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The Age of Exploration. What do you immediately think of as you read those four words? More than likely, you would throw out some of the more famous explorer's names and where their expeditions took place. Some of you might tell me about their goals such as claiming land for the monarch who financed the expedition and how in the case of some bringing Christianity to the natives was in most cases a guise to seize lands and riches. You most certainly wouldn't be wrong, but as many expeditions to the New World continued more people arrived who weren't just fortune hunters, soldiers and religious men wanting to save souls. Sometimes the monarchs themselves would order certain people to go along,  and in the case of explorers Jean Ribault an Rene Laudonnere, the French monarch ordered an artist to go along and capture not riches or natives but capture images of the things he saw in the New World. The artist was Jacques Le Moyne de Morgues who lived between ...

The search for the Northwest Passage, a route that was eventually mapped and traveled through the Arctic Ocean connecting the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans, is one of those ongoing events in history that teaches what real desire, real guts, and real determination is all about. In fact, many historians point to Sir Humphrey Gilbert as the person who coined the name Northwest Passage as early as 1576 when control of trade was the inspiration that spurred the explorers attempt to find a passage. It took nearly 300 hundred years of continuous searching before the passage was found. Yes…yes….I know….there was an element of greed, power, and thirst for adulation but the men who kept going out time and time again weren’t just power or attention hungry. These were men who kept going out time and time again even after the growing body of evidence pointed to the fact that all that awaited them was another dead end and possibly death. When it became evident after many years of searching that there ...

Quick! Dig down deep into that creaky file cabinet in your mind and pull out the folder labeled “Vikings” and name a few of the more famous ones for me. I’ll wait. No, not the football team. There should be another folder there for the OTHER Vikings. You know, the Norsemen who were explorers, warriors, merchants, and pirates. There you go. That’s it. Wow, that folder hasn’t seen the light of day in…..well, just blow the dust off it and open it up. So, what have you got? Erik the Red Leif Ericsson ….son of Erik the Red Canute (Knut or Cnut) Sweynsson….better known as Canute the Great ….King of England, etc. Those are usually the top three names I get. Most of the time folks just give me Erik and Leif. What about Thorfinn Karlsefni? Yep, you are so very right. Who in the heck is Thorfinn Karlsefni? Well….here goes…. 1. Thorfinn was a Norse merchant who followed Leif Ericsson’s route seven years later.…around 1010 AD…to North America. 2. While on a trading trip to Greenland Thorfinn met ...

Some things just bear repeating. I’ve been at the beach…again…for the last couple of days, so it’s more than appropriate to share a repeat of an earlier post written on this very same beach three years ago this month….. Mr. EHT and I were up and out very early this morning enjoying yet another sunrise on MY beach. It is not lost on me how things change….and how they remain the same. Enjoy my post I Conquer This Beach in the Name of ElementaryHistoryTeacher !