Tag Archives: united states history

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.

Cultural Literacy: Marbury v. Madison

Here is a Cultural Literacy worksheet on Marbury v. Madison, the United State Supreme Court’s legal decision that established the principle of judicial review–i.e. that the Court is the final arbiter of the constitutionality of any legislation drafted and passed in this republic.

This is a half-page worksheet with three questions that serves only as on introduction to this decision and its implications. I’m not an expert in United States history, but this is clearly a big conceptual moment in the history of this nation, so I must assume Marbury v. Madison merits–indeed requires– a much deeper dive than this document affords. For example, the Court, before Marbury v. Madison, had in 1796 exercised judicial review in the Hylton v. United States case–the adducing of which would help students understand a key concept in Supreme Court jurisprudence: stare decisis, also known as precedent.

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.

F. Scott Fitzgerald

Here is a reading on F. Scott Fitzgerald along with its attendant vocabulary-building and comprehension worksheet.

This is a biography of Fitzgerald. While it does include a paragraph on The Great Gatsby, this short reading supplies the author’s personal details. There are other materials on Fitzgerald and Gatsby (and more forthcoming) on this site–simply use the search bar in the upper-right of the home page.

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.

Book of Answers: Ernest Hemingway

“In what Hemingway short story does Nick Adams first appear? Hemingway’s alter ego, the central figure of In Our Time (1924), makes his first appearance in ‘Indian Camp.’”

Excerpted from: Corey, Melinda, and George Ochoa. Literature: The New York Public Library Book of Answers. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1993.