clair057

I've written and published a book! Of course, that was my intention when I began this blog way back in 2006 when I was still in the classroom, but the book I've published isn't exactly the book I had planned. The planned project - a teaching memoir - will still be published along with a few other projects, but the book you see to the left is what fell in my lap along the way. It needed to be done. History education is my prime focus along with writing curriculum. Over the last couple of years I've written a few college courses used by teacher candidates at Johns Hopkins University School of Education, and I have some other curriculum ideas up my sleeve, but local history has taken a front-burner position over the last year. I've been researching and writing the local history of Douglas County for the past four years, and have had a weekly column the Douglas County Sentinel for a year and a half. I've been a longtime fan of the Images of America series of books ...

  Do you know what these are? If you guessed dental tools you would be correct? Now, who owned them? None other than America’s silversmith and favorite son of Liberty who rode the countryside warning the folks that the British were coming.   No…not William Dawes, but that other one.   Yes, old what’s his name? Yes!   Paul Revere! Following the French and Indian War the economy in the colonies had been what is described by some today as an economic downturn. Actually, folks were really hurting financially. Not only did the colonies take a hit with the French and Indian War there was something called the Stamp Act that severely impacted Paul Revere’s business. With creditors after his property and no orders coming in for his metal working Revere turned towards dentistry. Seems logical. Right? A surgeon staying with a mutual friend taught Revere some of the tricks of the trade. Yes, five years before his midnight ride the following ad appeared in the Boston G...

Over on the Facebook page for this blog I’ve been posting a series of pictures this week I’ve simply sourced as “Library of Congress”, but the source goes much deeper than that.   The pictures are wonderful depictions of world scenes beginning in the 1890s through the 1930s. I’ve featured some here. The collection was put together by Frank and Frances Carpenter, a father-daughter team, during their world travels. The photos were used to illustrate his writings regarding travel and his world geography textbooks. I love to snap pictures myself. Over the last five years I’ve taken approximately ten thousand photos, myself, but over his lifetime no telling how many photographs Frank Carter produced. The Library of Congress collection contains 5,400 photos in albums, 10,400 loose photos, and 7,000 glass and film negatives.     Frank Carpenter was a journalist whose assignments took him many interesting places.   Being a writing myself, I love the fact that he took his...

Great advice for folks who control alumni groups!! Via: iContact

This past February Mr. Elementaryhistoryteacher and I ran off for a quick weekend in Charleston. It was rainy and cold most of the time, so we didn't get a chance to walk around very much, but we did take a turn through the visitor's center and then headed across the street to The Charleston Museum. The museum was founded in 1773 and is commonly referred to as America's first museum. While I found all of the exhibits informative and well done, one of the smaller ones simply astonished me. I love learning new things, and these types of cemetery markers were TOTALLY new to me.  Yes, that's a four poster bed headboard and for some people in the 18th century this served as their grave marker. I came home from Charleston and began digging a little deeper. I found an article from The Milwaukee Journal dated June 17, 1927 titled, "Four Poster Bed Headboard Marks Grave 189 Years". From the article: Still intact after serving 189 years [in Charleston, South Carolina]...

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 ...

In my opinion the least taught war in United States classrooms has to be the Korean War. The U.S never declared war on North Korea because we weren’t there on our own. Our involvement was a result of the United Nations aiding South Korea with the United States supplying 88% of the forces. The People’s Republic of China entered the war helping North Korea. Officially the Soviet Union provided material aid as well for the North Koreans, but talk to anyone involved, and they firmly believe the Soviet involvement included men on the ground and in the air. I feel that events in Korea during the 1950s have a real place in the classroom, but ignorance keeps it from being fully explored in the curriculum. We don’t take the time to fully explore all the possibilities the content of the Korean War could have in our classrooms. Take any history textbook and thumb through pages and you see that very little is given about the Korean War. Most of the time it’s treated as a “breather” of sorts betwee...