Feel Free to Comment!

If you have any questions or comments, feel free to post, or to contact me. You are also welcome to use the check boxes under each post to let me know whether the post have been helpful or not.

What Do Hot Beverages Have to Do With Politics?

Before the American Revolution, our country was under English rule. The colonists had to rely on England to import a lot of goods, and tea was one of those goods. The East India company was a large trading company. They were having financial problems and in danger of going out of business, which would have a devasting effect on England's economy. England decided to solve the problem by placing huge taxes on goods that were shipped to the American colonies.

The Americans were already angry about taxation without representation, which meant that they paid taxes to England, but they were not represented in the British government, called Parliament. They did not feel that they were treated as tax-paying citizens. They felt disrespected.

At the time, there was an underground, or secret, resistance group called the Sons of Liberty. They were led by Samuel Adams, and membership included Paul Revere, Patrick Henry, John Adams, and John Hancock. To some, the Sons of Liberty were heros; to others, they were terrorists.

The American Colonists were already paying heavy taxes on printed materials, sugar, textiles, and other goods, but the final straw came when England enacted the Tea Act, which gave the East India Company a monopoly on all British colonies, including America. This meant that colonists were not allowed to buy tea from anyone else.

Other colonies simply refused to allow the tea to be unloaded from the ships, and allowed them to sail off to other colonies. In the Massachusetts colony, however, they not only refused to allow the tea to be unloaded, but they would not allow the ships to leave Boston Harbor. On the night of December 16, 1773, a group of colonists, led by the Sons of Liberty, boarded the ships and threw all of the tea into Boston Harbor.

In response to "The Boston Tea Party," England closed the port of Boston and declared that the colony would pay for the tea that was destroyed. They took complete control of the Massachusetts colony, basically declaring martial law. Colonists were even expected to provide room and board for occupying British troops.

This chain of events led directly to the organization of the Continental Congress and the American Revolution. If you'd like to know more, plenty of information is available online or at your local library!

So what does the Boston Tea Party have to do with the modern Tea Party we've been hearing about on the news? The Tea Party, is not a "real" political party, but more of a movement. It's made up of a group of people who support tax cuts, less government spending, and lowering the national debt and the federal deficit, and they believe that Washington is not serving their interests. Most Tea Party supporters are conservative Republicans, and Sarah Palin is one of their main public figures. Their name connects them to the Boston Tea Party, because they have adopted a Sons of Liberty phrase as one of their slogans: "No taxation without representation.

The Coffee Party arose in response to the Tea Party. Although the Coffee Party is mostly made up of liberal, or progressive, democrats who want to separate big business from politics, they are a more diverse group of people. There are even some conservatives who support the Coffee Party. The group is also interested in environmental, energy, and immigration issues. They encourage all Americans to become involved citizens.

Wikipedia

If you would like to read more about any of the posting on this blog, or anything else you would like to know more about, check out http://www.wikipedia.com. This site is a giant encyclopedia, and the best part is that everything is hyperlinked. This means that, as you are reading, you can click on the highlighted words to go to another page and learn more about that subject! You could spend an awful lot of time on wikipedia just jumping from subject to subject!

Remember, the more you read, the more you know!

Sitting Bull and General Custer

Many American children have played "Cowboys & Indians." Usually the "Cowboys" were the good guys, and the "Indians" were the bad guys. A better name for the game might have been "Cavalry & Native Americans," and historically speaking, the "Indians," or Native Americans, were not bad at all. They were simply trying to preserve their culture and keep their lands from being stolen.

The events of the 1800s resulted from Anglo-American expansion across North America. Sitting Bull was a Hunkpapa Lakota Sioux holy man and chief in the Dakota Territory, which is now North and South Dakota. Anglo-Americans, or white men, were moving further and further west into Sioux territory and meeting with resistance from the Sioux people. In the mid-1870s, the Northern Pacific Railway attempted to build a railroad directly through Sioux territory, and the Sioux resisted.

Shortly afterward, Civil War vetaran Lt. Col. George Armstrong Custer led an expedition into the Black Hills to scout for gold and a place to establish an Army fort. When he announced that there was gold in the Black Hills, mining companies wanted a piece of the action.

The government tried to force the Native American people out of their lands and onto reservations. This action led directly to the Battle of Little Big Horn. The Lakota Sioux, Cheyenne, and Arapaho joined forces to fight Custer's 7th Cavalry near the Little Big Horn River in the Montana territory. The Army attacked the Native American camp, not realizing how many tribes had joined together. The US troops were badly outnumbered and they lost over 700 men, including Custer himself.

After the Battle of Little Big Horn, Sitting Bull led his people to safety in Canada. They stayed there for four years, but returned to the United States as they were facing mass starvation. Sitting Bull surrendered in 1883, and was sent to the Standing Rock Reservation in what is now South Dakota.

In 1890, the Ghost Dance religious movement gained popularity amongst Native Americans. In an effort to keep Sitting Bull from supporting the movemnet, a group of Indian police was sent to arrest Sitting Bull. They went very early in the morning, hoping to avoid confrontation; however, the confrontation took place anyway, with several people, including Sitting Bull, being killed.

Shortly after this happened, the Wounded Knee Massacre took place, and ended the Native American resistance.

Saturday Night Live Released on This Date in 1977

Are you old enough to remember disco? It was a popular dance style in the 1970s. On December 14, 1977, a film called Saturday Night Fever was released. It was about a young man in Brooklyn, NY, who lived for dancing at a local club. The young man was played by a very young John Travolta. The movie was all about the disco culture, and the soundtrack, which heavily featured The Bee Gees, became a bestseller. That was when music was still released on vinyl disks that us old folks called albums! If you'd like to see a little bit about what the late '70s were like for young urban 20-somethings, head to your local video store!

