Annotated Bibliography

Annotated Bibliography

Reid, Joan A. "Rapid Assessment Exploring Impediments to Successful Prosecutions of Sex Traffickers of U.S. Minors." Journal of Police and Criminal Psychology 28.1 (2013): 75+.Criminal Justice Collection. Web. 24 Nov. 2014.

                        The following article analyses the presence of sex trafficking of minors in the metropolitan areas of Massachusetts, which includes the city of Lowell, Massachusetts. The article evaluates the existence of prostitution within each area and references the decreasing rate of prostitution due to the increased rate of prosecution of child sex traffickers. The article also includes information referencing the psychological factors that contribute to victims testifying and not testifying against the prosecuted sex offenders and child sex traffickers. This article offers a few usable facts in relation to the topic of crime in Lowell, Massachusetts, however the usable information offered is very minimal.  

Goldman, Leah. “25 Most Dangerous Cities in America”. Business Insider Magazine. 23 May, 2011. Web. 24 November 2014.

           

                        Lowell is stated to be the eighteenth most dangerous city in America. With Flint, Michigan as the most dangerous and Elizabeth, New Jersey the twenty-fifth most dangerous, Lowell falls between the top twenty five most dangerous cities in America in relation to the irregularly high crime rate. The Business Insider Magazine calculates the danger per city by taking into account the location of each city, where the crime rates in their surrounding towns may have an effect on the city’s crime rate. The Business Insider Magazine considers the danger within a city in regards to the amount of violent crime that occurs within each city per year. The term violent crime covers the following misconducts: murder, non-negligent manslaughter, forcible rape, aggravated assault, and robbery.

“About Lowell Crime Rates” Crime Rates in Lowell, Massachusetts. Neighborhood Scouts Search Engine. Web. 24 November 2014.

                        The Neighborhood Scout website offers usable information and analysis on the crime rates in specific areas around the country and also includes the numerical value of each crime in the area for various years. The data calculated is originally from the FBI’s reported crimes in each area. The acts of violence that are taken into account are forcible rape, murder and non-negligent manslaughter, armed robbery, and aggravated assault, including assault with a deadly weapon. The property crimes that are taken into account are motor vehicle theft, arson, larceny, and burglary. The numerical value of each crime that is evaluated through this website is determined for every one thousand people. For example, there were a reported eight hundred forty nine burglaries in Lowell annually, that calculates out to be 7.82 burglaries per every one thousand citizens. This website reports the population of Lowell to be approximately 108,539 people. 

The Luna Theatre, The Fighter, and Irish Pride

Savannah Szymanski

Professor Conway

Freshman Honors Seminar

10 November 2014

The Luna Theatre

            The Luna Theatre’s delightful appearance and indie folk motif in addition to their respectable service provided for a pleasurable experience while attending a film there. From the theatre’s décor to their products available for purchasing, the Luna Theater established a unique impression where their style and perceptions seem unmatched by any average corporation owned theatre in the area. The theatre’s decorations all followed a folky interior design similar to a style commonly seen in the mid-western part of the country. The Theatre has various shops lined up leading to the theatre entrance where various goods are being sold, including coffee, pastries, artwork, and even clothes. Though the entire theatre was relatively unfinished when the class trip was taken to the theatre, the facility itself still appeared extremely well thought out and prepared for visitors. The theatre has an interesting bravura and character that all mixed together in order to form an intriguing and pleasurable experience at the Luna Theatre.

            Throughout the class trip to the newly built Luna Theatre, the story of Micky Ward was revealed within the entertaining and unique film The Fighter. The film itself was written by Ward and describes the stat and success of his career. The unexpected rise to fame that Micky Ward stumbles upon within the film displays how an unpopular boxer and an underappreciated man can shift from being an underdog to a well-known fighter with a boxing title. In addition to this film, the excerpt Irish Pride also describes the life of Micky Ward in his quest for a successful boxing career of which he and his family could be proud of. The excerpt is seemingly more of a summary of Micky Ward’s life, while the film provides an insight to Ward’s emotional standpoint and personality throughout the peak of his career.

