Removal of the Cherokee Essay - 1065 Words

In The Cherokee Removal, Perdue and Green show the trials that the Cherokee faced in the years from 1700 to 1840. This book shows how the Americans tried to remove these Indians from the southeastern part of the United States. The Cherokees tried to overcome the attempts of removal, but finally in 1838, they were removed from the area. nbsp;nbsp;nbsp;nbsp;nbsp;The Cherokees lived in the valleys of rivers that drained the southern Appalachians (Perdue, 1). The British first came into Cherokee country in 1700. They came for two major reasons: deerskins and war captives. They brought guns and ammunition, metal knives, hoes, hatchets, fabrics, kettles, rum, and trinkets. They took the Cherokee and made them slaves. The British built two†¦show more content†¦Knox hoped to end the fighting between the Cherokees and the Americans that was caused by expansion. Knox, along with George Washington, believed that the Indians were uncivilized. However, this lack of civilization was cultural, not racial. They thought that the Cherokees could become civilized if they were taught how to become civilized. They also believed that the United States should buy the land that the settlers illegally took from the Indians, and strictly obstruct further encroachment. This new system was called the Treaty of Holston (Perdue 11). It went into effect in July 1791. This treaty called for the civilization of the Indians. The civilization program was a major part of this new treaty. nbsp;nbsp;nbsp;nbsp;nbsp;The Cherokee culture went through some drastic changes. Schools were set up to instruct the Indians. Men farmed instead of hunting. They established some of their own laws. In 1827, the Cherokees wrote a constitution that provided for a bicameral legislature, a chief executive, and a judicial system (Perdue 13). The Americans tried to make the Indians become Christians. They developed their own writing system. They even began to publish their own newspaper called the Cherokee Phoenix (Perdue 14). The Cherokees became more civilized than in the past. The Cherokees tried to become civilized to make their relationship with the Americans better. nbsp;nbsp;nbsp;nbsp;nbsp;American views on the Indians changed. TheyShow MoreRelatedThe Cherokee Removal Essay1162 Words   |  5 PagesA long time before this land was called the United States, the Cherokee people used to live in this land in the valleys of rivers that drained the southern Appalachians. These people made their homes, farmed their land, and buried their dead. Also these people, who are now called Indians claimed larger lands. They would use these for hunting deer and gathering material, to live off of. Later these lands were called Virginia and Kentucky. As it is mentioned in the text, these people had their ownRead More The Removal of the Cherokee Essay5749 Words   |  23 Pagesthe Cherokee nation has haunted the legacy of Andrew Jacksons Presidency. The events that transpired after the implementation of his Indian policy are indeed heinous and continually pose questions of morality for all generations. Ancient Native American tribes were forced from their ancest ral homes in an effort to increase the aggressive expansion of white settlers during the early years of the United States. The most notable removal came after the Indian Removal Act of 1830. The Cherokee, whoseRead MoreCherokee Removal Essay1329 Words   |  6 PagesThe Cherokee people were forced out of their land because of the settler’s greed for everything and anything the land had to offer. Many Cherokee even embraced the â€Å"civilization program,† abandoning their own beliefs so that they may be accepted by white settlers. Unfortunately for the Cherokee though, the settlers would never accept them as an equal citizen. A quote from historian Richard White says it very well, â€Å"The Cherokee are probably the most tragic instance of what could have succeededRead MoreCherokee Removal Essays886 Words   |  4 PagesThe Cherokee role in the American society was an ongoing battle amongst closed minds and sheer ignorance to rights of original land owners. For years the fight over land was the dividing instrument amongst the new citizens of a new, free country and the traditions of the Cherokee people was being pushed back into the west. Since international law said that England had discovered the American colonies, they therefore owned all of the land. That meant that the natives or quot;uncivilizedquot;Read MoreIndian Removal Of The Cherokee Indians991 Words   |  4 Pagesthey grew stronger. It was a story of hope, courage, and survival. This was the Trail of Tears. Many events led up to the Cherokee’s removal. The Indian Removal caused the Cherokee indians