Allstate Insurance Company Introduction free essay sample

| Allstate Insurance Company Elizabeth Haskins Strayer University Instructor: Dr. Yohannes Abate Leadership and Organizational Behavior – BUS 520010VA016 July 24, 2011 Abstract As our population becomes grows more ethnically and culturally diverse, companies struggle more and more with the subject of diversity in the workforce. The latest strategy is to leverage diversity as a competitive business strategy. This paper will evaluate Allstate Insurance Company’s goal setting process and how they have used diversity as a strategy leveraging differences in order to create a competitive advantage in today’s diversified market. It will also discuss Allstate’s competitive advantage with the development of the Diversity Index and recommend what types of high-performance reward systems Allstate could use to motivate its employees to assist the company in reaching its diversity goals. . Introduction The fundamental point of the case is how Allstate has succeeded in linking their diversity strategy to a competitive advantage. In a competitive, corporate environment companies must constantly be looking for ways to improve performance in parallel with achieving corporate goals and initiatives. We will write a custom essay sample on Allstate Insurance Company: Introduction or any similar topic specifically for you Do Not WasteYour Time HIRE WRITER Only 13.90 / page Diversity at Allstate is ingrained in the companys culture; they launched their first affirmative action program in the 1960s; however, their commitment to diversity at that time was not linked to recruitment, development, and retention strategies to business performance or strategy. It was focused mainly through education and training and therefore, was not linked to the company’s business strategy. Allstate realized it had to reinvent its diversity strategy. According to the director of diversity management the key question had become â€Å"How do you take this workforce of differences and bring them together in a more powerful way so that it can impact business results? † (Hellriegel and Slocum, 2011). In its reinvention, and using the four goal setting process, Allstate has succeeded in making diversity a core value. Joan Crockett, senior vice president for human resources at Allstate, stresses that the companys diversity initiative isnt a nice-to-do, social conscience program. Its a compelling business strategy,† (Wah, 1999). Their strategy extends to all facets of the organization, including employees, customers, agents and suppliers and has made Allstate a leader in aligning diversity with their business strategy. Using the model for goal setting, evaluate Allstate’s goal setting process to determine whether or not Allstate has an effective goal-setting program. In an attempt to bring together the workforce of differences in a more influential way to achieve the business strategy results they were seeking, Allstate developed four specific steps. The first step is the succession programming step, which identifies candidates for key positions for career development and opportunity, which in turn ensures the company’s future workforce will remain diversified at all levels. The second step is Development, wherein employees complete an assessment of their current job skills and the employee’s ambition for possible future advancement. This step allows management how to address the career goals of their employees, whether through education, coaching or mentoring. The third step, Measurement, uses the Quarterly Leadership Measurement System (QLMS) and utilizes a Diversity Index Survey. This survey allows the employees to evaluate the company’s processes, management style, treatment of customers and relationship with their management. Based on survey results, the company initiates action programs to fix areas that showed concern. The fourth step, Accountability and Reward, links management compensation to the company’s diversity goals through the QLMS and Diversity Index Survey. Establishing an effective goal setting program is based on several conditions: 1. Employees must be able to obtain the goal. 2. The employee must be committed to the goal. 3. Employee should be provided feedback on their progress towards reaching their goal. 4. Tasks should be broken down so goals can be achieved in a reasonable timeframe. 