What are the similarities between Great Expectations and Les Miserables?

Magwitch, the escaped convict in Great Expectations is so moved by Pip's compassion and bountiful gift of "wittles," including brandy and a whole pork pie, that he remembers it for the rest of his life and vows to reward the boy by making him a gentleman.
Yes, Pip, dear boy, I've made a gentleman on you! It's me wot has done it! I swore that time, sure as ever I earned a guinea, that guinea should go to you. I swore arterwards, sure as ever I spec'lated and got rich, you should get rich. I lived rough, that you should live smooth; I worked hard that you should be above work. What odds, dear boy? Do I tell it fur you to feel a obligation? Not a bit. I tell it, fur you to know as that there hunted dunghill dog wot you kep life in, got his head so high that he could make a gentleman—and, Pip, you're him! (Chapter 39)
This illustrates one of the major themes in the novel, which is: A simple act of Christian charity can change a man's character for the rest of his life. This same theme is central to Victor Hugo's novel Les Miserables (1862). Bishop Bienvenu's kindness and generosity to the convict Jean Valjean changes him from a hardened criminal to an industrious and prosperous citizen who devotes the remainder of his life to helping other people.

I need to connect the theme of greed and blind ambition found in Shakespeare's Macbeth to our modern world and global community. A comparative analysis of how the theme of greed and ambition applies to each source should be explained. I need to use a variety of sources to display this theme which may include newspapers/magazine articles, tv shows, movies, song lyrics, blog posts, social media posts from well known people or a news photo with caption portraying an explanation of how the greed/ ambition applies to each piece of research. I need 5 different sources please. I have thought of How Scar from the movie The Lion King uses greed and ambition to climb to power by killing his brother Mufasa. I need some more ideas/suggestions please.

Greed and ambition lead Macbeth to commit unconscionable acts. He kills the king who is sleeping in his own home—a grievous act of inhospitality in a country in which hospitality is primary. He does this at his wife's urging to speed the witches' prophecy. He next kills his friend Banquo to protect himself and secure his power. He kills Macduff's wife and children in a wholly unnecessary act of cruelty, prodded by his own fear that Macduff had escaped to England and might threaten Macbeth's power.
If we reduce this story to its basic motives, we can see that the play is about a good man who is tempted to commit a horrific act to get what should have come to him anyway. Macbeth is unwilling to wait and so he seizes Fate for himself. This leads to a spiral of further horrible acts such that he eventually no longer knows himself nor cares for the power he has gained. Macbeth's bleak view of life is contained in the "tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow" speech in which he says that "Life is but a poor player" and that it "is full of sound and fury, signifying nothing." Any text that offers a similar view of a person losing himself by trying to reach a higher status could work for this assignment.
The Lion King is a good comparative text for the reasons mentioned.
Gangster movies offer good comparisons, too. Goodfellas might be interesting to explore since the story is told by a person who perpetrates crimes of greed and violence. This story follows the rise of a normal guy in the mob, his increasing power and prestige, and his drug use, which leads to the same kind of frenetic and sleepless life that the Macbeths experience near the end of the play. In Goodfellas, Henry Hill grows increasingly unfamiliar to himself as he betrays friends and family in the service of his ambition and greed.
Theaters sometimes like to stage the play using a contemporary theme of high end financiers in the role of Macbeth. Certainly, Wall Street greed and ambition are common enough, and one might think of Bernie Madoff, whose Ponzi scheme took advantage of family and friends and bankrupted people who trusted Madoff and who had no recourse to recoup their losses. The type of devastation brought upon innocent people due to an individual's corruption and greed is so familiar that one could compare many such stories in current financial news to Macbeth. Movies that show the temptation of Wall Street for those who lack integrity include Wall Street or Wolf of Wall Street. Obviously, Macbeth is far bloodier a story, but contemporary stories tend to bring the stories of greed down a notch or two.
One might also think of Nixon's blind ambition to maintain the presidency at all costs. In covering up the Watergate scandal, he damaged the country immeasurably. Nixon may not have started off as a particularly evil man, but his character flaws—ambition being one of the most serious—led him to trash the laws of the country he was bound to serve. If Nixon is not a recent enough example, you might be able to find more contemporary examples in the news. Michael Flynn seems to be an honorable man whose life fell off the rails. We do not have all the details about his criminal activity, but he has confessed to enough that we see how greed and ambition may have blinded him to what an earlier version of himself would have recognized as right and good.
We may not have all the facts here either, but the Saudi prince Mohammed bin Salman was originally touted as a force willing to modernize Saudi Arabia, and early reports of his power seemed hopeful. Public opinion served to "prophecy" that he would be a great leader with whom the world could forge new ties to the benefit of Saudi Arabia. However, there seems to be a far darker side to MBS, including increased torture, the arrest of several members of the royal family, the murder of the journalist Jamal Khashoggi, and the creation of a human rights crisis in Yemen. MBS seems oblivious to global criticism yet also somewhat trapped as nations are less willing to work with him.
As you look for other texts with which you are familiar, try to find something that places an otherwise decent person onto a dangerous and destructive path.

