Tag Archives: united states history

Native Americans

Here is a reading on Native Americans and its accompanying vocabulary-building and comprehension worksheet.

This reading is only four paragraphs. It uses the story of the Nez Perce Tribe, and especially Chief Joseph’s legendary speech–“Hear me, my chiefs!” I am tired. My heart is sick. From where the sun now stands, I will fight no more forever”–to tell the story of the destruction of the indigenous civilizations that inhabited North America prior to the arrival of the first European immigrants from England.

Given the disturbing, but unsurprising, discovery of mass graves at Canadian Indian Residential Schools, now is a very good time to take a look at what (if you happen to be of European descent, as I am) our forefathers wrought. It is not a pretty picture. But neither is ignoring these crimes. In any case, I think we are just seeing the first of the remains of this genocide.

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.

Walter Lippmann on the Creation of Perception

“The subtlest and most pervasive of all influences are those which create and maintain the repertory of stereotypes. We are told about the world before we see it. We imagine most things before we experience them.”

Walter Lippmann, Public Opinion ch. 6 (1922)

Excerpted from: Schapiro, Fred, ed. The Yale Book of Quotations. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006.

A Welcome Insight from The Washington Post

Here is something that popped up in The Washington Post that came over the transom last weekend. It’s long overdue, but better late than never.

American Scene Painting

“American Scene Painting: A term that has extended and supplanted the term regionalism. It had come to include several movements from the mid-19th to the mid-20th centuries in which painters chose limited areas or aspects of distinctly American landscapes or life as their subjects and rendered them in a direct, usually literal style. Includes the landscapes of Thomas Cole and Albert Bierstadt and the regionalist painters of the Middle West.”

Excerpted from: Diamond, David G. The Bulfinch Pocket Dictionary of Art Terms. Boston: Little Brown, 1992.

Enron

Here is a reading on Enron along with its accompanying vocabulary-building and comprehension worksheet.

Why does anybody need this? Maybe they don’t. But if you want your students to learn about fraud and corporate corruption, then maybe they need it. At the very least, Enron’s story is a cautionary tale about a lot of things, including corporate executives who are legends in their own minds; there seem to me to be a lot of those around these days.

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.

Thorstein Veblen on Conspicuous Consumption and Status

Conspicuous consumption of valuable goods is a means of reputability to the gentleman of leisure.”

Thorstein Veblen, The Theory of the Leisure Class ch. 4 (1899)

Excerpted from: Schapiro, Fred, ed. The Yale Book of Quotations. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006.

St. Lawrence Seaway

Hot off the press, here is a reading on St. Lawrence Seaway along with its accompanying vocabulary-building and comprehension worksheet. This is a good short, general history of the seaway.

That said, comparisons with the Erie Canal come up in the text. This might be a good set of documents to serve as a comparative study of these two trade routes. In my experience, many high-stakes tests in high school are about technological advances and their effect on society, culture, and, in this case, trade.

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.

Confederate (n), Confederation (n)

Here are a pair of context clues worksheets, one on the noun confederate, and the other on the noun confederation. These are obviously key words for any instruction on the Civil War in the United States between 1861 and 1865.

It’s well worth mentioning that confederate also has use in English as an adjective and a verb. These words carry a strong Latin pedigree, the verb confoederatus“to unite by league.” This word isn’t commonly used in English, or at least American English, perhaps because it carries the taint of the rebellion in the United States to protect the Southern planters’ prerogative to commodify human beings and hold them in servitude.

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.

“The Road Not Taken”

Here is a reading on Robert Frost’s poem “The Road Not Taken” accompanied by its vocabulary-building and comprehension worksheet. This is a rare two-page reading in the series of materials I have prepared using texts from The Intellectual Devotional series; it includes a full typescript of the text of the poem as well as a surprisingly thorough exegesis of the poem itself.

I only wrote this recently, but I did so because in the years that I worked in New York City, especially in the South Bronx, a number of paraeducators with whom I worked were students at Hostos Community College on 149th Street and the Grand Concourse, one of the Bronx’s great intersections. “The Road Not Taken” was at the time and may still be a staple of one or more of the American literature courses at the school. As this reading points out, this is a difficult poem to interpret; Frost himself said so (his remark is one of the “additional questions” on the reading and worksheet), calling the poem “tricky.” Even The Paris Review weighed in on the subject of “The Road Not Taken,” calling it “The Most Misread Poem in America.”

So, for students everywhere wrestling with these verses, this post may be useful to you.

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.

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. on Reading the Classics

“Have I uttered the fundamental blasphemy, that once said sets the spirit free? The literature of the past is a bore—when one has said that frankly to oneself, then one can proceed to qualify and make exceptions.”

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.

Excerpted from: Winokur, Jon, ed. The Big Curmudgeon. New York: Black Dog & Leventhal, 2007.