5. Employees should be provided the resources to obtain their goals. The four step action that Allstate has implanted in direct alignment with the conditions for succeeding with an effective goals setting program. Discuss the competitive advantage Allstate has from the development of the Diversity Index. In creating the Diversity Index, Allstate established an advantage in the competitive business world. Through the Diversity Index the company developed a way for its management to evaluate what is working and what is not working as far as service, customer satisfaction, employee satisfaction, work behavior, and utilization of employee skills. In communicating the results of the survey to all employees, employees are able to observe management making an effort produce and improve a diverse work environment. When employees know that management is looking to find areas within the company that need improvement and that such improvements will help make the company a bigger success, employees tend to become much more self-driven to make the company a success as well. This has worked well for Allstate as according to numerous sources like â€Å"Fortune Magazine†, â€Å"DiversityInc Magazine†, â€Å"Working Mother Magazine†, â€Å"Diversity Executive magazine †, and â€Å"Forbes Magazine†, to name a few, which have awarded Allstate such titles as â€Å"Americas Most Admired Companies â€Å", â€Å"Top 50 Companies for Diversity†, â€Å"100 Best Companies for Working Mothers†, â€Å"Top Companies for Supplier Diversity â€Å"Top 100 in Global 2000 Companies â€Å"(Allstate Insurance Company, 2010), Allstate has been highly recognized for its diversity programs. Recommend the types of high-performance reward system Allstate should use to motivate its employees to reach its diversity goals Specifically for diversity, Allstate could implement a referral program, which most companies today have in place; however, this program will reward a referral bonus based on the hiring of minority employees. For instance, an employee will receive $250. 00 for referring someone from a diverse background. Of course a simple referral does not get the employee the reward. There is typically a 90-day wait or probationary period to ensure the employee does not hire on and leave within a short period of time. After the 90-day probationary period, the employee receives the bonus. The Company can go one step further and increase the referral bonus for the 2nd candidate referred and hired, and so on. Since motivation is not based solely on monetary awards, a non-monetary reward system can be reached by a mentoring process. Mentoring is typical in today’s business world; however, the company can match candidates with different backgrounds, cultures, nationality, and/or gender. This is a win/win situation for the company as well as the individual. It allows individuals to learn other areas of the company. For instance, Allstate can team a Hispanic female from the claims department with a black male from the sales department. This system is harder to implement but it is effective in teaching individuals about different areas of the company and learning from someone with a completely different background. If employees know all aspects of how a company works (the inside and outs), they become much more successful, and in turn, the company becomes much more successful. References Hellriegel, D. , Slocum, J. W. , Jr. (2011). Organizational behavior: 2011 custom edition (13th Ed. ). Mason, OH: South-Western Cengage Learning. Louisa Wah. (July/August, 1999). Citing Websites. In Business Ethics Review. Diversity at Allstate: A Competitive Weapon. Retrieved July 6, 2011, from http://www. wahansa. com/portfolio/diversity. html. Allstate. (2010). Citing Websites. Allstate Digital Newsroom. Retrieved July 11, 2011, from http://www. allstatenewsroom. com/channels/Awards-and-Recognition/pages/awards-recognition