to move west. A man named Major Ridge struck lots of bargains with the United States. This man, Major Ridge, was one of the native sons, born in 1771, that lived in the Cherokee territory. The Cherokee’s lived in the Christians Eden because they believe their ancestors once lived in the same area. Throughout MajorRead MoreThe Horrors Behind Cherokee Removal967 Words   |  4 Pages The Horrors Behind Cherokee Removal The day the colonists first set foot on American soil marked the beginning of an arduous struggle for Native Americans. When the colonists first arrived, there were ten million Native Americans; over the next three centuries, over 90% of the entire population was wiped out due to the white man. The removal of Native Americans marks a humiliating period of United States history. President Andrew Jackson attempted to consolidate the Native Americans when heRead MoreCherokee Trail Of Tears : Removal849 Words   |  4 PagesCherokee Trail of Tears: Removal: 500 Nations In 1830, congress passed President Andrew Jacksons Indian Removal Act. This policy allowed the United States government to extinguish the Cherokee, Chickasaws, Choctaws, Creeks, Seminole and many other tribes title to their land. The Indians had to leave the land and life they had always known in the Southeastern United States behind. This disturbing event was named the Trail of Tears because many Native Americans died during the process of marching toRead MoreThe Cherokee Removal Book Review Essay725 Words   |  3 PagesThe Cherokee Removal Book Review The Cherokee Removal is a brief history with documents by Theda Perdue and Michael Green. In 1838-1839 the US troops expelled the Cherokee Indians from their ancestral homeland in the Southeast and removed them to the Indian Territory in what is now Oklahoma. The removal of the Cherokees was a product of the demand for land during the growth of cotton agriculture in the Southeast, the discovery of gold on the Cherokees land, and the racial prejudice that manyRead MoreTrail of Tears: the Removal of the Cherokee Nation1747 Words   |  7 PagesThe old Cherokee nation was a large thriving tribe located in northern Georgia, North Carolina, Alabama, and Tennessee, which was a region known as Appalachia. Because of greedy landowners wanting more money, land for themselves and land for their crops, this forced the Cherokees out of their land and into another region. The government, specifically Andrew Jackson, wanted the land because it was land that he â€Å"needed†. He needed t his land because he felt it would increase the white population andRead MoreCherokee Removal, Part Of The Trail Of Tears2515 Words   |  11 Pages  Cherokee removal, part of the Trail of Tears, refers to the forced relocation between 1836 and 1839 of the Cherokee Nation from their lands in Georgia, South Carolina, North Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, and Alabama to the Indian Territory in the then Western United States, and the resultant deaths along the way and at the end of the movement of an estimated 4000 Cherokee. The Cherokee have come to call the event Nu na da ul tsun yi ; another term is Tlo va sa --both phrases not used at the time

World War II And The Cold War - 916 Words

On a cold March morning on the 5th of 1953 Stalin lay in his bed surrounded by his personal doctors the great uncle Joe Stalin had been laid to rest euthanized by his doctors. He had grown up a member of the communist party more so a member as a means to power then a true believer in the doctrine. He would soon see this position put him in charge of the entirety of the newly named USSR (United Soviet Socialts Republic). He would steer the country through the horrors of World War II and he would consolidate all of Russia with fierce and deadly determination. Then see his country go face to face with the U.S. in the Cold War. Growing up Joseph Stalin was known as Losif Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili. He was born in Gori, Georgia on December†¦show more content†¦During his time he began to but heads with Trotsky, Lenin s second in command and his rival for power. With Lenin s death in 1924 Stalin began to centralize his power. He had Trotsky tried in a kangaroo court and exiled, l eaving him with no rival to power. By 1928 he was in complete control and began phase one of five year plan. His five year plan was a series of nationalized plans for the economic modernization of the Soviet Union. He rapidly changed an agricultural society to an industrial power house. This lead to massive famine taking the lives of over 5million Russian citizens between 1932 and 1933(1). These changes were not without challenge. Anyone who spoke up against his changes would be exiled to Siberian