Struggling with historical significance: Reasoning, reading, and writing processes

The concept of historical significance is seen as a key concept of historical reasoning. Assigning significance is based on criteria and related to the identity of who assigns significance. However, little is known about reasoning-, reading-, and writing processes when students attribute significance. The aim of this study is to investigate how students and experienced history teachers with a master’s degree reason, read, and write about historical significance while thinking aloud. We analyzed the think-aloud protocols of twelve 10th-grade students and four history teachers on reasoning, reading, and writing processes. While thinking aloud, participants read two contrasting accounts after which they wrote an argumentative text about the historical significance of Christopher Columbus. Analysis of participants’ think-aloud protocols and their written texts showed that students did not recognize historical accounts as perspectives—influenced by the historical context. In contrast, teachers looked for the authors’ judgement, evidence, and context. In addition, students’ limited use of metaknowledge regarding texts and the concept of historical significance hampered them. These out-comes provide direction for teaching reasoning, reading, and writing with respect to historical significance.

Alejo Carpentier, The Harp and the Shadow: Literature, History and Fiction

Not entirely a historical text, The Harp and the Shadow, the last novel published by Alejo Carpentier, takes as its pretext certain historical data in order to offer the readers a specific view of the protagonist, Christopher Columbus. Considered by some the great discoverer of the New World or highly regarded as “The Admiral of the Seas” and despised by many others as an adventurer and a liar, Columbus is also the author of some disturbing writings that still put critics and literary historians in discomfort. This is the novel’s point of departure, together with the intent of Pope Pius IX to initiate the canonization of Columbus, an idea regarded by the great majority of his contemporaries as a complete blasphemy. At the aesthetic level, comparable up to a certain point to the conception of Jorge Luis Borges, Carpentier’s form of understanding and practicing literature is always, in a more or less obvious way, reliant on Cervantes himself. But it is not limited to Don Quixote: in The Harp and the Shadow, the Cuban author builds an endless network of intertextual associations connecting his own creation to The Works of Persiles and Segismunda, the last work by Cervantes.

A systematic approach to literature analysis: traveling through stories

Travel literature has captured humanity’s imagination ever since the emergence of famous works such as The Wonders of The World by Marco Polo and The Journal of Christopher Columbus. Authors in this genre must process large and diverse volumes of data (visual, sensory, and written) obtained on their trips, before synthesizing it humanly in such a way as to move and communicate personally with the reader, without losing the factual nature of the story. This is the ultimate goal of the natural language processing (NLP) field: to process and generate human–machine interaction as naturally as possible. Hence, this article’s purpose is to analyze and describe a nonfictional literary text, which is a type of documentary text that contains objective, qualitative, and quantitative information based on evidence. In this analysis, traditional methods will not be used. Instead, it will leverage NLP techniques to process and extract relevant information from the text. This literary analysis is a new kind of approach that encourages further discussions about the methodologies currently used. The proposed methodology enables exploratory analysis of both individual and unstructured corpus databases while also allowing geospatial data to complement the textual analysis by connecting the people in the text with real places.

THE BANALITY OF IMMUNITY, DEATH AND DISTRESS OF TOBACCO SMOKING --("STRIKE THE RIGHT”)

WHO stated that Tobacco Control is "To protect present and future generations from the devastating health, social, environmental and out-turn of exposure to tobacco smoke”. Tobacco plants are indigenous to American abstinent and they knew of its cultivation thousands of years ago. Christopher Columbus brought this plant to European countries. Portuguese traders brought tobacco plants to India Tobacco put to use in the forms of smoking, chewing, or snorting. Bronchial accounts for more than 50% of all male deaths from malignant disease. It is four times more common in men than in women. Cigarette smoking for most cases of bronchial carcinoma, and the increased risk is directly proportional to the amount smoked and to the tar content of the cigarettes. Smoking puffs of any kind, disclosed to nicotine, have pernicious consequences on immune system. Nicotine escalates cortisol concentration, while curtail B cell antibody development and T cells' response to antigens. Smoking bumps one and the other innate and adaptive immunity and operates challenge roles in synchronize immunity

1491

Chapter 7 harnesses a huge number of new archival documents to reveal the story behind Meredith Willson’s ill-fated final musical 1491. In writing a flattering musical about Christopher Columbus, Willson was out of step with the civil rights movement, and both personal problems (including the death of his wife) and collaborative issues (with the producer) meant that his final musical never even made it to Broadway. The chapter discusses the extant songs, critiques the many drafts of the book, and charts the show’s progress to the stage with several collaborators. In a final section, the chapter also examines Willson’s aborted attempts to write several other shows including Dennis the Menace.

Dylematy poznawcze Krzysztofa Kolumba

The text analyses the inner life of Christopher Columbus based mainly on his writings and the literature on the subject. It is an attempt to reconstruct the mentality of the great explorer against the background of his turbulent biography and the historical context of the turn of the Middle Ages and modern times.