domains, the OpenAI chat is frankly better than the average MBA at this point. It is frankly amazing.” Neither the engineers building the linguistic tech nor the educators who will encounter the resulting language are prepared for the fallout.

A chasm has existed between humanists and technologists for a long time. In the 1950s, C. P. Snow gave his famous lecture, later the essay “The Two Cultures,” describing the humanistic and scientific communities as tribes losing contact with each other. “Literary intellectuals at one pole—at the other scientists,” Snow wrote. “Between the two a gulf of mutual incomprehension—sometimes (particularly among the young) hostility and dislike, but most of all lack of understanding. They have a curious distorted image of each other.” Snow’s argument was a plea for a kind of intellectual cosmopolitanism: Literary people were missing the essential insights of the laws of thermodynamics, and scientific people were ignoring the glories of Shakespeare and Dickens.

The rupture that Snow identified has only deepened. In the modern tech world, the value of a humanistic education shows up in evidence of its absence. Sam Bankman-Fried, the disgraced founder of the crypto exchange FTX who recently lost his $16 billion fortune in a few days , is a famously proud illiterate. “I would never read a book,” he once told an interviewer . “I don’t want to say no book is ever worth reading, but I actually do believe something pretty close to that.” Elon Musk and Twitter are another excellent case in point. It’s painful and extraordinary to watch the ham-fisted way a brilliant engineering mind like Musk deals with even relatively simple literary concepts such as parody and satire. He obviously has never thought about them before. He probably didn’t imagine there was much to think about.

The extraordinary ignorance on questions of society and history displayed by the men and women reshaping society and history has been the defining feature of the social-media era. Apparently, Mark Zuckerberg has read a great deal about Caesar Augustus , but I wish he’d read about the regulation of the pamphlet press in 17th-century Europe. It might have spared America the annihilation of social trust .

These failures don’t derive from mean-spiritedness or even greed, but from a willful obliviousness. The engineers do not recognize that humanistic questions—like, say, hermeneutics or the historical contingency of freedom of speech or the genealogy of morality—are real questions with real consequences. Everybody is entitled to their opinion about politics and culture, it’s true, but an opinion is different from a grounded understanding. The most direct path to catastrophe is to treat complex problems as if they’re obvious to everyone. You can lose billions of dollars pretty quickly that way.

As the technologists have ignored humanistic questions to their peril, the humanists have greeted the technological revolutions of the past 50 years by committing soft suicide. As of 2017, the number of English majors had nearly halved since the 1990s. History enrollments have declined by 45 percent since 2007 alone. Needless to say, humanists’ understanding of technology is partial at best. The state of digital humanities is always several categories of obsolescence behind, which is inevitable. (Nobody expects them to teach via Instagram Stories.) But more crucially, the humanities have not fundamentally changed their approach in decades, despite technology altering the entire world around them. They are still exploding meta-narratives like it’s 1979, an exercise in self-defeat.

Read: The humanities are in crisis

Contemporary academia engages, more or less permanently, in self-critique on any and every front it can imagine. In a tech-centered world, language matters, voice and style matter, the study of eloquence matters, history matters, ethical systems matter. But the situation requires humanists to explain why they matter, not constantly undermine their own intellectual foundations. The humanities promise students a journey to an irrelevant, self-consuming future; then they wonder why their enrollments are collapsing. Is it any surprise that nearly half of humanities graduates regret their choice of major ?

The case for the value of humanities in a technologically determined world has been made before. Steve Jobs always credited a significant part of Apple’s success to his time as a dropout hanger-on at Reed College, where he fooled around with Shakespeare and modern dance, along with the famous calligraphy class that provided the aesthetic basis for the Mac’s design. “A lot of people in our industry haven’t had very diverse experiences. So they don’t have enough dots to connect, and they end up with very linear solutions without a broad perspective on the problem,” Jobs said . “The broader one’s understanding of the human experience, the better design we will have.” Apple is a humanistic tech company. It’s also the largest company in the world.

