We get so tied up in slut-shaming contemporary celebrities that it's easy to forget how some of history's greatest minds spent most their energy having the nastiest sex they could get their hands on.
If these frescoes could talk...
America gets its name from Amerigo Vespucci. Kids will learn about this important historical figure with this fun worksheet.
The Vikings were a brutal people, renowned over a thousand years later for their skill and fearlessness in battle. Whilst many subsequent depictions have descended into unfounded conjecture, in particular the common belief in horned helms, and accounts of their deeds avoidably have become exaggerated across the centuries, it is…
If you use 50 Famous Stories Retold or the comparable version in The Book of Virtues, here are the images for those stories. A guide with wiki links and questions to answer: HERE Alexander,…
Although the 19th Century is the most notorious period for desperate overcrowding in the churchyards and burial grounds of London, the problem of finding enough space to bury the city’s dead …
This project is sure to be a hit with your social media-loving students! They can create a Facebook profile, Twitter page, or Instagram post. These are great for using at the beginning of the year for students to introduce themselves, for students to show what they know about a historical figure or book character, or to represent important historical events or plot points in a story. In addition to printed versions of this product (which can be done in full-color if you like), this product also contains DIGITAL versions of all three activities! They can be assigned through Google Classroom for students to work on their own devices. Clear directions are included so that students can work independently. This can be used across grade levels and content areas. Enjoy! *PLEASE NOTE: After purchasing, you will need to MAKE A COPY of this document in your Google Drive in order to be able to edit and assign it to students. I cannot accept your requests to access and edit the original. Please see the directions on page 2 of the file for how to do this. Thank you!
All you need is a recording device and a little time to record the personal histories of friends and family.
Bogeyman, any of a variety of fictional and oftentimes folkloric monsters described in stories designed to frighten children. Tales of the bogeyman and various analogues have been used for centuries all across the world to influence children to behave as their parents command and to exercise
Diogenes and Plato have been battling it out for hundreds of years, the stories have captured the imaginations of readers since ancient Greece through to today. Despite being nearly 2300 years old…
Who is Chinua Achebe? More about Chinua Achebe Bio, Net Worth, Age, Relationship, Height, and Career. [Updated 2024 June]
If you love historical fiction, take a dive into the lives of these people with 8 books that fictionalize real historical figures!
These are the stories of the liberators and the survivors — when the day of freedom finally arrived. Through their stories, we are reminded that even in the very coldest depths of humanity, kindness and compassion can be found.
How a deplored “tradesman of death” brought to life the highest accolade of human achievement.
Why don't schools teach us about the inventor of the wasp pistol, or the paleontologist who liked to eat mice on toast? (H/t Great British Eccentrics)
Talk to any person of color over age 60 in my part of Virginia and they know the story by heart: Black children reared during the postwar baby boom rarely left home without being admonished by their mothers, “Y’all stay together now or you might be kidnapped, just like Eko and Iko.” Eko and Iko were
John A. asks: When did people start smoking tobacco? While who exactly was the first to smoke tobacco has been lost to history, Jordan Goodman, in his book Tobacco in History, theorizes that tobacco was first cultivated thousands of years ago in the Americas, around the regions that have become known as Mexico and Brazil. The populations grew the plant [...]
**Warning for Graphic Pictures** In February of 1959 nine students of a hiking club in Soviet Russia ventured into the Ural Mountains in the northern part of Sverdlovsk. They were out to get an hon…
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The Parisian slums of the 17th century were a wild place. Unlike most other cities, Paris had numerous slums throughout the city. Each tenement had its own culture, hierarchy, and language. Despite the prosperous and famed reign of Louis XIV, the Sun King, the peasants of France were poor as…
Writing in 1928, Russel Crouse describes the 1872 campaign of Virginia Claflin Woodhull.
Abandoned and imprisoned, this real-life Amazon took back the life she had stolen away.
1896 lithograph of Sir William Herschel and Caroline Herschel by A. Diethe. William and Caroline made many important astronomical discoveries in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, and Caroline...
“I am not afraid… I was born to do this.” ~ Jeanne d’Arc This will be the first in a series of posts exploring the impact on the world of remarkable women. So often we celebrate men’s amazin…
She's the hottest renegade outlaw-turned-nun-debaucher-turned opera star you never knew you loved. The Internet is poised to make Julie D'Aubigny a star. Again.
I have always been wondering what famous people from the past looked like and now modern technology and forensic experts give us this fascinating opportunity. Let’s have a look at how people that lived hundreds and thousands of years ago actually looked like!
New Yorker cartoonist Kate Beaton’s hilarious six-panel vignettes about famous literary and historical figures and events.
