Raveena Nair: Fashion Pioneering

Though the literal Western Expansion may have ended in the 1890s, the pioneering for fashion has continued on past the 1890s. Fashion trends tend to come and go, some are born and some are reused. We have come along way with fashion: from The Victorian Era till the 21 Century, from no skin showing at all to short shorts and crop tops. There has definitely been a fashion evolution throughout the centuries and even decades. 

Older fashion trends tend to keep coming back in a more modified style, for example crop tops were an 80s fashion trend but they have come back into the modern fashion world. Flared pants during the Hippie Era is another trend coming back into style, along with many others. Fashion is like a cycle, the style will come, then go, then come back again.

Not only has this evolution struck daily fashion, but also in  swimwear. Before the 1960s belly baring swimsuits were not a thing, no one wore them. Some wore two piece swim suits while others wore one piece, but bikinis were not worn. However, during 1960s it became more common to wear these kinds of swimsuits, and by the 1970’s people of all ages were wearing them. With one simple change in a style, a whole new fashion trend was born; which in reality was how all of the fashion trends were born.

The fashion industry has also tied the world together, due to companies going global with their products: Zara, H&M, Top Shop, and many more. The merging of cultures has also influenced the styles of the fashion world, and will only continue on doing so.

Fashion is a big part of culture, it can represent ones personality, to where or how one lives, to if they are more modern or more traditional. There are many styles in the future that are going to be born or modified from its original form in order to work with the modern society. Fashion is a element in society that will always be pioneered.

Technology, US Made

       

          The movement of going west, to Americans, is like a discovery toward an unknown and new world. During the progress, people are eager to push the boundaries so that they can be the so called "frontiers." Nowadays, the US still plays a role as a "frontier" in the technology area because US has been leading the innovative technology since the last century. As always, new technology is created

to serve people's lives more effectively and give people benefits which are unprecedented in the human history.

         After World War I, the boosting American economy gave people a chance to have more leisure personal time. Henry Ford, as the first person who invented the first car--Model T, which dramatically altered people's lives into a more efficient way thanks to faster and easier transportation. To Henry Ford, he "was determined to build a simple, reliable and affordable car; a

car the average American worker could afford." During that year, although a few manufactures were resembling automobiles to people, all those automobiles seemed to be luxuries, which only people with tons of money and authority could afford them. As a result Henry Ford began to develop a brand new type of car, which lower the price of the cars significantly: the price lowered down to $575.00, which made it possible for much more ordinary people afford those nice cars with reasonable price. 

           What else, it is not hard to realize that the modern society has already become a world of "communication." The "communication" here doesn't  communicate by letters, which only people use that in ancient time, but to communicate by cell phones, which can let people express their feelings or thoughts to every corner of the world in just a second. Just imagine, it would take three months for a letter to be delivered from China to USA; however, nowadays, cell phone makes it possible to "reach" anyone in no second. Thus, the invention of cell phone gives us so many benefits that we could not list them one by one. Thanks to the American cell phone inventor: Martin Cooper, who

made the first cell phone in human history on April 3rd, 1973. "Cooper stood near a 900 MHz base station on Sixth Avenue, between 53rd and 54th Streets, in New York City and placed a call to the headquarters of Bell Labs in New Jersey," and he made the first phone call ever. This historic phone call symbolize the great step in the development of mobile technology. Gradually, many more brands of cell phones like Apple or Samsung play important roles in people's daily lives since they have more innovative functions which create a convenient way of living. 

            Last but not least, another great technology invention can be the creation of the tractor, which helps farmers to have much more production of crops so that people would not suffer starving any more. In early nineteenth century, people simply harvested the crops and cottons by themselves, which means it was super inefficiency, and this was the main reason caused why so many Americans could not get enough food. However, everything started to change when John Froelich, an American farmer, invented the first engine powered tractor in 1868. Then, the first open gear tractor was invented in 1912, which "allowed for a much better turning radius and much greater maneuverability."

