My party’s in power in the city, and it’s goin’ to undertake a lot of public improvements. Well, I’m tipped off, say, that they’re going to lay out a new park at a certain place. I see my opportunity and I take it. I go to that place and I buy up all the land I can in the neighborhood. Then the board of this or that makes its plan public, and there is a rush to get my land, which nobody cared particularly for before. Ain’t it perfectly honest to charge a good price and make a profit on my investment and foresight? Of course, it is. Well, that’s honest graft.
—George Washington Plunkitt, Plunkitt of Tammany Hall, 1905
Which action is best described by this excerpt?
Answer:
Political machines justified corruption while providing benefits to communities.
Explanation:
From this excerpt, it can be deduced that "Political machines justified corruption while providing benefits to communities." This is because it is believed that Geroge Washington Plunkitt, a former New York senator probably through illegal means of getting the right information decided to buy lands where he's sure that the United States government will eventually want to use. Thereby selling the land to the government and making a huge amount as profit from the transaction.
The Enlightenment and French Revolution were both turning points in European history. The Enlightenment marked a change in religion, science, philosophy, and government. The French Revolution also marked a change many of the aspects of French life and society. The Enlightenment greatly influenced the changes implemented in the French Revolution.
When Ceasar Augustus rose to power many things happened with Rome. One of them was that Rome became a truly powerful empire. He enabled Rome to trully flourish in the coming decades and these times were extremely good for people who lived under Roman rule.
It was primarily the pursuit of gold that led not only Portugal but most other European nations to invest in expeditions to the New World, since the Spanish were so successful at bringing back vast amounts of gold to Europe.
an Italian mathematician at the University of Padua, directed a new scientific instrument, the telescope, toward the heavens. Having heard
that a Dutch artisan had put together two lenses in a way that magnified distant ob- jects, Galileo built his own such device. Anyone who has looked through a tele- scope can appreciate his excitement. Ob- jects that appeared one way to the naked eye looked entirely different when magni- fied by his new “spyglass,” as he called it. The surface of the moon, long believed to be smooth, uniform, and perfectly spheri- cal, now appeared full of mountains and craters. Galileo’s spyglass showed that the sun, too, was imperfect, marred by spots that appeared to move across its surface. Such sights challenged traditional sci- ence, which assumed that “the heavens,” the throne of God, were perfect and thus never changed. Traditional science was shaken even further when Galileo showed that Venus, viewed over many months, appeared to change its shape, much as the moon did in its phases. This discovery provided evidence for the relatively new
