A tale set in the present time would be particularly relevant, as we are presently undergoing rapid technological change, and an era about which many people are nostalgic—the 20th century—has recently ended.
During the time period when students are working on their stories, read tall tales aloud to the class every day. Encourage students to share their stories when they are completed. Consider ways to publish your students' original stories—from creating a tall tale book for distribution in your school to posting them on your school's website or submitting them to other children's websites.
Moore, John Trotwood. Audience: Adult. Featuring Robin Williams. NTSC format U. Color, HiFi Sound. Skip to main content. Lesson Plan. Photo caption. Portrait of Davy Crockett. Wikimedia Commons. What are the characteristics of tall tales? How do tall tales reflect historical moments? Why did Davy Crockett become an important figure in American frontier history?
Distinguish between the fiction and non-fiction elements of Davy Crockett's biography. Lesson Plan Details Content Standards. In the first half of the 19th century, America was undergoing rapid change. Would the frontier spirit, closely associated with the American character at the time, disappear with the frontier itself?
Tall tales harked back to an era of rugged individualism. What is gained and what is lost when a frontier disappears? During the late 20th century, America was once again undergoing rapid change. Who could be our contemporary tall tale heroes?
As an example of a literary genre, tall tales will exhibit some of the following characteristics, to which you should introduce your students ahead of time in list format: The main character accomplishes great feats using strength, skill and wits. The main character is helped by a powerful object or animal. The story starts when the hero is a child e. The story explains how some familiar things began e. The hero has a colorful way of speaking. The hero has one or more companions e.
Famous people and places show up in the story. The hero tries hard to be a good person but sometimes fails. The hero does not like what others call progress e. More often than not, the hero dies or disappears.
National Archives Educator Resources , available through EDSITEment, offers a series of worksheets for analyzing primary source documents , including written documents and photographs, that you may wish to use or adapt to help students in reviewing the materials presented in this unit. The play helped propel Crockett to national celebrity, and before long, tales of his larger-than-life exploits had appeared in countless newspaper articles, almanacs and unauthorized biographies.
Illustration of the attempted assassination of Andrew Jackson. On January 30, , the two men were part of a crowd of lawmakers leaving the U. Capitol after a state funeral. As Jackson passed near the East Portico, a crazed gunman named Richard Lawrence emerged from a throng of spectators and shot at him with two pistols—both of which miraculously misfired.
Crockett, meanwhile, was one of several bystanders who disarmed the would-be assassin and wrestled him to the ground. Davy Crockett in the House of Representatives. His motivations for joining the Texas Revolution were complicated—he may have had an eye toward future political office—but only a few days after his arrival, he swore an oath to the Republic and agreed to take up arms against Mexico.
By early February, the year-old had found his way to San Antonio de Bexar and taken up a post at the former Franciscan mission known as the Alamo. Santa Anna and his Mexican forces laid siege to the Alamo just days later, and on March 6, , they breached its outer walls. In the ensuing battle, Crockett and some other defenders were all killed. Painting of Davy Crockett center and the other defenders of the Alamo. Early reports had him falling in the battle, and several witnesses claimed he was found surrounded by a heap of enemy corpses.
In , Disney released the first of five Davy Crockett television series starring actor Fess Parker. The model was strong enough for there not to be misattributions, giving a general attributive success of percent in three iterations to these known works.
These data also were culled, since a number of words are based heavily on genre and would have biased the analysis. Figure 5. Machine learning analysis of ghostwriters vs. Crockett publications. The data from the machine learning analysis show exactly what the cluster analysis dendrogram in Figure 4 demonstrated: In all three iterations, the technique attributed Life to J. French and Van Buren to Augustin Clayton.
The results for Texas are also in accordance with Figure 4. Richard Smith, in almost all iterations except for the third, was attributed as writing the middle part of Texas , Texas 2. Texas 1 was attributed to the author of Tour , while Texas 3 was arbitrarily attributed to James Fenimore Cooper, who most certainly did not write the book. There is no single author of the Crockett works. Stylometry has served as a tool to help uncover the likely authors of these works.
Using cluster analysis and machine learning classifiers, this research showed that Van Buren was written by Augustin Clayton, Life was written by French, and Texas had mixed authorial signals and was more-complicated than initially expected. Historian James Shackford demonstrated that the first two chapters of Texas are edited versions of letters sent from Crockett to his publishers, while the very last chapter was written by an unknown author with parts quoted verbatim from a letter written about the Alamo by Crockett.
This might show that Crockett did indeed have a hand in writing the book. The very last part of the book matched the control James Cooper—certainly not the author, but attributed as the author since Texas 3 is so unlike the rest of the publications and closest to a control. This study is the first to use stylometry and the more-advanced methods that the field has produced to attribute authorship to Life , Van Buren , and Texas.
Ayat, N. Pattern Recognition — Diederich, J. Authorship Attribution with Support Vector Machines. SpringerLink 19 1—2 , — Ebrahimpour, M. Eder, M. Visualization in stylometry: cluster analysis using networks. Digital Scholarship in the Humanities 32 1 : 50— Crockett, David.
The Life of Martin Van Buren. Kindle ed. Burrows, J. Not unless you ask nicely: the interpretive nexus between analysis and information.
Literary and Linguistic Computing 7: 91— Stylometry with R: a package for computational text analysis. R Journal 81, — French, James S. Groneman, Bill. Eyewitness to the Alamo. Republic of Texas Press. Hawthorne, N. Selected letters of Nathaniel Hawthorne. Holmes, D. Who was the author? An introduction to Stylometry. Paulding, J. Salsburg, David.
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