Nicholas II or Tim Curry?

I haven’t posted in a while, and I promise to put up LOADs during Christmas break… but this cracked me up today.  So I am teaching about the Russian Revolution of 1905 (not Bolsheviks… yet.) and Nicholas II.  I look at a picture of Nicholas II and know that I have seen that face before… and I then I thought… TIM CURRY??  Look at this stark comparison.

 

Can you believe this?!! Distant cousins?  Bloody dictator vs. Mean hotel concierge?!

The Vikings, what a legacy.

Whats funny is that I did not know hardly ANYTHING about the Vikings until 2 weeks ago when I had to do a mini-lesson on them.  They are actually very fascinating.

The Vikings were from Scandinavia (the map below depicts where the Scandinavian Peninsula is) and many of them actually claimed the Christian faith.  The ones who did not are the most famous!

The Vikings, or “norsemen”, were inhabitants of modern day Norway, Sweden, and Finland.  In the early 400s they began to have widespread famine and became very desperate to survive.  This is what caused the violent culture of the Vikings to begin, usually attributed to their lack of choice.  I would dispute that, but you can think what you want to.

So the Vikings start building these extremely efficient boats, called longboats, and travel down into northern England.  When they arrived on the shorelines, their boats were so shallow that they could actually pull their entire boats onto land.  From there, they would ramsack monasteries and villages in order to take riches back to their homebase.

But wait a minute… if they were supposively “christians” why would they steal from and kill monks?  Well, because in the early middle ages (aka dark ages) all the wealth was either in the hands on the church, or in the hands of wealthy land owners, but… mostly the church.  SO… the vikings took advantage of that wide spread knowledge.  The church was extremely powerful in the middle ages, and demanded taxes be paid to them, as well as land be donated (and land was like better than GOLD!).

So… for over 700 years people lived in fear that the Vikings would come and destroy their village.  They were vicious… when they came to your village, you had a low chance of surviving.

Apart from their title, and righfully so, of plunderers, warriors, and murderers, many vikings were explorers.  The vikings would travel lots of different places, and ended up settling in Iceland, Greenland (very little though, because its icy), and in modern day maine and canada.  So if your history teacher told you the first explorer to reach the new world was Christopher Colombus in 1492 (when he sailed the ocean blue) they were wrong.  It was the Vikings (Leif Eriksson and Erik the Red most notably).

So… there is still more!  Who has heard of Normandy?  What you cant find it on the map? Thats because its not a territory anymore.  It was called the “Duchy of Normandy” when it first became a territory, which in French is “Norse-land”.  Hmmmm… at the beginning of this post I called Vikings the Norsemen… and now Im calling Normandy the Norseland.  Could it be that the Vikings were involved?  My hunch is probably.

A very famous Viking named Rollo started conquering French territory very fast.  He sieged Paris in 910, and the French aristocrats were in terror.  So… Charles the Simple came to the rescue.  Instead of living in fear of Rollo, he used his  powers (he was king of the West Franks… what is now France) and gave Rollo (now known as Richard of Normandy) the Norman territory.

So, to sum this up:  The Vikings were desperate for food, started raiding, enjoyed raiding, got rich, became explorers, started to settle down, some stayed in Scandinavia, some lived in Iceland, and others became Normans and adopted French life.

There is a little more… the 1066 incident, which ended it for the Vikings indefinitely.  A Viking from Normandy named Harald Hardrada claimed that he was supposed to inherit the English throne after Edward the Confessor died without a male heir.  He invaded England, but lost.  The end of that story was the Battle of Hastings, where two others duked it out… but William I, the conqueror took the throne.  It was a big deal.  You should read about it.  Or maybe I’ll blog about it, someday.

For now… thats all I got.  To learn how the Vikings were a big part of the fall of Rome in 410AD… google it.

OH WAIT: IF you want to learn more and have fun doing it, visit THE VIKINGS game!  Its really fun.

Who was Henry VIII? … and who was the first Elizabeth??

Here is our handsome man… handsome, plump Henry VIII

Henry VIII?  He was a famous King of England.  His dates are June 28, 1491- January 28, 1547 and in that time he really made a name for himself.  He became king when he was 18 in 1509 after his father’s death.   He is best known for the controversy over his lustful actions, and terrible consequences of that lust he so whimsically acted on.

What some people don’t know, is that the controversy that surrounds Henry VIII really help christianity, apart from the Catholic Church, flourish in England.  Because the pope (Pope Julius II) would not allow Henry VIII to divorce his first wife Catherine of Aragon (of Spain), and Henry VIII would not be outdone by another power, Henry VIII denounced the Catholic Church.  In its place, he created the Anglican Church which soon spread through England with resistance from the devout Catholic believers.   He then went on to have six wives, all of which frustrated him because they could not produce a male heir.  The male heir that Henry VIII produced was an illegitimate child, Henry Fitzroy, whose mother was Henry VIII mistress Elizabeth Blount (also known as Bessie).

