As a student of history, I encourage others to learn about history as well.
As such, whenever I come across something that may work as a useful resource of knowledge, I examine the offerings and determine if it's worth sharing.
As such, I introduce you - if you haven't met him already - the History Matters Guy.
Created by a UK history professor as a quick video tutorial for students, he'd expanded from rather detailed and long video clips on large parts of European/American/World history to shorter, more focused videos on specific - and oft-times weird - moments that need a bit of clarity.
And like most things British, there is humor involved. Dry, sarcastic, often deep humor. Like this one.
NARRATOR: You had one job.
There's one I like in particular that explained a rather odd situation with Grenada - and a too-brief involvement of U.S. military there.
Not covered in the video: Because of it's Commonwealth status, the US accidentally went to war with the whole Commonwealth by invading Grenada without getting an OK from our allies first. Thatcher let it slide because communism got thumped.
I liked the bit where the poor Governor-General is tied up and wielded like baseball bats by both sides. The professor draws the best "I don't need this" side-eye in the business.
I wonder if the professor is going to come out with a History Matters regarding tonight's UK Parliamentary elections...
Here's one more American-themed history clip for you. THIS WILL BE ON THE AP AMERICAN EXAM (seriously):
(Thanks to James Bissonette, Kelly Moneymaker, Something-something Wolf, Dr. Howard Dr. Fine Dr. Howard, Three-Spinning-Pl..... ow stop hitting me)
Bit of an Update, What Hey: Wouldn't you know it, the History Matters guy released a video about the post-4th situation between the UK and the US, over whether the Brits tried to reclaim the colonies:
You cheeky bastards. Burning down the White House was the plan all along! ...so what was that bit about New Orleans...?
1 comment:
As a kid I was interested in local history because I could connect to it and it was about places I had actually been and was curious about. I even took summer school classes on California and Humboldt county history. Which is where I found out that the wildest thing about gold rush era Northern California was capitalism. The real money to be made in the gold rush wasn't the gold, but supplying the miners, who mostly barely found enough gold to pay the inflated prices for basic supplies that the burgeoning merchant class there were charging.
If you were an indigenous person, though, all bets were off and you were lucky to just be alive and have your land stolen out from under you.
Before they were rounded up and killed, the tribe in what is now Trinity county were perplexed by the white men who kept trying to find an overland passage to Humboldt bay so they could ship in supplies closer to the gold fields. Those white men, led by a man named Gregg, showed up near what is now Weaverville in late October and wanted to set out West to find the bay. The natives tried to dissuade them from this foolishness, unsuccessfully, and had to repeatedly rescue them from deep snow in the mountains. In hindsight, that was probably a bad move, but they did it anyway. I think a really good comic short video could be made from their story.
-Doug in Sugar Pine
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