Blog Changes

You may have noticed that this blog has been changing over the past month. The posts have been leaning more toward reading, history/social studies, and science, than about math and writing. While I will still be posting on these subjects, I am planning to include more posts about cultural literacy. This means that, not only will I be posting on things like Watergate and the Civil War, I will also be posting more about modern cultural references, such as movies, books, television, the Internet, and news items.

Cultural literacy is more than reading. It is having the background knowledge to make the most of your reading. Have you ever started watching a movie in the midde, so that you didn't really know what was going on? That's how a lot of people feel when they read a newspaper. One of my goals for this blog is to help fill in those gaps!

Race to the South Pole

Roald Amundsen was an explorer from Norway. He was among the first group of men ever to spend the winter in Antarctica. He had also been exploring the Arctic. In 1909, he was planning an expedition to become the first man at at the North Pole; however, while Amundsen was plannig his trip, American explorer Robert Peary beat him to the North Pole.

Amundsen did not give up. He turned his attention to the South Pole. Robert Falcon Scott, and English explorer, was also leading an expedition to the South Pole. He and Amundsen were competing to get there first.

Amundsen's team set up their camp 60 miles closer to the South Pole than Scott's team. The Norwegian team relied on sled dogs for transportation, while the English team used motorized sleds, Siberian horses, and sled dogs. These two factors made the difference, not only in winning the race, but in life and death.

Because Amundsen's camp was 60 miles closer, his return trip was shorter. Scott made it to the South Pole a full month after Amundsen. To make matters worse, the weather was very bad on his long trip back to camp. His motorized sleds broke down, and his animals had to be put down. Many of Scott's men, including Scott himself, froze to death.

Roald Amundsen had another notable achievement, but it was mistakenly attributed to Richard Byrd until 1996! Amundsen attempted many times to become the first to fly an airplane over the North Pole, and he came within 150 miles of his target. He finally accomplished the feat in a dirigible, or a zeppelin, in 1926. Unfortunately, Richard Byrd beat him to it by three days. In 1926, Byrd's diary was discovered. It seems, according to the diary, that Byrd actually turned back before reaching the North Pole, because he had a oil leak. This new information means that Amundsen was not only the first person to reach the South Pole, he was also the first person to fly over the North Pole. Because Amundsen died in 1928, he never knew about his North Pole flight's success.

Thank Marconi for Radio!

Do you remember the song "We Built This City (on Rock & Roll)" by Starship?

One of the lines in the song goes like this:

Marconi played the mamba

Listen to the radio

Do you know who Marconi was or what he had to do with the radio?

Guglielmo Marconi was an Italian inventor who lived from 1874 until 1937. He won a Nobel Prize in Physics in 1909 for his work in wireless telegraphy. Before Marconi, we had telegraphs, but they could only be used with a network of cables and wires. Marconi proved that it was possible to not only transmit information via wireless radio waves, but he was the first person to send such signals across the Atlantic Ocean. Other scientists believed, correctly, that wireless radio waves would be lost after travelling approximately 200 miles, because the would continue to travel in a straight line, rather than follow the earth's curvature; however, after much experimentation, Marconi was able to bounce signals off the Earth's ionosphere to reach a receiver in Newfoundland, Canada.

Marconi's wireless system was widely used on ships to maintain contact with the mainland. One of those ships was the RMS Titanic. The radio controllers aboard the Titanic who sent out the distress signal were employed by Marconi's company, Marconi International Marine Communication Company. Only one survived the sinking. Despite his injuries, he helped the radio controllers aboard the rescue ship, RMS Carpathia, to send wireless messages to New York regarding survivors, and to send messages from survivors to loved ones. Marconi's invention saved the lives of 706 passengers that night. Without it, more than 2,223 lives would have been lost.

Think about that the next time you turn on the radio!

Nobel Prize

It is a great honor to win a Nobel Prize. The Prize is given to people whose work over the previous has been a great benefit to mankind. It awarded annually in the categories of chemistry, physics, medicine, literature, and peace.

The Nobel Prize is named for a Swedish scientist named Alfred Nobel. Nobel invented dynomite and other explosives. When he died in 1896, his will stated that most of his fortune should be banked and the interested should be distributed each year to the person or group of people whose work over the past year had the most benefit to mankind. It is believed that Nobel created the award because he felt guilty that his inventions were used for violence.

The first Nobel Prize was awarded in 1901, five years to the day after Nobel's death. The awards are still given each year on December 10. The Nobel Prize is considered the most prestigious prize in the world. Winners are given a cash prize, as well as the gold medal pictured above.

Past Nobel Prize winners include Albert Einstein, Ernest Hemingway, the Dalai Lama, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Nelson Mandela.

For more information, and to find out about this year's winners, go to http://nobelprize.org/ or just watch the news today - December 10, 2010!

Winter 1 2010 Session Begins!

Welcome, new and returning learners! The Winter 1 session begins Monday, December 13.

We mailed all of the materials out yesterday. Online students should have received an email that included links to your classes. Workbook students should receive their materials in the mail over the weekend. If you have not received your materials by Wednesday, please let us know.

Because the holiday season falls in the middle of the Winter 1 session, this session will be seven weeks long, instead of the usual six weeks. Enjoy the break and please have a pleasant and safe holiday season!