Catherine of Aragon, Henry VIII’s first wife, produced many children but all but one died at infancy.  The one that survived is the infamous Bloody Mary.  Mary rejected her father’s denounciation of the Catholic Church, and considered herself devout to the church.  In retailation to England’s rejection of the church, Mary acquired her nickname by killing hundreds of Protestant believers.

Mary I, aka Bloody Mary… look at the hatred produced in this painting… ahhhh.

Mary I re-established the Catholic Church, but all her efforts were in vain because her half-sister Elizabeth came to the rescue.  She reversed Mary’s attempt and angered many Catholics… not to say she did not anger Protestants as well.  She made sure that her role was political and did not get involved in naming a specific religious entity within England.   She issued the Book of Common Prayer in 1559, which was so vague that no one cared for it.

Queen Elizabeth I, a little softer around the edges….

She once said, “There is only one Christ, Jesus, one faith.  All else is a dispute over trifles.”

Elizabeth I, was the daughter of Anne Boleyn, and is considered the last of the Tudor dynasty.  For more on the Tudors visit the following links: Wikipedia.org(Tudor Link), Tudorhistory.org

Today in History- August 3

On August 3…

1492: Columbus sets sail from Palos, Spain for the “Indies”

1882: Congress passes the first law restricting immigration in the USA

1921: The first aerial cropdusting happened in Troy, Ohio to combat caterpillars

1923: Calvin Coolidge becomes the 30th president

1963: The Beatles have their final performance in Liverpool

AND Happy Birthday to Martin Sheen, who is now 79 years old.

Would you pass 8th grade in 1895?

This is an example of an 8th grade test in 1895… would you pass?

U.S. History (Time, 45 minutes)
1. Give the epochs into which U.S. History is divided.

2. Give an account of the discovery of America by Columbus

3. Relate the causes and results of the Revolutionary War.

4. Show the territorial growth of the United States

5. Tell what you can of the history of Kansas

6. Describe three of the most prominent battles of the Rebellion.

7. Who were the following: Morse, Whitney, Fulton , Bell , Lincoln , Penn, and Howe?

8. Name events connected with the following dates: 1607, 1620, 1800, 1849, 1865.

- Thanks Moms for sending this to me, via email. You’re great!

Wheat… who knew it would be so valuable?

It's wheat!

Man, did wheat every change the human race.

When humans started to learn about cultivation, wheat was the number one crop that got everyone talking.

Before civilizations started becoming stationary they were nomadic (definition: mobile: migratory; “a restless mobile society”).  Humans moved around, hunted for food, and did not have much population growth because they could not sustain many people while moving around that much.

Then… there was wheat.  When the earth started to warm up from the last ice age, rain started to fall, and things started to grow! Humans, being smart, started to catch onto the fact that they could eat what was growing (sometimes… stay away from daffodils, oleander plants, and some mushrooms).

Hunger, being a great motivator, started pushing humans to try new things, which eventually led to the understanding of seeds, water, and planting.  And whala… you’ve got wheat.

When the art of wheat cultivation became strong, people started storing it for the harsher months out of the year… and populations started growing, and staying stationary.

So… how valuable was wheat? It got us to where we are today… because it started civilizations.

I would say was prettttty valuable.

Why History??

Why History?  Why know it? When will you ever use it? Why is old stuff relevant today??

If you ever asked this question you’ve come to the right place.  I am a first-year teacher, about to teach high school history courses, and I am in LOVE with history.  I have an answer to all these questions in this first blog to get this started.

If you do not like history, you are in the wrong place… but let me persuade you that history is fun, exciting, invigorating, and interesting.

SO Why history? Is it history relevant in our modern world?  OF COURSE IT IS!  How do you think we have progressed as humans?  If we do not build upon former ideas, then we would be at a stand still.  And what about mistakes… have you not ever heard we learn from our mistakes? That does not have to just apply to an individual… it can apply to our entire human race!

Knowing history is important, for several reasons:

1. It teaches us about ourselves.  Humans have the same tendencies, the same wants, needs, desires.  If we study history we can find patterns to help us learn about who we are.

2. It helps us not make the same mistakes… although… we still do.  We should know through looking at human rulers and territories that greed can destroy men and nations, that passivity can wreak havoc, and relying too heavily on one means of production can plunge a country into debt and poverty.

3. It is interesting to see how people have lived, grown, matured, but in the midst of that, remained the same.  Civilizations were started by learning how to grow crops, they matured into societies, that created culture, which created governments, which created territories, which created (eventually) countries.  Cool huh? Except… we are still the same species… we think like they did, we act like they did, but we learn from what they did to become better.

There are so many more reasons, but for lack of time I will not go there today.  I will expand of these in future blog posts.

My intent for this blog is to write small tidbits of history that are fun and interesting because we (myself included, although I study it quite a bit) do not know enough of history.

Plus its fun…

-Britt Cudz