What did Rutherford B. Hayes contribute as a president?

Rutherford B. Hayes brought about civil service reforms as the President in order to end the use of the spoils system for the appointment of civil servants. Hayes was a believer in a meritocracy and believed that all people, regardless of race, should be rewarded based on their abilities. He decided that civil servants should be required to take an examination and their results would be used to determine who was appointed to various posts. Most of Hayes's reforms were accomplished through the use of Executive Orders as he was unable to gain significant support from Congress for a meritocratic appointment process. Hayes also sought to root out corruption in the postal service by refusing to renew star route contracts.
Hayes also recalled federal troops from southern states and essentially ended the Reconstruction Era through a compromise that allowed him to obtain the Presidency.

In To Kill A Mockingbird, who are the main characters? What is the setting? What is the problem/challenge in the story? What is the solution to the problem? List 3 events in the story.

The novel takes in the small, sleepy town of Maycomb, Alabama, in the 1930s. The main problem or challenge in the story is that a black man, Tom Robinson, is falsely accused of raping a white woman, Mayella Ewell. Even though he is innocent, white racism and the maintenance of white supremacy dictate that his trial is a sham: he has to be found guilty, according to values of the white community, so that blacks don't get uppity and so that they understand that whites always have the upper hand. What complicates the situation is that Atticus Finch, Robinson's public defender, decides to mount a real defense of this innocent man, riling the white community.
The story is told from the point of view of Atticus's daughter, Scout. Three events in the story include the burning down of their neighbor, Miss Maudie's house, the Robinson trial, and Bob Ewell's Halloween knife attack on Scout and Jem in revenge for Atticus's defense of Robinson.
The resolution of the problem of Tom Robinson's trial is that he is found guilty, even though it is clear he is innocent. He is killed in jail and Bob Ewell is also killed—by Boo Radley, the Finch's reclusive neighbor, who defends them from Ewell.

How did Helen learn to associate words with objects?

Helen explains how she learned to associate words with objects. This occurred after Miss Sullivan arrived at her home. From her very first day there, Miss Sullivan began finger writing letters into Helen's palm whenever she gave her an object. For instance, she gave Helen a doll and finger wrote the word "doll" into her palm. Helen found this manual writing interesting and even wrote the letters for doll into her mother's palm, but she did not make a connection between the doll and the letters.
It wasn't until some weeks later, when Miss Sullivan wrote the word "water" into Helen's palm while water was coming out of a water pump that Helen suddenly made the connection. This was a transformative, and to Helen, miraculous moment in her life. Suddenly she had the means to communicate, and her entire world opened up.

Mayberry Textiles Inc. is considering the purchase of a new machine which has an initial cost of $400,000. Annual operating cash inflows are expected to be $100,000 each year for eight years. No salvage value is expected at the end of the asset's life. Mayberry's cost of capital is 14 percent. Compute the net present value of the machine. (Ignore income taxes)

Net present value is calculated using the following formula:
NPV = X * [(1+r)^n - 1]/[r * (1+r)^n]
here,
x=amount received per period
n= number of periods
r= rate of return
Plugging in the following figures:
Initial cost: $400,000.
Annual operating cash inflows: $100,000 each year
n= 8 years
Cost of capital: 14 %
The net present value is: 100,000,000*((1+0.14)^8-1)/(0.14*(1+0.14)^8) = $626,566.42 (rounded to the nearest cent).
Since this is higher than the initial payment, the machine is worth the initial investment.

What was the relationship between the trends in African American politics and African American arts and culture during the late 1960s and early 1970s?

In the 1960s and 1970s, the relationship between African American politics and African American arts and culture was established through the Black Arts Movement, which began in 1965. In that year, the writer Larry Neal published an essay entitled "The Black Arts Movement." In that essay, which was a manifesto for the movement, he defined the Black Arts Movement as "the aesthetic and spiritual sister of the Black Power concept," a movement that "[proposed] a radical reordering of the Western cultural aesthetic." A year earlier, Neal established the Black Arts Repertory Theater in Harlem alongside fellow Black Arts Movement leader Amiri Baraka, a poet, essayist, and playwright formerly known as LeRoi Jones. Other key figures in this movement were Ishmael Reed (Mumbo Jumbo), Henry Dumas (Ark of Bones), the essayist and critic Addison Gayle Jr., and the poet Quincy Troupe.
Unfortunately, the most recognizable faces of the Black Arts Movement, like those of the Black Panther movement that coincided with it, were male. However, key women in the Black Arts Movement include Sonia Sanchez, Nikki Giovanni, and Audre Lorde (a vocal black lesbian feminist), whose political ambitions were expressed through their poetry. The female poets who sprang from Black Arts Movement ideology did not achieve prominence until the 1970s.
The Black Arts Movement began one year before Stokely Carmichael, then-leader of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), gave his Black Power speech and one year before the formation of the Black Panther Party in Oakland, California—both of which occurred in 1966. The key connection between the Black Nationalist movement that the Black Panther Party pursued and the Black Arts Movement, which pursued a uniquely black aesthetic, was that both were interested in self-sufficiency. In this sense, they were perpetuating Booker T. Washington's view of self-determination and separation from the white community, as expressed in his Atlanta Compromise speech, while also embracing W.E.B. DuBois's avowal of political radicalism. Additionally, both proponents of the Black Arts Movement and those of the Black Panther Party wanted to create a cultural value system that was defined within the community. In this sense, these movements coincided with the decolonization movements that occurred in former colonies in West Africa and the Caribbean. Ideas were shared between black nationalists and decolonialist leaders—to wit, Stokely Carmichael was so inspired that he later changed his name to Kwame Touré, after both the first Ghanaian president Kwame Nkrumah and the Guinean leader Sekou Touré.
Finally, you shouldn't think that the 1960s saw the first confluence between arts and politics within the African American community. The Harlem Renaissance was not only a period of artistic flourishing but also a period in which black people pursued self-definition and political activism, particularly Marcus Garvey's repatriation movement through the United Negro Improvement Association (UNIA).