System Tray Delphi Application

System Tray Delphi Application Take a look at your Task Bar. See the area where the time is located? Are there any other icons there? The place is called the Windows System Tray. Would you like to place your Delphi applications icon there? Would you like that icon to be animated - or reflect the state of your application? This would be useful for programs that are left running for long periods of time with no user interaction (background tasks you typically keep running on your PC all day long). What you can do is to make your Delphi applications look as if they are minimizing to the Tray (instead of to the Task Bar, right to the Win Start button) by placing an icon in the tray and simultaneously making your form(s) invisible. Lets Tray It Fortunately, creating an application that runs in the system tray is pretty easy - only one (API) function, Shell_NotifyIcon, is needed to accomplish the task. The function is defined in the ShellAPI unit and requires two parameters. The first is a flag indicating whether the icon is being added, modified, or removed, and the second is a pointer to a TNotifyIconData structure holding the information about the icon. That includes the handle of the icon to show, the text to show as  a tool tip when the mouse is over the icon, the handle of the window that will receive the messages of the icon and the message type the icon will send to this window. First, in your main forms Private section put the line:TrayIconData: TNotifyIconData; type TMainForm class(TForm) procedure FormCreate(Sender: TObject); private TrayIconData: TNotifyIconData; { Private declarations }public{ Public declarations }end; Then, in your main forms OnCreate method, initialize the TrayIconData data structure and call the Shell_NotifyIcon function: with TrayIconData dobegin cbSize : SizeOf(TrayIconData); Wnd : Handle; uID : 0; uFlags : NIF_MESSAGE NIF_ICON NIF_TIP; uCallbackMessage : WM_ICONTRAY; hIcon : Application.Icon.Handle; StrPCopy(szTip, Application.Title); end; Shell_NotifyIcon(NIM_ADD, TrayIconData); The Wnd parameter of the TrayIconData structure points to the window that receives notification messages associated with an icon.   The hIcon points to the icon we want to add to the Tray - in this case, Applications main icon is used.The szTip holds the Tooltip text to display for the icon - in our case the title of the application. The szTip can hold up to 64 characters.The uFlags parameter is set to tell the icon to process application messages, use the applications icon and its tip. The uCallbackMessage points to the application-defined message identifier. The system uses the specified identifier for notification messages that it sends to the window identified by Wnd whenever a mouse event occurs in the bounding rectangle of the icon. This parameter is set to WM_ICONTRAY constant defined in the interface section of the forms unit and equals: WM_USER 1; You add the icon to the Tray by calling the Shell_NotifyIcon API function. The first parameter NIM_ADD adds an icon to the Tray area. The other two possible values, NIM_DELETE and NIM_MODIFY are used to delete or modify an icon in the Tray - well see how later in this article. The second parameter we send to the Shell_NotifyIcon is the initialized TrayIconData structure. Take One If you RUN your project now youll see an icon near the Clock in the Tray. Note three things.   1) First, nothing happens when you click (or do anything else with the mouse) on the icon placed in the Tray - we havent created a procedure (message handler), yet.2) Second, there is a button on the Task Bar (we obviously dont want it there).3) Third, when you close your application, the icon remains in the Tray. Take Two Lets solve this backward. To have the icon removed from the Tray when you exit the application, you have to call the Shell_NotifyIcon again, but with the NIM_DELETE as the first parameter. You do this in the OnDestroy event handler for the Main form. procedure TMainForm.FormDestroy(Sender: TObject);begin Shell_NotifyIcon(NIM_DELETE, TrayIconData);end; To hide the application (applications button) from the Task Bar well use a simple trick. In the Projects source code add the following line: Application.ShowMainForm : False; before the Application.CreateForm(TMainForm, MainForm); E.g let it look like: ...begin Application.Initialize; Application.ShowMainForm : False; Application.CreateForm(TMainForm, MainForm); Application.Run;end. And finally, to have our Tray icon respond to mouse events, we need to create a message handling procedure. First, we declare a message handling procedure in the public part of the form declaration: procedure TrayMessage(var Msg: TMessage); message WM_ICONTRAY; Second, the definition of this procedure looks like: procedure TMainForm.TrayMessage(var Msg: TMessage);begincase Msg.lParam of WM_LBUTTONDOWN: begin ShowMessage(Left button clicked - lets SHOW the Form!); MainForm.Show; end; WM_RBUTTONDOWN: begin ShowMessage(Right button clicked - lets HIDE the Form!); MainForm.Hide; end; end;end; This procedure is designed to handle only our message, the WM_ICONTRAY. It takes the LParam value from the message structure which can give us the state of the mouse upon the activation of the procedure. For the sake of simplicity well handle only left mouse down (WM_LBUTTONDOWN) and right mouse down (WM_RBUTTONDOWN). When the left mouse button is down on the icon we show the main form, when the right button is pressed we hide it. Of course, there are other mouse input messages you can handle in the procedure, like, button up, button double click etc. Thats it. Quick and easy. Next,  youll see how to animate the icon in the Tray and how to have that icon reflect the state of your application. Even more, youll see how to display a pop-up menu near the icon.