Macbeth is deeply concerned with the theme of blind ambition but not so much with greed for financial or monetary gain. Both he and his wife crave power and status. Some deep insecurity makes him think that being king will bring genuine respect and not just superficial allegiance.
Examples abound in the modern world of ambition gone badly awry in the political sphere. Because there are few remaining monarchies and most of them are also constitutional democracies, those examples will rarely be of kings. One husband-wife couple who exemplify a similar power quest were Ferdinand and Imelda Marcos, who ruled the Philippines between the 1960s and 1980s; in 2018, Imelda Marcos was sentenced to jail on corruption charges.
In his recently updated and reissued book Blind Ambition, John Dean reveals how lust for power led to the downfall of Richard Nixon’s presidential administration.
Coups d’etat, bloody or otherwise, are not uncommon ways to transfer power. The current situation in Syria represents the family continuation of the Assad administration that first came to power through a coup, as did the Pinochet administration in 1970s Chile.
For southern Africa, the recently ended Mugabe reign, although technically achieved through elections, was based in revolutionary anti-British armed conflict.
https://www.britannica.com/biography/Augusto-Pinochet

https://www.britannica.com/biography/Hafiz-al-Assad

Cahokia is an ancient Hopewell City in North America that may have been home to as many as 100,000 inhabitians. Where was Cahokia located?

The ancient ruins of Cahokia are located in southern Illinois within the city limits of Collinsville. This places the ancient city less than ten miles from downtown St. Louis, Missouri just across the Mississippi River. Being so close to this major waterway had many advantages for the people of ancient Cahokia. For starters, the fertile floodplains of the river provided good land for farming. The Mississippi River also facilitated trade and contact with other peoples. Indeed, artifacts from all over the region and far beyond have been found at the site. In its day, Cahokia was likely the center of a large network of settlements of various sizes. At its height, the city of Cahokia itself probably encompassed as much as six square miles and was home to as many as one hundred thousand people in the thirteenth century.
https://www.ancient.eu/cahokia/

What is a recent short story (after 2000) about the American Dream?

The American Dream is a perennial subject of interest to fiction writers in the United States. In this millennium, the subject increasingly includes multiple cultural and gendered dimensions, while earlier authors most often wrote about the topic primarily in terms of class and sometimes in terms of race. Some of the newer stories about the Dream emphasize its dystopian side—the American nightmare. Many continue in the trajectory of exposing the hypocrisy of social climbing aspirations, while others highlight the unequal opportunities given to Americans of different backgrounds, including “Dreamers” and other immigrants. Some of them operate within standard conventions of realism, but you will increasingly find authors using postmodern strategies of multiple narrators and abrupt changes of setting to parallel the fragmentation of daily life.
Here are a few likely choices:
Before You Suffocate Your Own Fool Self (2010), Danielle Evans. This is a collection of stories mostly set in Georgia. You might look at “Robert E. Lee Is Dead,” which contrasts the lives of two teenage female students in a suburban high school.
Unaccustomed Earth, Jhumpa Lahiri. The title story in the collection (2008) focuses on three generations of an Indian and Indian American family.
"An Honest Exit," Dinaw Mengestu. In this story, Mengestu uses the theme of “exit” to explore immigration from Ethiopia to the United States. The author won the MacArthur “Genius Grant."
“The Next Thing," Steven Millhauser (2008, collected in We Others). The author scrutinizes the “hoopla and . . . vague promise of a better life” of American consumerism when a big-box store comes to a small town. Millhauser’s interest in the American Dream was laid out as a literal dream in his 1996 Pulitzer Prize–winning novel Martin Dressler.

