The Jeaning of America

1. Unit 14 Text 1 The Jeaning of America

2. Teaching Objectives • Practice using the past perfect tense, and differentiate it from the simple past; • Discuss what makes one succeed; • Learn to use the following structures: • …have sth done • use…as… • It seems likely that… • …so much so that…

3. Before Reading • Global Reading • Detailed Reading • After Reading

4. Before Reading Background Information Top 5 American Icons A national icon is someone who, by the mere mention of their name, will remind people of their country. Whether they like it or not, they are representatives of their nation to the rest of the world.

5. Top 5 : Ronald Reagan Best known for his role as the 40th President of the United States, Reagan started out as a radio announcer and Hollywood actor, having made over 50 films. He realized politics was his calling and in 1947 became President of the Screen Actors Guild. He changed his party affiliation from Democrat to Republican and was elected Governor of California in 1966. After taking over the White House in 1981, he served in this capacity for two terms. During those years, he showed the world what America is all about. Best quote: "America is too great to dream small dreams."

6. Top 4: Ernest Hemingway Hemingway is considered the greatest American fiction writer of the 20th century. He was an ambulance driver during World War I and a war correspondent during World War II. He wrote about his experiences as an American expatriate in Paris during the 1920s, hunting in Africa, and fishing off Cuba. His direct and sparse way of writing became his trademark, which has often been imitated and parodied. His works have earned him both the Pulitzer and the Nobel Prize. He supposedly committed suicide while struggling with a bout of depression, but he still remains one of the most prominent literary ambassadors America has ever had. Best quote: "All things truly wicked start from an innocence."

7. Top 3: Michael Jordan Here's a man who lives the American Dream. Originally from Brooklyn, Michael Jordan attended the University of North Carolina and proved that he truly was the best basketball player that ever lived by taking his team to the NCAA championship. He was soon drafted into the NBA as a guard for the Chicago Bulls. He led his team to six league championships and won the MVP award five times. Also a savvy businessman, Air Jordan's fortune was estimated at $408 million in 2003. Best quote: "I can accept failure, but I can't accept not trying."

8. Top 2: Martin Luther King, Jr. He had a dream. When he heard about a pacifist in India named Mahatma Gandhi, and became enamored with Gandhi's methods of peaceful protest. Openly supporting Rosa Parks and her refusal to relinquish her seat to a white bus passenger made him a target for his opponents and his house was bombed. But that just served to fuel his desire to see segregation terminated. He became a national advocate for civil liberties and inspired a nation to change its ways. His assassination in 1968 only proved that he was on the right track. Best quote: "If a man hasn't found something he will die for, he isn't fit to live."

9. Top1: John Fitzgerald Kennedy The Kennedy clan is often considered the only Royal family the United States has ever had. What makes it so is not their wealth or political role, but rather the aura of nobility surrounding them. JFK was the embodiment of this. A Navy officer during World War II, he became a senator in 1952. Nine years later, he became the 35th American president. His term in office was often dubbed the New Frontier since it was an era of change. He put an end to segregation, established the Peace Corps, and masterminded the resolution of the Cuban Missile Crisis.Unfortunately, he is often best remembered for his assassination in 1963. For all his youthful energy and magnetism, he represented the quintessence of America. Best quote: "Ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country."

10. Before Reading Warm-up Questions: • What style of clothes do you prefer? • Do you like jeans? Why or why not? • What famous brand of jeans do you know? And why do you think the brand become popular?

11. Global Reading Is this a piece of narration, description or argumentation? What do you think jeaning represent in American culture? How many parts can this passage be divided into? Structural Analysis

12. Detailed Reading • Introduction • Paragraph 1 • Paragraphs 2-3 • Paragraph 4 • Paragraph 5 • Paragraph 6 • Paragraph 7

13. Introduction Question: • What do you know about the author? • Who was the first blue jean invented for?

14. Introduction Language work Today, there are toughdouble-kneed jeans for kids, acid-washed jeans for teens, designer jeansfor the fashion set, and boot-cut jeansfor outdoor workers. But all began in 1850 when Levis Strauss, a German immigrant who had gone West to seek his fortune, sewed upsome sturdy canvas pants for a miner.

