Passage 1
A divide between aesthetic and technical considerations has played a crucial role in
mapmaking and cartographic scholarship. Since nineteenth century cartographers, for instance,
understood themselves as technicians who did not care about visual effects, while others saw
themselves as landscape painters. That dichotomy structured the discipline of the history of
cartography. Until the 1980s, in what Blakemore and Harley called “the Old is Beautiful Paradigm,”
scholars largely focused on maps made before 1800, marveling at their beauty and sometimes
regretting the decline of the pre-technical age. Early mapmaking was considered art while modern
cartography was located within the realm of engineering utility. Alpers, however, has argued
that this boundary would have puzzled mapmakers in the seventeenth century,
because they considered themselves to be visual engineers.
Passage 2
Most mammals reach sexual maturity when their growth rates are in decline,
whereas humans experience a growth spurt during adolescence. Whether apes experience
an adolescent growth spurt is still undecided. In the 1950s, data on captive chimpanzees
collected by James Gavan appeared devoid of evidence of an adolescent growth spurt in these apes.
In a recent reanalysis of Gavan’s data, however, zoologist Elizabeth Watts has found
that as chimpanzees reach sexual maturity, the growth rate of their limbs accelerates.
Most biologists, however, are skeptical that this is a humanlike adolescent growth spurt.
While the human adolescent growth spurt is physically obvious and affects virtually the entire body,
the chimpanzee’s increased growth rate is detectable only through sophisticated mathematical
analysis.Moreover, according to scientist Holly Smith, the growth rate increase in chimpanzees
begins when 86% of full skeletal growth has been attained, whereas human adolescence generally
commences when 77% of full skeletal growth has occurred.
Passage 3
Many cultural anthropologists have come to reject the scientific framework of empiricism
that dominated the field until the 1970s and now regard all scientific knowledge as socially
constructed.They argue that information about cultures during the empiricist era typically
came from anthropologists who brought with them a prepackaged set of conscious and unconscious
biases. Cultural anthropology, according to the post 1970s critique, is unavoidably subjective,
and the anthropologist should be explicit in acknowledging that fact. Anthropology should stop
striving to build a better database about cultural behavior and should turn to developing a more
humanistic interpretation of cultures. The new framework holds that it may be more enlightening to
investigate the biases of earlier texts than to continue with empirical methodologies.
Passage 4
Writing about nineteenth-century women’s travel writing, Lila Harper notes that the four women
she discussed used their own names, in contrast with the nineteenth-century female novelists who
either published anonymously or used male pseudonyms. The novelists doubtless realized that they
were breaking boundaries, whereas three of the four daring, solitary travelers espoused traditional
values,eschewing radicalism and women’s movements. Whereas the female novelists criticized their
society, the female travelers seemed content to leave society as it was while accomplishing their
own liberation.In other words, they lived a contradiction. For the subjects of Harper’s study,
solitude in both the private and public spheres prevailed — a solitude that conferred authority,
hitherto a male prerogative,
but that also precluded any collective action or female solidarity.
Passage 5
Although vastly popular during its time, much nineteenth-century women’s fiction in the
United States went unread by the twentieth-century educated elite, who were taught to ignore it
as didactic. However, American literature has a tradition of didacticism going back to its Puritan
roots, shifting over time from sermons and poetic transcripts into novels, which proved to be
perfect vehicles for conveying social values. In the nineteenth century, critics reviled Poe for
neglecting to conclude his stories with pithy moral tags, while Longfellow was canonized for his
didactic verse. Although rhetorical changes favoring the anti-didactic can be detected as
nineteenth-century American transformed itself into a secular society, it was twentieth-century
criticism,which placed aesthetic value above everything else, that had no place in its doctrine for
the didacticism of others.
Passage 6
During the Pleistocene epoch, several species of elephants isolated on islands underwent rapid
dwarfing. This phenomenon was not necessarily confined to the Pleistocene, but may have occurred
much earlier in the Southeastern Asian islands, although evidence is fragmentary. Several
explanations are possible for this dwarfing. For example, islands often have not been colonized
by large predators or are too small to hold viable predator populations. Once free from predation
pressure, large body size is of little advantage to herbivores. Additionally, island habitats have
limited food resources, a smaller body size and a need for fewer resources would thus be favored.
Interestingly, the island rule is reversed for small mammals such as rodents, for which gigantism
is favored under insular conditions.
Passage 7
In the early twentieth century, small magazines and the innovative graphics used on them created
the face of the avant-garde. It was a look that signaled progressive ideas and unconventionality
because it dispensed with the cardinal rule of graphic design: to take an idea and make it visually
clear, concise, and instantly understood. Instead, graphics produced by avant-garde artists
exclusively for the avant-garde (as opposed to their advertising work) were usually difficult to
decipher, ambiguous, or nonsensical. This overturning of convention, this assailing of standard
graphic and typographic formats, was part of a search for intellectual freedom. The impulse toward
liberation enabled avant-gardists to see with fresh eyes untried possibilities for arranging and
relating words and images on paper.
