Finally, for Asian Pacific American Heritage Month 2026, here is a Cultural Literacy worksheet on Tiananmen Square. This is a half-page worksheet with a one-sentence reading and one comprehension question.
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.
“Red Guards: Radical university and high-school students formed into paramilitary units of the Chinese Cultural Revolution. They responded in 1966 to Mao Zedong’s call to revitalize the revolutionary spirit of the Chinese Communist Party and went so far as to attempt purging the country of its pre-Communist culture. With a membership in the millions, they attacked and persecuted local party leaders, schoolteachers, and other intellectuals. By early 1967 they had overthrown party authorities in many localities. Internal strife ensued as units argued over which best represented Maoist thought. Their disruptions of industrial production and urban life led the government to redirect them to the countryside in 1968, where the movement gradually subsided.”
Excerpted from: Stevens, Mark A., Ed. Merriam Webster’s Collegiate Encyclopedia. Springfield, Massachusetts: Merriam-Webster, 2000.
Here is a Cultural Literacy worksheet on Tahiti. This is a half-page worksheet with a reading of two sentences, the second of them a bit long, but not so long that students–even emerging and struggling readers–can’t make sense of it.
Even in two sentences, the reading mentions Tahiti’s allure to Paul Gauguin and Robert Louis Stevenson, summoning both of them to the Island to create art extolling the its beauty.
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.
This week’s Text, for the final Friday of Asian Pacific American Heritage Month 2026, is this reading on Mao Zedong with its accompanying vocabulary-building and comprehension worksheet. Mao was and is a world-historical figure, so I must assume he remains part of a Global Studies curriculum in some states.
If you find typos in these documents, 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.
In August of 2021, while I was looking for an apartment in New York after three disastrous years in New England, I read Vincent Bevins’ excellent book, The Jakarta Method (New York: Public Affairs, 2020). The book chronicles the United States’ policy, executed by way of the Central Intelligence Agency, of abetting anti-communist mass killings during the Cold War. Jakarta, of course, is the capital of Indonesia.
You’ve probably already guessed that Jakarta, and Indonesia, were in fact the site of mass killings; some 500,000 people lost their lives in anti-communist violence aroused by Suharto in 1965. Until Suharto deposed him, Sukarno lead Indonesia. He was an internationalist, and anti-imperialist, and as such one of the progenitors of the Non-Aligned Movement. This was a group of nations that rejected Cold War bipolarity and refused, as the name of their movement implies, to align themselves with the Cold War superpowers, i.e. the Soviet Union and the United States.
So, finally, here is a Cultural Literacy worksheet on Sukarno. This is a half-page worksheet with a reading of one sentence and one comprehension question. I think this is woefully inadequate, which is why you have been compelled (or impelled, depending on how interesting you find all of this) to slog through those first two paragraphs.
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.
“Sumatra: Island, West Indonesia. It is one of the Sunda Islands and the second-largest island of Indonesia. It is 1,060 miles (1,706 kilometers) long and 250 miles (400 kilometers) wide; a chief city is Palembang. Located on the seaborne trade routes, it had early contact with Hindu civilization. The kingdom of Srivijaya arose in the 7th century and came to dominate much of the island. It fell under the Majapahit empire in the 14th-16th centuries. First the Portuguese, then the Dutch and English established forts there beginning in the 16th century. It was occupied by Japan in World War II; in 1950 became part of the Republic of Indonesia. Its exports include rubber, tobacco, coffee, pepper, and timber products; mineral reserves include petroleum and coal.”
Excerpted from: Stevens, Mark A., Ed. Merriam Webster’s Collegiate Encyclopedia. Springfield, Massachusetts: Merriam-Webster, 2000.
This six-sentence reading in this Cultural Literacy worksheet on South Korea does a very nice job of summarizing the last seventy-five or so years of South Korean history. The six comprehension questions, which I wrote, are up for your judgment.
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.
“James Wong Howe originally Wong Tung Jim: (1899-1976) U.S. cinematographer. At age 5 he emigrated with his family to the U.S. He worked in Hollywood from 1917 and became a cameraman for Cecil B. DeMille. He developed innovations in lighting in the 1920s and pioneered the use of the wide-angle lens, deep focus, and the handheld camera. His low-key cinematography is seen in such films as Kings Row (1942), Body and Soul (1947), Picnic (1956), The Rose Tattoo (1955, Academy Award), and Hud (1963, Academy Award).”
Excerpted from: Stevens, Mark A., Ed. Merriam Webster’s Collegiate Encyclopedia. Springfield, Massachusetts: Merriam-Webster, 2000.
OK, let’s face (or at least I should) a simple fact: this reading on mahjong and its accompanying vocabulary-building and comprehension worksheet are not exactly essential materials.
This board game did arrive in this country from China, so it does have relevance to Asian Pacific American Heritage Month 2026. And this relatively short reading is interesting: it notes the game’s popularity among Jewish women (my mother, and her mother, neither of whom was Jewish, played it with their Jewish friends when I was a very little kid) and speculates that this stems from the proximity in tenements of Jewish and Chinese people in American cities.
If you find typos in these documents, 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.
“Tamils: People originally of South India who speak the Tamil language. The Tamils have a long history of achievement; sea travel, city life, and commerce seem to have developed early among them. They traded with the ancient Greeks and Romans. They have the oldest cultivated Dravidian language and a rich literary tradition. They are mostly Hindus (the Tamil area of India is a center of traditional Hinduism). In Sri Lanka there are two separate Tamil populations, the Ceylon Tamils and the Indian Tamils. Tensions between the Ceylon Tamils and the Sinhalese Buddhist majority prompted a Tamil guerilla insurgency in the 1980s and 90s. The Tamils number about 57 million, with 3.2 million living in Sri Lanka.”
Excerpted from: Stevens, Mark A., Ed. Merriam Webster’s Collegiate Encyclopedia. Springfield, Massachusetts: Merriam-Webster, 2000.
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