Western world

The Western world or the West is a term referring to different nations, depending on the context, most often including at least part of Europe. There are many accepted definitions about what they all have in common. The Western world is also known as the Occident (from Latin: occidens "sunset, West", as contrasted with its pendant the Orient).

The concept of the Western part of the earth has its roots in Greco-Roman civilization in Europe, and the advent of Christianity. In the modern era, Western culture has been heavily influenced by the traditions of the Renaissance, Protestant Reformation, Age of Enlightenment—and shaped by the expansive colonialism of the 15th-20th centuries. Before the Cold War era, the traditional Western viewpoint identified Western Civilization with the Western Christian (Catholic-Protestant) countries and culture. Its political usage was temporarily changed by the antagonism during the Cold War in the mid-to-late 20th Century (1947–1991).

The term originally had a literal geographic meaning. It contrasted Europe with the linked cultures and civilizations of the Middle East and North Africa, South Asia, Southeast Asia and the remote Far East, which early-modern Europeans saw as the East. Today this has little geographic relevance since the concept of the West has been expanded to include the former European colonies in the Americas, Russian Northern Asia, Australia, and New Zealand. In the contemporary cultural meaning, the phrase "Western world" includes Europe, as well as many countries of European colonial origin with substantial European ancestral populations in the Americas and Oceania.

Joanna Newsom

Joanna Caroline Newsom (born January 18, 1982) is an American harpist, keyboardist, vocalist, lyricist and actress.

Early life

Newsom was born and raised in the small town of Nevada City, California. Her mother, Christine (née Mueller), is an internist, and her father, William Newsom, is a medical oncologist. Her parents were "progressive-minded professionals" who previously lived in the San Francisco Bay Area.

As a child, Newsom was not allowed to watch television or listen to the radio. She describes her parents as "kind of idealists when it came to hoping they could protect us from bad influences, like violent movies, or stupid stuff". She was exposed to music from a young age. Her father played the guitar and her mother was a classically trained pianist who played the hammered dulcimer, the autoharp and conga drums. Newsom attended a Waldorf school where she studied theater and learned to memorize and recite long poems.

At the age of five, Newsom asked her parents if she could learn to play the harp. Her parents eventually agreed to sign her up for harp lessons, but the local harp instructor did not want to take on such a young student and suggested she learn to play the piano first. She did, and later moved on to the harp which she "loved from the first lesson onward." She first played on smaller Celtic harps until her parents bought her a full-size pedal harp in the seventh grade.