“The Mayan Calendar’s 52-Year Cycle: The Mayan’s fifty-two-year cycle is created by observing how the combination of their two simultaneous calendars—the 260-day-long Tzolk’in fertility calendars and 365-day-long Haab solar year—fitted into a naturally repeating cycle over a fifty-two year time span.”
Excerpted from: Rogerson, Barnaby. Rogerson’s Book of Numbers: The Culture of Numbers–from 1,001 Nights to the Seven Wonders of the World. New York: Picador, 2013.
Posted in Essays/Readings, Quotes, Reference, Social Sciences
Tagged hispanic history, numeracy, readings/research
This week’s Text, in Mark’s Text Terminal’s ongoing observance of National Hispanic Heritage Month 2019, is a reading on Augusto Pinochet and its accompanying vocabulary-building and comprehension worksheet. Pinochet–along with Trujillo, the Somoza family, and in general a disturbingly long list of despots–is one of the great villains of Hispanic History. When I was in high school, Pinochet was kind of our version of the bogeyman.
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.
“Claribel Alegria: (1924-2018) Salvadoran writer, born in Nicaragua. Alegria has published poetry, novelas, and novels. Her work ranges from the intimate lyric to agonized denunciation of the horrors that have beset Central America. Her Sobrevivo (1978) won the Casa de las Americas award in poetry. She excels at a narrative poetry that that is compact, tender, fanciful, and even fantastic, Alegria deals with love, solitude, family life, and injustice from a political and feminist stance, as in La mujer del Rio Sampul (1987; tr Woman of the River, 1990). She has coauthored many books with her husband, Darwin J. Flakoll, particularly testimonial accounts of the Nicaraguan revolution and the lives of Salvadoran women. Cenizas de Izalco (1966; tr Ashes of Izalco, 1989) is a recreation of the peasant uprising of 1932. Luisa en el pais de la realidad (1987; tr Luisa in Realityland, 1987) is an experimental novel.”
Excerpted from: Murphy, Bruce, ed. Benet’s Reader’s Encyclopedia, Fourth Edition. New York: Harper Collins, 1996.
Here, in observation of Hispanic History Month 2019, is an Everyday Edit worksheet on Pablo Picasso. If you like this kind of exercise, the good people at Education World very generously offer at no charge a year’s supply of them–that hyperlink will take you to them.
If you find errors in this document…well, then you’re doing good work! Finding and correcting copy errors is kind of the point of this material.
“Xiuhtecuhtli (Turquoise Lord) * Tecpati-Itzli (Lord of the Obsidian Blade) * Piltzintecuhtli (Our Lord Prince) * Centeotl (Lord of the Maize) * Mictlantecuhtli (Underworld Lord) * Chalchiuhtlicue (Lord of the Jade Skirt) * Tlazoteotl (Our Lady of Two Faces—Lustful Sin and Purification) * Tepeyollotl (Lord of the Heart of the Mountain) * Tlaloc (Lord of Rain and Fertility)
The Aztecs, like most of the pre-Columbian civilizations of Mesoamerica, ran a number of sacred calendars concurrently, which made life more interesting, in terms of working out festivals and celebrations, as well as good, bad, propitious and impossible days, nights and months. Blocks of nine nights fitted into both the 365-day-long solar year (known as Haab), which was divided into twenty groups eighteen-day months, as well as the 260-day-long fertility calendar (known as Tzolkin) composed of twenty groups of thirteen-day months as well as twenty-nine groups of nine nights.
Twenty-nine is of course the unit of a lunar month, while nine months represent the gestation of both a human child and the complete tropical cycle of sowing to reaping for such vital crops as maize. So the Lords of the Night, in some South American cultures, appear also as the Lords of the Nine Months, or the Nine Judges of Hell, and other ninefold manifestations.”
Excerpted from: Rogerson, Barnaby. Rogerson’s Book of Numbers: The Culture of Numbers–from 1,001 Nights to the Seven Wonders of the World. New York: Picador, 2013.
Posted in Essays/Readings, Quotes, Reference, Social Sciences
Tagged hispanic history, literary oddities
OK, here is an Everyday Edit worksheet, “Columbus Sets Sail,” which serves, I think, as a pretty good introduction to how Hispanic History begins.
