Welcome to the conversation!

Join historical novel writer Marilyn Weymouth Seguin here every week for conversation about digital tools you can use for researching, writing, revising, publishing and promoting your work! Buy the eBook at this link.

Monday, November 26, 2012

Google Search Tip

I use Google a lot to help me find information and images on the internet.  When I find a web page via Google that I think might have answers to the research questions I am asking, I key “Control F” to bring up a “Find” page. In the “Find” box, I can type in exactly what I am looking for and Google will take me to the key term on that web page.  That way, I do not have to read through the entire page to find what I am looking for.  It saves some time when I am impatient to get right to the information I seek.

Tuesday, November 13, 2012

Fast research!

Ever wish you could quickly grasp the historical context of something without doing all that research?  Well, probably not. If you write historical fiction, doing the research is more than half the fun.  But if you need to grasp a historical concept quickly or you are looking to kill a few hours, check out Crash Course.  John Green teaches you the history of the world in 40 YouTube episodes of Crash Course.

Each video is about twelve minutes long, and titles include The Agricultural Revolution, The Silk Road, Rome, The Crusades, and The Atlantic Slave Trade. These videos are designed for history teachers and their adolescent students.  The two that I viewed were lively and engaging, but annoyingly flip. John Green is really, really enthusiastic. Nevertheless, I learned a great deal that I didn’t know (or had forgotten) when I watched The Silk Road video. You have the option of skipping the commercial that begins each video. These videos are entertaining and enlightening, whether you want to learn something new or brush up on the history that you learned in school.

Thursday, November 1, 2012

Young people made history too!

Adults sometimes overlook the contributions of young people to our nation’s history. American children have a long tradition of changing things for the better in our nation. Teachers and parents can help young people make connections to their history and to children who lived in the past. History is their story too.

Consider the following historical contributions from young Americans, and share them with your youngsters:

·         John Darragh was fourteen when he acted as a Revolutionary War spy. When he got important information, his mother sewed messages inside large cloth covered buttons that she then sewed onto John’s coat. Once he was behind British lines, he cut off the buttons and sent them straight to George Washington.
·         Sacagawea was a teenager when she helped to guide Lewis and Clark and the Corps of the Discovery on their journey to the Pacific Ocean.
·         Thirteen- year- old Emily Edmonson and fifteen-year-old Mary Edmonson, sisters, were among the 77 enslaved Americans who participated in the single largest known Underground Railroad escape attempt.
·         Teenager Adam Lowry Rankin and his family helped more than 2000 slaves to freedom. One of the fugitives they helped was an inspiration for Harriett Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin.
·         Nine-year-old Johnny Clem joined the Union Army, was a lance corporal by age 11, and later became a major general.
·         As a nineteen-year-old teenager in 1888, Minnie Freeman led her young pupils to safety through one of history’s worst blizzards.  As many as 200 people or more, perished during what became known as the Children’s Blizzard, because so many of the dead were children.
·         Fifteen-year-old Claudette Colvin was arrested for refusing to give up her bus seat---nine months before Rosa Parks took a similar stand!
Young people are fascinated by the courageous stories of people their own age throughout history.  Young people, after all, no less than adults, helped make our nation’s history.
Marilyn Seguin
Author of Young and Courageous: American Girls Who Made History