Tag Archives: united states history

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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Cultural Literacy: Iroquois League

Posted on November 1, 2024 | Leave a comment

Here is a Cultural Literacy worksheet on the Iroquois League. This is a half-page worksheet with a reading of on sentence and one comprehension question. In other words, a short, basic introduction to this indigenous nation.

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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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, 1 November 2024, National Native American Heritage Month Week I: A Reading and Comprehension Worksheet on the Pequot War

Posted on November 1, 2024 | Leave a comment

Today begins National Native American Heritage Month 2024. Unlike this blog’s (therefore my own) woeful deficiencies during Hispanic Heritage Month 2023 last month and in September, I have a full raft of materials to post this month–which contains five Fridays.

So the Weekly Text for today, Friday, 1 November 2014, is this reading on the Pequot War along with its attendant vocabulary-building and comprehension worksheet.

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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Concepts in Sociology: Assimilation

Posted on October 25, 2024 | Leave a comment

A couple of years ago, I was assigned a sociology elective at my school. In the inimitably brilliant style of my school’s chief administrator, I learned of this three days before classes began. And of course there was, again typically, no curriculum for this course.

So I needed to come up with something in a hurry. I did, but let’s face it: developing a curriculum for a high school sociology course, let alone mastering its teaching, is a process that takes years: I really only had days, so I needed to move this process along quickly. I have a fair amount of material, but I fear it is of mixed quality. So, here is a worksheet on assimilation, the process by which immigrants integrate into their adopted nations and societies.

I would be particularly interested, if you use any of this material, and especially if you happen to know anything about sociology (I do, but clearly not enough for the endeavor to which I was deployed), to hear from you about it.

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 Devil’s Dictionary: Ambition

Posted on October 25, 2024 | Leave a comment

“Ambition, n. An overmastering desire to be vilified by enemies while living and made ridiculous by friends when dead.”

Ambrose Bierce

Excerpted from: Bierce, Ambrose. David E. Schultz and S.J. Joshi, eds. The Unabridged Devil’s Dictionary. Athens: The University of Georgia Press, 2000. 

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The Weekly Text, 25 October 2024: A Reading and Comprehension Worksheet on The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

Posted on October 25, 2024 | Leave a comment

Like other avid readers, I expect, I have been watching the long overdue public advance of Percival Everett’s career. While I have yet to actually read his books, I did see American Fiction (based on his novel Erasure),  heard him interviewed in various places, and read a profile of him in The New Yorker. To call him interesting would be to considerably understate the case.

His most recent novel, James, re-imagines Mark Twain’s classic–and now controversial–American novel Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, from the perspective of Jim, the escaped slave who travels with Huck. Jim’s humanity and his moral uprightness, as the novel proceeds, informs Huck’s morality and therefore criticizes the immorality, hypocrisy, and just plain horror of slavery.

So, it seeks like a good enough time to post as a Weekly Text this reading on the Adventures of Huckleberry Finn along with its accompanying vocabulary-building and comprehension worksheet.

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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The Labyrinth of Solitude

Posted on October 11, 2024 | Leave a comment

“The Labyrinth of Solitude (El laberinto de la soledad, 1950; tr 1961): A book by Octavio Paz. This penetrating essay on Mexican history has probably been more widely read and is thus more influential than any of Paz’s other essays or poetry. In search of the meaning of the Mexican and, by extension, the Latin American experience, Paz singles out the conquest of the Indians by Spanish invaders as the moment the true Mexico became isolated and obscured by masks. Silence, dissimulation, machismo, hermeticism, violence, and the cult of death are the masks adopted by the Mexican to disguise his fundamental historical solitude. Paz argues, however, that solitude has become a universal part of the human condition and that all men, like the poet himself, must become conscious of this condition in order to find, in the plentitude of love and creative work, a glimpse of the way out of the labyrinth of solitude.

In the revised and supplemented edition of 1985, Paz clarifies his view of Mexican culture and history, and deals with U.S.-Mexico relations. He also reexamines the dichotomy between the “two Mexicos,” the “developed” and the “underdeveloped,” and finds that the distinction is itself an imposition of the former upon the latter. He discusses the “other” Mexico as not only a tradition and a culture, but as representing a philosophical “Other,” like the other within.

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

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