This website gives you the opportunity see the world through different people all over the world on a variety of topics. Watch videos, see lesson plans about global issues and looking at it from a lense of focus on 100 people.
Huitzilopochtl, God of the Sun, was the Aztec principal god. He had an insatiable appetite for blood. Under his urging, the Aztecs rose from a band of primitive farmers to become the bloodiest civilization of the early Americas. Many Central America cultures indulged in human sacrifice. The Aztec practiced it on an industrial scale, sacrificing tens of thousands of victims each year.
In the wake of Columbus' historic voyage in 1492, expeditions, especially from Imperial Spain, swarmed into Aztec territory. They came in search of gold and souls gold to enrich the coffers of the Spanish king (and their own), and heathen souls to rescue for Christianity. Within a generation, America's ancient civilizations were crushed. Both the Aztec and Inca Empires collapsed after campaigns lasting just a couple of years. How did they fall so fast? Historians suggest many causes.
MOSAIC selects, reviews, and promotes books that authentically and realistically portray the diversity of all students, from both historical and contemporary perspectives.
Every resource is reviewed by ESU 18 committee members for accuracy, authenticity, content and perspective, characterization, setting, and literary quality. Only the "best of the best" resources are included in the annual MOSAIC collection.
This funny song by Lebanese singers describes their ride on camels through the center of Beirut. The video shows images of downtown Beirut and how unusual it is for camels to be in a big city in the Arab world.
They were called the Lost Generation. America's most talented writers of the 1920s were completely disillusioned by the world and alienated by the changes in modern America. The ghastly horrors of trench warfare were a testament to human inhumanity. The ability of the human race to destroy itself had never been more evident. The materialism sparked by the Roaring Twenties left many intellectuals empty. Surely there was more to life than middle-class conformity, they pined.
Powerful kingdoms, beautiful sculpture, complex trade, tremendous wealth, centers for advanced learning all are hallmarks of African civilization on the eve of the age of exploration. Hardly living up to the "dark continent" label given by European adventurers, Africa's cultural heritage runs deep. The empires of Ghana, Mali, and Songhay are some of the greatest the world has ever known. Timbuktu, arguably the world's oldest university, was the intellectual center of its age.
When immigrants reach a new land, their old ways die hard. This has been the case with most immigrant groups to the New World. The language, customs, values, religious beliefs, and artistic forms they bring across the Atlantic are reshaped by the new realities of America and, in turn, add to its fabric. The rich traditions of Africa combined with the British colonial experience created a new ethnicity the African American.
Acceso is a complete, interactive curriculum for intermediate-level learners of Spanish. The materials on the site are provided freely to the public and are intended as a replacement for commercial textbooks, which are generally ill-suited to the learning outcomes now considered crucial to successful language study. These materials are supplemented by an online workbook built on the MySpanishLab platform of Pearson Education, Inc., as well as detailed lesson plans, rubrics for the evaluation of student work, and reliable instruments for measuring student progress and learning outcomes.Winner of 2012 Computer Assisted Language Consortium (CALICO) Focus AwardReviewed in:CALICO Journal 29.2 (Jan 2012): 398-405.Hispania 95.2 (June 2012): 365-366
This interdisciplinary course surveys modern European culture to disclose the alignment of literature, opposition, and revolution. Reaching back to the foundational representations of anarchism in nineteenth-century Europe (Kleist, Conrad) the curriculum extends through the literary and media representations of militant organizations in the 1970s and 80s (Italy's Red Brigade, Germany's Red Army Faction, and the Real Irish Republican Army). In the middle of the term students will have the opportunity to hear a lecture by Margarethe von Trotta, one of the most important filmmakers who has worked on terrorism. The course concludes with a critical examination of the ways that certain segments of European popular media have returned to the "radical chic" that many perceive to have exhausted itself more than two decades ago.
In this unit, students will become familiar with fables and trickster tales from different cultural traditions and will see how stories change when transferred orally between generations and cultures. They will learn how both types of folktales employ various animals in different ways to portray human strengths and weaknesses and to pass down wisdom from one generation to the next. Use the following lessons to introduce students to world folklore and to explore how folktales convey the perspectives of different world cultures.