work camps and worked to death. By 1934 Stalin had purged the rest of the Soviet party using mock courts, assassination, and â€Å"unfortunate† accidents. This left him as absolute ruler of the U.S.S.R. In the fall of 1939 Stalin would see his country enter WWII. He started with a neutrality agreement with Germany. Hitler would soon violate this treaty and push him into the arms of the Allied Powers. He was very resistant to put his armies on the defense, because he was wanting to make sure Hitler made the first move (3). The war had not been going well for Stalin. This culminate in the battle of Stalingrad. This bloody battle turned the tide of war for Stalin but cost him almost 1million troops (3). With the close of the war in 1945

Cinema of India and Irish Pages Free Essays

string(160) " the family drama that surrounds such an event anywhere – and made a â€Å"realitycheck†version of it so different from the normal Bollywood film\." Irish Pages LTD Glorious Particularity Author(s): Mira Nair Reviewed work(s): Source: Irish Pages, Vol. 3, No. 2, The Home Place (2006), pp. We will write a custom essay sample on Cinema of India and Irish Pages or any similar topic only for you Order Now 103-108 Published by: Irish Pages LTD Stable URL: http://www. jstor. org/stable/30057428 . Accessed: 09/11/2012 06:27 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms Conditions of Use, available at . http://www. jstor. org/page/info/about/policies/terms. jsp . JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor. org. . Irish Pages LTD is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Irish Pages. http://www. jstor. org GLORIOUS PARTICULARITY MiraNalr Illumining the actual. I make images in my work. I don’t pen words, especially not words to be delivered from church pulpits. So I experienced great agony writing this essay, particularlysince it was also meant for publication, until I began to see it as an opportunity to think aloud with you on what has been possessing my mind of late, in this tumultuous past year since the watershed of 9/11/01. I have been reflecting on the torrent of ceaseless images flooding our lives: in the print media, TV and of course, in our popular cinema, ultimately asking myself the age-old questionsTer Braakraises in his still-radicalessay:what is the role of an artist in any society? What is the place and future of cinema in the world today? In the new â€Å"globalvillage†of incessant images, increasinglyI see the failure of mass media to impart actual understanding. This overactive pluralism gives one the illusion of knowing a lot about a lot when actually you know a smattering about nothing at all, leaving in its wake an audience so thoroughly bludgeoned by little bits of information that one is left confused and consequently apathetic politically. Perhapsthat is its intention. The fact is that while images have become more and more international, people’s lives have remained astonishingly parochial. This ironic truth of contemporary life is especially troubling in today’s war-mongering times, when so much depends on understanding worlds so different, and consequently totally divided, from one’s own. In this post-9/11 world, where the schisms of the globe are being cemented into huge walls between one belief and way of life and another, now more than ever we need cinema to reveal our tiny local worlds in all their glorious particularity. In my limited experience, it’s when I’ve made a film that’s done full-blown justice to the truths and idiosyncraciesof the specifically local, that it crosses over to become surprisinglyuniversal. Take Monsoon edding,or instance. I wanted to make an intimate family W out of nothing, a love song to the city of Delhi where I come flick, something from, to return to my old habits of guerilla film-making. Except this time, fired m by the recent empowering of the Dogme ethod, I wanted to make a film in just 30 days. That was the original premise: to prove to myself that I didn’t need the juggernaut of millions of dollars, studios, special effects and plenty of men in suits to make a good story in the most interesting visual way possible. I wanted 103 IRISH PAGES o capture, first and foremost, the spirit of masti(meaning an intoxication with life) inherent in the full-bodied Punjabi community from where I come, and then, to capture the Indiathat I know and love, an India which lives in several centuries at the same time. As Arundhati Roy put it, â€Å"as Indian citizens we subsist on a regular diet of caste massacresand nuclear tests, mosque breakings and fashion shows, church burnings and expanding cell phone networks, bonded labour and the digital revolution, female infanticide and the Nasdaq crash, husbandswho continue