Tag Archives: questioning/inquiry

Totemism

Posted on November 8, 2024 | Leave a comment

“Totemism: Complex of ideas and practices based on the belief in kinship or mystical relationship between a group (or individual) and a natural object, such as an animal or a plant. The term derives from the Ojibwa word ototeman, signifying a blood relationship. A society exhibits totemism if it is divided into an apparently fixed number of clans, each of which has a specific relationship to an animate or inanimate species (totem). A totem many be a feared or respected hunted animal or an edible plant. Very commonly connected with origin myths and with instituted morality, the totem is almost always hedged about with taboos of avoidance or of strictly ritualized contact. Totem, taboo, and exogamy seem to be inextricably intertwined.”

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

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Sand Creek Massacre or Chivington Massacre

Posted on November 8, 2024 | Leave a comment

“Sand Creek Massacre or Chivington Massacre: November 29, 1864) Surprise attack by U.S. troops on a Cheyenne camp. A force of 1,200 men, mostly Colorado volunteers, under Colonel John M. Chivington attacked several hundred Cheyenne camped on Sand Creek near Fort Lyon in southeastern Colorado territory. The Indians had been conducting peace negotiations with the fort’s commander; when the attack began, they raised a white flag, but the troops continued to attack, massacring over 200 Indians. The slayings led to the Plains Indian wars.”

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

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Iroquoian Languages

Posted on November 1, 2024 | Leave a comment

“Iroquoian languages: Family of about 16 North American Indian languages aboriginally spoken around the eastern Great Lakes and in parts of the Middle Atlantic states and the South. Aside from the languages of the Iroquois Confederacy (Mohawk, Oneida, Onondaga, Cayuga, and Seneca, all originally spoken in New York, along with Tuscarora, originally spoken in North Carolina) and Cherokee (originally spoken in the southern Appalachians), the Iroquoian languages are extinct and with the exception of Huron and Wyandot, the extinct languages are poorly documented. Iroquoian languages are remarkable for their grammatical intricacy, Much of a sentence’s semantic content is bound around a verbal base, so a single very long word may constitute a fairly complex utterance.”

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

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Iriquois Confederacy or League of the Iroquois

Posted on November 1, 2024 | Leave a comment

“Iriquois Confederacy or League of the Iroquois: Confederation of five (later six) Indian tribes across upper New York that in the 17th-18th centuries played a strategic role in the struggle between the French and British for supremacy in North America. The five original nations were the Mohawk, Oneida, Onondaga, Cayuga, and Seneca; the Tuscarora joined in 1722. According to tradition, the confederacy was founded between 1570 and 1600 by Dekanawidah, born a Huron, carrying out the earlier ideas of Hiawatha, and Onondaga. Cemented mainly by their desire to stand together against invasion, the tribes united in a common council composed of 50 sachems; each tribe had one vote, and unanimity was the rule. At first the confederacy barely withstood attacks from the Huron and Mahican, but by 1628 the Mohawk had defeated the Mahican and established themselves as the region’s dominant tribe. When the Iroquois destroyed the Huron in 1648-50, they were attacked by the Huron’s French allies. During the American Revolution, the Oneida and Tuscarora sided with the Americans while the rest of the league, led by Joseph Brant, fought for the British. The Loyalist Iroquois were defeated in 1779 near Elmira, New York, and the confederacy came to an end.”

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

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Iroquois

Posted on November 1, 2024 | Leave a comment

“Iriquois: Any member of the Iroquois Confederacy or more broadly, any speaker of Iroquoian languages. Iroquoian-speaking peoples were semisedentary, practiced agriculture, palisaded their villages, and dwelled in longhouses that lodged many families. Women worked the fields and, in matrilineal groups, helped determine the makeup of village councils. Men built houses, hunted, fished, and made war. Iroquoian mythology was largely preoccupied with supernatural aggression and cruelty, sorcery, torture, and cannibalism. Their formal religion consisted of agricultural festivals. Warfare was ingrained in Iroquois society, and war captives were often tortured for days or made permanent slaves, Today the various Iroquois tribes include about 20,000 members.”

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

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The Weekly Text, 18 October 2024: A Lesson Plan on the Zodiac from The Order of Things

Posted on October 18, 2024 | Leave a comment

Once again, adapted from the pages of Barbara Ann Kipfer’s fascinating reference book The Order of Things, here is a lesson plan on the Zodiac with its accompanying worksheet with a list of the Zodiac Signs as a reading and five comprehension questions.

