Calliope articles from April 2006

Calliope archives from April 2006

A boy's memory.(MUSINGS)(Biography)
April 1, 2006... History is really a series of lesson plans--the test comes in knowing how to use them to avoid past mistakes. With famine stalking areas of the world today, the lessons to be learned from this issue are right on target. After reading about the...

Frederick Douglass on the Famine.(Excerpt)
April 1, 2006... In his autobiography, The Life and Times of Frederick Douglass, written in 1881, the African American ex-slave and abolitionist compared the songs of enslaved Africans to those sung by poor Irish during the Great Irish Famine. He wrote: I...

The potato blight.
April 1, 2006... Potatoes were first gathered for food in the Andean region of South America about 6000 B.C. They later became the staple, or main food crop, of the Inca empire that controlled the area known today as Peru. After the Spanish took control of the...

The Irish Famine song "Praties They Grow Small".(Poem)
April 1, 2006... "Praties They Grow Small" Oh the praties they grow small, over here, over here Oh the praties they grow small over here Oh the praties they grow small And we dig them in the fall We eat them coat and all Full of...

Who was who in Irish society?
April 1, 2006... What caused the Great Irish Famine? While the potato failure was the direct cause, the way that land was owned and used was the real cause. Before the famine, Irish rural society consisted of landlords (people who owned the land) and tenants...

A call for help.
April 1, 2006... The re-created letter on the next page was written or dictated by Michael and Mary Rush during the Great Irish Famine. Mary and her husband John Rush lived in the hamlet of Ardnaglass in County Sligo, Ireland. She sent the letter to her father...

'Leave now!'.
April 1, 2006... He threw my children out in the street; one of them was sick at the time. Her name was Anne. She died last week; she was nearly five at the time. Coleman, my son, died Friday last, aged ten years. He died from cold and hardship. My house was...

The boy who fought back.(Short story)
April 1, 2006... People often ask why people who are oppressed or mistreated do not fight back. The answer is usually that they believe that they are powerless to protect themselves or that they need all their strength just to survive. Sometimes, an individual...

The relief network.
April 1, 2006... By tradition, people in the Irish countryside were generous to their families, friends, and neighbors. When a Frenchman traveling in Ireland in 1835 was asked who supported the poor in Ireland, he responded, "It is the poor." When the...

The Choctaw's Gift.
April 1, 2006... In the 1830s, the United States government forced the Choctaw nation and other American Indians to abandon their lands east of the Mississippi River and resettle on the land the U.S. government designated as Indian Territory--present-day...

The workhouse.
April 1, 2006... The Poor Law the British government passed in 1838 for Ireland did not allow for "outdoor relief"--financial support for the poor who live outside of the local workhouse. Thus, anyone who needed shelter or food had to go to a workhouse, and...

Longford Workhouse.(poet Padraic Colum )
April 1, 2006... Born in 1881 at Longford workhouse, where his father was the workhouse master, the Irish poet Padraic Colum described the place in a poem: They carved the name above the gate, 1839, When they built the workhouse on the hill Of...

The man who was raised from the dead.
April 1, 2006... Among the tales told in later years about the workhouse were those about people who had been buried alive. These stories made a vivid impact on listeners, and the narratives were repeated from one generation to the next. In 1898, O'Donovan...

Starting over.
April 1, 2006... Today, Ireland is a small country with a population of about 4 million people. An additional 1.5 million people live in the British controlled provinces of Northern Ireland. The combined total is less than that of most states in the United...

Whyte's journal.(Robert Whyte )
April 1, 2006... Whyte's journal was published in 1848 under the title The Ocean Plague: The Diary of a Cabin Passenger. It is unclear whether Robert Whyte was the author's actual name or a pseudonym. Nothing is known of his later life other than that he...

Success on foreign shores.
April 1, 2006... The great Irish famine and the diaspora that followed changed world history. in the United States, Canada, Australia, and England, Irish immigrants and their descendants--four of whom are profiled here-have made many significant contributions....