Incidentally, if you, or more importantly, your students, like this kind of exercise, the good people at Education World give away a year-long supply of them at no charge. Just click on the hyperlink in the previous sentence to get to them.
If you find typos in this document…well, that’s the point of it. Ask your students to correct them.
“Miguel Angel Asturias: (1899-1974) Guatemalan novelist, short-story writer, and poet. Asturias spend much of his life in exile because of his public opposition to dictatorial rule. When he was sympathetic to his country’s leadership, he served as ambassador to El Salvador and later to France. He took a law degree in 1923 and then went to London to study economics and Paris to study anthropology, where he encountered French translations of Mayan writings. He proceeded to translate the Mayan text Popol Vuh into Spanish in 1925, developing a deep concern for the Mayan culture that was to weave its myth and history into everything he wrote, though never to the exclusion of this social and political statements. His greatest novel is El senor president (1946; tr El Senor Presidente, 1964), a phantasmagoric satire on Latin American military dictators, based largely on the regime of Manuel Estrada Cabrera, president of Guatemala from 1898 to 1920. Viento Fuerte (1950; tr Strong Wind, 1968), El papa verde (1954; tr The Green Pope, 1971), and Los ojos de los enterrados (1960; tr The Eyes of the Interred, 1973) comprise a trilogy attacking the exploitation by U.S.-owned fruit companies of the Guatemalan banana plantations. Week-end en Guatemala (1956) is a collection of stories about the C.I.A.-directed overthrow of the government of Jacobo Arbenz, whom Asturias had supported. After Arbenz’s ouster, Asturias went into exile, returning to Guatemala in 1966. In 1967 he was appointed ambassador to France, the same year in which he was awarded the Nobel Prize in literature.”
Excerpted from: Murphy, Bruce, ed. Benet’s Reader’s Encyclopedia, Fourth Edition. New York: Harper Collins, 1996.
Last Monday, September 15, marked the beginning of Hispanic Heritage Month 2019. Last year at this time I knew I was running out of materials to properly observe the Month Over the summer I struggled to assemble materials to publish. Unfortunately, finding a new job, moving, and the typical vagaries of life intervened; the section of the warehouse at Mark’s Text Terminal where the appropriate materials are stored is nearly bereft of goods. So I begin the month belatedly and with a regrettable deficit, which embarrasses me.
In any case, to kick off Hispanic Heritage Month for 2109, here is a reading on the Bay of Pigs invasion and the vocabulary-building and comprehension worksheet that attends it. These cover both Hispanic history and United States history. These documents have served, along with others, in my classroom, to start students thinking critically about the wages of imperialism.
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.
“(fr Arab kal’-at hamra, “the red castle”) A citadel and palace at Granada, Spain, built by Moorish kings in the 13th century. The buildings stand on a plateau some thirty-five acres in area and are surrounded by a reddish brick wall. Considered one of the finest examples of Moorish architecture in Spain, the palace consists largely of two rectangular courts, the Court of the Pool or Myrtles and the Court of the Lions, and their adjoining chambers. The latter court contains a famous central fountain, consisting of an alabaster basin supported by twelve lions of white marble. While he was an attache at the American legation in Madrid in 1829, Washington Irving spend much time in the Alhambra and wrote a well-known volume of sketches and tales called Legends of the Alhambra (1832, 1852). An admirer of Moorish civilization, he wrote about the clashes between the Spaniards and the Moors.”
Excerpted from: Murphy, Bruce, ed. Benet’s Reader’s Encyclopedia, Fourth Edition. New York: Harper Collins, 1996.
“Oh, Mr. President, do not let so great an achievement suffer from any taint of legality.”
Philander C. Knox (1853-1921)
Quoted in Tyler Dennett, John Hay: From Poetry to Politics (1933). Knox’s reply, as attorney general, to President Theodore Roosevelt’s request for a legal justification of his acquisition of the Panama Canal Zone.
Excerpted from: Shapiro, Fred, ed. The Yale Book of Quotations. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006.
Posted in English Language Arts, Quotes, Reference, Social Sciences
Tagged hispanic history, humor, united states history
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