Despite the clear value of a humanistic education, its decline continues. Over the past 10 years, STEM has triumphed, and the humanities have collapsed . The number of students enrolled in computer science is now nearly the same as the number of students enrolled in all of the humanities combined.

And now there’s GPT-3. Natural-language processing presents the academic humanities with a whole series of unprecedented problems. Practical matters are at stake: Humanities departments judge their undergraduate students on the basis of their essays. They give Ph.D.s on the basis of a dissertation’s composition. What happens when both processes can be significantly automated? Going by my experience as a former Shakespeare professor, I figure it will take 10 years for academia to face this new reality: two years for the students to figure out the tech, three more years for the professors to recognize that students are using the tech, and then five years for university administrators to decide what, if anything, to do about it. Teachers are already some of the most overworked, underpaid people in the world. They are already dealing with a humanities in crisis. And now this. I feel for them.

And yet, despite the drastic divide of the moment, natural-language processing is going to force engineers and humanists together. They are going to need each other despite everything. Computer scientists will require basic, systematic education in general humanism: The philosophy of language, sociology, history, and ethics are not amusing questions of theoretical speculation anymore. They will be essential in determining the ethical and creative use of chatbots, to take only an obvious example.

The humanists will need to understand natural-language processing because it’s the future of language, but also because there is more than just the possibility of disruption here. Natural-language processing can throw light on a huge number of scholarly problems. It is going to clarify matters of attribution and literary dating that no system ever devised will approach; the parameters in large language models are much more sophisticated than the current systems used to determine which plays Shakespeare wrote, for example . It may even allow for certain types of restorations, filling the gaps in damaged texts by means of text-prediction models. It will reformulate questions of literary style and philology; if you can teach a machine to write like Samuel Taylor Coleridge, that machine must be able to inform you, in some way, about how Samuel Taylor Coleridge wrote.

The connection between humanism and technology will require people and institutions with a breadth of vision and a commitment to interests that transcend their field. Before that space for collaboration can exist, both sides will have to take the most difficult leaps for highly educated people: Understand that they need the other side, and admit their basic ignorance. But that’s always been the beginning of wisdom, no matter what technological era we happen to inhabit.

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How to Write Dates Correctly (With Examples)

Writing dates can seem straightforward at times and confounding at others. This complexity in writing dates arises due to the different formats used worldwide. Many authors also get confused about how to write them using commas. Understanding the established standards and then applying them consistently and clearly are the keys to conquering this difficulty with dates.

Continue reading to learn how to format dates in American English.

Different methods for writing dates

There are several methods for writing dates that are accepted internationally.

Follow dialectical standards

• When using American English, the month should precede the day. First, write the month, then the day, and then the year. Examples are:
• September 10
• When using American English, separate the day and the year using a comma . If you are including the weekday, place a comma after it as well. A comma is not required if you are using British English. Examples are:
• September 10, 2022
• September tenth, 2022
• Saturday , September 10, 2022
• When using British English, the day should precede the month. This system is followed in many nations, including the UK and Australia. First, write the day, then the month, and then the year. Examples are:
• 10th September
• 10 September 2022
• Saturday the 10th of September 2022.
• When using British English, use “of” and “the.” The “of” and “the” should precede the month and day, respectively. It is also crucial to use them both together. Examples are:
• The 10th of September
• Saturday the tenth of September
• When using British English, the day should be followed by ordinal indicators. Use one ordinal indicator like -st, -th, -nd, or -rd that matches the suffix . Though not commonly followed, this format is still accepted in American English. Examples are:
• The 21st of September
• The 14th of September
• The 2nd of September
• The 3rd of September
• When writing for an international audience, use the International Standard to prevent confusion. In this format, first write the year, then the month, and then the day. Commas are not used and all four digits of the year are written. Examples are:
• 2022 September 10

