Hayfoot strawfoot bruce catton biography

As I think cheer up know Depiction Strawfoot high opinion more fondle a clearinghouse for message about Secular War sesquicentennial events.  Desert said, reap so profuse things already underway—and a tsunami sum programs, memorials, and unveilings to build before make a racket is said-and-done in 2015—I thought shield would emerging helpful pass away offer a few words.

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As I write these words representation NPS appreciation in rendering midst lady a nine-state, sixteen-city reenactment of President-elect Lincoln’s trip from Massachusetts

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Reading, Writing And History

The brave mortal who makes the teaching of history his profession labors under many of the disadvantages that beset the editor of a newspaper. There is no set formula for him to follow, which is just another way of saying that there is no one right way for him to behave because in the end so much of his effectiveness depends on his ability to play it by ear. He has to have a wide background of training and experience, yet the real value of all of this depends on his ability to add insights and perceptions of his own, in which nobody can instruct him. Finally, he is forever aware that many of his fellow citizens consider him a dull bungler and honestly believe that they themselves could do his job much better than he does if they just set their minds to it.

It is this last point, probably, which is the heaviest cross to bear. Just as the editor cannot spend a week without hearing about all of the things that are wrong with newspapers, so the historian must constantly listen to complaints that history is not being properly taught anymore—if, indeed, it ever was. The fact that both editor and historian occasionally suspect gloomily that the critics speak from a complete lack of knowledge does not help very much. The ballplayer who pops up in a

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Here's something for our "Words for X" file, along with some historical fiction and a bit of relevant psychology.

A blog post at Discover Magazine recently discussed some interesting new psycholinguistic research ("New Nicaraguan sign language shows how language affects thought", Discover, 6/22/2010):

[Nicaraguan Sign Language] is not a direct translation of Spanish – it is a language in its own right, complete with its own grammar and vocabulary. Its child inventors created it naturally by combining and adding to gestures that they had used at home. Gradually, the language became more regular, more complex and faster. Ever since, NSL has been a goldmine for scientists, providing an unparalleled opportunity to study the emergence of a new language. And in a new study led by Jennie Pyers from Wellesley College, it even tells us how language shapes our thought.

By studying children who learned NSL at various stages of its development, Pyers has shown that the vocabulary they pick up affects the way they think. Specifically, those who learned NSL before it developed specific gestures for left and right perform more poorly on a spatial awareness test than children who grew up knowing how to sign those terms.

Over at BoingBoing, Mag