            Micky Ward was born to an opinionated family and raised in the underprivileged town of Lowell, Massachusetts where he developed his talent for boxing while in the shadow of his brother’s former career. The two brothers, Micky and Dicky, were displayed in the film as not only extremely close, but also extremely unequal in terms of the attention they were given by both the members of their community and the members of their family. Dicky received the majority of the attention rather than Micky and could arguably be seen as the favorite son in the family. In addition to Dicky’s favoritism within their household, his former career as a semi successful boxer attracted the responsiveness from the public eye to the point where Micky’s career was perceived as seemingly obsolete. The intriguing character dynamic established between the two brothers in the film not only provides audiences with the personal background of Micky Ward before his achievements in boxing, but also allows viewers to see the emotional mindset of Micky in a way that is not displayed within the Irish Pride reading.

            Micky Ward’s inspiring story of trading in his life as a mediocre boxer with a relatively unheard of career for a victorious and motivating profession along with a championship title proves to be extremely inspiring to the Lowell community given Ward’s ties to the city. Being a native born Lowell community member, Ward is displayed as an inspiration to those growing up within the city. Micky Ward spent the majority of his training time within Lowell, which means not only did he live in the city, but he also endured the most successful period of his career in the city of Lowell as well. The act of completing his training within the city that raised him further reaffirms the reputation Ward has amongst the community members for rising up and retaining an efficacious career despite the large obstacles that one faces when coming from an underprivileged area. At the time of Micky Ward’s career, Lowell was known for its financially unstable and economically deprived community that was faced with a vast amount of issues, including a lack of jobs throughout the city, which eliminated most possibilities for Lowell to improve their standards. By defying the odds presented to him by living in such an economically detrimental area, Micky Ward serves as a star to many Lowell community members, especially the young wishful thinkers of up and coming generations.   

Townie

Savannah Szymanski

Professor Conway

Freshman Honors Seminar

17 November 2014

Townie

            Within the memoir Townie by Andre Dubus III, Dubus’s life as a teenager is vividly described as he grows up in Haverhill, Massachusetts. Dubus’s life at the start of the memoir is uprooted as his family moves from Iowa City to Haverhill, Massachusetts, which is exhibited as a large shift in settings. As if the move from a Midwest City to an industrial ton along the east coast does not already have enough of an impact on an adolescent’s mindset, Dubus is even more distraught by his parents’ divorce when he was ten years old, shortly after the cross country move. Dubus’s memoir displays the negative emotions that accompany dramatic changes in one’s adolescent life, especially while growing up on the lower economic side of an underprivileged town. The result aggression and emotional troubles that are seen through Dubus’s mindset and actions as a teenager can be traced back to his emotional trauma as a child and inability to properly overcome his obstacles until later in his life.

            Any child troubled with the unfortunate penalties of their parents’ divorce is likely to suffer some sort of emotional distress, however these consequences are further maximized by a split devotion to each parent mixed with conflicted resentment. Dubus’s parents announced their separation and divorce after his father left when he was ten and once their marital problems extended beyond disagreements and arguments when they became conflicts resulting from infidelity. Dubus’s father, whose former military profession is turned to being a professor at this point in the novel, is unfaithful in his marriage to Dubus’s mother which not only ends their marriage together with four children, but also creates a large separation between Dubus and his father. Dubus rarely sees his father throughout his teenage years, resulting in a lack of guidance as he endures the troubles of overcoming the various obstacles in front of him while becoming an adult. Being the oldest son of four children, with his sister Susan being the only sibling older than him, Dubus felt a large drive to remain strong throughout his parents’ divorce in order to help his mother and siblings deal with the massive shift in their lives.