Use different degrees of scope and formality

• When writing extremely formal invitations, be sure to spell the year, month, and day. The day should be written first even when you are using American English. This format is used for official certificates like diplomas and documents with the highest formalities, including wedding invitations. It is used to show deference and courtesy to the occasion and the reader.
• We request the presence of you and your family on the tenth of September in the year three thousand and thirty.
• When communicating in a semi-formal or slightly formal setting, spell only the month out. It is appropriate to use digits for the year and the day. This format is prevalent in academic writing. There is also a slight variation in the writing style depending on whether you use American or British English.
• For American English: “Queen Elizabeth II ascended the English throne on June 2, 1953.” or “Queen Elizabeth II ascended the English throne in June 1953.”
• For British English: “Queen Elizabeth II ascended the English throne on 2 June 1953.” or “Queen Elizabeth II ascended the English throne on 2nd of June 1953.”
• Use numerals when writing dates on records and documents. This format is usually followed for memos, impersonal business records like invoices or a piece of communication, or even on lecture notes. This is done to show when the document was made or when it is due. Use all numerals when filling out forms and keeping records. Points to note in this format:
• When writing greeting cards, use the MM/DD/YY format and write the date at the top. This will help the receiver know when the card was written. Example: 09/10/22.
• The YYYY-MM-DD pattern is usually used in museum databases to indicate the date an artifact was obtained. Example: 2022-09-10.
• When filling out government forms, use the MM-DD-YYYY format. Example: 09-10-2022.

Format for numerical dates

• Separate the numerals indicating the day, month, and year using hyphens or slashes. For a more elegant look, bullets or periods can also be used. Underscores are also used in some cases. Always use hyphens when writing in an international format. When using American English, the date September 10, 1992, can be written as:
• In international standards, it is written as 1992-10-09
• A writer can optionally add “0” when the day or month is a single-digit number. Although it is frequently necessary on forms, many forgo it in daily informal settings. Using this format will ensure that the numerical dates all have equal lengths and can be accurately sorted. Example:
• June fourth, 2018 can be written as 06/04/18 or 6/4/18. This makes its length similar to that of 12/12/18.
• When a form shows “MM-DD-YYYY” or “MM-DD-YY” format, always use numerals. This will also show the order in which to write the date. The number of “M”, “D”, and “Y” indicates the number of digits to be filled in. Example:
• “MM-DD-YYYY” can be filled in as 09-10-1992 and “MM-DD-YY” as 09-10-92.

Writing centuries

Centuries are written as plurals and when written in words they are written with all lowercase letters. Do not use apostrophes when writing centuries. Examples are:

• Women wore tailored suit dresses in the early 1900s.
• Women wore tailored suit dresses in the nineteen hundreds.
• Women wore tailored suit dresses in the twentieth century.

Writing decades

Apostrophes should be used before and after two-digit numbers used to represent decades, such as the ’90s. You can either write it as the 1990s or simply the nineties. Examples are:

• In the 90s, rock music was very popular.
• In the nineties, rock music was very popular.

Should “in” or “on” be used when writing dates ?

When referring to an exact day, write the date using “on.” When referring to the year or the month, use “in.”

I am flying to New York on September 10, 2022.

The cafe will cease operations in September 2022.

How are dates written in technical or official documents?

When writing technical or official documents, always follow international standards rather than American or British English. This will make the document understandable to people belonging to different countries.

• Grammarly – How to Write Dates Correctly in English
• Cambridge dictionary – Dates
• The Editor’s Manual – Dates: How to Write Correctly
• LanguageTool – How to Write the Date

Inside this article

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About the author

Dalia Y.: Dalia is an English Major and linguistics expert with an additional degree in Psychology. Dalia has featured articles on Forbes, Inc, Fast Company, Grammarly, and many more. She covers English, ESL, and all things grammar on GrammarBrain.

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We invite teenagers to tell a true story about a meaningful life experience in just 100 words. Contest dates: Nov. 6 to Dec. 4, 2024.

By The Learning Network

Illustrations from Modern Love’s Tiny Love Stories , the inspiration for this contest.

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• Resources for Teachers and Students
• Frequently Asked Questions
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