Why content yourself with portraits of historical figures when you can come face to face with one? Through a combination of history, science and artistic interpretation, researches were able to create 3D models of the faces of famous people in history.
Slave trade brought many advantages to western societies. The main duty of a slave was to work on plantations increasing productivity. Slaves often worked long tedious hours in the sun with no pay or reward for their hard labour. Their presence made traders and plantation owners more productive and made their living conditions very harsh. After...
Required reading and summer reading lists have been the bane of students for generations. We find the books boring, wishing that we could spend the time struggling to get through the classics on something we want to read. Surprisingly, several novels have remarkably real stories behind them. They depict adultery,…
Here's a few tidbits about your favorite authors, from Uncle John’s Bathroom Reader Attack of the Factoids. The best-selling fiction author of all time is William Shakespeare. #2: Agatha Christie. Writer Lewis Carroll coined the word “chortle.” It means a cross between a chuckle and a snort. It took author J. R. R. Tolkien 12 years to write the Lord of the Rings trilogy. Author Norman Mailer claimed to have invented thumb wrestling. Novelist F. Scott Fitzgerald was born Francis Sc...
The Gothic Tea Society www.gothicteasociety.com 100 Years ago today there was a terrible tragedy. A fire killed 146 workers, mostly female immigrants. For a modern article on the 100 year remembrance go HERE Wiki says: The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire in New York City on March 25, 1911, was the deadliest industrial disaster in the history of the city of New York and resulted in the fourth highest loss of life from an industrial accident in U.S. history. The fire caused the deaths of 146 garment workers, who either died from the fire or jumped to their deaths. Most of the victims were recent immigrant Jewish and Italian women aged sixteen to twenty-three. Many of the workers could not escape the burning building because the managers had locked the doors to the stairwells and exits. People jumped from the eighth, ninth, and tenth floors. The fire led to legislation requiring improved factory safety standards and helped spur the growth of the International Ladies' Garment Workers' Union, which fought for better working conditions for sweatshop workers. The factory was located in the Asch Building, at 29 Washington Place, now known as the Brown Building, which has been designated a National Historic Landmark and a New York City landmark. The Triangle Waist Company factory occupied the eighth, ninth, and tenth floors of the Asch Building on the northwest corner of Greene Street and Washington Place, just to the east of Washington Square Park, in the Greenwich Village area of New York City. Under the ownership of Max Blanck and Isaac Harris, the factory produced women's blouses, known as "shirtwaists." The factory normally employed about 500 workers, mostly young immigrant women, who worked nine hours a day on weekdays plus seven hours on Saturdays. As the workday was ending on the afternoon of Saturday, March 25, 1911, a fire flared up at approximately 4:45 PM in a scrap bin under one of the cutter's tables at the northeast corner of the eighth floor. A large crowd of bystanders gathered on the street, witnessing sixty-two people jumping or falling to their deaths from the burning building. Louis Waldman, later a New York Socialist state assemblyman, described the scene years later: One Saturday afternoon in March of that year — March 25, to be precise — I was sitting at one of the reading tables in the old Astor Library... It was a raw, unpleasant day and the comfortable reading room seemed a delightful place to spend the remaining few hours until the library closed. I was deeply engrossed in my book when I became aware of fire engines racing past the building. By this time I was sufficiently Americanized to be fascinated by the sound of fire engines. Along with several others in the library, I ran out to see what was happening, and followed crowds of people to the scene of the fire. A few blocks away, the Asch Building at the corner of Washington Place and Greene Street was ablaze. When we arrived at the scene, the police had thrown up a cordon around the area and the firemen were helplessly fighting the blaze. The eighth, ninth, and tenth stories of the building were now an enormous roaring cornice of flames. Word had spread through the East Side, by some magic of terror, that the plant of the Triangle Waist Company was on fire and that several hundred workers were trapped. Horrified and helpless, the crowds — I among them — looked up at the burning building, saw girl after girl appear at the reddened windows, pause for a terrified moment, and then leap to the pavement below, to land as mangled, bloody pulp. This went on for what seemed a ghastly eternity. Occasionally a girl who had hesitated too long was licked by pursuing flames and, screaming with clothing and hair ablaze, plunged like a living torch to the street. Life nets held by the firemen were torn by the impact of the falling bodies. The emotions of the crowd were indescribable. Women were hysterical, scores fainted; men wept as, in paroxysms of frenzy, they hurled themselves against the police lines. The remainder waited until smoke and fire overcame them. The fire department arrived quickly but was unable to stop the flames, as there were no ladders available that could reach beyond the sixth floor. The fallen bodies and falling victims also made it difficult for the fire department to approach the building.
