Cultural Aspect: The discovery of the ninth planet

In the XX century a new telescope was made, but people didn’t know that this telescope was going to serve us find a new planet, the ninth one.

In 1906, Percival Lowell, a wealthy Bostonian started an extensive project in search of a possible ninth planet, which he termed "Planet X".  Lowell and his observatory conducted his search until his death in 1916, but to no avail. Unknown to Lowell, on March 19, 1915, his observatory had captured two faint images of Pluto, but did not recognize them for what they were.

On the year 1929 Clyde Tombaugh Flagstaff  and spent ten months photographing the sky and carefully viewing the resulting plates. If a planet was captured, it would show a slight displacement of position between two plates photographed a week apart. Percival Lowell had started out inspecting his plates with a magnifying glass, but Tombaugh used a blink comparator, which allowed him to view two plates simultaneously and look for any movement that would betray the existence of a planet.

By September, Tombaugh decided that Lowell's predictions had little use, and that he would conduct a thorough search of the sky. In January, he exposed two plates of an area in the constellation Gemini. It was a few weeks before he could check them, and on February 18, 1930, Tombaugh was comparing the two plates when he saw a star shifting position. It was fainter than expected, but he knew he had finally found Planet X.

The observatory followed the object for a few weeks to confirm it was Lowell's planet. The discovery of the ninth planet was then officially announced on March 13, 1930

Mrs. Constance Lowell suggested Zeus for the name of this new planet, but then decided that "the gods of the past are worn out." She tried Percival, after her husband, then Constance, after herself, but these were politely turned down, or ignored altogether. Many others suggested Percival or Lowell, but the astronomers at the observatory were in favor of a classical name.

The name Pluto was first suggested by Venetia Burney, an 11-year-old schoolgirl in Oxford, England. She had been studying Greek and Roman mythology in school, and felt that the planet, being far from the Sun in its own dark world, should be named after the Greek god of the underworld. The observatory officially proposed the name Pluto on May 1, 1930, with the symbol being PL, the first two letters of Pluto and coincidentally the initials of Percival Lowell.

Cultural Aspect: The Mafia

The Mafias roots begin in Silica a city where The Phoenicians, Romans, Arabs, French, Spanish and lots of other invaders like the mentioned ones ruled the city. The residents of this island, formed groups to protect themselves from the occupying forces, as well as from other regional groups of Sicilians.

These groups developed their own system for justice and retribution, carrying out their actions in secret. By the 19th century, small private armies known as “mafie” took advantage of the frequently violent, chaotic conditions in Sicily and forced protection money from landowners. From this history, the Sicilian Mafia emerged as a collection of criminal clans.

Although its precise origins are unknown, the term Mafia came from a Sicilian-Arabic dialect expression that means “acting as a protector against the arrogance of the powerful,”

After some years in 1861, Sicily became a province of Italy. However, by the moment chaos and crime reigned across the island. In the 1870s, Roman officials even asked Sicilian Mafia clans to help them by going after dangerous, independent criminal bands; in exchange, officials would look the other way as the Mafia continued its protection. The government believed this arrangement would be temporary but instead Mafia became skillful at political corruption and intimidated people to vote for certain candidates.

The Mafia’s influence in Sicily grew until the 1920s, when Prime Minister Benito Mussolini came to power and launched a brutal crackdown on mobsters, who he viewed as a threat to his Fascist regime.

The American Mafia, a separate entity from the Mafia in Sicily, came to power in the 1920s Prohibition era after the success of Italian-American neighborhood gangs in the booming bootleg liquor business. Like the Sicilian Mafia, American Mafia families were able to maintain their secrecy and success because of their code of omerta, as well as their ability to bribe and intimidate public officials, business leaders, witnesses and juries. For these reasons, law-enforcement agencies were largely ineffective at stopping the Mafia during the first part of the 20th century.

However, during the 1980s and 1990s, prosecutors in America and Italy began successfully employing tough anti-racketeering laws to convict top-ranking mobsters. Additionally, some Mafiosi, in order to avoid long prison terms, began breaking the once-sacred code of omerta and testified against fellow mob members. By the start of the 21st century, after hundreds of high-profile arrests over the course of several decades, the Mafia appeared to be weakened in both countries; however, it was not eliminated completely and remains in business today.

Cultural Aspect: The Jazz Age

Jazz didn’t born exactly in the XX century, instead Jazz was born around 1895 in New Orleans. Originally it was a mixture of Blues and marching band music and was played by African-Americans and Creoles on old U.S Army instruments.

So if Jazz really born in IX century why we have the Jazz age on the XX. Well that’s because the twenties, were the time for experiments and discovering new jazz-styles. In that period of growing industrialization black people and new-Orleans-musicians moved from the country site south to Chicago. There they helped creating the Chicago-Style. Lots of Chicago musicians finally moved to New York, which was an important center of jazz, too.

Jazz bands started the musical revolution using for the first time the saxophone. It has been known to provoke close familiar dancing and many people were shocked by the loud and extraordinary sound of the sax.

Unfortunately old people in society didn’t agree with this kind of music so the prohibited them. Prohibition influenced the birth and development of Jazz in the United States. Prohibition was a period that banned the sale of alcoholic drinks. This resulted in the growth of a great number of speakeasies, which illegally sold alcoholic drinks. Jazz flourished in this environment, and grew in popularity because it was able to reach a wider audience than it had previously.

Further, because jazz was played in illegal environments, it gained a reputation as immoral and illegitimate music..

Then as the Jazz became more popular in young people. That’s because the national radio started to help Jazz being spread around all the United States, so the barely known new jazz sound spread quickly over America, and found many supporters. Lots of important clubs, or illegal clubs, helped jazz bands to get famous and featured their songs.

As the 1920s carried on, jazz, despite competition with classical music, the jazz popularity helped to generate a cultural move. There were Dances like the Charleston, developed by African Americans, suddenly that became very common and also like we have seen with the beginning of radio broadcasts in 1922, Americans were able to experience different styles of music. The radio provided Americans with a trendy new avenue for exploring the world through broadcasts and concerts from the comfort of their living room.

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