Anglo-Saxon Gold Rewrites History

An enormous hoard of gold, unearthed in a field near the village of Hammerwich, near Lichfield, in Staffordshire, UK, on 5th July 2009, is proving to be one of the most astonishing European archeological discoveries for decades.

The one of newly photographed artefact

The find, discovered by an amateur metal-detecting enthusiast Terry Herbert - comprises more than 1,500 items, amounting to more than five kilogrammes of gold and including remains of 84 sword pommels, three crosses and several helmets. This compares with the 1.5 kilogrammes of gold in Sutton Hoo in Suffolk - previously the largest Anglo-Saxon treasure trove ever discovered.

Jesse Owens: The Hero of the Games

James Cleveland Owens was born in Oakville, Alabama, on September 12, 1913, the son of a sharecropper, a farmer who rents land. He was a sickly child, often too frail to help his father and brothers in the fields. The family moved to Cleveland, Ohio, in 1921, for better work opportunities. There was little improvement in their life, but the move did enable young Owens to enter public school, where a teacher accidentally wrote down his name as "Jesse" instead of J. C. He carried the name with him for the rest of his life.

Jesse Owens in the peak of his career

When Owens was in the fifth grade, the athletic supervisor asked him to join the track team. From a skinny boy he developed into a strong runner, and in junior high school he set a record for the 100-yard dash. In high school in 1933 he won the 100-yard dash, the 200-yard dash, and the broad jump in the National Interscholastic Championships. Owens was such a complete athlete, a coach said he seemed to float over the ground when he ran.

What is the right way to teach history in British schools?

Everyone has an opinion about history in schools. Andrew Marr and Terry Deary certainly do. But it doesn’t follow that, because they have opposing views, one of them must be right. Both have interesting things to say, particularly about the importance or otherwise of subject knowledge.

In any case, what are we to make of Terry Deary’s assumption that it doesn’t matter whether pupils know the names of dead prime ministers? Is it because they’re dead? History would be a rather thin discipline if we excluded people from study because they’re no longer living. Or does he just dislike prime ministers?

Whatever the reason, it seems a bizarre approach to studying the past, as well as a rather selfish one. I bet Terry Deary knows about Gladstone and Disraeli. It’s because he knows about them that he can so confidently assert that they don’t matter. I think our pupils have quite as much right to know about them as he does – more, indeed, if they’re studying 19th-century British history, since they’d actually find this knowledge quite useful.



Prime Minister Gladstone - Should we know about him?

                                        

The Legendary Route of Pony Express

Young and daring horseback riders once carried U.S. mail between St. Joseph, Missouri, and Sacramento, California, from where it was then taken by steamer to San Francisco. The service began on April 3, 1860. Its promoters hoped to prove that the central route followed by the Pony Express was better than the longer southern route used by the stagecoaches of the Butterfield Overland Mail. Senator William M. Gwin of California was the chief promoter of the Pony Express, while the freight firm of William H. Russell, William B. Waddell, and Alexander Majors backed the project financially.

Romantic view of Pony Express

The Pony Express route followed the Oregon-California Trail, along the Platte River in Nebraska, through South Pass in Wyoming. At Fort Bridger, Wyoming, the riders left the trail, swung to the south of the Great Salt Lake, and then headed due west across the salt desert to the Sierra Nevada Mountains at Carson City, Nevada, and then across the Sierra Nevada into California and on to Sacramento. Relay stations stood 10 to 15 miles apart along the route.

The world’s first video game

The world’s first video game, OXO, was invented in 1952. As the title suggests, it was simple tic-tac-toe, and you could only play it on the EDSAC computer at the University of Cambridge. (Watch it in action here.) The fun didn’t really get started until the late 1960′s, when Robert Baer, Bill Harrison and Bill Rusch developed a ping pong game you could play on your television. The video below shows Baer and Harrison playing the game on the “brown box” — the prototype for the computer consoles that would make the 70s and 80s such wonderful, sedentary decades to be a child.

The Romanov Mystery - Finally solved or endless crime story

Anastasia Romanov born June 18,1901 to the Tsar Nicholas II of Russia and his wife Alexandra Fyodorvna was the youngest daughter of the four daughters the couple had. Anastasia was the younger sister of Grand Duchess Tatiana, Grand Duchess Maria, and Grand Duchess Olga her only brother was Alexei Nikolaevich, Tsarevich of Russia. The claim is that on July 17, 1918 she was murdered with her entire family by the Bolshevik secret police.

Romanoy Royal family

Rumors continued to fly about the possibility of her survival due to nobody being able to clearly identify where her body had been located. The mass grave had been revealed in 1991 however only the mother, the father and three daughters had been located. The body of Alexei and one of his sisters had not been located.
In 2008 the Russians made claim that her possible survival had been disproved and that the remains of a young boy and a young girl's charred remains had been located near Ektarinburg in 2007 and that fact was they were the remains of Alexei and one of his four sisters. In March 2009 Michael Coble of the USAF DNA identification laboratory stated that all sister's had been accounted for and that nobody survived. Isn't this questionable? Did they run tests on the young boy to prove in fact that he was Alexei? Or was it a burial ground for two unidentified children?

On this day: The King Henry II of France died after fatal injury

Historically, as the representative of a nation, it was essential that a monarch remain strong and healthy. In 1559 Henri II of France was injured at a jousting tournament when a lance splintered, went into his eye and shot upwards into his brain, causing a subdural haemorrhage (a build-up of blood between the inner and outer membranes covering the brain). Although he was badly injured, the king managed to get to his chambers, where all of his physicians gathered in the hope of curing him.

Medieval tournament

Born in 1519, the future Henry II married Catherine de Medici in 1533 when they were both 14 years old. His father, King Francis I, reportedly supervised the consummation, announcing they had both shown valour in the ‘joust’. Catherine was rich but not pretty and Henry was soon in the arms of Diane de Poitiers, a beautiful, ambitious widow in her mid-thirties who became almost a queen behind the scenes. Henry had other mistresses but his two other great loves were hunting and jousting. He succeeded his father to the French throne on his 28th birthday in 1547 and in 1558 his and Catherine’s eldest son, the stunted and sickly Francis, was married to Mary, Queen of Scots, who had been brought up in France by her mother’s family, the Guises, to keep her out of the hands of the English. The French intended through her to acquire the Scottish throne.