Category Archives: Reference

These are materials for teachers and parents, and you’ll find, in this category, teachers copies and answer keys for worksheets, quotes related to domain-specific knowledge in English Language Arts and social studies, and quotes on issues of professional concern. See the Taxonomies page for more about this category.

Seneca Falls Convention

“Seneca Falls Convention: (July 19-20, 1948) Assembly held at Seneca Falls, New York, that launched the U.S.s women’s suffrage movement. The meeting was initiated by Elizabeth Cady Stanton (who lived in Seneca Falls) and Lucretia Mott. Over 200 people attended the meeting including 40 men, The group passed the Declaration of Sentiments, a list of grievances and demands modeled on the Declaration of Independence that called on women to organize and petition for their rights. A controversial demand for the right to vote passed by a narrow margin.”

Excerpted from: Murphy, Bruce, ed. Benet’s Reader’s Encyclopedia, Fourth Edition. New York: Harper Collins, 1996.

Book of Answers: Zelda Fitzgerald

Did Zelda Fitzgerald write any novels? One, Save me the Waltz (1932).

Excerpted from: Corey, Melinda, and George Ochoa. Literature: The New York Public Library Book of Answers. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1993.

Sandra Day O’Conner

“Sandra Day O’Connor originally Sandra Day (b.1930) U.S. jurist. Born in El Paso, Texas, she studied law at Stanford University, graduating first in her class, and entered private practice in Arizona. She served as an assistant state attorney general (1965-69) before being elected in 1969 to the state senate, where she became the first woman in the U.S. to hold the position of majority leader (1972-74). After serving on the superior court of Maricopa County and the state court of appeals, she was nominated in 1981 by President Ronald Reagan to the U.S. Supreme Court and became the first female justice in the Court’s history. She proved to be a moderate and pragmatic conservative who sometimes sided with the Court’s liberal minority on social issues (e.g. abortion rights). She is known for dispassionate and meticulously researched opinions.”

­­­­­­­­­Excerpted from: Stevens, Mark A., Ed. Merriam Webster’s Collegiate Encyclopedia. Springfield, Massachusetts: Merriam-Webster, 2000.

Hortense Callisher

“Hortense Calisher: (1911-2009) American novelist and short-story writer. Calisher’s first, partly autobiographical, stories appeared in The New Yorker. Many of her early stories featured Hester Elkin and her large Jewish family living in New York City. Her most frequently anthologized story, ‘In Greenwich, There Are Many Gravelled Walks’ (1951), focuses on a man, his loneliness, and a final promise of companionship. The full range of her short fiction is contained in Collected Stories (1975). Apart from the facts that she is an acknowledged master of style and that her work offers intricately drawn insights into her characters, Calisher’s writing defies easy classification. Characters in her first novel, False Entry (1961), reappear in an entirely different context in The New Yorkers (1969). Both Journal from Ellipsia (1965) and Queenie (1971) contain spoofs of American sexual mores, the former by presenting alternatives from another planet, the latter through the eyes of an ‘old-fashioned girl.’ Other novels include Texture of Life (1963), On Keeping Women (1977), and In the Palace of the Movie King (1993). In 1988, Calisher published a volume of memoirs, Kissing Cousins.”

Excerpted from: Murphy, Bruce, ed. Benet’s Reader’s Encyclopedia, Fourth Edition. New York: Harper Collins, 1996.

Harold Washington

Harold Washington: (1922-1987) U.S. politician and mayor of Chicago (1983-87). Born in Chicago, he practiced law and served as a city attorney 1954-58). He was elected successively to the Illinois legislature (1965-78), state senate (1976-80), and U.S. House of Representatives (1980-83). After a hard-fought campaign for reform and an end to city patronage, he was elected mayor of Chicago, becoming the first black to hold that office. He was elected to a second term in 1987, but died soon after.

Excerpted/Adapted from: Stevens, Mark A., Ed. Merriam Webster’s Collegiate Encyclopedia. Springfield, Massachusetts: Merriam-Webster, 2000.

Langston Hughes Famously Reflects on Dreams

“Hold fast to dreams

For if dreams die

Life is a broken-winged bird

That cannot fly.”

“Dreams” l. 1 (1929)

Excerpted from: Schapiro, Fred, ed. The Yale Book of Quotations. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006.

Denmark Vesey

“Denmark Vesey: (1767?-1822) U.S. insurrectionist. Born in the West Indies, he was sold to a Bermuda slaver captain, with whom he sailed on numerous voyages. They settled in Charleston, South Carolina, and Vesey was allowed to purchase his freedom for $600 in 1800. After reading antislavery literature, he determined to relieve the oppression of slaves. He organized city and plantation blacks (up to 9,000 by some estimates) for an uprising in which they would attack arsenals, seize the arms, kill all whites, burn Charleston, and free the slaves on surrounding plantations. After a house servant warned the authorities, the insurrection was forestalled and 130 blacks were arrested; Vesey was tried and hanged with 35 others.”

Excerpted/Adapted from: Stevens, Mark A., Ed. Merriam Webster’s Collegiate Encyclopedia. Springfield, Massachusetts: Merriam-Webster, 2000.

Jamaica Kincaid

“Jamaica Kincaid: (1949-) Antiguan novelist and short-story writer. Kincaid’s collection of ten short stories, At the Bottom of the River (1983), is distinctive in its poetic style and dream sequences. The collection explores what it means to grow up female in the Caribbean, through an intense mother/daughter relationship. Annie John (1985), an autobiographical novel, portrays a female protagonist struggling to establish an identity within the complexities of Caribbean society. Other works include A Small Place (1988), an essay about Antigua, and Lucy, a novel.”

Excerpted from: Murphy, Bruce, ed. Benet’s Reader’s Encyclopedia, Fourth Edition. New York: Harper Collins, 1996.

Bernard Coard on Low Expectations

“When the Teacher Does Not Expect Much From the Child: Most teachers absorb the brainwashing that everybody else in the society has absorbed—that Black people are inferior, are less intelligent, etcetera, than white people. Therefore the Black child is expected to do less well in school. The IQ tests which are given to the Black child, with all their cultural bias, give him a low score only too often. The teachers judge the likely ability of the child on the basis of this IQ test. The teacher has, in the form of the IQ test results, what she considers to be ‘objective’ confirmation of what everybody else in the society is thinking and sometimes saying: that the Black children on average have lower IQ than the white children, and must consequently be expected to do less well in class. Alderman Doulton of the Education Committee in the Borough of Haringey has expressed this view, and it is probably fair to say that the banding of children in Haringey for supposedly achieving equal groups of ability in all the schools was really clever plot to disperse the Black children in the borough throughout the school system. The notorious Professor Jensen, the Enoch Powell of the academic world, has added credence to the myth of Black inferiority by openly declaring that Black people are inherently less intelligent than whites, and therefore Black children should be taught separately.”

Excerpted from: Coard, Bernard. How the West Indian Child Is Made Educationally Sub-Normal in the British School System: 50th Anniversary Expanded Fifth Edition. Kingston, Jamaica: McDermott Publishing, 2021.

W.E.B. Du Bois on the Problem of the Twentieth Century

“The problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color-line—the relation of the darker to the lighter races in Asia and Africa, in America and the islands of the sea.”

W.E.B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk ch. 2 (1903)

Excerpted from: Schapiro, Fred, ed. The Yale Book of Quotations. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006.