Passage 8
According to Hill and Spicer, the term “nation-state” is a misnomer, since the ideal model
of a monolingual, culturally homogeneous state has never existed, not even among Europeans,
who invented the nation-state concept and introduced it to the rest of the world.
Modern European states, they argue, emerged after the Renaissance through the rise of nations
(i.e., specific ethnic groups) to positions of political and economic dominance over a number
of other ethnic groups within the bounded political territories. The term “nation-state”,
Hill and Spicer argue, obscures the internal cultural and linguistic diversity of states that
could more accurately be called “conquest states.” The resurgence of multiple ethnic groups
within a single state, Hill says, is not “potentially threating to the sovereign jurisdiction
of the state,” as Urban and Sherzer suggest; rather, the assertion of cultural differences
threatens to reveal ethnocentric beliefs and practices upon which conquest states were historically
founded and thus to open up the possibility for a “nations-state” in which conquered ethnic
cultural assimilation into the dominant ethnic group.
Passage 9
From 1910 to 1913, women suffragists in the United States organized annual parades —
activity traditionally conducted by men to proclaim solidarity in some cause — not only as a public
expression of suffragist solidarity but also a conscious transgression of the rules of social
order: women’s very presence in the streets challenged traditional notions of femininity and
restrictions on women’s conduct. While recognizing the parade’s rhetorical force as a vehicle
for social change, scholars have recently begun to examine its drawbacks as a form of protest.
Lumsden characterizes the American suffrage parade as a “double-edged sword”, arguing that
women’s efforts to proclaim their solidarity left them open to patronizing commentary from press
and public and to organized opposition from antisuffragists.
Passage 10
Unlike most Jane Austen scholarship before 1980, much recent scholarship analyzes the novels
of Austen, who lived from 1775 to 1817, in the context of Austen’s tumultuous times, which saw
the French and American revolutions and the Napoleonic Wars. Yet Frantz notes another revolution,
rarely mentioned in Austen scholarship: The Great Masculine Renunciation that altered conventions
in men’s dress and behavior. During the later eighteenth century, wealthy gentlemen exchanged
the velvets and satins long in fashion for somber woolen suits. Frantz contends that this change
reflected deeper cultural changes. The value once placed on men’s expressiveness, reflected in
Mackenzie’s novel The Man of Feeling (1771), gave way to a preference for emotional restraint.
In Austen’s novels, the heroine often struggles to glimpse the true nature of hero beneath his
reserved exterior.
Passage 11
Whereas Carlos Bulosan aimed through fiction and personal testimony to advance both Filipino
civil rights in the United States and the social transformation of the Philippines,
Yen Le Espiritu has set herself the task of recovering life histories of Filipino Americans.
Her work brings Filipino Americans of the generation following the 1934-1965 immigration hiatus
graphically to life. A special strength is the representation of Filipino American women,
who were scarce among immigrants before the 1934 American curb on Filipino immigration but
composed more than half of the immigrants to America since liberalization in 1965. Espiritu’s
subjects document their changing sense of Filipino identity in the United States,
much as Bulosan did as a member of the first substantial wave of immigrants.
Passage 12
1800 Thomas Dilworth’s New Guide to the English Dialogue was being widely used to teach
reading in the United States. Dilworth‘s primer, unlike earlier ones, stressed the importance
of children’s understanding what they read. While it is in fact unlikely that children would
have recognized all the vocabulary Dilworth used, that was at least his stated goal. Dilworth
recognized that primers should enable children to decode words from print with the form of
language they already knew: speech. In contrast, many earlier authors assumed that, just as
introductory Latin texts taught children an unknown language, introductory English texts should
teach English as if it, too, were an unknown language — such their esoteric choice of vocabulary,
it in effect became unknown.
Passage 14
Although the passenger pigeons, now extinct, were abundant in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century
America, archaeological studies at twelfth-century Cahokian sites in the present day United States
examined household food trash and found that traces of passenger pigeon were quite rare. Given that
the sites were close to a huge passenger pigeon roost documented by John James Audubon in the
nineteenth century and that Cahokians consumed almost every other animal protein source available,
the archaeologists conducting the studies concluded the passenger pigeon population had once been
very limited before increasing dramatically in post-Columbian America. Other archaeologists have
criticized those conclusions on the grounds that passenger pigeon bones would not be likely to be
preserved. But all the archaeological projects found plenty of bird bones - and even tiny bones
from fish.