How was Maryland founded?

The Colony of Maryland was founded in 1632, when King Charles I granted a charter to George Calvert, also known as the first Lord Baltimore. This charter granted Calvert lands between the Potomac River and the Chesapeake Bay. Calvert, a converted Catholic, envisioned a land where Catholics and Protestants would live peacefully together. However, Calvert died before he could settle these lands. His sons Cecil and Leonard left England soon after to fulfill their father's vision in the New World.
The first permanent English settlers in Maryland arrived aboard two ships in March 1634. They consisted of a mix of Protestants and Catholics. Soon afterward, many persecuted English Catholics found their way to the colony in search of religious freedom. There would be conflicts between Puritan settlers and the Catholics during the decades following the initial settlement of Maryland. In 1650, a Puritan army took control of Maryland and outlawed other religious practices. This rebellion was put down several years later and religious tolerance restored. However, it highlighted the tensions between the forces of religious tolerance and extremism in the colonies.
At first, the Calverts attempted to govern Maryland according to a feudalistic model, with landholders dividing up their estates among vassals. This did not last long, and in 1638, the colonial assembly forced Governor Leonard Calvert to adopt the laws of England. Afterward, the power to make laws passed to the assembly.
The early settlers quickly set about building the colony's economy, which was primarily based on the production and exportation of tobacco. A large number of indentured servants came to work these tobacco plantations. These people, who signed up to work for a set amount of years in exchange for passage to North America, made up a large portion of the initial European population in the area. By the beginning of the next century, however, most indentured servants were replaced by enslaved Africans. A significant number of the early European settlers were also convicts sent to North America as a form of banishment.
https://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/the-settlement-of-maryland

In Zadie Smith's "That Crafty Feeling," what stylistic features are used, and how can this improve the standard of students' writing?

In her lecture “That Crafty Feeling” (2008), Zadie Smith’s approach to the craft of writing is somewhat different than expected. For one, Smith says at the very onset that she can’t offer advice on a single overarching "Craft Of Writing." Rather, when talking about writing, all she can draw from is her own experience of writing, her particular craft. This too is not a monolith, as her craft differs from one novel to another. She then goes onto offer ten bits of advice for writers, which she says are specific of her career output of three novels in twelve years. I think Smith’s no-size-fits-all approach itself is useful for writing students because it gives them the freedom to experiment with their writing process. Smith suggests that an over-dependence on rules and writing manuals may actually encumber the writer-in-training and keep them from finding their voice. Trying to figure out the “technique” of writing may be like trying to breathe consciously. If you’ve ever done the latter, you know how breathless you end up feeling!

It felt like being asked to be attentive to your breathing, to your in, out, in, out, in, out…I thought: if I read one more word about the intimate third person, I’ll never be able to write the bloody thing again.

Out of the ten bits of advice Smith lists, I’d like to discuss a couple in greater detail. The first is titled “OPD in the First Twenty pages.” Smith suggests most novelists are either macro-planners or micro-managers, the latter a class to which she belongs. Macro-planners, very roughly speaking, have the plot and structure of their story worked out before they start the first page. Micro-managers like Smith on the other hand, “start at the first sentence of a novel and…finish at the last.” In other words, they work out the exact details of their plot as they write. Smith’s tone shows she obviously prefers the micro-manager approach, but she qualifies her bias with this statement:

I can’t stand to hear them speak about all this, not because I disapprove, but because other people’s methods are always so incomprehensible and horrifying.

For a writing student, one bit of relevant advice here is that neither of the two methods is sacrosanct; what is more important is identifying the method with which one is comfortable. The second bit is about paying attention to beginnings, especially for writers who work in Smith’s vein. She terms this tendency to obsess over the “first 20 pages” of novels Obsessive Perspective Disorder, or OPD. Although sometimes the tendency to dwell on these pages can spin out of control, as in the case of Smith’s first novel On Beauty (2005), where she “reworked those first twenty pages for almost two years,” paying attention to beginnings has its uses. It can help writers find the “tone” of their novel or story, which is crucial to the writing process.

Yet while OPD is happening, somehow the work of the rest of the novel gets done. That’s the strange thing. It’s as if you’re winding the key of a toy car tighter and tighter…when you finally let it go, it travels at a crazy speed. When I finally settled on a tone, the rest of the book was finished in five months...Once I get the tone, every-thing else follows. You hear interior decorators say the same about a shade of paint.