            Dubus and his siblings saw their father only a few times each month and on special occasions, meanwhile they barely saw their mother as she worked all day every day in order to keep their house and her children fed. With only a minimal amount of child support money being supplied by Dubus’s father, Dubus and his family were forced to remain in lowest class part of Haverhill where they struggled to stay afloat. In addition to being financially unstable, Dubus also lived in a drug infested portion of his town that had a massive problem with violence and crime. Growing up in this area without any guidance to raise him and his siblings, Dubus had an extremely rough time fighting through the circumstances he was dealt, where for large periods of time he relied on drug use, violence, and fighting back at the man throughout his teenage years. Dubus’s memoir displays the impacts of a poverty stricken town on the up and coming generation that live within it especially when the youth of these generations face other issues, in Dubus’s case these issues include family and financial troubles mixed with exposure too drugs and violence.

            Despite the emotional conflicts and dysfunctional mindset that accompanies his life growing up in Haverhill, Dubus tells an inspirational tale as he develops his skill of writing in order to reshape his life and overcome the hindrances he faces while moving from a teenager to an adult.  Within the memoir, as Dubus ages he develops a strong motivation to leave his life of teenage crime and former rebellious disposition behind in order to attend the college his father teaches at and improve his education beyond the Haverhill academic system. Dubus quickly learns upon his arrival to his new school that his exposure the world is minimal compared to those around him, however he continues to push through his intellectual and emotional dilemmas in order to improve his education while simultaneously developing a somewhat better relationship with his father. Dubus defies the steadfast obstacles that were presented against him from childhood all the way until he became an adult that seems near to impossible given the circumstances he faces throughout the memoir, therefore proving an inspiration to readers and others who are faced with similar and equally troubling conflicts. 

FYSH Optional Writing Prompt #1: University Crossing

Savannah Szymanski

Professor Conway

Freshman Honors Seminar

27 October 2014

University Crossing

One of the most recent renovations within the University of Massachusetts in Lowell campus is the University Crossing building on East Campus. The building is placed near the center of the University’s campus where it is easily accessible to students by walking from other campuses or by taking the bus. Though the University Crossing building has been a part of the campus for several years, the building can be considered completely new due to the extremely modern renovations and improvements on the edifice which we completed for the fall semester of 2014. The building not only holds various floors for offices and presentation rooms, but also the Riverhawk store, the book store, and the Crossroads Café. The Building renovations cost the school a sufficient amount of money, however the student activity and attendance of the stores and café within the building provide a large profit for the school.

In 2011, the University of Massachusetts in Lowell purchased the University Crossing building and transformed the structure from a former hospital to the University’s site for their offices, stores, and campus restaurant. The property was originally used as a hospital during the industrial era in the early twentieth century, but continued to be used as a hospital throughout the early 1900s (“University Crossing: History”). The ownership of the property was altered various different times where it was originally known as the Saint Joseph’s hospital until it finally became a full service community hospital named Saints Medical Center (“University Crossing: History”). Once the Medical Center vacated the property to occupy a new hospital in a separate location, the University purchased the location as the new headquarters for student relations, offices, and school stores.  

The newly renovated University Crossing building serves the purpose of accommodating students’ needs while simultaneously generating a large profit for the school. By holding the book store, Riverhawk store, and the Crossroads Café, the University Crossing building contains some of the most attended store on campus. Students generally spend a large quantity of their money at the start of the year on textbooks that can be ordered and purchased through the book store. Often times, people find it more convenient to order through the bookstore because that way students can order all their books for every class through one place rather than going to multiple stores and websites to order their materials. In addition, being able to purchase books from the school store website online and pick them up later in person is an added convenience for students.

            Above the book store is the University’s large Riverhawk store, equipped with all the latest University of Massachusetts in Lowell attire. When one walks around campus during average day hours, it is almost impossible not to see various students sporting the school logo and all the Riverhawk colors of white, red, and blue. Students all over campus wear their university attire as a means of comfort and school spirit to classes, school events, sports games, and anywhere they feel like showing off their Riverhawk pride. Whether it is casual clothing, coffee mugs, or the classic photo ID lanyards, a large majority of students purchase Riverhawk gear from the overly large collection of school oriented goods within the Riverhawk store. The amount of students that purchase custom Riverhawk items from the school boosts the profits made from the University crossing building.

