Midnight in Paris

Historical References
Art, Music, Film, Literature, Dance, Design, etc.

As the main protagonist Gil (Owen Wilson) enters into the world of the 1920s, he interacts with many literary figures of that time period. For some historical context, here are some links to the numerous members of the "Lost Generation."
· Cole Porter
· Zelda Fitzgerald
· F. Scott Fitzgerald
· Ernest Hemingway
· Josephine Baker
· Juan Belmonte
· Alice B. Toklas
· Gertrude Stein
· Pablo Picasso
· Djuna Barnes
· Salvador Dalí
· Man Ray
· Luis Buñuel
· T. S. Eliot
· Henri Matisse
· Leo Stein
· Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec
· Paul Gauguin
· Edgar Degas

Harlem Renaissance

• Power Point on The Great Migration
• "The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain" by Langston Hughes
• A worthy read, but something we won't go over: "The New Negro" by Alain Locke
• Group Project

As you research (websites provided), keep in mind that in addition to the resources for specific artists, look at general websites to get more background information.

Websites related to African American history

• African American Odyssey - http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/aaohtml/exhibit/aointro.html
• This website, produced by the Library of Congress, presents an overview of African American history beginning with the Atlantic slave trade and continuing through the 20th century.

• Reconstruction: The Second Civil War - http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/reconstruction/
• This website, produced as part of the PBS series The American Experience, discusses what happened to African Americans during the second half of the 19th century.

Websites related to the Harlem Renaissance

• A Guide to Harlem Renaissance Materials -http://www.loc.gov/rr/program/bib/harlem/harlem.html
• The Library of Congress offers this annotated collection of Library of Congress resources related to the Harlem Renaissance, included digital materials collections, lesson plans, learning page activities, and exhibits.
• The Harlem Renaissance Teacher’s Guide - http://165.29.91.7/classes/humanities/amstud/97-98/harren/HARREN.HTM
• This guide provides an overview of the time period and includes links to noted leaders, writers, and entertainers.
• Rhapsodies in Black: The Harlem Renaissance - http://www.iniva.org/harlem/home.html
• This website describes the development of the Harlem Renaissance and noted examples of art, poetry, and literature.
• Harlem 1900–1940: An African-American Community - http://exhibitions.nypl.org/harlem/
• This exhibition website, from the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture at the New York Public Library, includes a timeline of the Harlem Renaissance.
• Drop Me Off in Harlem: Exploring the Intersections - http://artsedge.kennedy-center.org/multimedia/series/AEMicrosites/drop-me-off-in-harlem
• This ARTSEDGE website explores the ways that different art forms and social movements interacted and flourished during the Harlem Renaissance.

Jacob Lawrence websites

• From Jacob Lawrence: Exploring Stories (presented by the Whitney Museum of American Art):
• Meet Jacob Lawrence - http://whitney.org/www/jacoblawrence/meet/index.html
• Jacob Lawrence's Art - http://whitney.org/www/jacoblawrence/art/index.html
• Jacob Lawrence: Over the Line - http://www.phillipscollection.org/sites/default/files/interactive/jacob-lawrence-over-the-line/flash.html
• Jacob Lawrence: DC Moore Gallery - http://www.dcmooregallery.com/artists/jacob-lawrence
• Jacob Lawrence Biography - http://www.biography.com/people/jacob-lawrence-9375562

William H. Johnson websites

• The William H. Johnson Foundation for the Arts - http://www.whjohnsongrant.org/whjohnson.html
• A Journey Through Art with W.H. Johnson (presented by the Smithsonian American Art Museum) - http://americanart.si.edu/education/johnson/index.html
• Rhapsodies in Black: William H. Johnson - http://www.iniva.org/harlem/william.html
• Street Life, Harlem (by William H. Johnson, presented within the Encyclopedia Smithsonian: Harlem Renaissance entry) - http://americanart.si.edu/exhibitions/online/highlights/artworks.cfm?id=AA&StartRow=31
• Mom Alice (by William H. Johnson, presented by American Art from the Howard University Collection) - http://www.founders.howard.edu/hucollection/JohnsonWilliamH1.htm