Marketing Campaign for Ocean Spray Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1000 words - 1

Marketing Campaign for Ocean Spray - Essay Example This mechanism which was coined by Crown Holdings Inc, had reduced the effort which was required to pen the jar. The appearance of the new lid is somewhat similar to the normal twist lid. The survey conducted found that Orbit lid was much easier to open than a normal jar out of the 100 respondent 85 of them considered it to be ‘much easier’ (Packaging World, 2012). therefore this was proved that the open lid would satisfy the customers and would provide an easy way to access he bottles. According to an article, the market has opened wide for easy open cans. With several new and modified new styles, companies are providing the customers with more convenient choices of their meals. As per the can manufacturer institute, the can shipped for human food consumption has exceeded about 25billion per year. Recent survey has revealed that in US more than 70% of the consumers eat few meals which are on the run each week (Wiemer, 2005). Recommendation Based on the innovation and th e rate of acceptance the company has decided to participate in the Christmas Exhibition to be held in London. Before participating in the exhibition, it is necessary to promote or to generate awareness in the mind of the customers about the new product. So at the initial stage promotional campaign such as advertisements would be aired in some channels mainly in food channels to generate awareness. The advertisements would also run on the other channels which are the most viewed channels by the mid level age groups, this is because the product is mainly aimed at the mid age level and the survey was also conducted on the women who belong to the age group of 40 plus. Therefore running advertisements would help them to know about the new re-launch of the product... Based on the innovation and the rate of acceptance the company has decided to participate in the Christmas Exhibition to be held in London. Before participating in the exhibition, it is necessary to promote or to generate awareness in the mind of the customers about the new product. So at the initial stage promotional campaign such as advertisements would be aired in some channels mainly in food channels to generate awareness. The advertisements would also run on the other channels which are the most viewed channels by the mid level age groups, this is because the product is mainly aimed at the mid age level and the survey was also conducted on the women who belong to the age group of 40 plus. Therefore running advertisements would help them to know about the new re-launch of the product with an easy open lid allowing them to easily open the jar. In addition to the advertisements, hoarding and bill boards will add on to the promotional activity. A big banner, situated in the peak are a would allow consumers to look at it and know about its re launch. The exhibition is also a big platform to re launch the product. There are thousands of people visiting the exhibition, thus making the avenue attractive would provide success for its target people.

Sheikh Zayed AlNahyan biography Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 750 words

Sheikh Zayed AlNahyan biography - Essay Example However, presently, his rule has come under scrutiny. There is great debt being accrued and little solutions to resolve it as yet. This is how the Sheik’s decadence and spending, which contributed to so many improvements, also, had some negative side effects, as well, particularly debt. In order to understand the man better it is best to start at the beginning. Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum was born on July 15th 1949 in Dubai, into a family with a long line of rulers. Al Maktoum family has ruled Dubai since 1833. They are descended from the Al Bu Falasah, a part of the Bani Yas, which was a highly respected and dominant tribal â€Å"federation† made of those who would become the present UAE, founded in the 1970s. The Present Sheikh is not the first member of his family to take a great interest in attempting to stabilize, improve, and change the conditions of Dubai, as a whole, throughout history, many rulers before him have tried. Since the family took power in the 19th century they have all worked to improve Dubai situation and reputations, transforming it into a popular tourist locale and potential business location (Government of Dubai). The young Sheikh Zayed Al Nahyan was privately tutored as a child, but would later, in 1966, attend Bell School of Languages at Cambridge University. In 1979 he married the first of his w ives, and therefore senior wife, Sheikha Hind bint Maktoum bin Juma Al Maktoum, and his youngest and newest wife Princess Haya bint Al-Hussein is the daughter of the Hussein of Jordan. In his lifetime he has welcomed 16 children into the world (The Biography Channel 1). It was in 1995, at the age of 46, he was named Crowned Prince of Dubai and in his new position he eagerly began fulfilling his vision of Dubai becoming a lush and popular place, no longer just a tiny piece of desert. After he

