For the final Friday of Asian Pacific American Heritage Month 2025, here is a reading on the Battle of Midway along with its attendant vocabulary-building and comprehension worksheet. This is solid material on one of the turning points in the Pacific Theater of World War II.
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 other morning, one of my favorite shows on National Public Radio, On the Media ran a repeat show on Christian Nationalism, the latest scary manifestation of religious lunacy in the United States. The guest, Matthew Taylor, explained well this latest manifestation of what is basically a form of aggressive Protestant cultural militancy with something of a long history in this country.
So, now seems like a good time to post this reading on the Second Great Awakening along with its attendant vocabulary-building and comprehension worksheet. And if you are so inspired, you might familiarize yourself with the term “Burned-over district.”
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.
“Barons: Robber, Press, Etc.: Individuals operating in spite of—or perhaps thanks to—a severe inferiority complex transformed into megalomania.
As Andrew Carnegie and John D. Rockefeller demonstrated, the robber variety can find some inner peace through the semi-physical therapy of having people make and do things. A select few may even come to resemble the sort of medieval barons who bullied King John into signing the Magna Carta. The press sector offers less scope for improvement. Devoid of practical therapeutic tools, it leaves the mentally unstable to pontificate publicly while using their power to bully others into silence. So long as the widespread ownership of newspapers prevents them from limiting the public’s general freedom of speech, these unhappy individuals provide others with the welcome distraction of colorful comic relief.”
Excerpted from: Saul, John Ralston. The Doubter’s Companion. New York: The Free Press, 1994.
“fascism: [E20th] The term fascism was first used of the right-wing nationalist regime of Mussolini in Italy (1922-1943), the Partito Nazionale Fascista (National Fascist Party), and later applied to the regimes of Franco in Spain and the Nazis in Germany. It comes for the Latin fascis “bundle.” In ancient Rome the fasces were the bundle of rods, with an axe through them, carried in front of the magistrate as a symbol of his power to punish people.”
Excerpted from: Creswell, Julia. Oxford Dictionary of Word Origins. New York: Oxford University Press, 2010.
OK, for the final documents post of Women’s History Month 2025, here is a Cultural Literacy worksheet on Carry Nation, the once-famous temperance crusader. This is a half-page worksheet with a reading of two sentences and two comprehension questions.
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.
Here is a Cultural Literacy worksheet on Elizabeth Cady Stanton. This is a half-page worksheet with a reading of two sentences, the first a bit long, and three comprehension questions.
Incidentally, the reading on this document terminates with the imperative to “See Seneca Falls Convention” in parentheses. You’ll find a Cultural Literacy worksheet on that event here.
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.
For the fourth and final Friday of Women’s History Month 2025, here is a reading on Edith Wharton with its accompanying vocabulary-building and comprehension worksheet.
And that is it for Women’s History Month for 2025.
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.
Here is a Cultural Literacy worksheet on Eleanor Roosevelt. This a half-page worksheet with a reading of three sentences–all of them elegantly simple, single-clause sentences–and three comprehension questions. Just the basics, and if you need more, search “Eleanor Roosevelt” from the home page.
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.
Here, against my better judgment, is a Cultural Literacy worksheet on Ayn Rand. This is a full-page worksheet with a reading of two sentences–beware the first of them, a doozy of a compound that I am convinced would best be revised and shortened for struggling and emergent readers–and four comprehension questions.
Why “against my better judgment”? I suppose because I find Ayn Rand’s (born in Russia as Alisa Zinoyevna Rosenbaum) “objectivist” philosophy to be little more than a simple minded rationale, dressed up in the most tawdry, yet soaring, rhetoric, for the worst kind of selfishness.
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.
“Sarah Barnwell Elliott: (1848-1928) American writer and feminist activist. Elliott was one of the “local color” (or regionalist) writers, and is best known for her novel Jerry (1891). Her most powerful fiction represents the displaced slave-owning class into which she was born, as it confronts hard economic times and a new social order. Elliott was a feminist activist in the South and led the fight for Tennessee to ratify the 19th amendment. Her fiction is often valued for its liberal attitudes toward women, as in The Making of Jane (1901). Her stories about race relations during Reconstruction are extremely problematic: the portraits of ex-slaves in An Incident, and Other Stories (1899) are both nostalgic and derogatory, and seem to contradict her family’s sense of noblesse oblige and well-known resistance to virulent racism. The title story is the first representation in American literature of a black man pursued by a lynch mob for raping a white woman. Elliott’s work raises questions about the attitudes toward race among Southern white women and the roles they played in reestablishing white supremacy in the postbellum South.”
Excerpted from: Murphy, Bruce, ed. Benet’s Reader’s Encyclopedia, Fourth Edition. New York: Harper Collins, 1996.
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