No Irish need apply.(Poem)
April 1, 2006... The earliest written version of this popular song dates to 1865. Part of the oral tradition in both the United States and Canada, the song begins with: I'm a decent boy just landed from the town of Ballyfadd; I want a situation and I want...

Greetings from Albany.(Excerpt)
April 1, 2006... An excerpt from a letter Michael Hogan in Albany, New York, wrote in 1851 to Catherine Nolan in Pollerton, County Carlow, Ireland: I take this opportunity of writing those few lines to you hoping to find you and your family in good health...

Let's dance.(ACTIVITY)
April 1, 2006... Dance allows us to explore the experiences of life. Sometimes dance is used to examine the lives and experiences of other people. Folk dance is like language--it communicates what people are feeling and what they may want us to know about their...

Word origins.(FUN WITH WORDS)
April 1, 2006... Ireland has two official languages: the Irish language and English, the latter being the more widely used. While Irish had declined as a spoken language in favor of English even before the Great Irish Famine, the famine accelerated the decline....

Expressions.(FUN WITH WORDS)
April 1, 2006... Erin Go Bragh (ERIN go BRAW) favorite Irish expression, one you hear and see written on banners on March 17-the Irish holiday known as St. Patrick's Day--it translates as "Ireland forever." Cead Mile Failte (KAYD MEEL-a FALL-cha) The...

Proverbs.(FUN WITH WORDS)
April 1, 2006... When speaking, the Irish often use proverbs, short statements that say something about life that people believe is true and that often are used to teach a lesson. Below are a few Irish proverbs that talk about hunger, home, and the help of...

Famine strikes.
April 1, 2006... The son of an English gentleman, the Reverend Thomas Robert Malthus as an Anglican clergyman and an economist. In 1798, he predicted that human population would always outstrip natural resources, especially the supply of food. The result would...

Mary Robinson on hunger in today's world.
April 1, 2006... In May 1995, Mary Robinson, the former president of Ireland, addressed the International Conference on Hunger in New York City. In her speech, she argued that knowledge about hunger and poverty in the contemporary world needs to become a...

Tragedy in Darfur.
April 1, 2006... The ongoing 21st-century famine in Darfur is not the first to ravage the country of Sudan, an arid region in northeastern Africa. Famine struck in 1984, when the rains did not come and crops could not grow. At that time, 100,000 people died of...

Ask Calliope.
April 1, 2006... [?] What does it mazel tov mean? --Beth, 12, Web post [!] The biblical term mazel means "planet," "star," or "sign of the zodiac." Gradually, mazel came to mean "a sign of luck." Tov is the Hebrew word for "good." Gradually the...

Off the shelf.(Black Potatoes: The Story of the Great Irish Famine, 1845-1850)(Under the Hawthorn Tree)(The Great Irish Famine Curriculum)(Brief article)(Book review)
April 1, 2006... Black Potatoes: The Story of the Great Irish Famine, 1845-1850 by Susan Campbell Bartoletti (Houghton Mifflin, 2001) offers a very interesting-to-read account of the blight and its effects nationally and internationally. Contemporary...

On the net.(Directory)(Website list)
April 1, 2006... Check out this site for more than 100 newspaper engravings about the Irish Femine from 1846-1850, many with accompanying news paper text: http://vassun.vassar.edu/-sttaylor/FAMINE/ For a great site on the potato, with time lines,...

Femine silences.
April 1, 2006... My great grandfather's generation lived during the Great Irish Famine. The horror and sadness of the famine were all about them, but perhaps what was most frightening about the years after the famine was the silence in the countryside and the...

The famine's legacy.(FROM PAST PRESENT)
April 1, 2006... The legacy of an experience such as a famine often includes stories that remind the younger generation about what it meant to live during those times and how one survived. Incorporated into the stories are "lessons for living." For example,...