The quantity of harvest, since then, grew significantly in the following years. Presently, people probably do not realize the importance of trator that much, but I could say that if one day there is no more trator existed, sixty percent of people will die from hunger! 

         In a nutshell, we should admire those people who invented these great inventions because people's lives got improved a lot by them. Also, this phenomenon, which almost always US inventors create those magnificent inventions, explicitly shows that US, as the No.1 country in the current world, still plays a role of "frontier" in technology area.

Madalena Almanza: Feeding American Heroes

European american settlers pushed west into undiscovered and untainted lands to create an improved lifestyle much like American nutritionists have pushed the boundaries of food to improve our American heroes ability to preform their jobs and make a better life for them. New methods of feeding our american heroes, including soldiers and astronauts have shaped American history for the better.

Can meat unify an army? This question proved to be yes during the second world war when over 150 million pounds of spam had been shipped and served sometimes three times a day by the US military. As Bruce Heydt puts it, "they had shared the danger of combat and the ever-present threat of more Spam." Spam consists of pork shoulder, ham, salt, water, potato starch, sugar, and sodium nitrite and was introduced into the war for it's affordability, long self-life, and easily transportable. A can of spam provided around 1054 calories and 44 grams of protein, giving a soldier a meal with little hassle, minimal cost, and lots of energy to protect their country (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spam_(food)). Along with its practical use, Spam also provided soldiers with a lot of laughter as well, lighting up the war scene. Referred to as "mystery meat", Spam to this day remains part of urban legends and jokes. 

 "An army is a big thing and it takes a great many eatables and not a few drinkables to carry it along" said a Union Officer in October of 1863. The US army ration system went through many revisions to adapt to the conditions of the war and give it's soldiers the best they could. Chocolate is not something people would normally think of as part of a fighting solider diet but military chocolate has been a part of the ration system since 1937 and used to give soldiers a quick energy boost and a moral boost as well. These chocolate bars are easy to carry and could withstand high temperatures . Along with the practical, military chocolate provided comfort to the American soldier because it was as if they were home eating regular Hershey's chocolate bar in their regular everyday life, not in combat away from home. The first chocolate bar that was made could withstand 120°F and three of these bars provided a soldier with 1,800 calories. Modern day military chocolate has been improved to withstand 140°F and the taste has become more appealing as well (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_military_chocolate). 

Although you may think that astronauts don't expend a lot of energy sitting in a shuttle up in space, they do and the food they eat has to not only provided a balanced nutrition but also be easy and safe to store, prepare, and consume in space with limited tools. Americans have continued to innovate and create new foods that are easy and accessible and the most extreme example of this is space food. In earlier space missions, like the Project Mercury (1959-1963), Astronauts were having to try and eat weightless food, squeeze their food from tubes, and eat their food from freeze-dried powder forms. Obviously they found this very unappetizing and improvements quickly came. Foods and drinks started to fly up dehydrated and the only thing astronauts had to do was add water and they can enjoy up to 70 different meal options. One of the most interesting inventions was food in cube form. In fact, the first food that was eaten on the moon was a bacon cube. The comfort of astronauts who are far, far away from home is made better with better food and enhances their ability to do their job.

Food has a bigger impact on our lives than we realize and a big factor of American success compared to others in the world has been because of how we have feed our American heroes. In order to preform the best they can, American heroes, like soldiers and astronauts, need energy and food that not only sustains them but can adapt well to their environments.      

Kyla Scott   The Fight For Our Planet

Our earth is a beautiful place and we as a whole have become much more aware of our planet as time has gone on. The U.S. in particular has broken all kinds of ground in renewable energy and easier transportation, but our neglect up to this point has caused major harm to our earth. We see these negative affects in biodiversity, mass extinctions and the most famous one global warming. We as an American people are giving a hard shove towards disaster with simply not wanting to change.

 While the U.S. is a major power and has created all kinds of savvy ways to improve the environment we are not able to touch those frontiers because we are stuck in our way of life. Americans are major consumers used to all the trappings of life. While developing countries can build an environmental friendly society from the ground up we have to replace our old way of life, and as the saying goes it is hard to teach an old dog new tricks. I belive that we the people do want to improve our environment, but there are plenty of the 1% who are just a little to greedy to change.

