Geography Blog

I will be away with the grade 10 InS class on Friday. Here is your work for today.

We have been discussing history and how we use sources (primary and secondary) to learn and study the past.

Today, you will look at sources in order to write the obituary of someone you admire. An obituary is a notice of a death, usually in a newspaper, typically including a brief biography of the deceased person.

First,get in groups of 2 or 3 and quickly choose a celebrity (living or dead) whom you admire.

Then, you will have the rest of the period to research that person’s life story. You may start with Wikipedia, but it cannot be a source you use for your actual project.

Once you have a good idea of the person’s life, think of the events that you think were the most important in his or her life? What should be included or not in their obituary?

Then, create a google doc titled YOUR-NAME-Gr8-Humanities-Celebrity-Obtuary-March-14-2014. Share me on the document, with an email notification. 

Write a 200 word (no more) obituary on the Google document:

• Give a summary of his/her career and character.
• Highlight some particular achievements
• Give the assessment of his/her overall impact on his/her times.
• Include a picture that you feel best represents his/her lifetime image (The way they will be remembered)
• Have a bibliography with at least 4 sources (no Wikipedia)

Period 2:

In your groups, compare each other’s obituaries. Read them out loud and explain why you chose to include the information you did.

Then, on the same google doc, write a reflection answering these question:

• What were the main differences between the obituaries? Did this make for a different storyline?
• Why did some of you decided to include or omit negative parts of his/her life?
• Do you think people are remembered the way they want to be, or does history pass judgement, positive or negative, on people after their death?
• Has social media changed the way we remember people?

Due Tuesday March 18th at the beginning of class.

First we will read; A Point Of View: What is history’s role in society? and have a socratic debate about the definition and role of history in our lives. 

How do we research history? How do we know what “really” happened in the past?

Consider the many different perspectives in history:

• Political history: the story of government, political leaders, electoral activities, the making of policy, and the interaction of branches of government
• Diplomatic history: the study of the relations between nations, diplomats, and ideas of diplomacy
• Social history: the study of ways and customs, of family, education, children, demography (population change), and voluntary institutions (churches, for example)
• Cultural history: the study of language and its uses, of the arts and literature, sport, and entertainment, in constructing cultural categories
• Economic history: the study of how an entire system of production and consumption (or of any of its parts) works, of markets, industry, credit, and working people at all levels of the system
• Intellectual history: the study of ideology and epistemology, analyzing how ideas affect human actions and how the material world affects human ideas
• People’s history:  history from below, or folk history is a type of historical narrative which attempts to account for historical events from the perspective of common people rather than political and other leaders.
• Can you think of others?

Exercise: 

Click on this documents. Make a copy, add your name in the title, and categorize each event as one of the above perspectives of history. Explain why you put it in that category. Things can be in more than one category or may not fit any category, in which case you can add your own.