Dirty Jobs of the Middle Ages

Dirty Jobs of the Middle Ages

Researching Christmas Traditions?

Writing about Christmas traditions in your historical novel? Check out the info graphic at the Balsam Hill website . The timeline includes historical holiday information about culture, decorations, traditions and figures, from early origins to the early twenty first century. From this info graphic, I learned that my Civil War characters would have depicted Santa as the typical Nast character we know of today, all jolly and fat, er overweight. My characters would not have known about Rudolph, however, because he was not created until 1939.

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.

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.

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

http://marilynwseguin.com

Create strong passwords!

If you are like me, you may have a hard time keeping track of your passwords to your online accounts.  I try to create a new password for each new account, just to protect them from hackers.  Many folks create one password and use it for multiple accounts, however (you don’t really do that, do you?) because they have a hard time remembering multiple passwords.

Recently, I watched a tutorial on how to create strong passwords at Explainia. In a nutshell, the tutorial advises that a strong password should be at least eight characters and include small letters, capital letters, numbers and punctuation marks.  It might look something like this: miN@5_2k?

According to this month’s AARP Bulletin, among the easiest to guess and steal passwords include: password

 123456

 12345678

qwerty

 abc123

Now, you haven’t really used any of these as passwords, have you?

Has the internet killed reading books?

Because I teach in the English Dept. of a large Midwestern University, I am surrounded by people who love to read books—students and faculty.  Therefore, I am always puzzled when folks lament that no one reads books anymore because information on the internet is both pervasive and ubiquitous.  As a reader of books and a writer of them, the idea of the internet replacing books for reading pleasure gives me pause. You probably feel the same.

Thus, I was interested to read this article from The Atlantic, “The Next Time Someone Says the Internet Killed Reading Books, Show Them This Chart.” Of course, the study is a little skewed, as the author of the article acknowledges, but still.  Makes me feel better. How about you?