15. The story of levis Strauss’s career, and the parallel career of his proletarian pants, is part true grit, part luck, and part legend. The bottom line, Quinn reports, is 83 million pairs of Levis riveted blue jeans sold every year.

16. Paragraphs 1 Question: • How does author prove that the blue jeans stand for “a passion for equality”?

17. Language work This is the story of a sturdy American symbol which has now spread throughout most of the world. It is a simple pair of pants called blue jeans, and what the pants symbolize is what Alexis de Tocquevillecalled “a manly and legitimate passion for equality…”

18. Blue jeans are favored equally by bureaucrats and cowboys, bankers and deadbeats, fashion designers and beer drinkers. They draw no distinctions and recognize no classes: they are merely American. Yet they are sought afteralmost everywhere in the world—including Russia, where authorities recently broke upa teenaged gang that was selling them on the black market for two hundred dollars a pair. And it seems likely that they will outlive even the necktie.

19. Paragraphs 2-3 Question: • What kind of life did Levis Strauss expect in New York? • Why did Strauss decide to leave New York for the West?

20. Language work This ubiquitous American symbol was the invention of a Bavarian-born Jew. He was born in Bad Ocheim, Germany, in 1829, and during the European political turmoil of 1848 decided to take his chances in New York, to which his two brothers already had emigrated.

21. Upon arrival, Levis soon found that his two brothers had exaggerated their tales of an easy life in the land the main chance. For two years he was a lowly peddler, hauling some 180 pounds of sundries door to door to eke outa marginal living. When a married sister in San Francisco offered to pay his way West in 1850, he jumped atthe opportunity, taking with him bolts of canvas he hoped to sell for tenting.

22. Paragraph 4 Question: • Was there any use of the canvas that Strauss brought to the West? • What do you think led to Strauss’s successful invention of the jeans?

23. Language work It was the wrong kind of canvas for that purpose, but while talking with a miner down from the mother lode, he learned that pants – sturdy pants that would stand upto the rigors of the digging – were almost impossible to find. Opportunitybeckoned. Opportunity presented itself.

24. On the spot, Strauss measured the man’s girth and inseam with a piece of string and, for six dollars in gold dust, had the canvas tailored into a pair of stiff but rugged pants. Word got aroundabout “those pants of Levis’s”, and Strauss was in business.

25. Paragraph 5 Question? • Did the miner, Alkali, demand copper rivets to be added to his pants? • What was the intended purpose of the tailor who added copper rivets to the pants?

26. Language work When Strauss ran out ofcanvas, he wrote his two brothers to say more. Almost from the first, Strauss had his cloth dyed the distinctive indigo that gave blue jeans their name. The rivets were the idea of a Virginia City, Nevada, tailor, Jacob W. Davis, who added

27. them to pacify a mean-tempered miner called Alkali Ike. Alkali, the story goes, complained that the pockets of his jeans always tore when he stuffed them with ore samples and demand that Davis do something about it. In 1873 Strauss appropriated and patented the gimmick – and hired Davis as a regional manager.

28. Paragraph 6 Question: • When and how were Levis’s jeans introduced to the East?

29. Language work Over the ensuing years the company prospered locally, and by the time of his death in 1902, Strauss had become a man of prominence in California. For three decades thereafter the business remained profitable though small. With sales largely confined to the working people of the West ---- cowboys, lumberjacks, railroad workers, and the like.

30. Levis’s jeans were first introduced to the East, apparently, during the dude ranch craze of the 1930s, when vacationing Easterners returned and spread word about the wonderful pants with rivets. Another boost came in World War II, when blue jeans were declared an essential commodity and were sold only to people engaged indefense work.

31. They have become, through marketing, word of mouth, and demonstrablereliability, the common pants of America. They can be purchased pre-washed, pre-faded, and pre-shrunk for the suitably proletarian look. They adapt themselves to any sort of idiosyncratic use; women slit them at the inseams and convert them into long skirts, men chop them off above the knees and turn them into something to be worn while challenging the surf. Decorations and ornamentations abound.

