About Us

This Web site was created by two Ohio University Freshman English classes. It was originally doe by the students of the 2nd section of Ohio University's Winter 2001 English 153 class, and then was expanded by the students of the 28th section of Ohio University's Winter 2002 English 151 class, both of which were taught by Patrick Madden. The classes used Eduardo Galeano's Book of Embraces as a text, and we focused our learning on Latin American topics and issues. That's not to say that our discussions and studies were confined strictly to that region. We also studied Martin Luther King Jr. and the Civil Rights Movement in the United States; we talked about popular music and television; we considered the lives of migrant farm workers and Native Americans and other ethnic minorities. The class had two main goals (among a lot of others). First, we sought to make writing real—that is, our writing had a purpose beyond simply getting a grade in class. To this end, we wrote to our congresspeople to express our opinions on important national or state issues. You're reading the other big example of how we're making our writing real: by creating this Web site, which can be viewed by as many people as might come across it (especially since it's one of only 4 sites in Yahoo's directory under "Eduardo Galeano"). Our other goal was to extrapolate what we read (and what we wrote) beyond the covers of a book or the margins of a page. The Book of Embraces was perfect for this because its short fragments (abrazos, or "embraces") often allude or refer to people (Gabriel García Marquez, Pablo Neruda, Augusto Pinochet, Pancho Villa, etc.), places (El Salvador, Nicaragua, Chile, Uruguay, etc.), and events (civil wars, U.S. interventions, exiles, etc.) that most of us know very little about. So we read beyond the text, researching on the Internet and in the library, reading poems and stories (sometimes), talking about the histories behind the stories that Galeano tells. This Web site is the culmination of a quarter's-worth of study of writing and argument and researching. Hope you dig it.

For biographical information on the students who made the site, please use the links below:

English 153 section A02 Winter 2001

English 151 section A28 Winter 2002