In The Great Gatsby, what was Jimmy Gatz' life like before he took on the name Gatsby?

The full truth of Gatsby's early life isn't revealed until
the conclusion of the novel when his father shows up in West Egg after Gatsby's death.
What he tells Nick, along with earlier passages of exposition in the novel, makes it
clear that Gatsby had indeed traveled "a long way" to his "blue lawn" in pursuit of his
romantic dream.

Jimmy Gatz, an imaginative boy, had been
born into a poor family in North Dakota and grew up among "shiftless and unsuccessful
farm people"; he had never felt at home in his own family and had rejected his identity
as the son of such parents. The family conflicts Jimmy experienced growing up are
suggested when his father tells Nick, "He told me I et like a hog once and I beat him
for it." Trapped in poverty and ugliness in North Dakota, Jimmy Gatz dreamed of a
different life, one of beauty, glamour, and romantic
possibilities.

An ambitious boy, Gatz applied himself to
change his circumstances. The notes he made in the back of his Hopalong
Cassidy book reveal that he had lived a disciplined daily life. When he
wasn't working, which took up most of his time, he spent almost all of the remaining
hours in activities to improve himself and his life; only thirty minutes were "wasted"
on play (sports and baseball). His choosing to spend two hours each day to "[s]tudy
needed inventions" shows that he was searching for a means to succeed--to make money in
order to find the colorful life he dreamed of.

Jimmy Gatz
eventually ran away from home, determined to sieze his future. He kicked around the
south shore of Lake Superior, taking odd jobs to buy himself "food and bed." As he grew
into manhood, with his "brown, hardening body," he was often pursued and spoiled by
young women, whom he held in contempt; he was self-absorbed and living without a sense
of direction. Then he drifted to St. Olaf's where he attended college, working as a
janitor to pay his way; after only two weeks, he took off again in search of the life he
hungered for and found himself once again along the shores of Lake
Superior.

It was here Jimmy Gatz met his destiny in the
shape of Dan Cody and his beautiful white yacht anchored in Little Girl
Bay:

To young
Gatz, resting on his oars and looking up at the railed deck, that yacht represented all
the beauty and glamor in the
world.

At that moment, Jimmy
Gatz changed his name to Jay Gatsby, a name he had had ready "for a long time" as he had
dreamed his way into a new identity that would leave the North Dakota boy behind
forever.

The American economy between 1920 and 1929 is best described by which of the following statements?Fear of a recession persuaded most Americans...

The 1920s economy expanded rapidly, as did jobs in
manufacturing, advertising, and construction.  The 1920s were the first time we saw an
American middle class of any real size.  Many workers were paid a decent wage, unlike
the Gilded Age sweatshop employees, and for the first time could dream of home
ownership.  Workers in Henry Ford's auto plants made $5 a day, even though they were
doing relatively simple factory work.

Today we think of
vacations as something like a birthright, but the 1920s were the first time you saw
large numbers of average Americans talk about what to do with their "time off".  The
tourism and leisure industries expanded along with everything
else.

With all I've just described to you, hopefully you
can choose which answer fits that description best from the list you've provided.  One
should stand out above the rest.

Discuss the function of written law in ancient Babylon.

The Code of Hammurabi of Babylon is the first evidence of
a written code. Hammurabi called himself "king of the four corners of the world" and
proposed the code to remove the wicked, insure welfare, promote justice, and prevent
oppression in order to be a "light" to the land:

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To promote the welfare of the people...to cause
justice to prevail in the land, to destroy the wicked and evil, so that the strong might
not oppress the weak, to rise like the sun over the people and to light up the
land.

By modern standards,
the Code of Hammurabi is harsh. Death was the proper sentence for theft or false
accusations, and often death was imposed by means considered appropriate:
Examples:

If
any one bring an accusation against a man, and the accused go to the river and leap into
the river, if he sink in the river his accuser shall take possession of his house. But
if the river prove that the accused is not guilty, and he escape unhurt, then he who had
brought the accusation shall be put to death, while he who leaped into the river shall
take possession of the house that had belonged to his
accuser.

If any one receive into his house a runaway male
or female slave of the court, or of a freedman, and does not bring it out at the public
proclamation of the major domus, the master of the house shall be put to
death.

If fire break out in a house, and some one who comes
to put it out cast his eye upon the property of the owner of the house, and take the
property of the master of the house, he shall be thrown into that self-same
fire.

Two important points
about Hammurabi's code should be emphasized:

1. It
   relied on the principle of lex talionis--the law of retaliation.
   Under this principle, the punishment fit the crime. A prime example of lex
   talionis is in the Old Testament Pentateuch:
   

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An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, a foot
for foot, and a burn for a
burn

2.  Social Distinction
was recognized and punishment meted out differently according to class distinction. For
example, if a commoner were to injure a nobleman, he was put to death; yet if a nobleman
injured a commoner, he paid a fine in silver.

Once the mystery is solved in The Adventure of the Speckled Band, the story ends quickly. Is this a sound literary device? Why or Why not?

According to the great American genius Edgar Allan Poe,
what is important in a short story is to create a "single effect." Poe uses the term
"effect" a lot. What he means is a feeling or an emotional effect. It seems obvious that
once this effect is achieved, the author should terminate the story as quickly as
possible so as not to dilute the emotional effect with extraneous data. The reader
should be left with a "feeling." That is the purpose of a short
story.