Technical Skills Essential to the Role of Secretarial Administration Essay

Technical Skills Essential to the Role of Secretarial Administration - Essay Example The researcher will begin with the statement that his experience in administration began when he was appointed as personal secretary to the Director-General of the Department of Arts and Culture. The researcher’s duties included the giving of administrative support to the Director-General. His main focus was administrative leadership, security and control functions which facilitated internal and external communication of the Head of Department with Top Management, Board Members and Agencies receiving state funding for arts and culture. The author got familiar with the Department’s policy regarding its system of correspondence, which included the drafting of internal memoranda, letters, and submissions for approval of funding proposals according to the system of delegation. In the researcher’s 10 years of employment with the Department, he prepared agendas for board and in-house meetings, took notes and set-up minutes of the meetings. The author had to organize in ternal staff meetings and provide all related documentation to the program managers (heads of the department’s divisions) like the financial executive director. Of his functions were to build a complete and efficient filing system in the form of paper files for back-up as well as an electronic filing system which kept track of each matter under discussion. Each unresolved matter was given a deadline date and the computer programme gave a daily print-out of outstanding matters with regard to urgent bookmarks for immediate attention that day.

The Concept Of Film Authorship

The Concept Of Film Authorship Arising in France in the late 1940s, the auteur was a cinematic theory created by Andre Bazin and Alexandre Astruc, and introduced in the French film magazine Cahiers du Cinema. Francois Truffaut and Jean-Luc Godard were the first to coined the phrase la politique des Auteurs, suggesting the theory of the director as author. The idea was to advance the cause of cinema as a legitimate art form by awarding the director with the status of an artist. Both Truffaut and Godard believed that directors should use the commercial device of film making the way a painter uses a brush, or writer uses a pen, and, through the mise en scà ¨ne, impress his or her vision apon the work. The idea was that a film is most valuable when it is the product of the director, and his personal style. Thus in film authorship, the influences of the director can be seen through all of his works, often at times exhibiting aspects of their personal life portrayed through out each film. Ideally, one could watch a film without previously knowing who directed it and then be able to identify who was responsible for its creation. Simply put, the auteur theory acts to describe the mark of a film director on his films and a style that he distinctly owns. Much like one can look at a painting and tell if it is a Picasso, if a film director is an auteur, one can look at his film and tell by its style and recurring themes that a certain director made it. According to the authorship theory, it does not matter whether or not the director writes his own films, the cinematographer, actors, and others involved in its creation are of secondary if any consideration. The film is said to reflect the vision and the mind of the director through the choices he makes in his film, including his casting of crew and actors. Naturally, a great deal of criticism surrounds such a suggestion. As Philip Halsall (2002) points out film is clearly a collaborative process, even in the smallest of productions, and to elevate the status of the director is to belittle the contributions of other creative personnel such as the cinematographer, the editor, the sound man, and the actors. For a director to be considered a true auteur, Andrew Sarris declared, (HYPERLINK http://www.britishfilm.org.uk/lynch/biblio.html#sarrisNotes on the Auteur Theory in 1962HYPERLINK http://www.britishfilm.org.uk/lynch/biblio.html#sarris) a premise must exist whereby the distinguishable personality of the director is a criterion of value. Over a group of films, a director must exhibit certain recurring characteristics of style, which serve as his signature. One notable auteur, whose filmography has expanded over three decades, is David Lynch. A David Lynch film produces distinctly notable traits readily observed by the amateur, and commanded by the aficionado. His individual surrealist style has defied description thus necessitating the creation of a new term of classification, aptly titled Lynchian. Lynchs films are aesthetically progressive with inherently conservative subject matter hidden behind a postmodern veneer. Thematically repetitive, a David Lynch film involves parallel worlds both literally and the metaphorically contrasted elements of evil and innocence, weirdness and normality, the absurd and the macabre. The use of duplicity, extensive use of dreams and dream like nightmarish sequences, an obsession with the clandestine, extreme graphic violence and sadistic masochistic sexuality are all fixtures in some form. Lynchian created protagonists are tortured souls constructing illusions to escape their reality, when these fantasies unravel, in the case of Lost Highway, Mulholland Drive, Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me, The Elephant Man and Eraserhead, the only alternative is death. For those characters that manage to survive a Lynch film, the idea of a happy conclusion is parodied in a contrived manner, the image of the mechanical robin in Blue Velvet mocking such an improbable end. Lynchs juxtaposition of the homely and the eccentric is re-occurring fixation. Nothing is ever as it seems, there is always a more ominous existence lying beneath the surface or hidden behind the curtains. In Blue Velvet, Lynch created an idyllic suburbia drawing on conventions from teenage movies of the 50s, he presents a Happy Days/American Graffiti nostalgia to the point of parody, to give a contrast to the dark other world that is inevitably co-existent. (Philip Halsall (2002) The idealised picturesque world is contrasted with a more sinister dystopian one by employing Lynchs continuing engagement of conventional