Some writers tend to shoot off their writing to a magazine or publisher the moment they finish it. In “Step Away from the Vehicle," point number 8 on Smith’s list, the novelist explains why this is a bad practice. She suggests writers should instead wait and “step away from the vehicle” until they have enough distance from their work to be able to look at it as a reader. This second look, as a reader, is extremely useful in editing their work.

You can ignore everything else in this lecture except number eight. It is the only absolutely 24-karat gold-plated piece of advice I have to give you…After I read Alan Hollinghurst’s magnificent novel The Line of Beauty, I met him at a dinner, and drunkenly I think I asked him how he got his novel to be so magnificently. He said: “Oh, I left it for a long while. And then I tinkered with it. Five years, actually.”
That’s the best piece of writing advice I ever had.

Finally, writers can also learn from stylistic features Smith uses to compose this particular lecture. Her language is alive, entertaining, and free from the clutter of heavy jargon. It makes you want to listen to her, ears cocked. One way Smith energizes her language is with lots of contemporary, relatable metaphors. Gaining objective distance from your work becomes “stepping away from the vehicle”; finding the right tone is like an interior decorator searching for the right shade of paint. She also illustrates her advice with personal experience, making it immersive and immediate for the reader. Further, the shunning of dry jargon, accompanied with the easy use of words like “magnificently,” gives the lecture the air of a free-flowing conversation between Smith and the listener/reader.
https://believermag.com/that-crafty-feeling/

Early in her essay, Zadie Smith proposes that “Reading about craft is like listening to yourself breathe. Writing about craft prompts a self-consciousness so acute one forgets how to exhale altogether.” The advice here seems to be that students or young writers shouldn’t fixate too much on theories about the craft of writing; if they do, they will become too self-conscious about their work. Just as being conscious about one’s breathing might in turn render one’s breathing unnatural and strange, so too might being self-conscious about one’s craft render one’s writing unnatural and strange. The implication is that a student or young writer needs to maintain some distance from the craft of his or her writing in order to ensure that he or she is writing freely and naturally.
Smith describes two types of writers. The first type is the “Micro Planner.” The second type is the “Macro Planner.” The former begins with the first sentence and then works on, organically, letting the structure grow from the accumulation of words.The latter, she says, designs the structure or plot of the story before writing a word. Smith uses the metaphor of building a house to demonstrate her point. She says,

Macro Planners have their houses basically built from day one and so their obsession is internal—they’re forever moving the furniture.

In this metaphor the house represents the overall structure of the story, and the furniture represents the characters, settings and so forth. Micro Planners, on the other hand,

build a house floor by floor, discreetly and in its entirety. Each floor needs to be sturdy and fully decorated with all the furniture in place before the next is built on top of it. There’s wallpaper in the hall even if the stairs lead nowhere at all.

In other words, the framework or exterior of a Micro Planner’s story is determined according to, and subsequent to, the internal fixtures being put in place. The external structure, or plot, is built around the internal fixtures.
Understanding the difference between a Micro Planner and a Macro Planner is perhaps a useful starting point for any budding writer. A Micro Planner who always—to continue Smith’s metaphor—gets stuck on the ground floor, fixating over the internal fixtures, might try instead to become a Macro Planner. Likewise, a Macro Planner, who builds the house only to find that he or she can’t find the internal fixtures to fit inside it, might try instead to take the Micro approach.
The one piece of advice that Smith offers that she says is indispensable is to, metaphorically, “Step away from the vehicle.” She goes on to explain that “The secret to editing your work is simple: you need to become its reader instead of its writer.” What Smith means by this is that after finishing a story, one should step away from it for as long as possible, and only after a significant amount of time has passed should one return to it to edit it. In this way, one can become more of an objective reader and critic rather than the invested writer. One can judge the work more honestly and therefore edit it all the more effectively.

How did the Revolutionary War affect colonial families?