Aaron Douglas websites

• Treasures of the New York Public Library - http://exhibitions.nypl.org/treasures/items/show/170
• Topeka Capital Journal - http://cjonline.com/stories/091607/lei_199987476.shtml#.WjFTmFWnHIU
• Kentake Page - http://kentakepage.com/aaron-douglas-major-artist-of-the-harlem-renaissance/

Duke Ellington websites

• Duke Ellington: The Site of the Jazz Legend - http://www.dukeellington.com/   
• PBS Biographies: Duke Ellington - http://www.pbs.org/jazz/biography/artist_id_ellington_duke.htm
• America's Jazz Ambassadors - http://www.meridian.org/jazzambassadors/
• Photograph of Duke Ellington (from the Library of Congress) - http://lcweb.loc.gov/exhibits/odyssey/archive/08/0811001r.jpg

Bessie Smith websites

• PBS Biographies: Bessie Smith - http://www.pbs.org/jazz/biography/artist_id_smith_bessie.htm
• Bessie Smith Biography - http://www.biography.com/people/bessie-smith-9486520
• Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum: Bessie Smith - https://rockhall.com/inductees/bessie-smith/bio/
• Bessie Smith: Empress of the Blues - http://blog.oup.com/2015/05/bessie-smith-empress-blues/

Billie Holiday websites

• Archive for Virtual Harlem - http://scalar.usc.edu/works/harlem-renaissance/billie-lady-day-holiday
• Official Website of Billie Holiday - http://www.billieholiday.com/
• Strange Fruit: The First Great Protest Song - https://www.theguardian.com/music/2011/feb/16/protest-songs-billie-holiday-strange-fruit

Langston Hughes websites

• The Academy of American Poets: Langston Hughes - https://www.poets.org/poets/poets.cfm?45442B7C000C0E01
• America's Story from America's Library: Langston Hughes - http://www.americaslibrary.gov/aa/hughes/aa_hughes_subj.html
• I Hear America Singing: Profile of Langston Hughes  - http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/masterpiece/americancollection/cora/ei_hughesbiography.html
• A Centennial Tribute to Langston Hughes - http://www.howard.edu/library/reference/guides/hughes/

Countee Cullen websites

• Modern American Poetry: Countee Cullen - http://www.english.illinois.edu/maps/poets/a_f/cullen/cullen.htm
• The Academy of American Poets: Countee Cullen - https://www.poets.org/poetsorg/poet/countee-cullen
• Countee Cullen - http://www.afropoets.net/counteecullen.html
• Rendezvous with Life: An Interview With Countee Cullen - http://newdeal.feri.org/magpie/docs/42winp19.htm

Zora Neale Hurston websites

• Official Website - http://www.zoranealehurston.com/
• New Yorker - https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1997/02/17/a-society-of-one
• Zora Neale Hurston Digital Archive - https://chdr.cah.ucf.edu/hurstonarchive/?p=hurstons-life
• PBS - http://www.pbs.org/speak/seatosea/powerprose/hurston/

Progressive Era

Progressive Powerpoint

The Jungle 

• Chapter 2 (and questions)
• Chapter 3
• Chapter 5 (and questions)
• Chapter 14

Realism/Regionalism--Kate Chopin

Notes on Realism/Natruralism
A man said to the universe:
"Sir, I exist!"
"However," replied the universe,
"The fact has not created in me
A sense of obligation."
-Stephen Crane

KATE CHOPIN

We will read three short stories by Chopin, Take note of literary elements as you read.


From "American Passages: A Literary Survey"

Kate Chopin introduced American readers to a new fictional setting with her evocations of the diverse culture of Cajun and Creole Louisiana. But while much of Chopin's work falls into the category of regionalism, her stories and especially her novel, The Awakening, are also notable for their introduction of controversial subjects like women's sexuality, divorce, extramarital sex, and miscegenation.

When the cotton brokerage business failed in 1879, the Chopins relocated to Natchitoches Parish in rural Louisiana, where they intended to operate one of Oscar's father's cotton plantations. But by 1883 Oscar Chopin had died of swamp fever, leaving Kate Chopin a thirty-two-year-old widow with six children to support and limited financial resources. After running the plantation on her own for a year, Chopin returned to St. Louis, where she moved into her mother's house and began writing poetry and short stories. Drawing on her experiences in New Orleans and Natchitoches, Chopin created realistic depictions of the distinctive customs of the region and captured the cadences and diction of Louisiana speech in her dialogue. By 1893, she had published her first novel, At Fault, and placed stories in such prestigious venues as the Atlantic Monthly, Vogue, and Century. In 1894 she published an extremely successful collection of short stories, Bayou Folk, and followed it up with another volume of stories about Louisiana entitled A Night in Acadie.

