 Though people have lived in the Yellowstone National Park region for at least 10,000 years, it was only “discovered” in 1807 by mountain man John Colter. People scoffed at his descriptions of the famous geysers and other features as “fire and brimstone.” Succeeding descriptions by other men during the following decades received similar dismissals. An expedition led by geologist Ferdinand Hayden in 1871 established the reality of Colter’s observations. Its members included noted landscape painter Thomas Moran and photographer William Henry Jackson. Hayden immediately realized the potential of the area. Aided by the stunning images Moran and Jackson produced, he persuaded Congress to set aside the area as a national park—the first in the United States and perhaps the world. President Ulysses S. Grant signed the bill establishing the park on March 1, 1872. It was hardly an instant success. The new park’s remoteness and lack of amenities made it accessible only to the hardiest of travelers. Only about 300 people visited it in the first year. Compounding the problem of access was the disapproval of many people who lived near the park. They wanted to continue to hunt its wildlife and cut down its trees for lumber as well as begin to mine its minerals. It was difficult to exercise any control over the situation. Congress refused to provide more than a pittance for the park’s protection. A key development came in 1886 when US Army General Phil Sheridan, acting on his own authority, ordered troops to take control of Yellowstone Park. They built Camp Sheridan (later renamed Fort Yellowstone) inside the park boundaries. Though their presence helped curb poaching and mining, they had little authority to punish offenders. George Bird Grinnell, publisher of Forest and Stream magazine and founder of the Audubon Society, had long promoted the park even though he lived in New York City. He linked up with rising politician (and future president) Theodore Roosevelt to take advantage of a notorious poaching incident in 1894 and help pass the Lacey Act the same year. The new law provided “teeth” to prosecute lawbreakers. By then, travel to Yellowstone had become a little easier. Railroads dropped off visitors near the park entrance. They boarded stagecoaches which took them to newly established lodging facilities. And by 1916, when Yellowstone became part of the newly established National Park Service, automobiles were making the park much more accessible. Today more than 3 million people thrill to Yellowstone’s natural wonders every year.  Ferdinand V. Hayden's map of Yellowstone National Park, 1871
 National Grand Canyon located in the Yellowstone Park  Jim Whiting was a voracious reader when he was a kid, and now he has turned into a voracious writer. He writes books on adventure, sports, history, and most of all, he writes about people. One of his biography series is "Modern Role Models," featuring such popular titles as David Beckham, Jeff Gordon, and Tim Duncan. For more information on the series, click here. MLA 8 Citation Whiting, Jim. "The Birth and Growing Pains of the First National Park." Nonfiction Minute, iNK Think Tank, 8 May 2018, www.nonfictionminute.org/ the-nonfiction-minute/The-Birth-and-Growing-Pains-of-the-First-National-Park. 
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 While helping to win his country’s independence from Great Britain, Captain C. W. Peale painted General George Washington’s portrait. Cleveland Museum of Art via Wikimedia It was December 24, 1801, when bundled-up Philadelphians bought their 25¢ tickets and entered Peale’s Museum on Fifth Street. Once inside, they saw the owner’s paintings. And I’ll bet you have too—even if you’ve never heard of Charles Willson Peale. This one, for instance, of his fellow Revolutionary War soldier: Visitors to the museum had seen Peale’s collections of butterflies, too, and other nature specimens, such as the fossilized teeth of mysterious beasts. (Who knew then that animals went extinct? Hardly anybody!) But on this extra-special Christmas Eve, people probably hurried past Peale’s handmade dioramas, with the lifelike bodies of birds and mammals that he’d stuffed and posed. Today, Mr. C.W. Peale himself was introducing his NEW ATTRACTION. People had paid an extra 50¢ just to see it! Now they looked up, up, UP at it, and were astonished. What animal’s skeleton was eleven feet tall? Seventeen and a half feet from its bony tail to the tips of its giant, curving tusks? It was a mastodon.  It was not clear, in 1801, that mastodons weren’t the same as wooly mammoths. Wikimedia No one had seen a live mastodon in more than ten thousand years. So how did one’s bones get to Philadelphia? Mr. Peale and other naturalists such as Thomas Jefferson, the new President-elect, wrote to one another about their studies, collections, and the latest discoveries, such as like these huge, mysterious bones in southern New York state. Some of North America’s long-gone mastodons ended up there, by the Hudson River. As soon as he heard about them, Peale hurried to see them. Then he not only figured a way to dig up the bones, but he also painted a picture of the huge excavation!  