to burn their wives for dowry and our delectable pile of MissWorlds. It couldn’t be said better. Such were the fluid pillars of the India I wanted to put on film – 68 actors, 148 scenes, and one hot monsoon season later, using paintings,jewellery, saris and furniture taken from relatives on the screen, with each member of my family acting in it, after shooting exactly 30 days, a film was born that then had a journey so different from any expectation (more correctly, non-expectation) that we might have had for it during its making. People from New Delhi to Iceland to Hungary to Brazil to America believed it was their wedding, their family,themselves on that screen – and if they didn’t have a family,they yearned to belong to one like the people they saw on screen. I didn’t make the film to educate anybody about â€Å"my culture and my people†- I believe that to be simply a cultural ambassadorof one’s country is boring – rather, if it was made for anybody beyond myself, it was made for the people of Delhi to feel and laugh and cry at our own flawed Punjabi(a. k. a the PartyAnimals of India) selves. Uniquely for me, Monsoon edding as the first of seven films I’d made that W was completely embraced by the mainstreamBollywood film industryin India; producers, directors, movie stars, choreographers, musicians alike embraced the film, and for the first time in my 20-odd years as an independent film maker – independent really from both the Indianand the Americanma instream – I felt the possibility of my work belonging somewhere. Although the style and form of Monsoon edding as radical for the Indianpublic (the entire film was w W hot with a hand-held camera,was reality-based, with a host of completely unknown faces mixed in with legendary actors, live singing, no studio shooting, using a mixture of old Indianpop songs with new original music, and dialogue simultaneouslyin Hindi, English and Punjabi),it continues to play in Indiaalmost a year after its release. Perhapsthis was because we took a familiar premise – that of an Indian wedding, and of the family drama that surrounds such an event anywhere – and made a â€Å"realitycheck†version of it so different from the normal Bollywood film. You read "Cinema of India and Irish Pages" in category "Essay examples" Bollywood, a term for the enormous commercial film industryin Bombay, refers to those grand, epic and over-the-top extravaganzas eplete with musical r 104 IRISH PAGES numbers and lavish production values, designed as escapist entertainment for the masses. It is what Ter Braak hilariously describes in his discussion of low cinema – â€Å"born among cigarette-chewing youths and giggling maid-servants, received with wild enthusiasm and the honest romanticism of a proletariat yearning for deliverance. â€Å" Despite its inimitable, distinctive style and its current arty-exotic cache, Bollywood is nothing like cinema of the art-house, New Wave variety, nothing like expressionism – it does not have pretensions of purity. It is defiantly popular, made for the masses and for profit. Therefore, Bollywood as a cinematic form is necessarily adaptive and composite – a genre welcoming outside influences, not fearing them. In the first place, the filmmakers always aiming for the broadest possible audience – have had to accommodate the multiple interests of an extremely regional and diverse country. Certain unifying elements – Mahabharata and Ramayana, the foundational epic texts from which many stories derive, and the emphasis in all films on family tradition and local setting – give Bollywood films a broad resonance within Furthermore, Bollywood was born under colonialism and brilliantly survives in a post-colonial world. The Bollywood style is famously adaptive and absorbent, a sponge that had to respond to imperialist influences to survive pre-Independence, and willingly imitated them for profit in more recent years. A common phenomenon in Bombay are the so-called DVD India. irectors who pitch their stories to moviestars using cued scenes from wellknown Hollywood movies (e. g. , â€Å"it is basically a combination of Godfather meets Love Story meets When Harry Met Sally†). Western stories from Jane E re to Dead Poets’Societyare retold with Indian characters and production design that very often – ingeniously – play into both Westerne rs’ and Indians’ idealization of India. This suggests a border around India that is both porous and protective, flagrantly absorbing and copying all sorts of influences yet twisting them to make it finally seem inimitably Indian – or, to put it more accurately, inimitably Bollywood. There is much debate on the survival of local cinemas in a global age, and much consternation about the unstoppable wave of American