Native American Experience

• Small group discussion today on "Every Little Hurricane" and "A Drug Called Tradition." See the discussion protocol and questions here.
• Here are some of my own "notes & quotes" from the stories: "Hurricane" and "Drug Called Tradition"

FOR THURSDAY:

• Let’s read an article together
• Here is a summary that integrates quotes from the article: 
• Then go to our article resource page.
• Read two articles 
• Summarize (paragraph for each), integrating at least ONE quote in your summary, citing correctly 
• Do a Works Cited right after your paragraphs 

Howard Zinn and Sherman Alexie

Who is Howard Zinn?

Here is a quote from him, from his bestselling book A People's History of the United States:

I don’t want to invent victories for people’s movements. But to think that history-writing must aim simply to recapitulate the failures that dominate the past is to make historians collaborators in an endless cycle of defeat. If history is to be creative, to anticipate a possible future without denying the past, it should, I believe, emphasize new possibilities by disclosing those hidden episodes of the past, when, even if in brief flashes, people showed their ability to resist, to join together, occasionally to win. I am supposing, or perhaps only hoping, that our future may be found in the past’s fugitive moments of compassion rather than in its solid centuries of warfare. That, being as blunt as I can, is my approach to the history of the United States. The reader may as well know the before going on.

• What does he seem to value and why? 
• What does he seem to think the purpose and function of history is? 
• How does this approach seem similar to and different from how you have studied history in school?
• What are your thoughts on the reading you did?

Other relevant materials:

• Supreme Court decision of 1980
• "Reparations" for the Sioux
• "One Word," a word association with "Reservation"

Also, in keeping in-line with critically looking at history, here is a great article about how Lincoln ordered the mass execution of 38 Sioux. Sherman Alexie even wrote a poem about it.

At this point in the year, we have not had many opportunities for small group discussion. Academic discourse is a necessary skill that needs to be honed. Your ideas are important, and as such we want you to feel comfortable sharing those ideas.

For The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fist Fight in Heaven, we will be working on discussion tactics and skills, which will carry us over throughout the year. For the short stories in the book, take notes--use the note guide provided. We will have small group discussion, which will be assessed following a strict protocol before we open up to a full-class discussion. Remember, any notes you take will help you with your essay at the end of the week.

Native American Experience

Essential Question: How and why have Native Americans struggled with their cultural identity?

• We will read some contemporary fiction from Sherman Alexie, a humorous, poetic writer, and these stories from The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven all revolve around one reservation, and the way of life there.
• As for history, well, essentially our mistreatment and near eradication of Native Americans will be looked at, and how that has also formed the Native American Identity.
• Our schedule
• A nice introduction to contemporary reservation life is a 20/20 special, "Children of the Plains." and some guided questions
• Excerpt from Howard Zinn's A People's History of the United States
• Sherman Alexie is charming on the Colbert Report...And again.
• If you would like to see what our assessment will be, it's here.

Civil War Letters

I came across an interesting article about a Civil War correspondence...

Read it HERE.

Within the article, there are also some links to some online letters. Could help you!

Art & Literature of the 19th Century

Painting/Poetry Groups

“Pioneers! O Pioneers!" by Walt Whitman

Westward Ho!/Westward the Course of Empire by Emmanuel Leutze

“The Two Streams” by Oliver Wendell Holmes

High Point: Shandaken Mountains byAsher Durand

“The Snowstorm” by Ralph Waldo Emerson

Niagra Falls by Frederic Church

“Old Ironsides” by Oliver Wendell Holmes

Engagement Between the Constitution and the Guerriere by Thomas Birch

“Flaxman” by Margaret Fuller

The Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone by Thomas Moran

“Meditations” by Margaret Fuller

The Three Tetons by Thomas Moran

“A Song” by Walt Whitman

The Oxbow by Thomas Cole

“It feels ashamed to be alive” by Emily Dickinson

Our Banner in the Sky by Frederic Church

“The Birch-Tree” by James Russell Lowell

Cattleya Orchid by Martin Johnson Heade

“Stanzas on Freedom” by James Russell Lowell

Farmers Nooning by William Sydney Mount

Romanticism: Poetry

• Fireside Poets
• Remember, Americans are still trying to find their "voice." The "Fireside Poets" (Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, John Greenleaf Whittier,Oliver Wendell Holmes, James Russell Lowell, and William Cullen Bryant) are among the first American poets to mimic the European style, while still making their work their own
• Analysis: "The Tide Rises, The Tide Falls" by Longfellow
• Analyzing Poetry Handout

• Emily Dickinson
• From PoetryFoundation.org: Emily Dickinson is one of America’s greatest and most original poets of all time. She took definition as her province and challenged the existing definitions of poetry and the poet’s work. Like writers such as Ralph Waldo Emerson,Henry David Thoreau, andWalt Whitman, she experimented with expression in order to free it from conventional restraints. Like writers such as Charlotte Brontë and Elizabeth Barrett Browning, she crafted a new type of persona for the first person. The speakers in Dickinson’s poetry, like those in Brontë’s and Browning’s works, are sharp-sighted observers who see the inescapable limitations of their societies as well as their imagined and imaginable escapes. To make the abstract tangible, to define meaning without confining it, to inhabit a house that never became a prison, Dickinson created in her writing a distinctively elliptical language for expressing what was possible but not yet realized. Like the Concord Transcendentalists whose works she knew well, she saw poetry as a double-edged sword. While it liberated the individual, it as readily left him ungrounded. The literary marketplace, however, offered new ground for her work in the last decade of the 19th century. When the first volume of her poetry was published in 1890, four years after her death, it met with stunning success. Going through eleven editions in less than two years, the poems eventually extended far beyond their first household audiences.

American Hero and Transcendentalism

Agenda:

• Discussion of "A Rescue"
• How does the Deerslayer set the stage for the concept of the American Hero? Check out the heroic qualities in action in the trailer for the film adaptation of Cooper's Last of the Mohicans..
• History themes
• Transcendentalism
• Accessing prior knowledge/Connections: Discussion
• What is Transcendentalism? Notes.
• Read: "Self Reliance" and "Nature" Take a stab at the questions for the two pieces--but don't freak out if you cannot answer them all--just try. Trust your gut.