The U. S. by itself, of course, is not the main cause for all of the problems we have experienced in past years. China has takes the cake for the country with the worst smog pollution. Smog in China is so bad that the Chinese government has begun to take drastic measures to save the Chinese lung. The government has started to shoot jets of water 2000 feet into the air to dispel smog, but to know avail. While Americans are far from the idea of choking when you walk outside with our current life styles we are well on the way to self destruction. The release of sulfur dioxide into our air by industry is

almost unreal. That's right America smokestacks are killing our air forcing plants to work 3x as hard to create the air we breath. We have tried to put our best foot forward with innovative new energy supplies besides the terrible energy plants, such as: solar panels, and wind turbines, but it is just not enough. Energy plants still produce over 70% of our electricity off of coal and fossil fuels, causing some bad breathing problems for America. At times our situations seems terrible, and some times it is. America has destroyed enough of our forest to have to come to a ultimatum. In America we use this method of cutting down trees and it is called clear-cutting. We try to stay above the fray but we have fallen short. While there is such thing as re-planting trees once they have been cut down we do not always practice what we preach. Soil erosion is also caused by clear cutting a large forest of trees. In Texas we all know what soil erosion cause, mud slides when it actually decides to rain and those aren't very good either. Of course, again America is not the worse when it comes to bad behavior, in China they do not even have air quality laws, in India they do not have a set up system of trash pick-up, and in Africa the government is just to care about their people much less their environment.

I hope in the near future the world as a whole comes to a head and realizes we can't breath money, so when all the trees are gone we won't, we can't make soil as rich as the Amazon so when the Amazon is gone so will over 1/3 of the worlds species, and we won't survive on the surface of the earth without the Ozone layer so when it is gone we will go with it. While America has broken many innovative frontiers in other fields we are forgetting the one field that matters our earth.

 

Our Flawed Prison System

     Social justice frontiers in America are not being challenged, especially when it comes to our incarceration system. Since 1970, prison populations have been growing disproportionally total population growth and have now increased by 700%. Substandard medical care, racial profiling, and prison privatization all contribute to a deteriorated and unjust prison system.

   In May of this year, prisoner Regan Clarine was given a C-section during which "[T]hey decided to use sugar" as an antibiotic (the way they did in the early 1900s, when they still used heroin to treat children's coughs). Clarine stated that "[t]hey would open it and pour it inside [the wound] and put gauze over and tape it up. And I had to do that for like three weeks." The head of the Arizona prison system responded by advising we "take [inmates' stories] with a grain of salt or in the case of the hospital, with maybe a grain of sugar."

   In 2011, just under half of the 1.5 million drug arrests were for marijuana possession, and an FBI report estimated that one marijuana-related arrest was made every 42 seconds that year. While a National Household Survey on Drug Abuse and Health that spanned from 2001-2010 found that more whites than blacks have ever even used marijuana, arrest rates for marijuana possession were shown to be dramatically higher for blacks than whites. This, among other stories, is evidence of an inherently racist criminal justice system.
     At the beginning of the 20th century, it was outlawed for private corporations to run prisons. However, many prisons are now run by private companies. A for-profit prison model is detrimental to any hope of fair treatment towards prisoners. Private prisons and the neglectful way they are run has resulted in maggots in prisoners' food, a baby girl being born into a toilet, and a lot of violent outbreak.
     Prisons in the U.S have done very little that could be considered cutting-edge. Our capitalist mindset, as old as the nation itself, has infiltrated the prison system through privatization, reducing real people to their monetary cost (another familiar pattern of American economics). Prisons are not only treating prisoners unjustly, but their arrest rates have done very little in the way of even improving public safety. One cannot claim that America is challenging frontiers in prison management without facing a huge amount of evidence to the contrary.

