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Participation is based on completing weekly assignments, and absences will be counted if students fail to submit work for the week.  

This course is laid out in modules. In each module, you will find a list of the learning objectives for the module, activities to complete, and a list of assignments for the module.

First, the good news: Americans are definitely eating more healthful meals. We are consuming greater amounts of such high-fiber foods as whole-grain breads, fruits, and vegetables, which are believed to help prevent certain cancers and other diseases. At the same time, we are substituting relatively low-fat foods for higher-fat ones-for example, eating fish instead of red meat, drinking skim milk instead of whole. The bad news is that our snack foods are not nearly as healthful.)Between meals, we often revert to eating large amounts of fat. For instance, sales of ice cream and potato chips are going through the roof. Another drawback of the snack foods is that they have almost no fiber. As eating-behavior experts have concluded, we try super-hard to eat healthfully at mealtimes-but then undo some of the good work by “rewarding” ourselves with snacks that are bad for us.

In 1980 Mount St. Helens in Washington state erupted, killing nearly a hundred people and leveling thousands of acres of timber. By contrast, most Hawaiian volcanoes never erupt; instead, they simply emit flowing lava. Whether a volcano erupts or simply emits lava depends on the composition of its molten rock, which comes to the surface as lava. Volcanoes like Mount St. Helens have quick-cooling lava. As a result, the lava forms a dome that plugs the volcano’s hole. Eventually the pressure becomes so intense that a tremendous explosion blows off the lava dome and spews out a massive cloud of ash. Instead of hardening soon after it reaches air, the lava of most Hawaiian volcanoes flows down the cone’s sides until it encounters an obstacle or slowly cools into a solid. Because the lava never plugs the volcano, the volcano never erupts.

An especially grim chapter in U.S. military history began on April 9, 1942 in the Philippines. Racked by disease and surrounded by an overwhelming Japanese force, 98,000 American soldiers, Filipino soldiers, and Filipino civilians surrendered to the Japanese. Then began what became known as the Bataan Death March. Herded by their captors, the prisoners slogged, limped, and dragged their comrades through fifty-five miles of jungle. Then they were jammed into railroad cars for further travel. Finally they were marched eight more miles to a prison camp. By the time they were locked up, their number had dwindled to 54,000. Almost three years later, only 513 skeletal, disease-ridden prisoners were still alive.

In the South, the Civil War destroyed half the region’s farm equipment and killed one-third of its draft animals. The death of slavery also ended the plantation system. The number of farms doubled from 1860 to 1880, but the number of landowners remained the same. The size of the average farm dropped by more than half, as sharecropping and tenancy rose. A shortage of cash forced Southern farmers to borrow against future crops. Crop liens and high credit costs kept a lot of black and white farmers trapped in a cycle of debit and poverty. So at the very time the rest of the economy was consolidating after the Civil War, Southern agriculture was marching off in the opposite, less efficient direction.

In the language of botanists (scientists who study plants), fruit has a different meaning than in everyday talk about food. To most of us, fruit refers to sweet or tart foods like apples, peaches, and lemons. To botanists, however, fruit also includes seed-containing “vegetables” such as cucumbers, eggplant, olives, peas, squash, string beans, and tomatoes (which are berries). Botanically speaking, cashews and other nuts are single-seed fruits. Many plants that we don’t eat-for example, milkweeds and azaleas-also are fruits. So, a mix of milkweeds and azaleas is a fruit cup; a package of dried fruit and nuts is a package of fruit and more fruit; and parents who scold, “Eat your vegetables!” when their children refuse to eat string beans or peas could, instead, coax, “Don’t you want to eat your fruit?”

Today’s full-time workweek of forty hours is considerably less than it was in the late 1800s. Bricklayers, carpenters, and other laborers in the building trades generally worked ten hours a day. A factory worker usually worked at least twelve hours a day. During the summer, many mills ran from sunrise to sunset, with shifts lasting as long as sixteen hours. In 1860 an average workweek was sixty-six hours long. Most employees worked six days a week.

The word opera comes from the Italian opera in musica (work in music), and it may be defined as a drama, either tragic or comic, sung throughout and presented on stage with scenery and action. The emphasis is on the solo voice, and, like the oratorio, which borrowed the forms from opera, it employs arias [melodic solos] and recitatives [musical forms without melody]. Because opera, of all the musicalor dramatic forms, is the most difficult and expensive to produce, it has always been associated with the upper strata of social life. Often, the satisfaction of being able to support an operatic production–that is, sponsor a big, ostentatious display– has been compensation enough for a great many noble and wealthy patrons. Likewise, to be able to understand and appreciate this art form has been, and still is, a prestige symbol with the general public. (Mary Ann Frese Witt et al.,The Humanities, Volume Two. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1997, p. 275.)