Do you know that the Plains Indians lived in North America for centuries before they got horses? These people were nomads, moving from place to place through the seasons as they sought protection from winter weather and hunted for buffalo, their main source of food. Can you imagine how difficult it was, walking many miles in soft moccasins across the rough prairie ground with only dogs to help carry their possessions? The dogs dragged goods on a travois, a set of wooden poles strapped together. A big, strong dog could manage a load of just seventy-five pounds or less. It took an Indian band a long time to get from one place to another, and the people couldn’t bring very many things along. Then, in the 1500s, Spanish explorers and settlers brought horses with them to North America. Indian slaves in the Southwest took care of the horses on Spanish ranches but were forbidden to ride them. Of course they figured out how useful horses were, and soon the Apache tribe had horses. In 1680, the Indians rebelled against the Spanish, driving them out of New Mexico and forcing them to leave many horses behind. From then on, horses spread northward and by 1750, tribes all the way into Canada had horses. These powerful animals revolutionized Indian culture. With horses, the Indians could ride instead of walk. They could bring along more goods, as a horse could drag a travois load of three hundred pounds. Just five horses could transport everything needed by a family, including enough buffalo hides to make a big, comfortable tepee. Old or sick family members could be carried along on a travois as well. Just as the Indians were embracing the horse, European Americans were moving into Indian lands, forcing some tribes to move westward onto the prairie and adopt the horse culture. Within a generation, Indians became supreme horsemen and used horses to hunt buffalo and to wage warfare. They fought against one another as well as against the U.S. Army, which was trying to clear the way for white settlers to make their homes on the prairie. By the late 1800s, the Plains tribes had been beaten and forced to live on reservations. The Indians still value their horses, competing with them in rodeos and races as well as for recreation and transportation.  Horses made life much easier for the Plains Indians. People could ride the horses at the same time the horses pulled the travois that carried their goods. Moving camp, Edward Curtis, courtesy Library of Congress  The annual Crow Fair draws twenty to thirty thousand Indians from Canada and the U.S. to eastern Montana to celebrate and compete. Every morning, a parade of Indians showing off their beautiful costumes and horse gear passes through the camp. Wm. Munoz  These Crow chiefs proudly show off their costumes and beadwork for photographer Edward Curtis, who documented many Indian cultures during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Edward Curtis. Courtesy Library of Congress.  Every winter, a group of young Indians show their pride in their cultural traditions by challenging themselves to repeat the frigid 287-mile ride of Lakota Chief Big Foot and his band to Wounded Knee, South Dakota, where they were massacred by the U.S. Army in December, 1890. Indian Teens, Wm. Munoz  Dorothy Hinshaw Patent says about her book, The Horse and the Plains Indians: "This book was truly a labor of love and respect. Within a few years of acquiring horses after the Spanish brought them to America, Indians became among the greatest horsemen in the world and created vibrant new horse-related aspects to their cultures. I wanted to communicate these achievements to young people and to show them that despite all they have suffered at the hands of European American culture, the Indians heart and soul attachment to horses endures." For more information, click here. Dorothy Hinshaw Patent is a member of iNK's Authors on Call and is available for classroom programs through Field Trip Zoom, a terrific technology that requires only a computer, wifi, and a webcam. Click here to find out more. MLA 8 Citation Patent, Dorothy Hinshaw. "How Horses Revolutionized the Lives of the Plains Indians." Nonfiction Minute, iNK Think Tank, 5 Mar. 2018, www.nonfictionminute.org/the-nonfiction-minute/ How-Horses-Revolutionized-the-Lives-of-the-Plains-Indians. 
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One reviewer claimed that my book, The Roots of Rap: 16 Bars on the 4 Pillars of Hip Hop, surprised him. “I didn’t take Carole Weatherford for a hip-hop head,” he confessed. Maybe not. But I have designed and taught a hip-hop course for college students. I write poetry and stories steeped in oral traditions. And I was raised on family lore; street, playground and handclap rhymes; proverbs; spirituals; and the call-and-response of the black church. As a child, I also read Langston Hughes poems and chanted James Brown’s anthem, “Say It Loud (I’m Black and I’m Proud.” I later tuned into Gil Scott Heron’s spoken word manifesto, “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised.” Back in the day, I partied to Whodini, the Fat Boys and Run DMC, but did not fathom the power of rap until 1981 when I heard “The Message” by Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five. The song confirmed for me that rap is rooted in resistance. Rap originated in the late 1970s among alienated black and Latino youth in the Bronx, Harlem and Brooklyn. The genre has since come of age, and rappers have won Grammys for best album (The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill in 1999) and best song of the year (Childish Gambino’s “This Is America” in 2019). In 2017, Kendrick Lamar won the Pulitzer prize for music, a first for rapper. Today, hip hop is the language of global youth culture. Rap reveries have replaced hoop dreams, especially as a male rite of passage. A vehicle for self-expression, hip hop gives youth validation and agency. Despite rap’s rebellious vibe, the genre has form and makes use of figurative language. Here’s how I harness the power of hip hop in the classroom. I discuss rap’s roots in oral traditions and its use of poetic elements. I show documentaries on the pillars of hip hop: graffiti, breakdancing, deejaying and emceeing. We study how rap influences pop culture, politics and commerce. Finally, I get students to write homages, confessional lyrics, social commentary and/or advertising jingles. My son and collaborator, poet/illustrator Jeffery Weatherford, amps up the excitement with a mini-studio that lets students download beats, record lyrics and mix audio. Mobile apps can produce similar results. Like the genre itself, rap workshops convey to students that their voices deserve to be heard.