            Next to the convenient and profitable Riverhawk store and book store, is the Crossroads Café which is attached to a downsized Starbucks. The Crossroads Café is not only attractive in appearance with a unique yet likable furniture and color scheme, but also appealing in their offered cuisine. The café offers a refreshing selection of pizzas, sandwiches, and other classic café meals that are not available at the University’s several dining halls. The Crossroads Café accepts Riverhawk points, which acquaints to money placed on students’ IDs, as well as meal swipes within select time intervals throughout the week. The café attracts a vast amount of business due to its convenient location which allows students to go out to eat or order take out without the high prices of restaurant food because the café is run by the school and made accessible to students and their budgets.

                                                                    Works Cited

“University Crossing: History” University Crossing. University of Massachusetts in Lowell. 25 October 2014. Web.

Riverhawk's Hockey Game

Savannah Szymanski

Professor Conway

Freshman Honors Seminar

20 October 2014

Riverhawk’s Hockey Game

            Some of the most well-known and participated events on campus are arguably the University of Massachusetts in Lowell hockey games, which are always attended by masses of people eager to cheer on their respective team. As crowds of students fill the Tsongas center, the environment becomes filled with energy and excitement. It is not only the large amount of people in the audience that make for an enjoyable experience, but also the performance of the players as they fight to maintain their established reputation as a higher level hockey team. The players can feed off of the infectious energy of the crowd meanwhile the audience becomes infatuated with the game causing them to become increasingly thrilled as the team plays. The fantastically symbiotic relationship between the players and the audience contributes to a hockey rink surrounded by hyper energized individuals ready to celebrate their team’s victory or compensate their loss through obscene cheering and commemoration. The University of Massachusetts in Lowell hockey games are some of the most anticipated events throughout campus allowing the students of the university to band together as one chaotic yet unmatchable student body audience.

            Upon attending my first game at the Tsongas center, I quickly realized that this year’s season would be occupied with hype filled crowds of students and families prepared to cheer on our University’s valiant team. An hour before the game began, the entrance to the Tsongas center was packed with both young and old hockey fans awaiting the opening game of the Lowell Riverhawk’s hockey season. Children were wearing player’s duplicated jerseys while students sported the free hockey shirts supplied by the school in a fulfilled attempt to maximize school spirit. Crowds of students swarmed the center fully ready to support our team as they challenge their longtime rivals the Boston College Eagles. For a large portion of new students, this was their first exposure to a Riverhawk’s hockey game. For other more experienced students, this game was one of many sports oriented activities where they are provided the opportunity to display their support for their school. Whichever level of exposure one has to the Riverhawk’s hockey games, the opening game this year has surely contributed to a correlation between students and their new strong loyalty to the team. As the audience members all took their seats throughout the Tsongas center for the opening game to start, contagious energy and rampant noise flowed through the air and a truly memorable moment occurred that no person could have fully predicted no matter their experience with Riverhawk games.

            In one extraordinary moment in the opening scenes of the Riverhawk game, an unforgettable moment occurred that caught public attention, and it all started with the student section of the Tsongas Center. Every sports game is traditionally begun with the singing of the national anthem out of respect for our country’s customs. In addition to this tradition, many times the anthem will be sung by a live performer, which is exactly what occurred the night of the opening game. A female vocalist was introduced to the audience as an award winning singing prepared to endure the nerve-wracking experience of preforming the national anthem in front of thousands of people, including a massive crowd of lovely yet obnoxious University students. Through a string of unfortunate events, after her introduction to the audience and at the start of the anthem, her microphone was tragically malfunctioning and unable to play the audio throughout the rink. To make matters exponentially more awkward, the jumbo-tron screen was filming her the entire time, so her realization of this embarrassing mishap was viewed by every individual in the audience. However, in an unpredicted turn of events, the student section of the stadium took the luckless situation and transformed it into an uncanny and remarkable one to be reveled about for days to come. It began from one student, then to a group of students, to the entire student section, followed by the entire stadium singing the national anthem in unison. The spectacle transferred the uncomfortable malfunction while singing the anthem to a marvelous revelation of students bonding together to fulfill the tradition of our school and country.  

