Roots of the Mexican-American War

The Mexican-American War (1846-1848) was a long, bloody conflict between the United States of America and Mexico. It would be fought from California to Mexico City and many points in between, all of them on Mexican soil. The USA won the war by capturing Mexico City in September of 1847 and forcing the Mexicans to negotiate a truce favorable to US interests. By 1846, war was nearly inevitable between the USA and Mexico. On the Mexican side, the lingering resentment over the loss of Texas was intolerable. In 1835, Texas, then part of the Mexican State of Coahuila and Texas, had risen in revolt. After setbacks at the Battle of the Alamo and the Goliad Massacre, the Texan rebels stunned Mexican General Antonio Là ³pez de Santa Anna at the Battle of San Jacinto on April 21, 1836. Santa Anna was taken prisoner and forced to recognize Texas as an independent nation. Mexico, however, did not accept Santa Annas agreements and considered Texas nothing more than a rebellious province. Since 1836, Mexico had half-heartedly tried to invade Texas and take it back, without much success. The Mexican people, however, clamored for their politicians to do something about this outrage. Although privately many Mexican leaders knew that reclaiming Texas was impossible, to say so in public was political suicide. The Mexican politicians outdid each other in their rhetoric saying that Texas must be brought back into Mexico. Meanwhile, tensions were high on the Texas/Mexico border. In 1842, Santa Anna sent a small army to attack San Antonio: the Texas responded by attacking Santa Fe. Not long after, a bunch of Texan hotheads raided the Mexican town of Mier: they were captured and poorly treated until their release. These events and others were reported in the American press and were generally slanted to favor the Texan side. The simmering disdain of Texans for Mexico thus spread to the entire USA. In 1845, the USA began the process of annexing Texas to the union. This was truly intolerable for Mexicans, who may have been able to accept Texas as a free republic but never part of the United States of America. Through diplomatic channels, Mexico let it be known that to annex Texas was practically a declaration of war. The USA went ahead anyway, which left Mexican politicians in a pinch: they had to do some saber-rattling or look weak. Meanwhile, the USA had its eye on Mexicos northwestern possessions, such as California and New Mexico. The Americans wanted more land and believed that their country should stretch from the Atlantic to the Pacific. The belief that America should expand to fill the continent was called Manifest Destiny. This philosophy was expansionist and racist: its proponents believed that the noble and industrious Americans deserved those lands more than the degenerate Mexicans and Native Americans who lived there. The USA tried on a couple of occasions to purchase those lands from Mexico, and was rebuffed every time. President James K. Polk, however, would not take no for an answer: he meant to have California and Mexicos other western territories and he would go to war to have them. Fortunately for Polk, the border of Texas was still in question: Mexico claimed it was the Nueces River while the Americans claimed it was the Rio Grande. In early 1846, both sides sent armies to the border: by then, both nations were looking for an excuse to fight. It wasnt long before a series of small skirmishes bloomed into war. The worst of the incidents was the so-called Thornton Affair of April 25, 1846 in which a squad of American cavalrymen under the command of Captain Seth Thornton was attacked by a much larger Mexican force: 16 Americans were killed. Because the Mexicans were in contested territory, President Polk was able to ask for a declaration of war because Mexico had †¦shed American blood upon the American soil. Larger battles followed within two weeks and both nations had declared war on one another by May 13. The war would last about two years, until spring of 1848. The Mexicans and Americans would fight about ten major battles, and the Americans would win all of them. In the end, the Americans would capture and occupy Mexico City and dictate terms of the peace agreement to Mexico. Polk got his lands: according to the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, formalized in May of 1848, Mexico would hand over most of the current US Southwest (the border established by the treaty is very similar to todays border between the two nations) in exchange for $15 million dollars and forgiveness of some previous debt. Sources: Brands, H.W. Lone Star Nation: the Epic Story of the Battle for Texas Independence. New York: Anchor Books, 2004. Eisenhower, John S.D. So Far from God: the U.S. War with Mexico, 1846-1848. Norman: the University of Oklahoma Press, 1989 Henderson, Timothy J. A Glorious Defeat: Mexico and its War with the United States.New York: Hill and Wang, 2007. Wheelan, Joseph. Invading Mexico: Americas Continental Dream and the Mexican War, 1846-1848. New York: Carroll and Graf, 2007.

The Russel County Middle School Situation Analysis

Introduction Part of the Russell County Middle School (RCMS) mission statement declares that we as an organization will help students accomplish what they are capable of. Procedures are in place to assist special education students and cater to gifted students, but some students seem to fall through the cracks. About five percent of the student population is retained each year and about one percent fail to capitalize on the opportunity to be promoted mid-year the following school year. A review of these students’ average data showed that absenteeism and discipline were issues, but that the students performed on or close to grade level on standardized tests. A group was formed to determine root causes and develop a plan of action to reduce the number of students that are retained each year and help those that have been retained to get back on track. A consensus was reached that a lack of motivation was the underlying cause for students’ poor classroom performance and resulting retention. After brainstorming and evaluating options, the group decided to implement a mentoring program in which faculty and staff members that did not teach the retained students would meet with them periodically to build relationships and encourage them. Challenges At the conclusion of the 2012-2013 school year, 28 students were retained that returned to RCMS the following year. This group of students averaged over twenty-three absences from school, 4.5 days in in-school suspension, 4.9 daysShow MoreRelatedProject Mgmt296381 Words   |  1186 PagesLeadership Chapter 2 Organization Strategy and Project Selection 1.4 Projects and programs (.2) 1.4.1 Managing the portfolio 1.4.3 Strategy and projects 2.3 Stakeholders and review boards 12.1 RFP’s and vendor selection (.3.4.5) 11.2.2.6 SWAT analysis 6.5.2.7 Schedule compression 9.4.2.5 Leadership skills G.1 Project leadership 10.1 Stakeholder management Chapter 11 Teams Chapter 3 Organization: Structure and Culture 2.4.1 Organization cultures [G.7] 2.4.2 Organization structureRead MoreBrand Building Blocks96400 Words   |  386 Pages 4. Complex Brand Strategies And Relationships There was a time, not too long ago, when a brand was a clear, singular entity. Colgate, for example, was a brand name that simply needed to be defined, established, and nurtured. Today, the situation is far different. There are subbrands, brand extensions, ingredient brands, endorser brands, and corporate brands. The Coke logo can be found on a dozen products, including Diet Cherry Coke, Caffeine Free Diet Coke, and Coke Classic - and it doesn