 Carole Boston Weatherford has written many books inspired by oral traditions, including The Roots of Rap: 16 Bars on the 4 Pillars of Hip Hop, illustrated by Frank Morrison. Here is Vicki Cobb's review. 
Where am I? This was a cruel question for sailors before John Harrison.
In 1707 a fleet of British warships mistook their location and sailed onto the rocky Scilly Islands. Two thousand men drowned. The Royal Navy offered a prize of £20,000 (3 to 4 million dollars in today’s money) for anyone who could provide a way for ships to find their position. North and south latitude wasn’t the problem. Tables gave the positions of the sun, moon and stars above or below the equator. Navigators could use a sextant (it measures angles between the ocean horizon and a celestial body) to find a ship’s position north or south. But the only way of knowing your position on the spinning earth, east or west, is to know what time it is, within seconds, at the Royal Observatory at Greenwich, England—0° longitude. Sailors needed a seagoing clock! Clocks in the 1700’s were slow or fast by several minutes a week. Not good enough. And they measured seconds with a pendulum, which wouldn’t work on a rocking, rolling ship. John Harrison was a fine carpenter who became fascinated by accurate timekeeping. He built big clocks for houses, barns and churches. Bit by bit he made them more accurate. He set out to win the longitude prize. He invented ways for a clock to compensate for temperature, so they wouldn’t run slower when it got warmer. He invented a nearly frictionless escapement (the mechanism that “counts” the tick-tocks with the clock’s hands). He overcame the pendulum problem with pivoted “dumbells” that rocked back and forth with springs. Harrison worked for five years to construct the large and beautiful Sea Clock #1. In 1736 Harrison and his clock took a trip on HMS Centurion to Lisbon, Portugal, and back. Harrison was terribly seasick. His clock was not. It was a great success. But the Royal Navy wouldn’t award the prize. It dithered for the next 37 years. Harrison worked on, making his sea clocks smaller and more accurate. In 1761 he sent his son William on a trial run with Sea Watch #1 to Jamaica and back. The smaller clock worked beautifully. The Navy kept dithering. Not until Harrison was 80 years old was part of the prize awarded to him. He died three years later but he knew that he had changed the world, solving one of our most important, most perplexing problems: where are we?
Harrison's first sea clock (H1) can be seen on display at the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich, England. Phantom Photographer via Wikimedia
An important part of Jan Adkins' considerable output is books of non-fiction for young people, his special audience. He also writes humor and feature articles for several magazines. He has illustrated most of his books and contributes illustrations to dozens of mainstream magazines, especially on marine and technical subjects. Have a look at his Wooden Ship: The Building of a Wooden Sailing Vessel in 1870, a chronicle of a fictional whale ship describing and illustrating the details of her building from design to launching.
Jan Adkins is a member of iNK's Authors on Call and is available for classroom programs through Field Trip Zoom, a terrific technology that requires only a computer, wifi, and a webcam. Click here to find out more.
MLA 8 Citation
Adkins, Jan. "Tick Tock: A Carpenter Solves an Ocean Riddle." Nonfiction Minute, iNK Think Tank, 19 Mar. 2018, www.nonfictionminute.org/ the-nonfiction-minute/Tick-Tock-A-Carpenter-Solves-an-Ocean-Riddle. 