Personal ticket from University of Massachusetts in Lowell vs. Boston College Opening game

Year 2014

Savannah Szymanski

Professor Conway

Freshman Honors Seminar

6 October 2014

Year 2014

            While sitting in the theatre awaiting the performance of Year Zero, I fully expected to spend the next three hours of my night paying minimal attention to a history based performance that focused more on a history lesson than actual story telling. Although the topic of Cambodian immigration and individuals seeking refuge in America from Cambodian genocide is an extremely serious and riveting topic, history based placed generally seem to bore me rather than entertain. I personally seem to enjoy reading about history rather than watching a documentary of it, therefore I had low expectations for what I might gain from the play’s storyline and performance. However, as the play began, I was kindly surprised. The performance started with a peculiar and gripping scene where the protagonist speaks to a human skull, begging for its guidance over his mother’s now deceased soul. The main character, an adolescent teenage boy in his beginning years of high school, is displayed as a frequently bullied Cambodian immigrant aiming to find a balance between an unstable social life and the even more tormenting psychological destruction that comes with losing a parental figure.

            My attention was immediately caught the moment the protagonist, Vuthy, began speaking. To begin with, the character Vuthy speaks like a comedian, expression in his voice accompanied by a sarcastic and dramatic undertone. His character is shown to not only be a victim of the stereotypes inflicted upon him due to his immigrant status, but also of his inability to fully adapt to his culture’s traditions seeing that he is both Cambodian and American. In addition, Vuthy has relationship conflicts with each other character with in the play, including his sister Ra, Ra’s boyfriend Glenn, and his neighbor Han. With each character having their own separate past, the play took a more individualized approach to the immigrant experience where it displayed the effects of first hand immigrants and the effects on the following generations. Year Zero included an intriguing plot that proportionally combined modern personal conflicts and historical background all with a Cambodian American motif.

            Arguably the most surprising portion of the play is something I discovered after the performance. The play is based around the generation and following generations of Cambodian refugees that fled their native country in order to escape the racial cleansing and genocide being inflicted by Khmer Rouge and Pol Pot. The most shocking realization that resulted from this performance is the massive amount of people who were unaware of the Cambodian genocide prior to the play. It was in some sense baffling that a large portion of students who attended the play had not been made aware of the happenings in Cambodia with the Khmer Rouge before they had prepared to view Year Zero. Two of the most commonly talked about genocides amongst modern day society are the Holocaust led by Adolf Hitler and the Soviet Union Genocide led my Joseph Stalin, followed by other well discussed conflicts such as massive genocides in Syria and Darfur. Each of these extreme killings of populations have resulted in large quantities of awareness amongst all communities. In contrast to these frequently discussed tragedies, the Cambodian genocide and ethnic cleansing is rarely among the most talked about mass killings, despite the fact that the overall death toll as a result of the Cambodian genocide was roughly one and a half million deaths. The idea that political uprising, dictatorship, and colossal murder of generations of Cambodians is rarely learned about in most history classes is almost saddening when examining how detrimental the events in Cambodia were to not only the country as a whole, but general population of individuals that can trace their ancestry back to the fateful events that took place there. From personal experience, the Cambodian genocide was and remains obsolete to my previous curriculum in public schooling while growing up, and most students can say the same. The sheer irrelevance of genocide to most classrooms is troubling especially when events such as the Holocaust are so widely discussed, meanwhile the amount of deaths in the Cambodian ethnic cleansing is approximately six and a half million deaths less  than that of the holocaust and is therefore seen as irrelevant to classes that teach about major world genocides. Although these alternative genocides are viewed as more world matters due to other country’s’ involvement to end said genocides, the overall events in Cambodia should be much more recognized throughout history classrooms nationwide, rather than just in areas with a high population of Cambodian American students.

