9-5-17 blog

           In today's Honors Human Geography class with Mr Schick, we went over the excellence in which Elbert Hubbard describes in his notorious essay "a message to Garcia". We learned not only about the excellence, but we also learned about the general history of the essay. The official publication date for the essay was sometime in March, 1899. It was published as an inspirational message. When the essay was printed it became very popular and many people bought it in pamphlet form and book form to put in their homes, schools, or offices. The essay became so popular that over 40 million copies were sold and the phrase 'send a letter to Garcia' became a reference to get something done. People even went to the extreme of making the essay into a movie. The whole background of the essay came from President William McKinley needing to reach someone by the name of Garcia (during the Spanish-American War) who was unreachable by telegraph or mail. McKinley asked a man named Rowan to deliver the letter and without question Rowan traveled through many different landscapes and delivered the letter successfully. We then received our vocabulary words which consist of perihelion, slipshod, imbecility, stenographer, and missive. Mr. Schick then showed us a cartoon of McKinley asking Rowan to deliver the letter in 1899 versus asking Rowan to do it in 2009. In 2009 Rowan simply said, "he's on Twitter. I'll just tweet him." And it was interesting to think about whether or not he was being productive with technology or lazy with technology. We also learned that the Greeks have a word for things of excellence which is "arete". Arete just basically means excellence in any kind. After that the bell rang and class was dismissed.

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