Tag Archives: readings/research

Cultural Literacy: Lizzie Borden

Posted on March 11, 2021 | Leave a comment

Here is a Cultural Literacy worksheet on Lizzie Borden. If you are my age (or perhaps younger–do kids still recite this?), you might remember her from this piece of doggerel, recited on finer playgrounds during recess from the horrors of the elementary school classroom:

“Lizzie Borden took an axe
She gave her mother forty whacks.
When she saw what she had done
She gave her father forty-one.
Lizzie Borden got away
For her crime she did not pay.”

I wrote this worksheet for this year’s Women’s History Month 2021 which is under way now. So I’ve never used it in the classroom. But it’s a safe bet that it will be a high-interest item–especially if paired with a deeper examination of the facts of Lizzie Borden’s case, and the fact that one may, if one chooses, lodge at the Lizzie Borden Bed & Breakfast/Museum while traveling through Fall River, Massachusetts.

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.

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Cultural Literacy: Fannie Farmer

Posted on March 10, 2021 | Leave a comment

Here is a Cultural Literacy worksheet on Fannie Farmer. I knew so little about her that I confess I cannot honestly say (to my chagrin) that I understood that she was even a real person.

Rest assured she was: in fact, she possessed the kind of indomitable spirit that makes for interesting and inspiring reading. At age 16, she suffered a paralytic stroke, which prevented her from finishing high school in Medford, Massachusetts. At age 30, with a limp she would endure throughout her life, Ms. Farmer enrolled in the Boston Cooking School. When she submitted her famous cookbook, The Boston Cooking-School Cook Book, to Little Brown for publication, the publisher couldn’t imagine a market for the book and so limited the first edition to 3,000 copies; moreover, the book was published at Ms. Farmer’s expense. Unsurprisingly, there appear to be no true first editions of this book for sale in online used book sites–but quite a few reprints, to the annoyance of this bibliophile, identified as firsts.

I asked two friends of mine about Fannie Farmer, both of whom are talented and adventurous cooks. They responded immediately. The first noted that Ms. Farmer’s cookbook is “The first cookbook I ever bought and I still use it from time to time. Basic and reliable.” This friend also sent along a photograph of the copyright page of her copy, which shows, as of 1968, that the book had been through 18 printings (HA! Take that, Little Brown!). My other friend declared himself agnostic where Ms. Farmer is concerned: “My thoughts on Fannie Farmer? I don’t have any. She’s more an historical allusion but I’m late coming to the cooking game.” At least he knows she’s a real person, which, again, was more than I could say for myself before I prepared this post.

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.

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Cultural Literacy: Amelia Earhart

Posted on March 8, 2021 | Leave a comment

Here is a Cultural Literacy worksheet on Amelia Earhart. She requires no commentary from me.

That said, the enduring mystery of her disappearance is just the kind of thing, in my experience, that motivates alienated students to work to get to the bottom of it. Stories, like this one from just over a year ago, continue to appear in the popular press. In fact, the question “Where, how, and why did Amelia Earhart disappear?” is the kind that starts synthetic research papers.

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.

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The Weekly Text, 5 March 2021, Women’s History Month 2021 Week I: A Reading and Comprehension Worksheet on Kate “Ma” Barker

Posted on March 5, 2021 | Leave a comment

In observance of Women’s History Month 2021, here is a reading on Ma Barker along with its accompanying vocabulary-building and comprehension worksheet.

While I understand she is not exactly a feminist icon, this has tended to be relatively high-interest material among the students I’ve served over the years. I expect a phrase from the opening sentence, to wit, that Kate “Ma” Barker was the “…matriarch of a notorious family of midwestern bank robbers” contributes to student interest in this short text. But it might also be that fact that she was “proclaimed a public enemy” and that she and her gang was “the target of a nationwide hunt until the gang was cornered in Florida and gunned down by the FBI.” I know that some kids found fascinating the criminal culture of the Barker family–all four of Mrs. Barker’s apparently half-witted sons, Herman, Lloyd, Arthur, and Fred, were “in and out of jail for bank robbery, car theft, and other crimes.” Finally, many students who have used these documents, especially young men, found fascinating the life and criminal career (which apparently included, while Karpis resided at Alcatraz Penitentiary, giving guitar lessons to Charles Manson) of Alvin “Creepy” Karpis, a member of the Barker-Karpis Gang, as it became known after Karpis joined forces with the Barkers.

If nothing else, I guess, there is a lot of solid vocabulary in this reading: matriarch, notorious, and proclaim among others. As far as Women’s History is concerned, well, Ma Barker was a woman, and she is unquestionably part of history.

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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Mary Wollstonecraft

Posted on March 4, 2021 | Leave a comment

“Mary Wollstonecraft: (1759-1797) English author. Wollstonecraft is famous for her groundbreaking Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), and as the wife of William Godwin and the mother of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley. Yet her political and literary life developed much earlier. Wollstonecraft was the father of an alcoholic father, from whom she tried to protect her mother, just as she helped her sister flee an abusive husband. After helping to found a girl’s school, working as a governess, and suffering years of poverty, she began to write. Her first novel, Mary, a Fiction (1788), was actually based on her own life. In the same year, she published a children’s book (later illustrated by William Blake). Her A Vindication of the Rights of Man (1790) predated Thomas Paine’s famous response to Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France and was similar in kind. In her more famous Vindication of the Rights of Woman, she showed how women were an oppressed group as much as the working class. Her analysis of social roles and the effect of laws that reduced women to the status of nonpersons was a model for later feminists.

Wollstonecraft lived in France during the revolution’s most violent phase, and began an unhappy affair which led to a child and two suicide attempts, She met Godwin after her return to London, and married him in 1796. She died the following year after giving birth to her daughter Mary.”