 Baseball fans were fascinated by an article in Sports Illustrated magazine just before the start of the 1985 major league baseball season. It profiled Hayden Siddhartha “Sidd” Finch, a rookie pitcher who was in spring training with the New York Mets. According to the article, he could throw a baseball at a top speed of nearly 170 miles per hour. That was twice as fast as many other pitchers. Photos accompanying the article showed Finch with his excited teammates. Teams that would be playing the Mets contacted the league office. They feared that their batters would be in danger when Finch was on the mound. There was, however, a problem with the article. “Finch” in the photos was actually Joe Berton, an Illinois junior high school art teacher. The article’s subtitle provided a clue about its real purpose: “He’s a pitcher, part yogi and part recluse. Impressively liberated from our opulent life-style, Sidd’s deciding about yoga —and his future in baseball.” The first letters spell “Happy April Fool’s Day—ah Fib.” The issue was dated April 1. The Sidd Finch saga is one of the best-known hoaxes that occur every year on April Fool’s Day. It’s not clear when the custom of playing tricks on this day originated, or even why. The first clear reference seems to come in 1561, in a work by Belgian poet Eduard De Dene. A nobleman orders his servant to run silly errands on April 1. De Dene was almost certainly making a reference to a custom that was already well-established. By the end of the following century, it had spread to England. In 1698, a London newspaper reported that “Yesterday being the first of April, several persons were sent to the Tower Ditch to see the Lions washed.” This was a prank that city dwellers played on bumpkins from rural areas. There were no lions, nor was there any washing. In Scotland, April Fool’s Day actually became two days. The first day was “hunting the gowk” (a gowk was a cuckoo bird, a symbol of fools), sending people on ridiculous errands. Then came Tailie Day, which involved pinning tails or “kick me” signs on people’s butts. It’s not clear when April Fool’s Day came to the United States. But today Americans love “celebrating” it. So if someone tells you a story that seems like a hoax or a joke, check the calendar. If it’s April 1, someone is probably fooling you.
 Taco Bell Corporation took out an ad that ran in six major newspapers on 1 April 1996, announcing it had bought the Liberty Bell and was renaming it the Taco Liberty Bell. Hundreds of outraged citizens called in to express their anger.  Crack! It's going, going, it's gone! Professional players make it look easy to hit a home run. But without science, they’d be left in the batter’s box. In The Science of Hitting a Home Run, you can take a closer look at the science that makes a home run possible. Check this and Jim's many other titles out at his website. MLA 8 Citation Whiting, Jim. "April Fool's Day." Nonfiction Minute, iNK Think Tank, 30 Mar. 2018, www.nonfictionminute.org/April-Fools-Day.  
One of the joys of research is uncovering the unexpected. Most recently this happened to me when I was writing Charles Dickens and the Street Children of London. Dickens was a patron of the London Foundling Hospital, a charitable home for orphans founded in 1741. (Foundlings were children whose parents were unknown, and hospital meant shelter back then.)
Researching the Foundling, I learned that a century before Dickens, German composer George Frederic Handel was one of its greatest benefactors. I thought this must be a mistake since he was German. Curious, I took a side journey into Handel’s life to find out. Brimming with musical talent, Handel moved to London at age 26 to find work and quickly became a popular composer and performer. He decided to stay, eventually becoming a British citizen. Londoners readily recognized him, for he was a great bear of a man who wore stylish clothes and an enormous wig. He spoke with a thick German accent, and when angry, his words tumbled together in German, Italian, and English. He never married or had children, but he had a big heart and readily assisted the needy and destitute, especially children. It’s been said that no other composer contributed so much to the relief of human suffering. He often helped charities by donating all proceeds from a concert. In 1749 when he learned that the Foundling did not have funds for its proposed chapel, he offered a concert to introduce his newest composition, Messiah. The packed audience was enthralled. A second concert quickly sold out, and the chapel was completed. Handel became a member of the Foundling’s Board of Governors and continued his financial assistance by personally directing Messiah in the chapel at least once a year, always to overflow crowds. When the king attended a performance, he stood for the “Hallelujah Chorus”--and audiences have been standing ever since. Because Handel knew people would pay to see it, he willed the Foundling an original copy of Messiah. I listen to Handel’s compositions differently now. It’s no longer mere music from the past; instead, it feels alive, created by a fascinating man with a charitable heart who helped provide for orphans. I attend Messiah whenever I can, and when we all stand for the “Hallelujah Chorus,” I smile to myself, feeling a strong connection to history, for I know exactly why we are doing it. 
George Frideric Handel
As much as Andrea Warren loves writing, she also loves research. Getting distracted can pay off, because she's now writing a book on a subject she discovered while researching another book. To learn more about Handel and how he not only helped the poor but also inspired Charles Dickens, take a look at Warren's book "Charles Dickens and the Street Children of London." You'll learn more about it and about her other books at www.AndreaWarren.com . Andrea is also a member of Authors on Call. Bring her into your classroom via interactive video conferencing. Here’s where you can learn more about her and her programs. |
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For Vicki Cobb's BLOG (nonfiction book reviews, info on education, more), click here: Vicki's Blog *NEWSFLASH *
The NCSS-CBC Notable Social Studies Committee is pleased to inform you that 30 People Who Changed the World has been selected for Notable Social Studies Trade Books for Young People 2018, a cooperative project of the National Council for the Social Studies (NCSS) & the Children’s Book Council Categories
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