As I do when I post these lessons, I want to emphasize that I designed them for struggling and emergent readers, or for students for whom English is not a first language. This work calls upon students to perform an analysis in two symbolic systems–numbers and words–of the material on the worksheet, something with which many students I have served over the years struggled.

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.

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Jacobo Arbenz Guzman

Posted on October 11, 2024 | Leave a comment

“Jacobo Arbenz Guzman: (1913-1971) Soldier and president of Guatemala (1951-54). The son of a Swiss émigré, Arbenz joined the leftist army officers who overthrew the dictator Jorge Ubico (1878-1946) in 1944. Elected president in 1951, he made land reform his central project. His efforts to expropriate idle land owned by the United Fruit Company and his alleged Communist links led to an invasion sponsored by the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency. When the army refused to defend Arbenz against what appeared to be a superior force, he resigned and went into exile, and the CIA installed the leader of the proxy army, Colonel Carlos Castillo Armas (1914-1957), as president.”

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

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Salvador Guillermo Allende Gossens

Posted on September 20, 2024 | Leave a comment

“Salvador Guillermo Allende Gossens: (1908-1973) Socialist president of Chile (1970-73). Of upper-middle-class background, Allende took a degree in medicine and in 1933 helped to found Chile’s Socialist Party. He ran for president unsuccessfully three times before winning narrowly in 1970. He attempted to restructure Chilean society along socialist lines while retaining democracy, civil liberties, and due process of law, but his efforts to redistribute wealth resulted in stagnant production, food shortages, rising inflation, and widespread strikes. His inability to control his radical supporters further alienated the middle class. His policies dried up foreign credit and led to a covert campaign by the United States Central Intelligence Agency to destabilize the government. He was overthrown in a violent military coup, during which he died by gunshot, reportedly self-inflicted. He was replaced by General Augusto Pinochet.”

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

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The Lost Generation

Posted on September 2, 2024 | Leave a comment

“Lost Generation: Group of U.S. writers who came of age during World War I and established their reputations in the 1920s; more broadly, the entire post-World War I generation. The term was coined by Gertrude Stein in a remark to Ernest Hemingway. The writers considered themselves ‘lost’ because their inherited values could not operate in the postwar world and they felt spiritually alienated from a country they considered hopelessly provincial and emotionally barren, The term embraces Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, John Dos Passos, E.E. Cummings, Archibald Macleish, and Hart Crane, among others.”

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

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Seven Days of the Week

Posted on August 16, 2024 | Leave a comment

“Monday/Lundi * Tuesday/Mardi * Wednesday/Mercredi * Thursday/Jeudi * Friday/Vendredi * Satuday/Samedi Sunday/Dimanche

Our seven-day week is a straight inheritance from very ancient Babylonian and Jewish traditions that took the seven planets as one of the ordering principles of humanity and divinity. The main alternatives were the Egyptian ten-day week, the Germano-Celtic nine-night week and the eight-day week for the Etruscans. The latter was inherited by the Romans, for it allowed for a specific market-day, which enabled country-dwellers to come to the cities and sell fruit and vegetables (which lasted only eight days). During Julius Caesar’s calendar reforms the seven-day week was introduced to the Near East, though it ran alongside the old Etruscan traditions until the time Constantine.

And some time during that period, between 200 and 600 AD, the current charming muddle of English names was hatched out, part honouring the Roman pantheon and part the Norse-German deities. For Monday is moon day, Tuesday is the day to Tiw/Tyr’s day (the heroic Teutonic sky god), Wednesday is Woden/Odin’s (the Teutonic/Norse god of knowledge and war), Thursday is the day of Thor (the Teutonic smith-god of thunder)), Friday is the day of Frija/Freyr (the Teutonic goddess of fertility), Saturday is Saturn (the father of Zeus)’s day, and Sunday is of course the sun’s day.

The same process happened in France, ossifying that peculiar junction point between Roman paganism and the new Christian order. So the French have Lundi (from the Latin dies Lunae, or moon day), Mardi (dies Martis, or Mars day), Mercredi (dies Mercurii, or Mercury day), Jeudi (dies Jovis, or Jupiter day), Vendredi (dies Veneris, Venus day), Samedi (dies Saturni, Saturn day) and Dimanche (dies Dominicus, day of the lord).

In the well-ordered Christian state of Byzantium, all these pagan relics were ditched in favor of days 1, 2, 3 and 4, followed by Paraskene (preparation), Sabbaton and finally Kyriaki (God’s day). These remain the days in modern Greek.”

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.

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