Merrimack Reparatory Theatre (ten minutes before opening scene October 1rst 2014)

 

Year Zero Pamphlet (Includes cast, sponsors, and historical background information)

Boott Cott Mills Tour

Savannah Szymanski

Professor Conway

Freshman Honors Seminar

22 September 2014

The Lowell Mills were once a vital part of the city’s economy and financial stability, therefore the rich history offered by the Boott Cott Mills museum in Lowell provide deep insight into Lowell’s work force and community. Amidst the informational tour of the former mill factory, the factors that went into everyday life in the mills were revealed with a depth previously unknown to me. Although one would expect life in an industrial factory to be extremely difficult and at times, life threatening, the degrees of these hardship are not always common knowledge. The factory mills were generally composed of a majority of young women, who traveled to the mills from low paying farm lives often referred to as “mill girls”. However, small children also worked in the mills with lower scale jobs. The higher level positions in the mills were exclusively filled by men whose work was viewed as proficient and beneficial to factory production; the owner, overseers, and other boss occupations were all explicitly male positions as well.

The mills generally produced textile goods, where the most dangerous textile jobs were filled by the mill girls and at times, children. Most jobs throughout the factory were accompanied by conditions such as possible limb loss, severe illness and often times death. Most of these poor conditions were in response to the lack of employee safety implemented by the owner, unsafe machinery, and detrimental fabrics being inhaled. Smaller children often times either severely injured their ligaments by climbing on machinery that they could not reach, or losing limbs due to the lack of care in machine production. When observing the stories and poor conditions that are discussed throughout the tour, it is easy to not only disapprove of the mill life, but also pity those who had no other choice, but to work in the mills.

Often times, Mill girls acquired their jobs in response to needing to live their life away from their family’s farm and or obtain a substantial amount of money to send back to their families. Girls often saw the Mill life as their only ticket out of a financially unstable life on the farm, where they could not only have a job and receive money, but also have housing and a certain degree of personal safety outside of the factory. There was a particular give and take between the benefits and consequences of the industrial mill life, where girls sacrificed their safety in the work place while in change gaining independence as a well as external safety in their personal lives.

In terms of empathy and relating the situations that mill girls would undergo to my own personal life, frankly I am distraught. The mill life seems dramatically more positive than life on a farm, however the consequences of limb loss, disease, and potential death are far greater than farm life. The most strenuous job I have ever had is an eight month cashier job at a local grocery store. Complaining about my weekly paychecks of minimum wage and fifteen hours of work a week seems extremely insignificant compared to the extremely disadvantageous circumstances faced by mill girls. Living in a first world country, coming from a middle class family, and obtaining a low scale job as a teenage is barely comparable to the life of a young girl in a mill factory. Touring the museum and discussing the average lives of those who worked in the mills has brought to light the extreme differences between a mill girl and myself as well as the industrial revolution and the society of the twenty first century .

Another topic that arose throughout the tour was the idea of current day sweat shops in third world countries. The idea behind the conversation was, if the conditions of present day sweat shops are equivalent or worse than the mill factory conditions, what should be done? Most people agreed that these factories should be shut down immediately and the corporation in charge should end productions through all underprivileged countries. Despite the morality in this option, I have to disagree given the state of the populations working for these factories. Most times these factory workers are extremely poor and can either work in the sweat shop factories with poor conditions or resort to the streets of their respective countries. This is a very clear reason why these sweat shops should not be shut down, or else all the workers would be worse off in their lives. Instead, the conditions should be improved dramatically as well as the salaries of the workers. Although this may decrease the profit for these businesses, the lives and welfare of these underprivileged workers will be increased and preserved while they simultaneously remain employed.