By nature, war is designed to inflict pain on both military and civilians alike. While the military suffers from casualties as the result of battle, civilians are dramatically impacted in ways less traumatic in terms of being targets of military attack, but they still experience the effects of conflicts in significant ways. Colonial citizens that were non-combatants during the American Revolution suffered in many profound ways.
The most apparent impact on colonial families was that members of your family could be part of the militias fighting battles. Battles are fought by youth and commanded by elders. Farms would be deprived of their most valuable labor resources, young males. One reason the American colonial militias had such a hard time retaining soldiers was they could not afford the time away from their farms. History records General Washington paying soldiers a retention bonus out of his personal wealth to keep them from leaving when their enlistment was ended or right before the critical planting and harvesting season. Losing a valuable family member and farm resource was devastating to the local agricultural economies.
Colonial America was an agriculture community with economic roots deeply planted in the production of food or tobacco. Resources usually used by families to sustain them with surplus going to the market were severely disrupted. Some farmers sold their products to the British military, as they offered higher prices. Selling to the British was a risky proposition, as other colonists supporting the revolution would take a dim view of you helping the enemy. Many sold to both, torn between the ideas of the excitement of the possibility of a united independent colonial America and their loyalty to familial and business ties to Great Britain. Colonial America depended on the British in many ways, and breaking the relationship with what many still fondly thought of as the benevolent home country was not a decision to be taken lightly. War strained these relationships, and not all colonists viewed a break from Great Britain as beneficial or positive.
A famous military cliche is attributed to Napoleon— "An army marches on its stomach"—is an apt description for colonial militias and British soldiers. British soldiers would confiscate agricultural products, depriving families of food grown for personal use and sale. In some instances, crops and homes of the prominent growers were burned, with farms and farm implements destroyed to keep the products out of the hands of the colonial militias. If a farm was unlucky enough to be nearby the battlefield, British troops could forcibly remove you from your home and use your house as a military barracks.
With the disruption of the agricultural economy, trades and businesses that depended on the selling of goods to farmers took a big hit. Farmers could not afford to purchase new equipment or other farming materials, resulting in merchants going out of business. The domino effect is that with merchants going out of business, the need for imported goods became smaller. Coastal ports already suffering from a British Navy embargo saw a massive decline in port activity. In large cities, the squeeze on the ports resulted in massive unemployment, as port workers and port industries did not need workers. Displaced workers were left penniless with no options for work.
Colonial women may have suffered the most. The potential loss of their husbands or children to a battle was always at the forefront of their thinking. Colonial women had no property rights, and the loss of the male owner jeopardized the home they lived in. Colonial women were valiant in facing the difficulty of being left to manage a farm, continuing to raise any younger siblings not off to war, and living daily with the fear that at any moment a British regiment could demand the use of their home. Colonial women did everything they could to maintain as much of pre-war life as possible. During the conflict, many women formed groups providing clothing to both sides, depending on their loyalties. Some, as a way to support their families, became spies providing valuable intelligence and reconnaissance on troops as they moved through the areas. Soldiers from both sides were sometimes greeted by less-than-friendly females who protected their homesteads and children with great zeal, often showing their proficiency and accuracy in the use of firearms. Significant credit for the American colonial victories should go to the women who supported the troops from afar and tried to maintain as best as possible normal life on the homefront.
Family life in colonial America was significantly altered by the events of the Revolutionary War. It would be many years post-war until the colonies returned to life pre-war. The resiliency of the colonists was tested in similar proportion to the first settlers that came to the American shores to colonize.
http://americainclass.org/sources/makingrevolution/war/text7/text7.htm

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/divided-loyalties-107489501/

https://www.ushistory.org/us/11e.asp

How does Shaw attack upper-class society in Arms and the Man?

To begin with, the stage directions of Arms and the Man—which, in Shaw’s plays, are always highly specific—lay the groundwork by introducing the prominent Bulgarian Petkoff family as big fish in a small pond. The family, each in their own turn, relies on appearances whenever their concessions to reality fall short. This is, in itself, an entitlement of wealth. While everyone in the upper-class household—including the servants—must, to some extent, play by the rules of social propriety, these rules obviously only exist to favor those in power. The servants must stifle their own impulses to flatter their patrons until such time as they might need to exploit household secrets for leverage.
The daughter of the house, Raina—Calvary hero Sergius’s fiance—is particularly out of her depth during the Swiss ‘volunteer’ Bluntschli’s intrusion, and so she presents herself as a romantic figure, directly responsible for the proceedings yet naive about the male domain of mortal combat. Her behavior imitates that of the heroine in an opera. There’s a suggestion that Raina is unaware of the extent of her self-aggrandizing ways, living as she does, so much in the sway of mythology.
While Raina is guided by pretenses of cultural sophistication, the military hero Sergius is consciously operatic, a fatuous buffoon playing at chivalry. He acknowledges that his public role and high-flown position are a hierarchical social construct, a status display. But, in wooing the servant Louka behind Raina’s back, he loses composure over the nuances of his flirtation with a subordinate—a woman who should be grateful for his attentions but apparently considers herself his equal. This pretender claims that he contains multitudes as a man of the world but is confused. Is he the sexual aggressor in his entanglement with the maid, or is he the provoked?
The father and Sergius are each egotistical to the point that they can be easily hoodwinked by the women who ably gull them. Raina later understands that her “noble attitude” can be easily unmasked by Bluntschli, who is too straight-forward to indulge her posturing. But Bluntschli, as sympathetic as he is, is still Raina’s social inferior.

