| Dear Readers, On March 15, 44 B.C., Julius Caesar was assassinated by a group of senators hoping to restore the Roman republic. A group senators, who called themselves "The Liberators," resented Caesar's power and feared that he had monarchical ambitions that threatened the future of the Roman Republic. Caesar had been warned by a soothsayer to beware of danger on the Ides of March-March 15. However, his trusted friend Brutus convinced him to "cast aside the forebodings of all these people, and come," to the Senate that fateful day. Read our full article, which includes links to translations of primary sources - accounts written contemporaneously with the attack.
Samuel Lightnin' Hopkins was born outside Houston in the farmlands of Centerville, Texas, on March 15, 1912. Blending southern poetry and a loose, all-encompassing handling of the guitar, he brought a Texas accent to the masses with one of the most prolific blues careers in history. Read our full profile.
St. Patrick's Day Activities
St. Patrick's Day is this Thursday, March 17. Here is our blog post on 9 Things You Didn't Know About St. Patrick's Day, which links to our Web Guide and a number of Websites offering lessons plans and activities for class.
Primary Source Subscriptions?
Today, a school librarian sought opinions on the value of a subscription to a Website that curates primary sources. My response:
(1) For it to be worthwhile, teachers must be adept at teaching with primary sources. There is plenty of help on the Web about this topic.
(2) I think you are mostly paying for the curation. While the site appears to have some "premium" images, I think you could find most of this for free on the Internet, if you know where to look.
For example, here's a free site that both offers instruction of teaching with documents, and helps you find them.
http://www.archives.gov/education/lessons/
Here's a fabulous librarian's blog about teaching with documents:
http://www.maryjjohnson.com/primarysourcelibrarian/
Here's our page that will lead you to thousands of free primary sources for social studies, organized by topic:
http://www.sweetsearch.com/socialstudies
Lastly, SweetSearch, A Search Engine for Students, searches only 35,000 curated sites, many of them primary sources, so the primary source sites usually land on the first page of search results. By the next school year, we'll have a tab that enables students to see only primary source links.
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