“The color of the skin makes no difference. What is good and just for one is good and just for the other, and the Great Spirit made all men brothers.
I have a red skin, but my grandfather was white man. What does it matter? It is not the color of the skin that makes me good or bad.”
Arikara Chief
Excerpted from: Nerburn, Kent and Louise Mengelkoch, eds. Native American Wisdom. San Rafael, CA: Classic Wisdom Collection, 1991.
November is National Native American Heritage Month. I’ve made my thoughts about these themed history months sufficiently clear over the life of this blog that there is no need to belabor them, once more, here. I am quickly running out of materials to publish on these months, as this month’s posts, I’m afraid, will disclose.
This reading on the Gadsden Purchase and its accompanying vocabulary-building and comprehension worksheet are the first of three posts that might be more appropriately considered part of the standard curriculum on United States history. It is that. However, it also points the way toward a deeper understanding of Manifest Destiny in practice, and therefore a clearer picture of how legislation, war, and commerce expanded the United States into Native American lands, always to the detriment of indigenous peoples.
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.
“There are four architectural periods:
Pre-1850: Situated one floor above the ground level (the piano nobile) in a palace, chateau, or large house. Vaulted ceilings were succeeded by flat painted ceilings. Used for dancing. A mainstay of the Jane Austen-Leo Tolstoy novel.
1850-1945: Situated on the ground floor of hotels and commonly decorated with classical columns and gold leaf. The floors were sprung for dancing, but they are now most often used by businessmen’s lunch clubs to listen to speakers or for charity functions. A fixture of Edith Whartonesque fiction.
1946-1970: Situated on the fortieth floor (the penthouse) where they revolve. These rooms are decorated with oil-based materials in primary colours. They are usually empty. Sometimes used in feature films to depict modern life.
Post-1970: Situated in hotel basements beside the garage. These cement rooms seat 2,500 people when all partitions are folded back. They are used for BUSINESS CONFERENCES and AWARD SHOWs. Thanks to the division of society into thousands of specialized groups, they are always full. The basement ballroom has replaced the opera house, which itself replaced the royal palaces as a place in which the elites legitimize themselves. They exist in a post-literate vacuum. See: CORPORATISM.
Excerpted from: Saul, John Ralston. The Doubter’s Companion. New York: The Free Press, 1994.
It’s Election Day 2026 in the United States. So it seems like a good time to post this Cultural Literacy worksheet on the branches of government. This is a full-page worksheet with a five-sentence reading and five comprehension questions. A basic, symmetrical explanation of the distribution of governmental power under the United States Constitution.
And don’t forget that it is the role of the United States Congress to limit the power of the Executive Branch–i.e. the president.
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.
“Distinctly for Distinctively. ‘The custom is distinctly Oriental.’ Distinctly is plainly; distinctively, in a way to distinguish one thing from others.”
Excerpted from: Bierce, Ambrose. Write it Right: A Little Blacklist of Literary Faults. Mineola, NY: Dover, 2010.
Once again, from Paul Brians’ book Common Errors in English Usage (Sherwood, Oregon: William James 2013), here is a worksheet on the use of the expression not my forte. This is a mostly unstructured worksheet that calls upon students to write sentences extemporaneously from subject to period using the expression not my forte. Since this is an expression educated people use quite commonly, I think high school students ought to learn it.
Incidentally, Professor Brians allows free access to this book on his web page at Washington State University.
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.
“Civilization: The single and shortest definition of civilization may be the word language.
This is not to suggest that images or music are of lesser importance. It is simply that they have more to do with the unconscious. They are somehow part of metaphysics and religion. Civilization, if it means something concrete, is the conscious but unprogrammed mechanism by which humans communicate. And through communication they live with each other; think, create and act.”
Excerpted from: Saul, John Ralston. The Doubter’s Companion. New York: The Free Press, 1994.
Posted in English Language Arts, Quotes, Social Sciences
Here is a Cultural Literacy worksheet on the original thirteen colonies of what would become the United States. This is a half-page worksheet with a one–longish, with the first clause separated by a colon from the list of the thirteen colonies–sentence reading and two comprehension questions.
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.
“Factors of production: Any resource used in the production of goods or services. Factors of production can be broadly classified into three main groups: labor, or human services; capital, or man-made means of production; and land, or natural resources. Each of these broad groups of factors of production can be subdivided in various ways, for example labor with various amounts of human capital, or land with various mineral contents.”
Excerpted from: Black, John, Nigar Hashimzade, and Gareth Miles. Oxford Dictionary of Economics. New York: Oxford University Press, 2012.
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