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.

Is American Literature possible?

Review of history terms

Discussion: Is American Literature possible? Could literature and art thrive in this new nation? Were literature and art possible in the special political, social and economic conditions Americans created? How could the language and literary models of England be naturalized to the conditions of America?

This is what we will explore today, as we read some introductory notes on American Romanticism, and dive into some James Fenimore Cooper with an excerpt from The Deerslayer. To set up this excerpt: As this scene opens, Natty Bumppo -- known as Deerslayer to his Native American friends -- has been taken captive by the Hurons, allies of the French and sworn enemies of Deerslayer’s (and England’s) friends, the Delawares. Hist, a Delaware female who just happens to be in love with Deerslayer’s buddy, Chingachgook, has also been taken captive, as have two white women, Judith and her sister Hetty.

WELCOME!

Welcome to Honors Comprehensive American Studies II!

This blog was created by Mrs. Mireault and Mr. Bujold to help communicate more effectively with students and parents this year in Honors Comprehensive American Studies II. We will be blogging often with the class agenda, links to assignments, and links to interesting and informative topics that we see on the internet.

You will notice there are two additional tabs: "Unit Handouts" and "Resources." These will provide ample support as we journey through the year.

We are very excited to begin this year!

Here is our class expectation sheet

We will kick off our class with a quick summary of your summer reading, and use that as a basis for discussing the purpose of the class--to synthesize literature AND history, and how they are intertwined. You will informally present/summarize what you read & discovered. Most of you shared a book with somebody, and if that is the case, you will present as a group. This should be very quick-no more than 5 minutes. Touch base with your group to share your thoughts and make notes. Make sure to cover all three tasks you were to complete (unless otherwise noted in the handout).

Contemporary Civil Rights

Today, we take such freedoms as the right to privacy and freedom of speech for granted. But our civil liberties and rights are the result of many years of agitation and activism. Plus, our conceptions of civil rights and liberties have evolved. Recent events such as the debates over gay marriage, immigration, voter suppression, health care, and the war on terror ensure that our conceptions of liberty and equal rights will continue to evolve in the years to come.

The thing to always keep in mind: What basic, human rights should everyone have, and are these rights being violated by the government, corporations, or groups of people?

Your task is to choose a topic and write a researched, contemporary civil rights speech. Go to the libguide sau57.org/civilrights for current articles concerning the topics. Here is The Assignment and Rubric

WWII: Saving Private Ryan

Saving Private Ryan is an Oscar-winning film, winning for Best Director, Cinematography, Film Editing, Sound, and Sound Effects Editing. The film was praised for its gritty, realistic portrayal of combat in World War II (particularly the storming of the beach).

Our focus while watching this film is to study the “film form.” We discussed “form following function” with graphic novels and comics (with Maus), and it is the same idea with filmmaking. The filmmaking form provides tools for the director to better tell his/her story. We will focus on two such tools unique to the film form—Sound and Cinematography.

Sound & Sound Effects Editing

Believe it or not all sound in a film is put in AFTER principal photography (with the exception of dialogue, but even sometimes THAT is dubbed over). The sounds themselves are created artificially in a studio. The sound editing is the seamless blending together of all the sounds.

• HOW IS SOUND USED EFFECTIVELY IN THIS FILM?

Cinematography

The cinematographer is responsible for the technical aspects of the images (things like lighting and camera work), but works closely with the director to ensure that the “look” of the film supports the director's vision of the story being told.

• HOW DOES THE CINEMATOGRAPHY OF THE FILM ADD TO THE STORY?

Use the sheet to track these elements of the film form.

World War II/Maus

One of the goals of this unit is to analyze different media that we may not be accustomed to analyzing in a traditional English/Social Studies course. We will do this by looking at Maus by Art Spiegelman and Saving Private Ryan directed by Steven Spielberg.

• Looking at Comics Protocol
• Maus introduction
• Maus: Chapters 1-2; chapters 3-4; chapters 5-6
• Sample Analyses: Chapter 1 and Chapter 4