noir aesthetics. The picture perfect Grease type dynamic in Blue Velvet including the demure blonde debutante Sandy, is balanced by an exceedingly disturbing and menacing underbelly, centred on a dangerous and fairly unstable femme fatale. The femme fatale and its iconography can be scene in almost all Lynchian films. The portrayal of a highly sexualised woman, she is the figure of danger and unattainable desire. She is often filmed in a distinctly voyeuristic manner as scene in Blue Velvet when Jeremy hides in a cupboard and watches Dorothy undress, and in Lost Highway when Alice is forced to strip for Mr Eddy. Lynch utilizes duplicity of characters and motifs as a tactic to reinforce the parallel and to suggest alternative realities. The use of doubles is a traditional convention of dream like realities that can be seen as far back as characters from the Wizard of Oz, a film that Lynch is a self-proclaimed admirer of. Lynch also engages in acts of cinematic self-referentiality. The Black Lodge in Twin Peaks is resurrected in different forms in both Lost Highway and Mulholland Drive. The magical box is Hellraiser, a central ingredient to the narrative returns as the blue box in Mulholland Drive, symbolic of a portal between two worlds. Curtains are an interconnected motif and similar form of self-referntiality. They can be seen in the Elephant Man as he is revealed on stage, draped heavily almost engulfing Fred as he wanders down the dark hallway in Lost Highway and consuming the opening sequence of Blue Velvet the use of curtains points to looming darkness, the sinister undertone of whats hidden behind them. Lynchs films offer an artistic form to the contemporary efforts of post-classical Hollywood. Lynch has developed a signatory approach of unconventional narrative, consistent thematic expressions and a distinctly visual style recognizable to both audiences and critics worldwide. However, this cannot be proclaimed so evidently for all of Lynchs films. Dune (1984) was both a critical and commercial disaster and perceived as the least lynchian of his films. Shunned even by Lynch himself, Dune epitomises the constraints and compromises of artistic expression by the commercial demands of auteurism. I didnt really feel I really had permission to make it [Dune] my own. That was the downfall for me. It was a problem. Dune was like a kind of studio film. I didnt have final cut. And, little by little, I was subconsciously making compromises knowing I couldnt go here and not wanting to go there. (Rodley 1997, 119-120). David Lynch quote For David Lynch and many other auteurs, the focus on a films potential for box office returns, by the studios and the financial backers, becomes the catalyst for tremendous artistic limitation. There is a contradiction in cinema between the commercial need to maintain the ideology of the creative artists and a simultaneous need to redefine ownership in terms of capital, rather than creative investment. (Theories of authorship, Caughie, pg 2. Brecht and the film industry, Screen 16, Ben Brewster, pg 16-33). The auteur as a commercial oddity coincides with the contemporary status of the auteur as a celebrity. Contemporary auteurs are for the most part, labelled by their commercial status and their ability to promote a film. The idea of the auteur-star alternates the director in place of the actor as the main drawcard. As much as an actors acclaimed performance can carry or redeem a script, the auteur-star has the ability to carry and redeem any sort of textual material. (The Commerce of Auteurism, A Cinema Without Walls: Movie and Culture After Vietnam. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers UP, 1991, pg.104) The auteur as a business entity is less a matter of artistic accomplishments and more about attaining a status that sells both the film to the audience, and the director to a studio. (New Hollywood cinema: an introduction, By Geoff King pg.115) The idea of the auteur-star is seen commercially as a means of publicity and advertisement. Meaghan Morris noted that today the primary modes of film and auteurs packaging are advertising, review snippeting, trailers, magazine profiles always ready in appropriation as the precondition, and not the postproduction of meaning. (pg 91 Film theory: critical concepts in media and cultural studies, By Philip Simpson, Andrew Utterson, Karen J. Shepherdson Taylor Francis, 2004) Our primary access to the auteur is not seen directly through his/her films but through controlled media mediums such as television, websites, and award ceremonies. (An introduction to film studies, By Jill Nelmes, pg.139) Before David Lynchs Twin Peaks hit mainstream America it was backed by an explosion of teaser advertising, it was hailed as the show that would change the face of network television forever on the September 1989 cover of Connoisseur magazine, long before the pilot had gone to air. Overnight, it seemed, there were board games, guidebooks and even Bart Simpson Killed Laura Palmer T-shirts. The constant marketing and promotion of an auteur film communicates information to a large number of audiences who may know the makers reputation but have never seen the films. The auteur is then seen as commercial tactic for promoting associations and controlling audience reception. By listing a director in the films title, as some kind of brand, guarantees a relationship between the audience and the film and conditions the way it will be viewed and received. (The Commerce of Auteurism, A Cinema Without Walls: Movie and Culture After Vietnam. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers UP, 1991, pg.102) To react to a movie as primarily a Lynch film, for example, is the refusal to form any evaluative response. For the audience, much of the enjoyment lies in already being able to know the gist of the film as a product of the creators generated public image. 3. Textual auteurism 4. Critical auteurism as a category Auteurism is a critical category, in the sense of understanding the author as a critical construct rather than a person. The ability to identify Hitchcock as a group of structuring principles that could be engineered from a critical examination of films, but bearing no necessary relation to the small, fat, male person who routinely appeared in each of these movies.

