Week of Sept. 4

Welcome Back from the long weekend. Europe celebrated Labor Day on May First every year. There were many unions parading in the streets of cities. The United States decided to celebrate Labor Day on the Monday in September, as the business community was not unfriendly with Unions. Click on the pictures above to learn more. Each connects to a different web page.

If you find yourelf in the classroom alone, there's a reason. it is LABOR DAY. We'll be on holiday--perhaps we'll be standing over a grill as the person is in the third picture above. Labor Day celebrates organized labor. I hope you'll find some time to look at the articles linked to the pictures top left, and maybe also take a look at the videos above and to the left.

Read, in Delta Blues

Chapter 3, Dockery's Plantation pp. 45 - 75

Chapter 4, Parchman Prison. pp. 77-109

We will continue looking at the connection between slave songs and the blues, adding also a look at the effect of prison culture, especially southern prison culture.

The video above shows us what Dockery's plantion is, at least according to those who operate the foundation preserving it. To the left is a picture from an archive of pictures from Parchman Prison Click on it and see more of the illustrations. Following the same pattern I suggested for last week's work, Have your computer handy, and when you run across a person, tune, idea, whatever, which seems interesting to you, try to find out more, and with success, put it in your resources folder. I'd love to have each student add one resource per class session. Don't forget to send the e-mail notification. If someone else found something first, then go back and look again. You'll be able to find music as well as pictures and videos. Just search for the names of persons in Goia's book.

Read, in Delta Blues

Chapter 5, Hard Times on the Killin' Floor pp. 111 - 147

We will continue investigating blues. This time focusing on the "Great Depression," which stuck African Americans and whites equally hard. The video below will give you a look at some of the iconic photographs of that era. If you have difficulties understanding the lyrics, you can find them here. The iconoc photographs used to illustrate the video were taken by dorothea Lange, perhaps the greatest photographer of the depression area. The picture below is called "sharecropper boy" Click on it to see more of her very interesting work. I'd also like to have you start to think about your project for the semester. Some of you might wish to create websites, using tools such as https://www.websitebuilder.com/,

http://www.wix.com/, http://www.weebly.com/, or this. https://sites.google.com/. An alternate possibility would be to make a video such as the kind one sees on YouTube. Look at the Video at the bottom of this page. If you have a little time, you might play around with some of these tools.