Examine the tension experienced by African-Americans as they struggled to establish a vibrant and meaningful identity based on the promises of liberty and equality in the midst of a society that was ambivalent towards them and sought to impose an inferior definition upon them. The primary sources used are drawn from a time of great change that begins after Reconstruction's brief promise of full citizenship and ends with the First World War's Great Migration, when many African-Americans sought greater freedoms and opportunities by leaving the South for booming industrial cities elsewhere in the nation. The central question posed by these primary sources is how African-Americans were able to form a meaningful identity for themselves, reject the inferior images fastened upon them, and still maintain the strength to keep "from being torn asunder." Using the primary sources presented here, look for answers that bring your ideas together in ways that reflect the richness of the African-American experience.
The African Studies Collection brings together primary and secondary resources, research and teaching materials created by University of Wisconsin faculty and staff, and unique or valuable items related to this field held by the University of Wisconsin Libraries.
Jason Allen offers a comparative discussion of two important Caribbean poets and playwrights, Aime Cesaire and Derek Walcott, to emphasize the impact of Caribbean literature upon the postcolonial world. By using biographical and historical detail to support his analysis of some of Cesaire and Walcott's key texts, Allen offers insight into what it means to be a Caribbean writer - looking back to a colonial past, and forward to a global future. This audio recording is part the Interviews on Great Writers series presented by Oxford University Podcasts.
Al-Bab is a portal website designed to introduce non-Arabs to Arab culture by providing links to news sources, country profiles, articles, and a blog on Middle East current events. There are also specific links related to learning Arabic: dictionaries, language classes, textbooks, and other information pertaining to the study of Arabic. A free e-book, The Birth of Modern Yemen, is available for download.
This course explores the experiences and understandings of class among Americans positioned at different points along the U.S. social spectrum. It considers a variety of classic frameworks for analyzing social class and uses memoirs, novels, and ethnographies to gain a sense of how class is experienced in daily life and how it intersects with other forms of social difference such as race and gender.
Interviews with speakers of German-American and American English dialects from across the United States, complemented by rare recordings of ethnic music from the Mills Music Library, as well as a number of maps, short interpretive essays, and visual images. English translations and notes on aspects of linguistic and historical interest accompany the excerpted recordings.
ASL III is the third quarter of the first year study of American Sign Language (ASL) and the people who use it. ASL III will enhance the use of ASL grammar and consist of concentrated efforts to develop the studentęs expressive and receptive skills. The course will continue to provide insights into Deaf Cultural values, attitudes and the Deaf community. Now learning more abstract concepts of the language, ASL III students will be able to: narrate events that occurred in the past, ask for solutions to everyday problems, tell about life events, and describe objects. Students will also be able to: demonstrate intermediate finger spelling competency, generate complex ASL structures with intermediate vocabulary knowledge, execute a wide variety of grammatical principles, including classifiers and inflections, adapt to different sign language registers, dialects and accents, and create opportunities to interact with members of the Deaf community.
Students use the model of the infamous Bill and Ted from the feature film "Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure" to "go back in time" to learn about deities in the ancient world. After researching, studying, and viewing reproductions of artworks that depict gods and goddesses, students transport their chosen deities to the modern world as characters they write about in a mock television talk-show script, which they enact for the class.
In this lesson plan, students will learn about the 12 animals of the Chinese zodiac. In the introductory first lesson, they will see how animals are often used as symbols. In the second lesson, they will hear one of several versions of how the 12 animals were chosen. They will then focus upon a few of the animals in the story and see how they can be used as symbols of certain human characteristics. In the third lesson, they will be introduced to the other animals of the zodiac, and they will be given a chart on which they will assign traits to each animal. Then they will consult a number of websites to find the traits traditionally associated with the animals, which they will add to their list. Then, they will come up with a number of ways to compare and contrast the animals in the list. In the third lesson, they will focus upon the animal associated with the year of their birth, learning about its traits and discussing whether or not these apply to themselves and their peers. Finally, each student will make an acrostic, combining the letters of his or her first name with adjectives that relate to his or her zodiac sign.