Was Zachary Taylor a Republican?

The Republican Party as we understand it today didn't exist in Taylor's time, so no, he wasn't a Republican. He was, however, against the expansion of slavery into the Western territories, and this would be a flagship policy of the Republican Party founded four years after Taylor's death.
Politically-speaking, Taylor was a bit of a maverick, a man of independent judgement who resisted being identified with any one party. Prior to his election as President, he'd never even voted. Due to his status as a war hero, Whigs and Democrats alike wanted Taylor to represent them on the ballot in the 1848 Presidential Election. However, Taylor was initially reluctant to commit to either side, and this almost cost him the chance to be nominated. As it was, the Whigs managed to convince Taylor to be their nominee for President, with Millard Fillmore—who would succeed Taylor as President after his untimely death in office—as his running-mate.

How does Ken Burns’ depiction of African Americans in his PBS documentary “The Civil War” differ from those of other historians or works such as “Ordeal By Fire: The Civil War and Reconstruction”?

Comparing Ken Burns to other historians can be problematic because of his unique and innovative approach to the subject. Burns is a master filmmaker and first-rate historian. His work, which combines powerful photography and insightful quotes, evokes strong feelings in the viewer. Conventional historians produce books, while Burns recreates history on screen. Burns differs from other historians, then primarily in the method of delivery, rather than in content. His The Civil War, an eleven-part series, is a masterpiece, and it has been viewed in history classrooms throughout America.
Burns's film includes many perceptive quotes. The abolitionist Frederick Douglass is quoted: slavery gave him a feeling of "unutterable loathing." One Mississippi plantation owner said, "I'd rather be dead than be a nigger on one of these big plantations." The effect of these quotes is magnified by the melancholy music and haunting images that accompany them.
Burns explained the harsh reality of plantation life for slaves. Diseases were rampant. Fourteen-hour workdays were common. Marriage vows included the phrase, "until death or distance do you part." Slaves were often sold and moved—regardless of marital status.
The key point that Burns makes about slavery is that it caused the Civil War. The war was not about states' rights, nullification, or sectional differences, as some may claim. It was fundamentally about slavery.

What motivates decisions in the translation process?

"No one will ever read you as closely as your translator does." —George Szirtes
The "translation" of text (poetry, novels, short stories and so on) is unique in that the only hindrance is language. Taking a novel and turning it into a film is called an adaptation, and the film is not expected to be digested in the exact same spirit, because they are different mediums and multiple new components are at work. For example, to perform an original song as it was intended is arguably not a creative endeavor, but a display of skill. Therefore, a song is often performed in a different style to emote a different feeling (which is called a cover).
Translations, however, are a unique brand of artistry. They are often expected to show prowess in both linguistics and creative writing. They are tasked with mimicking the substance, emotional pacing, impact, stress, and slang of the original text through their own language and interpretive lens, which forever makes the translation imperfect from the beginning.
Anyone who has ever tried to learn a language will find that there are often no direct translations. The strength of the original word in its original context and original language will inevitably lose the punch that was intended when translated, but it's the translator's job to get as close as possible without sacrificing the visceral components that come about when reading the text. (Poetry is even more difficult when syllabic and syntactical properties are to be taken into account.)
The following are two different english translations from the same line of text:
“A strange melancholy pervades me to which I hesitate to give the grave and beautiful name of sadness”
“This strange new feeling of mine, obsessing me by its sweet languor, is such that I am reluctant to dignify it with the fine, solemn name of ‘sadness’ ”
They both may fundamentally say the same thing, but they may not "feel" the same way. When it comes to art, how a line feels is very important.
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/jul/24/subtle-art-of-translating-foreign-fiction-ferrante-knausgaard