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Posts Tagged ‘Bentley Boyd’
Rustling the old leaves
Written on Monday, March 17th, 2008 [permanent link]For all the exploring I do with my boys, we still make the classic Locals mistake! We have lived in Virginia for 15 years and still missed some great sites nearby. We’ve travelled hundreds of miles to climb rocks at Gettysburg, view the Cyclorama painting in Atlanta and walk the woods of Shiloh, but we had never stood at Cold Harbor. So a few weekends ago we took a traipse through Civil War sites around Richmond.
We were amazed at how many defensive earthworks survive in the woods. Almost 150 years after they made the difference between life and death for some soldiers, these earthworks still run right behind people’s backyards! I always get a better sense of a story or event when I can walk the land where it happened, and it was chilling and beautiful to see how the defensive earthworks still snake over the land around Richmond
Truman has a great eye for detail, and he discovered that the cannons posted outside one farmhouse used in the 1862 Seven Days Battle were actually cast in 1863, as we could see from a stamp in the barrel. He was . . . horrified!
And this photo is not of Grant’s tomb — it’s his cabin. Truman stands guard over the place where Union General Ulysses S. Grant stayed on a bluff above the James River during the months of siege against the Confederate railline at Petersburg, Virginia, just south of Richmond. It’s part of a pretty park in what is now Hopewell, VA, a place we’ve driven through to get to church for 14 years – and we’d NEVER stopped until after church this rainy Sunday!
Tags: Bentley Boyd, Chester Comix, Civil War, Confederate, Ulysses S. Grant, Virginia
Posted in Civil War | No Comments »
Kempsville Elementary Chalk Talk
Written on Tuesday, February 19th, 2008 [permanent link]
How do you hold the attention of 500 elementary students on a rainy day? Show them how a few penlines makes anyone into a superdude! I draw three versions of myself in my Author’s Purpose talks, to show how a powerful imagination can reshape reality (and there is no greater reshaping to be done than to make me into a superhero!).
I had a great time at Kempsville Elementary in Virginia Beach last week. After the opening session in the cafeteria I did break-out sessions with two classes at a time, and we drew up a storm. A brainstorm – there were drawings about Ben Franklin’s kite hypothesis, Thomas Jefferson’s narrow miss of a hangman’s noose and Abe Lincoln’s old magic hat. We even explained why the Powhatan Indians built longhouses out of the reeds and sticks on the ground around them — because no one had invented “Longhouse Depot” for Saturday errands yet.
Elementary students love feeling the power of their own creativity. So did I – so I never gave it up!
Tags: Author's Purpose, Bentley Boyd, Chester the Crab, graphic novels, Kempsville Elemenetary, Virginia Beach
Posted in Author's Purpose | No Comments »
American’s Back!
Written on Thursday, February 7th, 2008 [permanent link]
A few weeks after I posted a blog here about the death of the magazine American Heritage, I was wandering through my local Barnes and Noble and the American Heritage logo jumped out at me! It’s BACK!!
Editor Edwin S. Grosvenor has reinvented it as a quarterly magazine pushing History in the headlines – just look at that cover of women soldiers in the Middle East! Throughout the mag there is a push to use History to understand what the news is now.
I’m happy to see print isn’t dead. But there’s no mistaking the priorities here. The mag is now published only a third as often as it once was, and it really becomes a glossy marketing tool for the staff’s website (which carries the tagline “History’s homepage”). The good news is that the mag and the website are in step in their new, lively dance. The website features:
* the news of actor Heath Ledger’s death because he starred in the well-received historical movie “The Patriot”
* easy-to-find blog entries, including one about how to volunteer on an archaeological dig at Mount Vernon
* news of the rediscovery of photos of Lincoln’s second inauguration, which had been mislabeled long ago
It’s a great resource for teachers making the case to students that History is new everyday. It’s been a great resource for me! www.americanheritage.com
Tags: American Heritage, Bentley Boyd, Chester Comix, historian, History's Homepage
Posted in History Book Review | 2 Comments »