Annalise Plater: America's Stylin' Manifest

Under "Manifest Destiny," the early settlers had to spread their ideals "in order to free people in the Western Hemisphere from European monarchies and to uplift 'less civilized' societies" (http://www.historynet.com/westward-expansion). Just as the early settlers spread their American values westward, Americans circulate their fashion identity worldwide.

Recently, bloggers from the US have spread American fashion by making exclusive events like New York Fashion Week more accessible to the public. In an interview from September, five bloggers discussed the changes in Fashion Week since blogs and online magazines have become popular in the fashion world. Although there were 264 shows in New York's 2011 fashion week, the event is not public; blogs, however, have made Fashion Week more accessible and "intimate" for their readers. With the publicity from blogs, New York Fashion Week remains the leader with London, Milan, and Paris close behind in September every year.

Similar to blogs, Pinterest has brought attention to the fashion world in an innovative way, allowing for American fashion influence to spread through technology. Pinterest is a site where you can organize and share images. These images called "pins" can be categorized on different boards. These boards do not have to be about fashion, but since 80% of the 70 million users are women, many encompass aspects of women's fashion. When a user pins an image, the image shows up on all of his/her followers' feeds, giving them an opportunity to pin the same image. This process spreads miscellaneous photos from the runway, fashion blogs, or boutiques across the country to people all over the world.   

America's first break in the fashion world came shortly after the expansion west had ended; born in America, Vogue magazine is a symbol of the spread of fashion worldwide. Due to its prominence most people have read or at least heard of the lifestyle and fashion magazine Vogue. Like most magazines that started in the 1890s, Vogue highlighted women's fashion, allowing American women an identity in fashion. When Vogue began printing globally, it not only spread the US's credibility in fashion, but the identity that women gained through magazines. Today, the liberation that comes with Vogue is still recognized: "Recent Vogue launches in China and India became important events in these countries. The arrival of Vogue was interpreted as a sign of progress, liberation and enlightenment of women" (https://condenast.ru/en/portfolio/magazines/vogue/in-world/).

Although the early Manifest Destiny spread many American ideals in a morally questionable way, the spread of American fashion influence may have an overall positive effect on women's liberty worldwide.

Matthew Toming: Advances of Sports Medicine in America

     The US is still a frontier-busting nation when it comes to sports because the movements made over the years to increase athletes safety and awareness have advanced tremendously. Pushing boundaries and taking risks has gotten sports medicine where it is today.
Concussions are a primary focus of trainers around the country because they are a very serious injury and long term effects can be disastrous. In my Interview with St. Stephens athletic trainer  Elizabeth Bird, she defined a concussion: "A concussion is a result in changes on the cellular level of the brain from a blow to the head either direct or indirect that produces symptoms and sometimes alteration in mental status"(Elizabeth Bird). Elizabeth went on to explain that new ways to prevent and detect concussions are growing rapidly. The LSU football program has recently given their players  special mouth guards which can detect how hard a hit is and if a certain hit might have caused a concussion. The St. Stephens football team, as well as other football programs across the country, are trying a new method to prevent concussions by using guardian caps. These caps serve as an extra layer around the helmet to limit how severe a hit can be to the head.  Sports medicine has become very commonly known for giving cortisone injections to athletes to decrease swelling and help them be able to preform at a high level, even when injured. A teammate of mine was very suggestive towards this form of treatment: "It really helped me not feel any pain in my hip, and when I played the injury did not prevent me from going my hardest"(Trevor Bell). This form of treatment helps athletes play on injuries and makes them feel better. 
      Even though America has pushed the frontier in sports medicine and has made some great discoveries, they have showed lack in being able to push forward as well. The most dangerous sport in the world is basketball because there is so much cutting and pivoting involved. The fact is that even though knowledge and technology have improved over the years, athletes who play basketball have still come to sustain bad knee and ankle injuries at a very rapid rate.           In my post, I conclude that Americans love playing sports, as it is a necessity in many peoples lives. America has made this more enjoyable by pushing the frontier and making many new discoveries.