about a message to garcia

In Human Geography today, we discussed excellence. How “A Message to Garcia” conveyed this overall theme of excellence. We also learned a little background to the short essay. The essay was written in the time of the Spanish-American war. Garcia was a Cuban revolutionary seeking independence from Spain. The president of the United States of America at this time was President McKinley. McKinley wanted to help Garcia win Cuban independence because in his time Spain was a world power and with Cuba being only 90 miles off the coast of Florida, that would be a dangerous situation. So, the president needed Garcia to know that he was willing to help and will be helping. Rowan, a trusted army officer was given this highly important task. I also learned the meaning of many new words. For example, I know that perihelion is the point where a planet is closest to the sun therefore at its brightest. And slipshod is when someone does a poor job on putting a shoe on a horse and the shoe is loose and is not correct. And a stenographer job used to be very common up until the 1960’s. Now stenographers are mostly used in courtrooms. A stenographer is a person who takes dictation in shorthand and writes what is said super fast. In order to write as fast as someone speaks, the stenographers write in shorthand which is like a bunch of symbols for different words.