In the case of "The Adventure of the Speckled Band,"
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle very artistically and adroitly provides much of the follow-up
information at the beginning rather than after the final effect has
been achieved with the sight of Dr. Roylott having died an agonizing death and still
having the speckled band wrapped around his forehead. Doyle moves the ending to the
beginning as follows:

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Of all these varied cases, however, I cannot
recall any which presented more singular features than that which was associated with
the well-known Surrey family of the Roylotts of Stoke Moran.The events in question
occurred in the early days of my association with Holmes, when we were sharing rooms as
bachelors in Baker Street. It is possible that I might have placed them upon record
before, but a promise of secrecy was made at the time, from which I have only been freed
during the last month by the untimely death of the lady to whom the pledge was given. It
is perhaps as well that the facts should now come to light, for I have reasons to know
that there are widespread rumours as to the death of Dr. Grimesby Roylott which tend to
make the matter even more terrible than the
truth.

The real facts of the
case did not come to light at the time they occurred. Roylott's death was explained as
having been caused by careless handling of a pet snake. There was no need to taint the
family reputation by accusing him of attempted murder of his stepdaughter Helen. It
would be impossible to prove, anyway. As far as the murder of Julia was concerned, that
was a closed case and Roylott had gotten away with it. But he was appropriately punished
two years later by being killed by the same snake he had used to kill Julia. There would
have been no point in reopening that case in order to convict a dead man, and it might
have been impossible to connect him to Julia's death after all that
time.

Helen will get all the money rather than only
one-third and will soon be happily married. 

Why was Andromache near the battlements in The Iliad?

Andromache is near the battlement, or city wall, because
Troy's fundamental civil engineering feat is the development of these high walls.  She
stands at these walls at a couple of moments.  The first would be in Book 6, where she
pleads with her husband, the brave Trojan warrior Hektor, to not go on the battlefield
to fight Achilles.  Her positioning near the wall is significant as she tells her
husband not to go beyond it, outside it, and fight Achilles who has already killed men
in her family and will proably kill him too. As fitting with most pleading in the work,
her imploring does no good and the symbolic image of her positioning inside the city's
battlements and Hector's outside of it reflects how, while there is obvious love and
tenderness between them, the harsh condition of Classical warfighting also is present,
creating a permanent barrier between both of them and their happiness together.  Another
reason she is near the battlement wall is in Book 22, where the duel between Hektor and
Achilles ends with the great Trojan's death.  Her running towards the battlement, the
city wall, is done so to find that her husband has been killed, to which she faints. 
Another real interesting take on this question actually comes from Euripedes' work
The Trojan Women.  Detailing the horror of where Homer leaves off,
Euripedes argues that Andromache is near the battlement, the city wall, because that is
where the Achians threw her child, Astyanax, once the walls had been stormed.  An
excellent rendering of this can be found href="http://www.utexas.edu/courses/larrymyth/images/postwar/PA-Astyanax.jpg">here,
and one can see Andromache's placement at the battlement, a location where she loses
both her husband and her son at the hand of Classical warfare and the will of the
Gods'.

What is Worcester V. Georgia?

Worcester v. Georgia was a Supreme
Court case that was decided in 1832.  In this case, the Court decided that the state of
Georgia had no jurisdiction over the lands belonging to the Cherokee nation.  This
decision implied that the Cherokee had to be treated as if they were a separate nation
within the United States.

This case is famous for two
reasons.  First of all, Andrew Jackson supposedly said of this that "John Marshall has
made his decision, now let him enforce it."  He didn't really say this, but he did go on
to ignore the implications of the decision.  Instead of treating the Cherokee as a
sovereign nation, he allowed them to be evicted from their lands in the Indian Removal
of the 1830s.  Second, the case set something of a precedent for the way that Native
Americans are now treated by law.  It set the stage for them to be treated as
semi-sovereign nations.

Please analysis the poem "How do I love thee?" by Elizabeth Barret Browning.

I have moved your question to this group because How Do I
Love Thee? by Helen E. Waite is actually a biography of Elizabeth Barrett Browning
rather than a poem, so I assumed that it was this famous sonnet that your question
refered to.

This is the most famous poem of Elizabeth
Barrett Browning, written as part of a sequence of love sonnets to Robert Browning, her
husband. In this poem, however, the love that the speaker has for her beloved is fully
realised, and highlights both the spiritual and earthly nature of this love. The love
that the speaker has seems to occupy every part of every sphere of her life, both her
soul and her earthly existence, the "quiet need" of her humdrum life. The world of the
speaker is shown to alternate between happiness and unhappiness and day and night, but
the love she has penetrates all of these emotions and times. It is important to note
that in this pageant to the power of love, the ending of the poem recognises the way in
which death will impact the love she and her lover
share:

I love
thee with the breath,
Smiles, tears, of all my life! --- and, if God
choose,
I shall but love thee better after
death.

Note how life and
death are juxtaposed in this ending to highlight the way in which at the ending of this
poem, just as in the ending of her life, what is temporary and what is eternal unite as,
with the aid of God, the lovers move from their own earthly enjoyment of their love to
what the speaker hopes will be a more refined and intense love "after death," where the
speaker hopes to "love thee better."

Thus this poem
describes a love that envelops the temporary and the eternal as love and the feelings it
engenders are explored from a female perspective.