What issues were resolved by the Compromise of 1850 Who benefited more Research Paper

What issues were resolved by the Compromise of 1850 Who benefited more from its terms, the North or the South Why - Research Paper Example By 1847, however, the Courts of the United States were declaring that the Constitution was ultimate, and that slavery was a political, not a legal issue (Jones v. Van Zandt, 1847: General History of the United Sates Supreme Court, 2011)). The Missouri Compromise – which declared that Congress could exclude slavery from Missouri Territory north of the 36-degree, 30-minute line – meant that the political, rather than the legal battle about slavery had started. The Southern States, represented in the feelings of John Calhoun, felt as if they had been disadvantaged: â€Å"†¦ the fact that the equilibrium between the two sections in the government as it stood when the Constitution was ratified and the government put in action has been destroyed.† (Calhoun speech, 1850). He continued: the Southern States of the Union were extremely dissatisfied with conditions as they were and that this dissatisfaction had been growing since the question of slavery had arisen. The point had been reached at which the Southern States could not remain in the Union with â€Å"honor and safety† (Calhoun speech, 1850) if things remained as they were. Slavery was, of course not the only source of the dissatisfaction: the imbalance of power between North and South was also unacceptable. According to Calhoun, the North exercised far more political power than the South. In addition, racial attitudes in the North and South differed so widely as to be irreconcilable. For these reasons, the South was left with few choices. These States would have to agree to the abolition of slavery, or secede from the Union. Calhoun proposed that the North would have to hold the Union together by force and its superior numbers and wealth. The Northern States had more voting power, and Southern States had become increasingly geographically isolated from the rest of the Union. The Southern States with direct access to ports, for example, could afford to secede, in the hope that they

Human Behavioral Ecology Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1250 words

Human Behavioral Ecology - Essay Example As a result a person develops behavioral strategies to solve different problems that are set by nature like arranging for food, mating, looking after the offspring and maintaining interactions with kin, offspring and other individual. HBE gained popularity between 1960s and the 1970s when there was growing emphasis on animal behavior and evolutionary biology. J.B.S Haldane a British evolutionary biologist by 1956 had already argued that differences of human behavior could be analyzed as responses of different individuals with similar genetic composition exposed to varying environments. But the initial developments of HBE were in the field of foraging, drawn for the optimal foraging theory (OFT). This was because OFT was sophisticated and testable theory by 1980s and because much of the history of human species was spent as foragers. Foragers offer experiments for studying human behavioral variability. If people of today forage for living are constrained by aspects of ecology, then the variations in these limitations, the difficulties imposed by these constraints and the solutions that different individuals adopt to overcome the constraints are open to ethnographic observations. The OFT consists of a groups of mod els addressing resource choice, time allocation and patch choice and diet breadth model that is most commonly used in studying humans. In accordance to this model, individual foragers select food resources that promise to provide maximum nutrition, by trading off the handling and search times associated with acquiring that food source. Foragers often bypass those food sources that yield low post encounter mean rate of nutrition when more profitable food sources are common, but they take a broader array of prey species when more profitable items are rare (Kaplan and Hill, 167-201). Changes in subsistence pattern over a period time can be explained by changes in response to factors like technology, climate changes and availability of foreign imports. Thus new technology can either expand or contract the diet breadth (prey choice), depending on whether the cost of searching and handling the food resources have been affected. The diet breadth models even deals with archaeological deposi ts. For instance, deposits associated with societies that are on the brink of adopting agricultural activities, show increasing exploitation of previously unused sources, like plant food and seeds that require extensive processing. The diet breadth model as such suggests that agriculture emerged many times in history as an alternative in response to decrease in encounter rate with higher ranked nutritional items. Failures to support the foraging model predictions have been just as intriguing as the successes. For instance despite what foraging model suggest that humans acquire food that maximizes their mean acquisition, men go for large preys like animals, ignoring the small food items like plants that are more profitable for increasing their mean acquisition rate. Women on the other hand frequently do the opposite and favor small food items over large preys like animals. These observations have helped in generating two alternative hypotheses. The first hypotheses relates to the differences of constraints, that men maximize their nutritional acquisition through paying attention to the currency that gives more weightage to protein rather than