Research Paper on:
'Mysterious' Land of Eastern Europe

Unformatted Sample Text from the Research Paper:
In primitive societies, the unknown "other" can be the people in the village two hilltops over. In the modern world, the unknown is more likely to be a region or  a specific ethnic group. Since the nineteenth century, and even before that, Eastern Europe has been such a region in the Western mindset, haunting the Western psyche. Of  course, this aspect of Eastern Europe in Western perspective is very evident in literature, but this examination of cultural anxiety will look at this historical basis for the Gothic fascination  of the West with the East. The sources on this topic tend to fall into two main categories -- those that are factually based, and those that are representative  of the on-going influence of nineteenth century concepts about Eastern Europe that still affect perception today. In the first category is a web-based article that is rich in the history  of Romania and the Balkans. In the nineteenth century, the Balkans were still basically medieval (Historical Dracula). This region of Europe had only recently shaken off the burden of Turkish  rule and were culturally more in alignment with the Dark Ages then with Western European industrialized culture. Travelers into the East, into Transylvania and Romania record feeling as if  they had stepped back into history. These travelers brought back the mythology of the Balkans, which included tales of the undead, which ignited a Western European interest in vampires that  continues to this day (Historical Dracula). As this indicates, this report speaks of "mythology" and how cultural anxiety over tales from the East sparked a "trend." In other words, this  report keeps the perspective on Eastern Europe fully within the rational world of the twenty-first century. However, other sites available on the Internet are written in such a way as