Nosql Free Essays

Security Issues in NoSQL Databases Lior Okman Deutsche Telekom Laboratories at Ben-Gurion University, Beer-Sheva, Israel Nurit Gal-Oz, Yaron Gonen, Ehud Gudes Deutsche Telekom Laboratories at Ben-Gurion University, and Dept of Computer Science, Ben-Gurion University, Beer-Sheva, Israel Jenny Abramov Deutsche Telekom Laboratories at Ben-Gurion University and Dept of Information Systems Eng. Ben-Gurion University, Beer-Sheva, Israel Abstract—The recent advance in cloud computing and distributed web applications has created the need to store large amount of data in distributed databases that provide high availability and scalability. In recent years, a growing number of companies have adopted various types of non-relational databases, commonly referred to as NoSQL databases, and as the applications they serve emerge, they gain extensive market interest. We will write a custom essay sample on Nosql or any similar topic only for you Order Now These new database systems are not relational by definition and therefore they do not support full SQL functionality. Moreover, as opposed to relational databases they trade consistency and security for performance and scalability. As increasingly sensitive data is being stored in NoSQL databases, security issues become growing concerns. This paper reviews two of the most popular NoSQL databases Cassandra and MongoDB) and outlines their main security features and problems. Index Terms—NoSQL; Security; Cassandra; MongoDB; I. INTRODUCTION The recent advance in cloud computing and distributed web applications has created the need to store large amount of data in distributed databases that provide high availability and scalability. In recent years, a growing number of companies have adopted various types of non-relational databases, commonly referred to as NoSQL databases and as the applications they serve emerge, they gained extensive market interest. Different NoSQL databases t ake different approaches. Their primary advantage is that, unlike relational databases, they handle unstructured data such as documents, e-mail, multimedia and social media efficiently. The common features of NoSQL databases can be summarized as: high scalability and reliability, very simple data model, very simple (primitive) query language, lack of mechanism for handling and managing data consistency and integrity constraints maintenance(e. g. , foreign keys), and almost no support for security at the database level. The CAP theorem introduced by Eric Brewer [1], refers to the three properties of shared-data systems namely data onsistency, system availability and tolerance to network partitions. The theorem [2] states that only two of these three properties can be simultaneously provided by the system. Traditional DBMS designers have prioritized the consistency and availability properties. The rise of large web applications and distributed data systems, makes the partition-tolerance property inevitable, thu s imposing compromise on either consistency or availability. The main promoters of NOSQL databases are Web 2. 0 companies with huge, growing data and infrastructure needs such as Amazon and Google. The Dynamo technology developed t Amazon [3] and the Bigtable distributed storage system developed at Google [4], have inspired many of today’s NoSQL applications. In this paper we analyze the security problems of two of the most popular NoSQL databases, namely: Cassandra and MongoDB. Cassandra [5] is a distributed storage system for managing very large amounts of structured data spread out across many commodity servers, while providing highly available service with no single point of failure. Cassandra aims to run on top of an infrastructure of hundreds of nodes. At this scale, components fail often and Cassandra is designed to survive these failures. While in many ways Cassandra resembles a database and shares many design and implementation strategies therewith, Cassandra does not support a full relational data model; instead, it provides clients with a simple data model that supports dynamic control over data layout and format. Cassandra was designed to support the Inbox search feature of Facebook [6]. As such it can support over 100 million users which use the system continuously. MongoDB [7] is a document database developed by 10gen. It manages collections of JSON-like documents. Many applications can thus model data in a more natural way, as data can e nested in complex hierarchies and still be query-able and indexable. Documents are stored in collections, and collections are in turn stored in a database. A collection is similar to a table in relational DBMS, but a collection lacks any schema. MongoDB also provides high availability and scalability by using Shardings and Replica sets (see below). The increasing popularity of NoSQL databases such as Cassandra and MongoDB and the large amounts of userrelated sensitive information stored in these databases raise the concern for the confidentiality and privacy of the data and the security provided by these systems. In this paper we review the main security features and problems of these two database systems. We start with a brief overview of Cassandra and MongoDB functionality in section II. We then discuss security features of Cassandra and MongoDB in sections III and IV respectively. We conclude in section V. Since much of the discussion is based on open-source Internet documents, it naturally reflects the situation at the time this paper is written 2011 International Joint Conference of IEEE TrustCom-11/IEEE ICESS-11/FCST-11 978-0-7695-4600-1/11 $26. 00 Â © 2011 IEEE DOI 10. 1109/TrustCom. 2011. 70 541 How to cite Nosql, Essay examples