Students engage with materials developed as part of a partnership between the Smithsonian American Art Museum and the National Endowment for the Humanities to analyze the photographs captured during the original survey projects of the 1970s and create their own interpretations of places near and far to them.
The idea of the hero’s journey suggests that the adventures heroes and heroines undertake in many of our beloved stories follow a similar pattern. By broadly outlining these stories, you can see they contain characters and plot elements also found in fairytales and legends from different cultures.
This Launchpad, adapted from http://www.WhatSoProudlyWeHail.org, provides background materials and discussion questions to enhance your reading and understanding of Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.’s 1961 short story “Harrison Bergeron.” After reading the story, you can click on the videos to hear editors Amy A. Kass, Leon R. Kass, and Diana Schaub converse with guest host James W. Ceaser (University of Virginia) about the story.
It is perhaps no surprise that Fyodor Dostoevsky is known as one of the greatest psychological writers of all time, given his own dramatic history of suffering.
Perhaps the best-known pilgrim in Chaucer's Canterbury Tales is Alisoun, the Wife of Bath. The Wife's fame derives from Chaucer's deft characterization of her as a brassy, bawdy woman—the very antithesis of virtuous womanhood—who challenges the prevailing gender inequality of the times.
What was life like for women during the Victorian age? You will explore several websites that describe life in the Victorian era, a term used to describe the culture and society during the reign of Queen Victoria from 1837 to 1901. Keep in mind that like all broad claims about a society, the following are examples of life during this time, and only begin to reveal the complexity of Victorian-era livelihood.