Category Archives: English Language Arts

On this, the second week of Black History Month 2023, Mark’s Text Terminal presents this reading on the 54th Massachusetts Infantry and its accompanying vocabulary-building and comprehension worksheet. The 54th Massachusetts is the regiment made famous by the film Glory. If you live in Boston, and frequent that city’s Common, then you know The Shaw Monument, which passively honors the heroes of the 54th Massachusetts with this memorial to the regiment’s abolitionist, Boston Brahmin commander, Robert Gould Shaw (whom I learned recently was an ancestor to the revered American poet Robert Lowell).

In any event, we should remember the 54th Massachusetts for its heroic, selfless actions at the Second Battle of Fort Wagner (depicted well in Glory) on 18 July 1863. We should also remember William Harvey Carney for his heroism in that encounter, and for his status as the first Black soldier to win his greatly deserved Medal of Honor.

If you find typos in this document, I would appreciate a notification. And, as always, if you find this material useful in your practice, I would be grateful to hear what you think of it. I seek your peer review.

It’s the first Friday of Black History Month 2023. For this and the following three Fridays, Mark’s Text Terminal will offer (as it does every year), materials for the observance of the month. That said, let me offer my usual disclaimer here: at this blog, and in my own teaching practice, every month is Black History Month. However, I work on this blog to observe this month, first proclaimed by Carter G. Woodson, because I am not in the business of second-guessing a scholar of his stature.

This week’s Text is this reading on the Boston Massacre with its attendant vocabulary-building and comprehension worksheet. Interestingly, this reading fails to mention Crispus Attucks, one of the dead of the Boston Massacre–history records him as the first to die. He was a Black man who was one of the first martyrs to the cause of independence for the 13 colonies that would become the United States. So there are a couple of critical issues here for students to mull: the first is the erasure of Crispus Attucks, whose martyrdom is a salient fact in the history of this event, and therefore to the history of this nation; the second is the bitter irony of a Black man dying for the freedom of a country whose inhabitants, just about anywhere outside Boston, at the time of his death, would have enslaved him.

If you find typos in this document, I would appreciate a notification. And, as always, if you find this material useful in your practice, I would be grateful to hear what you think of it. I seek your peer review.