culture, often accused of alternately dulling and diluting art and aesthetic sensibilities around the world. The French have been railing about cultural protectionism from Hollywood for years now. In this context of trying to preserve and cultivate local voices, it is fabulous to see the unflagging energy of Bollywood cinema. Bollywood’s vigor, its staying power and its improbable, flexible hybridity, are all results of its huge internal market. Commercially and artistically – much like Indian culture itself. Bollywood is supple and muscular 105 IRISH PAGES The mass Indian audience for whom Bollywood films are made is evergrowing and makes the industry hugely profitable, even without taking into account the global reach it has attained. The first Indian film, Rala w Harishchandra, as produced in 1913. Thirty thousand films have been made since. Today,800 films per year are made throughout India, and 12 million people within the country’s borders go to see a Hindi film daily. The booming Bollywood market is self-sustainingand runs parallel to – and undisturbedby – American film exhibition in India. This is before taking into account Bollywood’s huge market abroad, both as an export to other lands (such as Russia, the Middle East, Africa) and to the far-reachingIndian Diaspora. Growing up in India in the sixties and seventies in the fairly remote state of Orissa, I was not an aficionadoof Bollywood pictures. I did swoon over many of the popular love songs from the movies, but the films themselves did little for me. I was much more interested in stories of real people, the extraordinarinessof ordinary life. Initiallyinspired by jatra which is the form of traditionaltravellingmythological theatre in the countryside, I later became involved with political protest theatre in Calcutta. Then, with eyes focused beyond my own country, I became preoccupied with the Beatles and the antiVietnam War movement, the Western avant-garde, guerilla theater, etc. It wasn’t until I went to America for college and began studying film that the â€Å"other†Indian movies first reached me: SatyajitRay, Ritwik Ghatakand Guru Dutt, whose emotionalism and visual stylization were actually pure independent film-making, but made from within Bollywood. The immediacy and grandeurof these films is a pillar for me now – I rely on seeing one of Guru Dutt’s movies every six months before I make another one of my own. However, I was the last person to ever imagine that the commercial cinema of the Indian mainstream would have anything whatsoever to do with my own work. Yet the opportunity to give this lecture has given me a chance to reflect on my own trajectory, and I am surprised to find that my home cinema has had a strong influence on my body of work indeed, regardlessof my exploration of increasingly motley and disparatecultures. And in reflecting, I’ve seen that the influence of Indian films – specifically that unabashed emotional directness, the freewheeling use of music, that emphasis on elemental motivations and values – is a thread running consistently through every one of my films; even when exploring foreign worlds, I have taken the bones and flesh of those societies and tried to infuse them with the spirit of where I’m from. Much of post-imperial scholarship focuses on the Western gaze – and Bollywood itself, as I’ve said, had to adapt to and be constantly aware of the colonialist point of view. I find myself applying an Eastern gaze 06 IRISH PAGES to Western contexts now, and enjoying the reversal. Historically,Hollywood has alwaysbeen open to foreign directors, so long as we have the competence, craft and flair needed to make money. From Erich von Stroheim to BillyWilder to Ang Lee to PaulVerhoevento ShekharKapur, the doors have opened for us, so long as we understand the bottom line. In my most recent film, Hysterical lindness, working-class drama set in a B New Jersey in the eighties, I found that even in the drab and loveless confines of these bar-hopping girls’ world, the Bollywood approachwas just as useful. Half-jokingly,I refer to the style of the film as â€Å"AmericanBleak, Bollywoodstyle†. Within the frame of â€Å"American Bleak,†understatement and mundane circumstances notwithstanding, the full-blown emotion was there, waiting to be made overt. People are people, after all, and no matter if we’re trying to portray a loveless reality where desperate women comb neighbourhood bars looking for love, only to find heartbreak,audiences must feel their neuroses as if they are their own. And now, looking at pre-Victorian London to adapt Thackeray’s gloriously entertaining saga, VanityFair, I find an enormous panorama of themes familiar to those of us steeped in Bollywood: a woman who defies her