What is the meaning of the poem "On Visiting the Site of a Slave Massacre in Opelousas" by Roger Reeves?

The poem "On Visiting the Site of a Slave Massacre in Opelousas" by Roger Reeves, from his 2013 poetry collection, King Me, is an exploration of agency, grief, and history. In unmetered but regular lines, interweaving figurative language with historical reference, this poem considers how to evaluate the life that continues even after acts of violence and atrocity. While the violence considered in the poem is connected to a single event, it raises a larger implicit question of the relationship between historical racial violence and its contemporary legacy.
The massacre named in the poem's title took place in Louisiana's St. Landry parish in 1868 and offers a terrifying glimpse into racial violence during the Reconstruction era. Within a two-week period, approximately 250 people in the parish were murdered, the vast majority of them African American. Confronting the site of the massacre, now simply a cornfield, the speaker of the poem begins with a reflection on Dr. Samuel Johnson's assertion that "Grief . . . is a species of idleness." From there, the poem proceeds to reflect less on the details of the massacre itself than on the physical space of that massacre's site today. The landscape itself is "idle," and this stillness communicates grief. The speaker describes different kinds of stasis or inactivity, each of which implies a preceding violence. Oars of beached, motionless ships are "orphaned" and the unmoving bodies of black women have been trampled by stallions (whose nineteenth-century Ku Klux Klan robes resembled wedding gowns). The speaker's own act of stillness in this place, to witness and simply "mourn for what fails here," exists in an uneasy tension both with the violence of this landscape's past and Dr. Johnson's comment on the limits of such grief.
The second half of the poem focuses principally on a dead deer in a ravine and the bees who have built a hive in its corpse. The mutual ignorance of the bees toward what has happened to the animal in whose cavities they now build their homes and of the deer "unaware of the work being done in its still body" highlights the way that historical distance changes our relationship to death. The deer's death and the bees' lives, happening in the same place but at different times, together act as a metaphor for the speaker's own physical presence in a place that has seen so much death.
The poem's conclusion is emotionally complex. While the speaker states that “Mercy, yes mercy / is at the end of grief,” suggesting that some form of peace can follow a reckoning with violence, the life that continues in its wake contains a painful awareness of our own proximity to death, as seen in statements like "nothing you love will be spared." The final image of the bees, whose "needle-hung bodies" subtly evoke the hanging deaths of lynching, imagines their frantic final moments, fighting not to stay alive but "in hopes of not being / the last to die." The speaker extrapolates a paradoxical lesson from this thought, one that brings into question his own position at the historical site of a racial violence whose legacy continues to haunt the present. Invoking both grief and acceptance, stillness and escape, the speaker ends the poem by asking, "Isn't that what we pray for: misery, anywhere but here?"
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/story-deadliest-massacre-reconstruction-era-louisiana-180970420/

In Every Day, what does A do on the days s/he doesn’t want to be someone else?

When A takes on the identity of Justin, s/he isn't very happy about it. Justin listens to loud, obnoxious music on a loud, obnoxious radio station with loud, obnoxious DJs. The rest of what A needs to know about him can be accessed from Justin's memory: the way to school; which parking spot he uses; the combination of his locker; etc. But even with all the relevant info, it's still hard for A to go through the motions of adapting him or herself to a new identity.
Whenever things get too tough and A can't imagine maneuvering him or herself through a long, hard day at school, it's time for A to stay at home. S/he'll phone in sick and stay in bed reading books. After a while, this gets tiresome, and A eventually finds that s/he's up for the challenge of a new school and new friends. But this feeling only lasts for a single day.