Listen My Children....

While most of my students learn history in a school setting from educators like myself, we cannot emphasize family history enough.

It IS important.

Family history helps students to realize their place within their families as well as how they fit in with historical events. Learning family history can answer questions regarding when relatives first arrived in North America and where they settled. Details regarding everyday life can be internalized, and the effects of certain events can help us connect to events we didn’t live through such as the Great Depression or World War II.

While there are many ways to go about learning family history one of the best ways to go about it is merely to listen……listen to those older members of your family. I don’t mean merely nodding your head at them, smile, and wonder when you can escape them. I mean really listen….and that means to listen with a purpose so that real communication takes place.

StoryCorps provides a fantastic opportunity for generations from the same family to communicate regarding family history. Their main goal is to honor and celebrate one another’s lives through listening.

Find out more about the fantastic work StoryCorps is doing over at my other place…….Georgia on My Mind.

Letters From the Past

Shame on you… if you don’t use primary sources like journals and letters to teach history.

Darren, over at Right on the Left Coast, has begun posting family letters written in 1865. He’ll be posting them over a few days. Go take a look. Darren mentions the spelling errors, but I’m mesmerized by the formality of the writing and tone.

One Light-Emitting Diode If By Land, and Two If By Sea

Somehow this post title doesn’t have the same stirring ring to it as “one if by land, and two if by sea”, but the Old North Church in Boston is changing with the times. This article greeted me this morning as I was preparing to start my day.

LEDs, or light-emitting diodes, are energy-efficient lights and are being used to illuminate the vaults inside the church which dates back to 1723. The church steeple was used to display two lanterns as a signal about British troop movements on April 18, 1775, and is aptly described in Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s famous--- if not somewhat inaccurate poem--- which included the line: “One if by land, and two if by sea.”

So, what’s so important about April 18, 1775? On that evening church sexton, Robert Newman, climbed the steeple and held high two lanterns to signal Paul Revere, William Dawes, and the other midnight riders that the British were marching to Lexington and Concord by sea and not by land.

What followed is commonly referred to as the 'shot heard round the world'.

While the installation has been done with historic sensitivity, and while it is as one visitor remarked no different than updating a building with air conditioning or running water it is a little sad that eventually the steeple’s compact fluorescents will be replaced with LEDs.

It might be a little interesting, however, to tie in the concept of historic preservation with the march of time and technology when studying Lexington and Concord.

My links to Paul Revere and the ‘shot heard round the word’ are from the site
Archiving Early America which has a few slideshows that could be useful to introduce a topic, review a topic, or for small group and individual use.