Excerpted from: Murphy, Bruce, ed. Benet’s Reader’s Encyclopedia, Fourth Edition. New York: Harper Collins, 1996.

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Mina Loy

Posted on March 2, 2021 | Leave a comment

“Mina Loy: (Born Mina Gertrude Lowy; 1882-1966) English poet and painter. Daughter of a Hungarian Jewish father and English Protestant mother, her first avocation was art. During her years in Florence (1906-1916) she was immersed in Italian Futurism. Loy gradually disassociated herself from the movement as it became increasingly fascist; a number of early satires take aim at the ‘Futurist genius’ as an example of male suprematism. Her first published work appeared in Alfred Stieglitz’s magazine Camera Work and Carl Van Vechten’s Trend (1914). Her controversial work ‘Love Songs for Johannes’ were considered shocking for their frank expression of female sexuality. In New York, she met Arthur Cravan, an infamous Dadaist “poet-boxer.” Divorcing her first husband, she married Cravan in Mexico City, with whom she had one child. Cravan later disappeared in Mexico and was never found. Her first collection of poems, Lunar Baedeker, appeared in 1923, and she did not publish another one until 1958 (Lunar Baedeker and Time Tables). Her work is distinguished by a satiric and feminist sensibility, an unusual polysyllabic and abstract diction, alliteration, internal and slant rhymes, and a combination of the image with the with the epigram. Some of her poems convey rage at the injustices done to women, the poor, and the homeless. Late in life she became more and more reclusive. Her collected poems, The Last Lunar Baedeker, appeared in 1982.”

Excerpted from: Murphy, Bruce, ed. Benet’s Reader’s Encyclopedia, Fourth Edition. New York: Harper Collins, 1996.

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Cultural Literacy: Mary McLeod Bethune

Posted on March 1, 2021 | Leave a comment

On the first day of Women’s History Month 2021, here is a Cultural Literacy worksheet on Mary McLeod Bethune.

While I would like to think Ms. Bethune requires no introduction, it seems safe to doubt that is the case. This important American heroine was an early and unequivocal champion of gender and racial equality, as well as an educator. In 1904, she started the Daytona Literary and Industrial School for Negro Girls. By 1931, her school had grown to such an extent that it became Bethune-Cookman University, now one of the preeminent Historically Black Colleges and Universities in the United States.

In other words, Mary McLeod Bethune is a world-historical figure. All of this is another way of saying this: to those southern cities taking down statues of white men to fought for (Confederate generals and political leaders), argued for (Supreme Court Justice Roger Taney) or otherwise abetted the practice of slavery in the United States, a nice bronze casting of Mary McLeod Bethune would make an appropriate, indeed just, replacement for any of those vacant plinths. You know?

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.

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The Weekly Text, February 19, 2020, Black History Month 2021 Week IV: A Reading and Comprehension Worksheet on George Washington Carver

Posted on February 26, 2021 | Leave a comment

This week’s Text, in this blog’s ongoing observance of Black History Month 2021, is this reading on George Washington Carver along with its accompanying vocabulary-building and comprehension worksheet. Today is the final Friday of Black History Month for this year; on Monday, March 1, this blog turns the corner to Women’s History Month.

Professor Carver is a staple of Black History, and usually observations of him tend to emphasize his interest in the peanut and its infinite varieties. While I don’t want to minimize those accomplishments–I for one would be very interested in knowing what Professor Carver’s recipes have added to the gross domestic product of the United States since their inception–I think it’s important to remember that George Washington Carver was a sophisticated agronomist who understood the need to rotate crops in southern fields so that cotton wouldn’t exhaust the topsoil. Alone, this area of his scholarly career makes Professor Carver an early environmentalist.

And all of this he accomplished while on the faculty of Tuskegee University in Alabama, in the heart of the Jim Crow South. If we White Americans are going to he honest with ourselves, we must stipulate that being a smart Black man in Alabama in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries could be dangerous indeed. For Americans of African descent, subservience and deference were the orders of the day in the Jim Crow South. His commitment to educating poor farmers also would have put him in the crosshairs of, say, the Ku Klux Klan.

So let’s all tip our hats to this great man.

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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Cultural Literacy: W.E.B. Du Bois

Posted on February 24, 2021 | Leave a comment

Here is a Cultural Literacy worksheet on W.E.B. Du Bois. He is a world-historical figure about whom, I confess, I know less than I should.

Fortunately, I found my way to the rich public programming at Yale University’s Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library, where I have been attending particularly rich and edifying webinars on Monday afternoons. These are open to the public; if you’re on Twitter, simply follow the Beinecke, which regularly tweets about upcoming events. Otherwise, searching “Mondays at Beinecke” (or clicking on that hyperlink) will take you to a calendar of events at the Library.

In any case, the Beinecke possesses some of W.E.B. Du Bois’s papers, which came to the Library by way of one of the major collections at the library, the James Weldon Johnson and Grace Nail Johnson Papers, which is a treasure trove of materials related to Black History in the United States in the twentieth century.

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.

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Hank Aaron

Posted on February 23, 2021 | Leave a comment

“Aaron, Hank: (orig. Henry Louis) (1934-2021) U.S. baseball player. Born in Mobile, Alabama, he played briefly in the Negro and minor leagues before joining the Milwaukee Braves in 1954. He would play outfield most of his career. By the time the Braves moved to Atlanta in 1965, he had hit 398 career home runs; in 1974 he hit his 715th, breaking Babe Ruth’s record. He played his final two seasons (1975-76) with the Milwaukee Brewers. His records for career home runs (755), extra-base hits (1,477), and runs batted in (2,297) remain unbroken, and only Ty Cobb and Pete Rose exceeded him in career hits (3,771). He is renowned as one of the greatest hitters of all time.”

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

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