Tag Archives: asian-pacific history

Here is a Cultural Literacy worksheet on the Hagia Sophia, an august building which has actually been in the news recently.

Hagia Sophia rose in late antiquity, the year 537 to be exact, as the patriarchal cathedral of the city of Constantinople and one of the centers of the Eastern Orthodox Church. After Constantinople fell to the Ottoman Empire in 1453, Hagia Sophia became, for nearly 500 years, a mosque in the rechristened city of Istanbul. In 1935, the secular Turkish Republic converted it to a museum. In 1985, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), added Hagia Sophia to its list of World Heritage Sites.

Just last year, Turkish authorities decided to convert Hagia Sophia back to a working mosque. As you might imagine, this was controversial: UNESCO announced that it “deeply regretted” this move; The Orthodox Church petitioned the United Nations to intervene and prevent Turkey from attempting to “erase the cultural heritage of Orthodox Christians.” Christians in Turkey fear marginalization–not exactly a new source of anxiety in this part of the world, but clearly not desirable if one wishes to avoid, say, religious strife.

So, this full-page worksheet (five questions) introduces a torn-from-the-headlines story that makes the history of this fraught building relevant to students, and a source of thought and discussion about a wide range of concepts and topics, including monotheism, paganism, Christianity and Islam, religious strife, conflicts rooted in philosophy, religion, and ideology, winners and losers in conflict, and nationalism, to name a few.

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.

Here is a Cultural Literacy worksheet on the Black Hole of Calcutta–a topic which fascinated me as a kid.

In fact, I think we kids used a potential stay in the Black Hole of Calcutta, or its equivalent on the east side of Madison, Wisconsin, as a deterrent to misbehavior. In other words, one had better not commit pranks on Halloween night lest one end up cast into the Black Hole of Calcutta. I may have gotten onto the Black Hole while reading through the reams of Classics Illustrated Comics my father accumulated as a child, then conveyed to me. But it was part of the lingua franca of my crowd, so we may have also gotten onto it by way of cartoons, or something else.

We probably assumed it was a mythological place. As it happens, the Black Hole was in Fort William, in Calcutta. The British East India Company (which if memory serves, the CUNY–John Jay College of Criminal Justice, to be exact–historian Mike Wallace, characterized as “Wal-Mart with Guns” in Ric Burns’ magisterial eight-part documentary series on New York City) built Fort Williams to protect its trade in India. In other words, a colonial, mercantilist endeavor designed to enrich England at the expense of India.

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.

Here is a Cultural Literacy worksheet on Chiang Kai-shek, the Generalissimo, as he was known for his service to the Chinese National Revolutionary Army.

Like Mao Zedong (of which more tomorrow), Chiang is a controversial figure. His record of imposing the White Terror on the island of Taiwan says quite a lot about him, I think. 38 years is a long run of martial law by any standard I recognize. The Kuomintang, known for its excesses, used anxiety about the Chinese Communist Party to sustain oppression of political opposition across the period of the White Terror. As in most tyrannies, one example serves to illustrate the absurdity of the oppression, to wit the case of Bo Yang, who made the mistake of translating a Popeye cartoon in a way that didn’t conform to the Kuomintang political orthodoxy.

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.