World History since 1500: The Payne Book Blog

Choose one of the following prompts to answer. U se at least three specific pieces of information no one has yet used in their blog posts and at least six specific pieces of information total, ONLY from Part 2 of The Underdogs , with a page citation for each; also, use at least 300 words in your answer.  1) Discuss three actions or violence, cruelty, or greed that you found particularly memorable to you in Part 2 . For each act, discuss who did it, to whom did they do it, why do you think they did it, and how others reacted to it. What do these stories tell us about how having power other others without fear of consequences changes people, especially those who had been oppressed their whole lives? OR 2) How do War Paint and Camila illustrate for us both the opportunities and limitations of women in the Mexican Revolution? OR  3) Who do you think the three most interesting (not necessarily likeable) characters in this chapter are, and why? How does each character...

Of all our books in this class, The Underdogs deals most with death, chaos, and disillusionment in the face of revolution. The author , Mariano Azuela, himself participated in the Revolution and wrote this book in 1915, in the very middle of the fighting. While the characters are mostly fictional, Azuela based them off of people he knew and fought alongside--or against.   The Mexican Revolution started in 1910-1911 with the overthrow of the tyrant Porfirio Días by the popular Francisco I. Madero . By 1913, however, Madero himself was deposed and murdered in a coup by one of his generals, Victoriano Huerta . By 1914, Huerta was also defeated by another popular uprising, but these revolutionaries were not united. So, fighting would continue for 6 more years, mainly under four factions: Pancho Villa (a bandit from the north), Venustiano Carranza (a politician from the north), Álvaro Obregón (one of Carranza's generals who turned on him), and Emiliano Zapata (a peasant from th...