Poetry Friday: Remembering Dr. King

who was assassinated 40 years ago today.
Lift Every Voice and Sing
by James Weldon Johnson (1871-1938)
Lift ev’ry voice and sing,
Till earth and heaven ring,
Ring with the harmonies of Liberty;
Let our rejoicing rise
High as the list’ning skies,
Let it resound loud as the rolling sea.
Sing a song full of the faith that the dark past has taught us,
Sing [...]

The Archimedes Project

From the article, “The Ancient Mechanics and How They Thought” by Guy Gugliotta, in today’s New York Times, combining several of our favorite subjects:
CAMBRIDGE, Mass. — Consider the galley slave, clad in rags, chained to a hardwood bench and clinging to an oar as long as a three-story flagpole. A burly man with a whip [...]

Uh-oh Canada

I forgot.
I recuperated and got busy with Easter, and then Tom’s birthday (Tuesday) and Laura’s 4H field trip to a nearby bakery (also Tuesday and delicious), and then got thoroughly sidetracked by some Spring cleaning and shopping (yesterday).
Which means I missed getting anything ready for Colleen Mondor at Chasing Ray’s literary salute to Canada. [...]

Following up on “What to Do About Alice?”

Children’s author Barbara Kerley was kind enough to leave another message the other day letting me know that the classroom activities for her new biography of Alice Roosevelt, What To Do About Alice?: How Alice Roosevelt Broke the Rules, Charmed the World, and Drove Her Father Teddy Crazy — whether your classroom is in a [...]

Biography

Thanks to our local CBC radio station, which has a weekly feature on new and noteworthy podcasts, I learned about the website for the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, which covers Great Britain; I think Charlotte Mason, were she around today, might find it a wonderful supplement to H.E. Marshall’s Our Island Story. Yet [...]

Poetry Friday and Big Birthday Bash week #2: George Washington

A letter and a poem written in 1775 or 1776 to General George Washington (born on this date in 1732) from Phillis Wheatley (1753-1784):
To His Excellency
George Washington
Sir,
I have taken the freedom to address your Excellency in the enclosed poem, and entreat your acceptance, though I am not insensible of its inaccuracies. Your being appointed [...]

Reviews here and there

David Elzey at the excelsior file has a review of What To Do about Alice?: How Alice Roosevelt Broke the Rules, Charmed the World, and Drove Her Father Teddy Crazy, by Barbara Kerley, with illustrations by Edwin Fotheringham. David calls it “a great book” and “a tidy biography of a colorful, spunky girl who [...]

Poetry Friday: For Abraham Lincoln

For Abraham Lincoln, whose birthday was on Tuesday, February 12th, because we don’t remember him, or his poets, as often as we did, as often as we should:
Abraham Lincoln
(1809-1865)
by Rosemary and Stephen Vincent Benét, from A Book of Americans
Lincoln was a long man.
He liked the out of doors.
He liked the wind blowing
And the talk in [...]

Big Birthday Bash week: February 14

In between bites of chocolate today, spare a thought for George Washington Gale Ferris, Jr., born on this date in 1859.

Ferris, of course, invented the Wheel, his great gift to the world for the 1893 Chicago World’s Columbian Exposition.

* * *
The Great Wheel by Robert Lawson (1957, Newbery Honor)
More literary Ferris Wheel riding:
Charlotte’s [...]

Big Birthday Bash week: February 12

Many happy returns to Charles Darwin (1809-1882) and Abraham Lincoln (1809-1865).
Dawn at By Sun and By Candlelight has a lovely list of Lincoln links.
Big bicentennial bashes are underway for Lincoln, too. Here’s the link for the Lincoln Bicentennial, 1809-2009: Live the Legacy. The “Learning about Lincoln” section, under the “Teachers” category, [...]

A true daring girl

From the time I started one of my favorite Christmas presents, Alice: Alice Roosevelt Longworth, from White House Princess to Washington Power Broker by Stacy A. Cordery (which I mentioned in this post), I kept wondering why there haven’t been any proper children’s biographies of this fascinating girl who grew up into a fascinating, and [...]

Downloading the Declaration and Constitution

“I prefer a man who will burn the flag and then wrap himself in the Constitution to a man who will burn the Constitution and then wrap himself in the flag.”
U.S. Congressman Craig A. Washington (D-Texas, 1989-1995)
Via GeekDad, the news that voiceover artist Debra Jean Dean has recorded her readings of the Declaration of Independence [...]

World War I by blog

I picked up The National Post while in town on Saturday afternoon, and found this article about a blog created by Bill Lamin of Cornwall, using his grandfather Harry Lamin’s letters home from the front during World War I. Grandson Bill is posting the letters 90 years to the date they were written by [...]

Quickie thumbnail reviews of Cybils middle grade/young adult nonfiction nominees, Part I

Not all of them, just the ones the publishers were kind enough to send along, because with the short list ready to be announced tomorrow, I want to finally finally finally pick up the pile of books from the carpet and put things away — on the shelves for the keepers, in the library bag [...]

School canceled, on account of

snow and hunting.
We were surprised Sunday by a goodly snowfall overnight, and then a bit more Sunday night. Enough for the kids to make this before lunchtime yesterday,

It doubles as a (very) small sledding hill.
Last night the temperature dropped down to about -20C (just below 0F), the coldest weather so far this season; winter [...]

Following up on David McCullough

I ran out of time yesterday, and wanted to add this list of suggested readings to go with my post yesterday about David McCullough’s new 1776: The Illustrated Edition, the illustrated and abridged edition of Mr. McCullough’s original 1776.
All of the children’s books listed below are narrative histories and overviews of the period, rather than [...]

G is for guitar…and giddy

Our first two back-to-school days, which ended up being out-of-the-house days, proved to be a wonderful way to ease back into the swing of things. The local author reading, and getting to meet him, inspired Laura and she’s been scribbling away ever since, with plans to write up our adventure with the hawk. Afterwards, we [...]

Rewriting history? Or at least museum exhibits

at the Canadian War Museum in Ottawa (via The Globe & Mail; emphasis in bold mine):
The battle’s not over yet. But under pressure from Bomber Command veterans’ groups and sympathetic politicians, the Canadian War Museum in Ottawa will adjust the wording on a panel dealing with the 1945 firebombing of Dresden.
“The final wording has not [...]

Respectable history for a general readership: bad news and a bit of good news

I’m slowly wading through news from the past week or two and was saddened to read in The New York Times (registration is free or use Bug Me Not) that the wonderful American Heritage Magazine has suspended publication with the April/May 2007 issue, now on newsstands. Editor Richard F. Snow, who started in the magazine’s [...]

Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr. (1917-2007)

From his obituary in yesterday’s New York Times:
Young Arthur first attended public schools in Cambridge, but his parents lost faith in public education in his sophomore year after a civics teacher informed Arthur’s class that inhabitants of Albania were called Albinos and had white hair and pink eyes. He was shipped to the Phillips Exeter [...]