In Peale’s painting “Exhumation of the Mastodon,” he shows some of his children (He had seventeen!) and how he had to pump water out of the beast’s muddy grave. Wikimedia Peale’s son, Rembrandt helped to draw and assemble the bones:  Rembrandt Peale drew the mastodon skeleton that he’d helped his dad to assemble. C.W. taught his many children – seventeen in all, many named after artists and scientists he admired – to draw, study, and help with his nature exhibits. Wikimedia For years, people paid to marvel at the enormous, sensational skeleton. Later on, after Mr. Peale’s death in 1827, his museum slowly went broke. P.T. Barnum, the circus showman, bought a lot of his exhibits. Later still, they were destroyed in a fire. And the mighty bones of the mastodon wound up lost for a hundred years, until the skeleton turned up in Germany, where you can see it today.  Mr. Peale painted himself in his marvelous museum, where people could marvel at and learn from the works of Nature. Wikimedia
 In Thomas Jefferson, her sixth presidential biography for National Geographic, Cheryl Harness illuminates the many sides of Thomas Jefferson: scientist, lawyer, farmer, architect, diplomat, inventor, musician, philosopher, author of the Declaration of Independence, founder of the University of Virginia, and third president of the United States. Readers meet this extraordinary man of contradictions: a genius who proclaimed that "All men are created equal" and championed the rights of "Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness," while at the same time living a life that depended on the enforced labor of slaves. MLA 8 Citation Harness, Cheryl. "The Big Deal in Mr. Peale's Museum." Nonfiction Minute, iNK Think Tank, 18 Apr. 2018, www.nonfictionminute.org/the-nonfiction-minute/ The-Big-Deal-in Mr-Peales-Museum. 
José Batlló’s house in Barcelona, Spain, was looking a little shabby. So, Batlló turned to Antoni Gaudí, the city’s most inventive architect—and got a house that astonished all Barcelona. Its walls, studded with glittering blue and green shards, billowed like the sea. Some windows were egg-shaped, others had balconies resembling giant masks. The roof was more fanciful. Eerily iridescent, colors shifted from bluish green to golden orange. With scale-like tiles, it reminded people of a dinosaur’s backbone. Because of the oval windows, people called it the House of Yawns. Others, noticing columns that looked like shinbones, christened it House of Bones. Born in 1852 into a family of coppersmiths, Gaudí grew up in a small town near Barcelona. As a boy he roamed the countryside making sketches, living in his own world of discovery and fantasy. Becoming an architect was his childhood dream. He quickly developed a style entirely his own, drawing inspiration from nature rather than anything man-made. He was disdainful of straight lines. “They belong to men,” he used to say. “Curved lines belong to God.” Near Casa Battló stands another Gaudi creation: Casa Mila, a six-story apartment building which, because of its soft swelling shapes, has been likened to human lips, pastries, and a hornet’s nest. Still, many people love it. Among Gaudí’s accomplishments is what may be the world’s quirkiest park: Park Güell, a kind of fairy-tale fantasy, with two dancing gazelles flanking the entrance, a giant tile-encrusted lizard, and a roof topped with upturned coffee cups. Deeply religious, Gaudí spent his last twenty years working on Sagrada Familia, a cathedral unlike any other, with eighteen towers symbolizing the apostles, evangelists, the Virgin Mary, and Christ. It became such an obsession with Gaudí that he set up residence at the worksite. Once something of a dandy, he became increasingly careless with his appearance. This neglect may have contributed to his death. On a spring evening in 1926, taking one last loving look at a newly completed Sagrada Familia tower, he stepped off the sidewalk and was hit by a streetcar and knocked unconscious. Because of wretched clothing he was taken for a tramp and not immediately brought to a hospital. Gaudí was finally recognized, but was beyond help and died three days later.
 Gaudi's Park Güell is one of the most famous sights of Barcelona. welcoming more than 4 million visitors a year. Art by Roxie Munro.  The tile-encrusted salamander in Park Güell has become a symbol of Gaudí's work. Wikimedia  Check your favorite bookstore for Roxie's latest book coming out on February 6th. Rodent Rascals has already garnered three starred reviews with Roxie's fabulous actual-sized artwork accompanied by fascinating facts about 21 rodents who share our world. Roxie is a member of Authors on Call where she can visit your classroom and show you her work herself. Read more about here here. MLA 8 Citation Munro, Roxie. "The Architect Who Hated Straight Lines." Nonfiction Minute`, iNK Think Tank, 31 Jan. 2018, www.nonfictionminute.org/the-nonfiction-minute/ the-architect-who-hated-straight-lines.  
Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio (1571 – 1610) came from humble origins, the son of a stonecutter. He moved from Milan to Rome while in his twenties, looking for painting commissions in the newly built churches and palazzi that were springing up there. Caravaggio became known as a master of realism—populating his paintings with contemporary, ordinary people—many of them rogues and ruffians from the mean streets of Rome. People were shocked by his realistic paintings. They were used to looking at devotional paintings showing choirs of angels and golden shafts of light beaming down from heaven. A big part of Caravaggio’s problem is that he felt (correctly) that he was underappreciated as a painter. He was hot-headed and quick to pick a fight, and kept getting into trouble. In 1594 he was arrested for hurling a plate of artichokes at a waiter, and he was forever getting involved in Roman street brawls. In 1606 he really messed up. While he was playing an early version of tennis, palla a corda, with a close friend, a wealthy acquaintance named Ranuccio Tomassoni walked by with a couple of his relatives and challenged Caravaggio to a game. They played. Each thought he’d won. They drew swords. They chased each other around, hacking away. Caravaggio was slashed twice, but then buried his blade in his enemy’s stomach. Ranuccio died shortly thereafter, and Caravaggio’s friends dragged Caravaggio away to a nearby house to bandage him up. The police came after him, and Caravaggio fled for the hills outside of Rome. He became a fugitive from the law. He was convicted of murder in absentia, and sentenced to death. For the next few years, he continued to paint while on the run. His reputation as an artist was growing. Still pursued by the law, he fled to Malta in 1607, got in trouble there, and fled to Sicily. By 1609, he was widely known as a master painter, and he traveled to Naples to await word from the Pope that his petition to be pardoned might be approved. While there, he was ambushed by four assassins, who stabbed him around the face and neck. He managed to survive the attack, but was left disfigured. When his papal pardon finally arrived, in 1610, he set sail for Rome but fell ill on the way with a fever—probably malaria. He died in 1610.  An early self-portrait by Caravaggio, called “Sick Bacchus,” about 1593. His yellowish skin tone and eyes indicate he may have been suffering from a liver illness, or just a bad bout of malaria. Wikimedia  Death of the Virgin 1604-6. Caravaggio’s painting of the dead Virgin Mary shocked people. She is depicted in a not very holy-looking pose, with dirty, swollen feet. He also used a prostitute as a model. Wikimedia  Sara Albee's latest book is Poison: Deadly Deeds, Perilous Professions, and Murderous Medicines. , Vicki Cobb reviewed this fascinating book-- poisons are in more places than you can ever imagine. Get A Dose Of This! MLA 8 Citation Albee, Sarah. "Renaissance Bad Boy." Nonfiction Minute, iNK Think Tank, 5 Jan. 2018, www.nonfictionminute.org/Renaissance-Bad-Boy.  
Kryptos stands in the shadow of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) headquarters in Langley, Virginia−waiting to be revealed. No, Kryptos is not a foreign spy. It is a mysterious sculpture. The large, curved copper monument is covered with 1800 cut-out letters that together form four separate coded messages. The sculpture was created by artist Jim Sanborn who was chosen to create it for the grounds of the CIA. When Sanborn began the work, he was not an expert in codes. He learned about writing codes and breaking codes from Ed Scheidt of the CIA. Kryptos stood there, like a silent challenge, after it was installed in 1990. Two years later men from the National Security Agency (NSA) set out to crack the code and they did solve the first three messages. Then in 1998 one man at the CIA also solved the first three. But neither agency publicly announced they had done it. Nine years after Kryptos was unveiled, Jim Gillogly was the first person who did not work for a government agency who solved the first three of four messages. These three messages are a poetic phrase, coordinates for a location on the grounds of the CIA, and an account of the opening of King Tut’s tomb. The fourth message is the shortest and only has 97 letters. For more than twenty years people all over the world have tried to figure it out. Sanborn, the creator of Kryptos, has grown impatient that the last section of Kryptos has not been solved. In 2010 he released a clue and revealed that one six word section of letters were code for the word “BERLIN.” Still no one could solve it. In November 2014, Sanborn announced another clue, a five word section of letters were code for the word “CLOCK.” Still the fourth message on the Kryptos code has not been broken. It remains one of the world’s most famous unsolved mysteries. Would you like to try to crack the fourth code of Kryptos? Here it is: OBKR UOXOGHULBSOLIFBBWFLRVQQPRNGKSSO TWTQSJQSSEKZZWATJKLUDIAWINFBNYP VTTMZFPKWGDKZXTJCDIGKUHUAUEKCAR  This image of the CIA's Kryptos sculpture is provided by the sculptor, Jim Sanborn, via Wikimedia Commons.  Carla Killough McClafferty writes about international intrigue in her book In Defiance of Hitler: The Secret Mission of Varian Fry. In this book you will learn the true story of how one American man traveled to France during World War II with the intention of rescuing refugees from the Nazis. Fry lived a double life as he secretly smuggled people out of Europe. Ultimately Varian Fry’s efforts saved the lives of more than 2000 people. Carla McClafferty 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.
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