poverty-stricken background to clamber up the social ladder, unrequited love, seduction through song, a mother’s sacrifice for her child, a true gentleman in a corrupt world . .. the catalog of human stories remains the same. Moreover, it is a story that comes down to basic human ambition, asking a spiritual, even yogic question:Which of us is happy in this orld? Which of us has his desire? Or, having it, is satisfied? The bold strokes of Indian cinema are ideal for this canvas,too. Culture-combining does not have to yield the soulless â€Å"Euro-gateau† lamented by Istvan Szabo in Zanussi’s 1993 lecture here. Because, as Zanussi explained, those are films without a center, stories that take place in nameless, unrecognizable cities with a host of Eu ropean actors desperately attempting a neutralAmerican/English accent, afraidof any eccentricities or distinctiveness that would distract from the mongrelization of the piece. The Bollywood form, itself an ever-growing collage of culturalinfluences, is making its way around the world, but retaining its soul. In fact, my only fear as Bollywood seems to cross over into Western commercial screens is that it waters itself down to suit the Western palate. Lately,Western culture has taken Bollywood styles and incorporated them into the mainstream Hollywood vocabulary:smash-hit movies and plays imitate Bollywood’s musical form and ultra-theatricalstyle, adaptingthem to Western contexts (MoulinRouge, ombay B Dreams). Think of Thora Birch in GhostWorld, atching a 1950s Hindi dance w umber and dancing around her room gleefully. She sees a freshness and 107 IRISH PAGES lustiness totally absent from her Anytown, USA existence. The crazy dance number is delightfullyforeign to her, yet throughit we also see her small world with new, sharp clarity. Bollywood’s pure emotional thrust and distinctive vocabulary has authenticity in itself, however manufactured and molded the form has been over the years. In this era of internationalmisunderstanding,as the threat of a global divide – culturally and politically – is more dire than ever, this distinctiveness is to be celebrated. I have always repeated to myself and to my students that â€Å"if we don’t tell our stories, no one else will. â€Å"The â€Å"we†and â€Å"our† in the best films is both local and universal. Cinema can mirror an individual’s tiny world, yet reveal infinite other worlds in all their particularity. Film should not behave. It cannot. Cinema is too democratic to be lobotomized into a single way or style. I always say,There are no rules in making cinema – there is only good cinema or soulless cinema. And as long as there are films made like In the Mood or Love,Angel at My Table,Pyaasa,Battle of Algiers,Dekalog, Timeof the f Gypsies,we’re doing all right. What is happening to the world lies, at the moment, just outside the realm of common understanding. The only revenge is to work, to make cinema that illuminates this common understanding,that destabilizes the dull competence of most of what is produced, that infuses life with idiosyncracy, whimsy, brutality, and like life, that captures the rare but fabulous energy that sometimes emerges from the juxtaposition of the tragic and comic. a F M L U Thisessaywasdelivered s the Cinema 2i1tans ecture t the Netherlands ilmFestival, trecht, in September002 It is published ereor the irst time. 2 hf f One of the world’sleadingfilmakers,Mira Nair has directedeightfeaturefilms since her celebrated ebutwith SalaamBombay! in 1988. Bornin 1957, shegrew up in Orissa, ndia d I and attendedHavardUniversity. Her mostrecentilms are Vani ty Fair (2004), Hysterical f Blindness (2002) and Monsoon Wedding (2001) Hernextfilm, he Namesake, basedon a T i novelbyjhumpa Lahiri,will be releasedn the springof 2007 108 How to cite Cinema of India and Irish Pages, Essay examples

The Crucible - The Difference Between Law and Justice free essay sample

Are law and justice the same thing? Many believe the idea that if one disobeys the law, they must be brought to justice. However, this isn’t always the case. The fact that there is law permitting or forbidding an act that does not determine that it is right or wrong. While justice is meant to be administered with the utmost fairness and equality, Arthur Miller’s play The Crucible demonstrates that this does not always prevail. In The Crucible by Arthur Miller, the citizens of Salem seem to think that law and justice are the same thing. However, this is not true. In act three, Danforth says â€Å"You must understand, sir, that a person is either with this court or he must be counted against it, there be no road between. This is a sharp time, now, a precise time—we live no longer in the dusky afternoon when evil mixed itself with