Fun & Exciting Stuff

Using a tag cloud, the NY Times has created a visual representation of every President’s Inaugural address. Pretty cool. Definately gives you an idea of the main concern of each President.

Over at this historical blog Lynn Meighan pointed out to us called Old Picture of the Day I have come across an interesting idea. I don’t know if it is educational or not, but is it possible to stump the internet?

Here. Quick money making scheme – Posterize the entire thing. Every history teacher in the country would buy one.

What books are important to read for a regular level, high school, US history class?

I am reading a couple of different books, but books that I think have value to Social Studies teachers:

Collapse: How societies choose to fail or succeed by Jared Diamond. Societies have made societal choices that ultimately led to thier downfall. It wasn’t like Monday everything is fine and Tuesday the place is a ghost town, but over the course of 50 to 100 years, these societies fal and are completely gone. Opened my eyes to the situations in Montana and with the Maya.

The other is: The Worst Hard Time: The untold story of those who escaped the great American Dustbowl by Timothy Egan. First person accounts of life in the Texas/Oklahoma panhandle, NE New Mexico, SE Colorado during the Great Depression. A very haunting book. I wouldn’t know what to do with a black cloud of dust that could penetrate every opening. And it isn’t just one or two storms. Roughly 8 years of them.

Not the most uplifting books, but great life lessons and you can see how people perservered through extremly challenging situations.

Karl Fisch brings up some great points about what we should be teaching in Social Studies.

Past and present activities.

Organizations of people associated together for [various] purposes.

Human society past and present.

Informed and reasoned decisions for the public good . . . in an interdependent world.

I think we need to look at how much we “cover” and how we can adjust to the changing world.

I have written previously about the new Civil War course I am creating. In my research, I found this blog: Teaching the Civil War with Technology I hope I will be able to use some of the resources demonstrated there. Check it out!

Now I will be up all night trying to figure out what all this of means. Very creative. I hate when kids tell me they can’t do something. This is the one piece of evidence I will need from now on. If someone can tell about the wars of the world from WWII to the present using food, anything is possible.

I don’t know how much you are reading on the housing crisis and the economic situation of the US and the world, but this article from Harper’s magazine is a great and non-economics jargony article.

More than a decade of economic and financial-market chaos followed, as the dollar remained the international currency but traded without an absolute measure of value. Inflation rose not just in the United States but around the world, grinding down the worth of many securities and brokerage firms. The Federal Reserve pushed interest rates into double digits, setting off two global recessions, and new international standards and methods for measuring inflation and floating exchange rates were established to replace the gold standard. After 1975, the United States would never again post an annual merchandise trade surplus. Such high-value, finished-goods-producing industries as steel and automobiles were no longer dominant. The new economy belonged to finance, insurance, and real estate—FIRE.