32. Paragraph 7 Questions: What does the author intend to prove with the three anecdotes?

33. Language work: The pants have become a tradition, and along the way have acquired a history of their own ---- so much so that the company has opened a museum in San Francisco. There was, for example, the turn-of-the-country trainman who replaced a faultycoupling with a pair of jeans; the Wyoming man who used his jeans as a towrope to haul his car out of a ditch;

34. the California who found several pairs in an abandoned mine, wore them, then discovered they were sixty-three years old and still as good as new and turned them over to the Smithsonian as a tribute to their roughness. And then there is the particularly terrifying story of the careless construction worker who dangled fifty-two stories above the street until rescued, his sole support the Levis belt loopthrough which his rope was hooked. To After Reading

35. tough • not easily cut, broken, or worn out • Tough glass is needed for windscreens. • severe; harsh: • Many homeless people are facing a tough winter. • demanding or troubling; difficult: • The process of adjusting to life with a baby can be pretty tough. • Strong-minded; resolute • You need to be tough to survive in the jungle.

36. designer jeans • Jeans that are named after their designers boot-cut jeans • Jeans that are specially tailored for people wearing boots

37. immigrant • A person who leaves one country to settle permanently in another • New York has a large immigrant population. • Word derivation: • immigration • Immigration officers would not allow us to take fruit into the country. • immigrate • He immigrated with his parents in 1895 and grew up in Long Island.

38. sew up • join or mend something by sewing : • Mother sewed up the hole in socks for me. • The suit was sewn up along the seams by hand. • (infml) arrange sth; settle sth • By the end of the meeting everything should be nicely sewn up.

39. sturdy • strong and solid • a sturdy chair, structure, car • a sturdy child • resolute, determined, firm • The sturdy resistance to the plan from Tony worked.

40. parallel • relating to two or more straight coplanar lines that do not intersect 平行线的； • Hills roRad is parallel to Mill Road. • exactly corresponding; similar • Parallel experiments are being conducted in Rome, Paris and Londong. • These beautiful African churches have no parallel in Europe.

41. proletarian • Of, relating to, or characteristic of the proletariat 无产阶级的 • Word derivation • Proletariat 无产阶级 • The dictatorship of the proletariat is one of the aims of Communism

42. grit • minute rough granules, as of sand or stone: • Several workers are busy spreading grit on icy roads. • quality of courage and endurance • Mountaineering in a blizzard needs a lot of grit.

43. bottom line • The main or essential point • A lot can happen between now and December, but the bottom line—for now—is that the city is still heading toward default. • The final result or statement • The bottom line, however, is that he has escaped.

44. symbol • Something that represents something else by association, resemblance, or convention, especially a material object used to represent something invisible • The cross is the symbol of Christianity. • The lion is the symbol of courage. • mark or sign with a particular meaning, eg plus and minus signs in mathematics, punctuation marks, musical notation, etc • Au is the chemical symbol for gold.

45. word derivation • Symbolism • Poetry is full of religious symbolism. • Symbolic • The power of the monarchy in Britain today is more symbolical than real.

46. symbolize • to serve as a symbol of • The picture of a red disc with rays coming from it symbolizes the sun. • represent sth/sb by means of a symbol. • The poet has symbolized his lover with a flower.

47. Alexis de Tocqueville • The name of a French historian, known for his studies of the nature and operation of democracy, with the view of advancing the rule of the people and at the same time controlling its undesirable tendencies.

48. manly • (approv ) (of things) suitable for a man • manly clothes • a manly pose • (approv) having the qualities or appearance expected of a man • I've always thought he looked very manly in his uniform. • (derog) (of a woman) having the qualities or appearance more appropriate to a man; mannish • The struggle between the good and the evil is eternal. • Tobacco is considered to be an evil. • The greed for money is the root of all evils.

49. legitimate • being in compliance with the law; lawful: • I'm not sure that his business is strictly legitimate, i.e., is legal. • based on logical reasoning; reasonable • A legitimate solution to the problem must be found soon.

50. bureaucrats • An official who is rigidly devoted to the details of administrative procedure • These insensitive bureaucrats will not have sympathy for such an old lady. • Word derivation • bureaucratic • bureaucratic government