good and befuddled the world. Now, by God’s grace, the shining sun is up, and them that fear not light will surely praise it (Danforth, 90). † When Danforth says this, it shows that he believes that unless someone was ruling with the court, then they were against it, and therefore, evil. Clearly, Salem does not practice separation of church and state, which at the time made for a lot of bigotry and religious-driven harm and persecution. Because the Bible says that any female that commits the sin of lechery should be stoned to death, that does not make it humane or justified. The citizens of Salem seem to lack the ability to comprehend that. An underlying theme within The Crucible is theocracy; God is supposedly the ultimate leader, judge, and arbiter. The way Salem sees it, God needs men on earth to instill justice in the lives of the citizens of earth. Hathorne, Danforth, Parris, and Hale were all part of that system. Though it seems that only those who confessed to having committed grave sins against God, along with those who refused to confess had a sense of that justice. Salem believed that God was speaking through the girls to bring to light crimes that would have been invisible otherwise. â€Å"But witchcraft is ipso facto, on its face and by its nature, an invisible crime, is it not? Therefore, who may possibly be to witness it? The witch and the victim. None other. Now we cannot hope the witch to accuse herself; granted? Therefore we must rely upon her victims—and they do testify, the children certainly to testify. As for the witches, none will deny that we are most eager for all their confessions. Therefore, what is left for a lawyer to bring out? I think I have made my point. Have I not (Danforth, 96)? † In this quote, Danforth explains that only the children would know of witchcraft in the town and that they have no other way of knowing the crime is committed. He was clearly ignorant, as Abigail and the girls she has convinced to play along were only children and teenagers. They would most definitely crave attention at their age, and would take advantage of any form of it that they could get. The court appears to overlook this and takes the word of the girls throughout most of the play. Not a single one of the accusations during the Salem Witch Trials is done out of fear. Each and every single one of them is due to a character attempting to preserve their own reputation or as an attempt to achieve their own selfish ambitions. And aside from this, Danforth chose to overlook several things that would prove the accused to be innocent, or at least give reason to doubt what the accusers are saying. It seems that the accusers are always right, no matter what the circumstances of the accusations. It is tossed aside that Abigail and John had an affair because Danforth and Hathorne did everything in their power to avoid believing the affair happened. It is overlooked that Putnam clearly wants Giles Corey’s land, and he conveniently accuses the man of witchcraft. When one is accused of witchcraft, their land is sold for a much smaller sum than it is worth. Giles Corey accuses Thomas Putnam of being an opportunist of the worst kind, as his land would be sold and Putnam would have the first opportunity to buy it. â€Å"My proof is there! Pointing to the paper. If Jacobs hangs for a witch he forfeit his property—that’s law! And there is none but Putnam with the coin to buy so great a piece. This man is killing his neighbors for their land (Corey, 92)! † Francis Nurse attempts time and time again to bring evidence to the court but he is unable to present it. The obvious reasoning for this is that Danforth is worried about his reputation. He has too much pride to admit that he believes Abigail and Tituba and the others that brought accusations against the innocent people of Salem. Instead, Danforth would rather those who had done nothing wrong, suffer in his place for his ignorance and selfishness. So perhaps, Danforth did have a sense of justice as the accused did, but he would rather keep quiet about it because his own reputation is more important than the lives of others. The â€Å"justice† system in Salem is based on religious belief, more than the actual law. This being true, the evidence is largely supernatural, and therefore cannot be countered with reason or hard evidence. The only people that had to prove their case are those that disagree with the accusers. Accusers are automatically assumed to be telling the truth and do not need an ounce of proof. They may be questioned, but they are always considered right. This type of law is not ethical in today’s justice system; innocent until proven guilty. While Salem has a form of law, there is no sense of justice in the community.