Raina: You have a low, shopkeeping mind. You think of things that would never come into a gentleman’s head.
Bluntschli: That’s the Swiss national character, dear lady.

What happens to Max and Kevin when they are walking to the millpond to see the fireworks?

It's the Fourth of July, and Kevin and Max are heading off to the millpond to enjoy the fireworks. Unfortunately, their fun is interrupted by Tony D, the town hoodlum. Drunk out of what remains of his mind, he approaches Kevin and Max, yelling all kinds of abuse at them. He also asks them if they have any M80s, which are super-powerful fireworks. Such fireworks would be dangerous enough in anyone's hands, let alone those of a violent, drunken gangster.
Not surprisingly, Kevin and Max don't oblige. For good measure Kevin calls Tony D a cretin. Not only that, but he actually explains what a cretin is, because, well, Tony's too much of a cretin to understand what it means. Anyway, Tony gets mad at this outrageous, but completely accurate, insult and starts threatening Kevin and Max with a knife and shouting "It's freak-show time!" He chases the odd couple—with Kevin still perched on Max's broad shoulders—into the millpond, where Tony gets stuck. Looking like an even bigger idiot than normal, he has to get his fellow gang members to help him out.
The police arrive in the nick of time before any more nastiness can happen. It's been a strange old night, to the say the least, exciting and scary in equal measure. It's also brought Kevin and Max even closer together. From now on, they are to be known, at Kevin's insistence, as "Freak the Mighty," a humorous reference to Max's strength and Tony's insulting reference to Kevin's disability.

Does any rock besides kimberlite decay into blue clay and then into yellow dirt/clay?

The short answer to your question is that many minerals can decay into "blue" and/or "yellow" clay. Clay is just the state of minerals when they have been sufficiently decayed into small enough pieces to mix with water, which produces a kind of slurry. There are two key factors in determining the color of clays, and they are interrelated.
Color is determined by the amount of oxygen in the rock and how that oxygen expresses itself. Many people have seen the red soil and clay of places like Georgia in the United States. That color is caused by mineral iron in the ground that "rusts," or oxidizes into that color. Iron in the minerals is exposed to air, and the oxygen changes the color of the rock. Red soil is, therefore, very high in iron concentration.
Different hues like blue, green, and yellow are produced, in part, by the amount of oxygen in the minerals. Minerals like kimberlite oxidize into a bluish color, which tends to yellow with more oxygen.
Another key factor in determining the color of clay is the amount and kind of bacteria that are in the soil. Bacteria can be aerobic, meaning they consume oxygen, or anaerobic, which means they don't. Green and blue clays tend to form when anaerobic bacteria are present in large numbers. When you pull some of these clays from the ground, the unpleasant smell comes from anaerobic bacteria "digesting" and processing the rock into clay.
Just like paint pigments (which are often made of clay) can be mixed to form different colors of paint, decaying or eroding rock can have different levels of oxygen and different combinations of bacteria that, when combined, give us the ranges of color in most clays.

Who poured poison in the king's ear, and why?

Prince Hamlet's uncle Claudius committed regicide (and fratricide) by pouring poison into the king's ear while he was sleeping in his orchard. Claudius assassinated his brother for a variety of reasons. He was motivated to attain the power, authority, and wealth that comes along with being king of Denmark. In addition to his lust for Denmark's crown, Claudius also desired to be with brother's wife, Gertrude. Claudius murdered King Hamlet before the start of the play, and Prince Hamlet discovers the truth about his father's death in act 1, scene 5. When Hamlet is visited by his father's ghost, the Ghost tells him that he did not die from a poisonous snake bite, as people previously thought: Claudius poured a vial of henbane poison into his ear while he was sleeping in the orchard. The Ghost then instructs Hamlet to avenge his death by murdering Claudius. Hamlet initially questions whether or not the Ghost is telling the truth and hesitates to get revenge for the majority of the play.