Moving the Books: The Ornament of the World

We are preparing for Lesser Boy 2.0 and I am losing my home office with the very tall and beautiful built in bookcases. But, I think it is worth it and frankly I am excited to see those shelves filled with toys and kids books! The loss of the office and it’s shelves has required me to move all the books upstairs into the new shared office. Despite the warm weather and flight of stairs this process has been pure joy. The chance to take down books and spend some time with them, it really is better than any Facebook update. The chance to catch up with old friends leads me to this post, the first in what I hope will be many short book reviews.

The Ornament of the World: How Muslims, Jews, and Christians Created a Culture of Tolerance in Medieval Spain by Maria Rosa Menocal

I purchased this book soon after its publication. I remember that I had just read a couple of works of historical fiction about Jews in Iberia and was very interested in the period. Plus it fed into what was then my growing interest into the question of why Jews and Muslims cannot get along (no time for this here, maybe more in another post if I am feeling daring!). The book is a work of high quality popular history, which does not shy away from depth and focus.

I had heard medieval Granada was a truly unique place,  in passing,  in various history texts and have always made a point of mentioning it to students while studying the middle ages, specifically Spain. I never had the details to dig deep and provide interesting examples. The book is full of vignettes and stories about the three religious groups that can provide secondary teachers with just the right hooks for students, or sections can be reproduced for student reading on a specific period.

After I pulled if off the shelf, I Googled the title to look for some quick reviews, links, and the image you see above and I was surprised that the scholarly reviews were all quite positive but the popular reviews (a la Amazon.com) were not. One that jumped out at me called the work “Optimistic History”. This really concerned me, I see the work as focusing on a moment in history that is often neglected and should be held up as a model of what greatness can be when everyone puts down that labels and lives in peace. Then again maybe as a teacher, I am a big optimist.

To wrap up, I would recommend this as a great supplemental read for teachers who teach courses in World History, Religion, if you are teaching AP then WORLD and EUROPEAN HISTORY.

Bonus, Dr. Menocal did her PhD at Penn, I think Albert would really dig this book.

Google Books Uncovers the Motel of Mysteries

This past weekend I presented a short demo lesson, well really a talk, about how I have taught archaeology in the middle school classroom.  The lesson begins with  a reading of David Macauley’s The Motel of Mysteries a really wonderful and all but forgotten book. You can find a synopsis of the here .

Needless to say although it is a wonderful story and very smartly written the illustrations are the focus and the key to a lesson how to study the past through artifacts (i.e. archaeology). Way back in the 1990s when I first started teaching with this book in my 7th grade classroom at the North Cross School, I searched for a way to get the images big enough for everyone to see them in detail. The solution was easy enough, overhead projector. I photocopied the entire book onto acetate, kind of magic lantern like!  This could keep working, but the book also seems to go out of print now and again. Enter Google Books.

Google Books has a copy complete scanned, but you cannot access the whole thing. You can access a good portion of it, enough to make the point to your students, plus if you already have a digital projector you can just pop it right up. Now for the fun part, working around the limitations of Google Books, i.e. copyright protection. (Please note: What I am advocating for is Education Fair Use, I am sure Mr. Macauley would be ok with this)

This post is not meant to focus on literary piracy, but to talk about using this great book in the classroom. The Motel of Mysteries satirizes the craze for all things Egyptian that took place in the late 70s, started by the first tour of King Tut artifacts to visit the States. The book asks the question, what if we have completely misinterpreted the artifacts found in King Tut’s Tomb?

The book challenges students, in a humorous way, to ask questions of the past. A teacher led discussion following the reading, demonstrates that artifacts have to be corroborated with the historical record. Although this does take some of  the romance out of archaeology it teaches the lesson.

The assessment for the activity was:

• Imagine an archaeologist discovers your bedroom 1,000 years in the future, exactly as it were today. What would an analysis look like? What historical record could the archaeologist used to support the findings?

Penn Museum – World History Heaven

American history teachers have Williamsburg, Boston’s Freedom Trail, the city of Philadelphia, and almost anything in their backyard to engage students and visit to inspire students in their courses. What about the teacher of World History? Sure when you get to the present you can take a look in the newspaper or visit New York City (capital of  the world?).
I would like to offer for consideration the ultimate destination, the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology (quick disclaimer: I am an employee of the University of Pennsylvania).  The Penn Museum is a rare museum in the United States, it hold a treasure trove of artifacts and research. Collected over a 100 year period the museum’s collection from from around the globe,  the result of University sponsored research trips and archaeological digs.  The collections spans almost the entire length of human history and touches all corners of the globe. The museum itself can at times feel a bit like a time warp, most galleries are lacking multimedia (and in some cases A/C) but what is missing in bells and whistles is more than made up in by the overwhelming amount of historic artifacts.

If you cannot make it to Philadelphia, the museum has recently relaunched it’s website. The site is deep and focuses predominantly on the past and present research project the museum sponsors. You can find digital reproduction of artifacts and research reports from over 100 years of archaeological work on the site, and recent conversations with the museum indicates that the digital collections on the site is just a first taste of what will be a comprehensive digital archive.

Armesto’s The World – First Impressions

I just received a examination copy of Felipe Fernandez-Armesto’s massive world history text. The World: A History it is one of the newest entries into the growing genre of world history textbooks (It was actually published in 2008, but what I received was the new 2nd edition).  Since the addition of the AP World History course into high schools in 2000, there has been a steady growth in the World History textbook market. I have been a fan of the course and how the AP has created a trickle down effect to other World History courses. Teaching either the AP or course inspired by the AP curriculum allows a teacher to paint a sweeping picture of the history of the world, allowing students to see that the concept of globalization was not invented at the end of the Cold War.

I have just begun to dig into this book, but I have been a huge fan of Dr. Fernandez-Armesto’s work for over 10 years.  His scholarship is  BIG history, looking at large concepts like interaction of peoples and the impact of technology on civilizations on the macro level. I remember in the 1999-2000 school year using his book Millennium, which that same year was the basis of a great CNN docu-news series of the same name. More recently I have used his work Civilizations to craft “super lectures” for my methods classes.

Below are some more in-depth reviews of the book, I hope to post my own soon:

• Review from World History Connected
• Reveiw from Academic Questions