Muckrakers were a group of writers, including the likes of Upton Sinclair, Lincoln Steffens, and Ida Tarbell, during the Progressive era who tried to expose the problems that existed in American society as a result of the rise of big business, urbanization, and immigration. Most of the muckrakers were journalists. Theodore Roosevelt gave the muckrakers their creative name. He compared them to someone stirring up the mud at the bottom of a pond.
Progressives in Ohio and elsewhere used muckrakers' writings to inspire and promote reform in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. They fought political corruption in urban areas resulting from the power of city bosses like George Cox of Cincinnati through the use of city managers. Progressives determined that Standard Oil was a monopoly and used the courts to force its dissolution. Urban reformers established settlement houses to provide services for immigrants and other poverty-stricken city dwellers. Muckraker reports also led to the Meat Inspection Act of 1906 and the Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906. Both of these pieces of legislation increased the federal government's ability to protect consumers from unsanitary products.
The correct answer should be:
<span>D) He is establishing ethos with the men to whom he is writing this letter.
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Martin Luther King's introduction made the letter sounds accommodating to his critics. He was open-minded to answer statements of criticisms about his principles.
<em>The Tell-Tale Heart</em> is one of the shortest stories Edgar Allan Poe penned down, yet it remains a classic.
As in most of his work, Poe employs the first person point of view, in which the narrator tells the story using the first person pronoun <em>“I”</em> and thus closes the gap between the reader and the characters.
First person narration is subjective, we as an audience are brought into the biased point of view of the narrator, and this is why it is also known as an <u>”unreliable narrator”</u> – as opposed to the <em>“omniscient narrator”</em> who knows and sees everything and uses the third person point of view.
In this story, <em>the narrator is unreliable by nature</em>, a mad narrator that cannot tell the story objectively because he justifies his actions throughout the text.
The very first sentence hints at this:
- <em>“TRUE! — nervous — very, very dreadfully nervous I had been and am; but why will you say that I am mad? (…) Harken! and observe </em><em>how</em><em> </em><em>healthily — how calmly</em><em> I can tell you the whole story.”
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We don’t even find out his name by the end of the story. It begins <em>in media res</em>, meaning in the middle of a conversation between the unreliable narrator and an unnamed character. He starts out very confident, stressing how calmly he can tell us what happened, trying to get us to trust him. Throughout the story he tries to reassure us that he is of a sound mind, that an insane person couldn't possibly plot a murder and the disposal of the body in such detail --
- <em>"If still you think me mad, you will think so no longer when I describe the wise precautions I took for the concealment of the body."</em>
He blames his very vaguely described disease for his impulsiveness that leads him to commit a murder which he by the end he confesses by blurting it out:
- <em>“"Villains!" I shrieked, "dissemble no more! I admit the deed! --tear up the planks! here, here! --It is the beating of his hideous heart!"” </em>
His paranoia drives him to confession and the story ends rather abruptly there.