Horsmandens Journal of the Proceedings Essays -- Analysis, Daniel Hor

Daniel Horsmanden’s Journal of the Proceedings was written with a specific purpose in mind which he openly acknowledges in his introduction. Horsmanden claims that it was for â€Å"the public benefit† (Zabin, p.46) and inspired by the fact that some individuals believed â€Å"there was no plot at all† (Zabin, p.45). He hoped that by displaying the facts of the case he could prove to the people of New York City that the proceedings were just and that there was a great need to keep close supervision on their African slaves (Zabin, p.45). Having such an obvious bias the Journal is far from a perfect historical record of events, but under close examination Horsmanden’s account gives a vast amount of insight into the sharp divisions that characterized eighteenth century New York and can help explain why the people were so ready to believe in such a grandiose conspiracy. One can even see ways in which the conspiracy brought New Yorkers together and how it drove them apart. An analysis of Horsmanden’s work paints a picture of the social divisions present in the city. Race was a fairly obvious division, exemplified by Horsmanden’s statement that Peggy was the â€Å"worst sort† of prostitute because she was â€Å"a prostitute to negroes† (Zabin, p.49) and that blacks were much more prone to suspicion which can be seen in the fact that roughly 30 blacks were executed compared to four whites (Zabin, p.175). Economic status also shines through as a source of division. This is apparent by the fact that the Hughsons, who owned a disreputable public house (Zabin, p.48), were tried and executed largely on the testimony of Mary Burton. However, when Ms. Burton cast suspicion upon some people â€Å"in ruffles† (those of better means), the court quickly wrapped up the ca... ...stered togetherness among the people. Horsmanden’s journal provides a wealth of information about eighteenth century New York if one is willing to analyze it critically and ignore the bias present in it. If one does this they catch fascinating glimpses of a divided world, one where people are partitioned by race, economic status, homeland and religion. A world filled with fear and suspicion caused by the tension inherent within such societal division. The same tensions that either gave rise to a massive conspiracy to destroy the town of New York or gave credence to a nightmare constructed by the minds of the people and fed by individuals’ self-serving nature. Regardless, eighteenth century New York was a troubled place and Horsmanden’s Journal of the Proceedings gives us a partial but valuable insight to the lives and interactions of colonial New York’s peoples.