Category Archives: The Weekly Text

This week’s Text, the final for this year in observance of Asian Pacific American Heritage Month 2021 is a reading on Chandragupta Maurya and its accompanying vocabulary-building and comprehension worksheet.

Chandragupta Maurya founded the Maurya Empire, which enjoyed a long run–from 322 to 180 BCE. We know about Chandragupta Maurya and his eponymous empire from a variety of sources. India was known to the ancients in the West, including Pliny the Elder and Plutarch (and don’t forget that Alexander the Great fought briefly in northwest India); the Roman historian Justin also left biographical details about Chandragupta. He is also mentioned in the Arthashastra, a Sanskrit book on statecraft. Since the Mauryas oversaw the rise of Buddhism in India under King Ashoka, Chandragupta’s grandson and the third of the Mauryan emperors,. Buddhist texts also supply facts about Chandragupta and the Mauryas. Finally, a wealth of archaeological evidence underwrites both Chandragupta’s reign as well as the broader history of the Maurya Empire.

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.

This week’s Text, in observation of Asian-Pacific American Heritage Month 2021, is a reading on Mao Zedong along with its accompanying vocabulary-building and comprehension worksheet.

His image, when I was in high school, was instantly recognizable–though I must stipulate that I ran with a crowd that tended to have his one of his various complimentary portraits displayed. Back then, and perhaps now, he was a demigod a certain sort of political aficionado–the forgiving sort, to be sure. While Mao is unquestionably a world-historical figure, his balance sheet tips toward liability, especially in the light of the excesses of the Cultural Revolution and the Great Leap Forward. If one considers the Chinese Annexation of Tibet and its subsequent corollary, the Sinicization of that nation, Mao emerges, in terms of both domestic policy and statecraft, as an unmitigated disaster.

One could plan on unit on Mao and use it to examine a number of conceptual processes of history, including, war, revolution, peace, types of tyranny, utopias and their drawbacks and downfalls, the individual and the collective, political theory and practice, free and regulated markets, capitalism and communism–well, this list could go on at some length.

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.