State of the Jen

[jenett]

Actually, better than it might be. I'm still not great, but today I feel like I sort of have a brain and am not meaningless at work. Which is rather nice. (I am still quite tired, and I have a headache and the weird crankiness in my neck, but slight brain is nice.)

I have:
- helped a student find resources on Tokugawa Japan

- found a primary source for students focusing on the Rex v. Bourne case in England (one of the early abortion cases)

- checked out at least 20 books (yay for our circ stats)

- had conversations reassuring nice people that primary source documents for Queen Elizabeth are fairly easy to come by, and please do not worry. (But not going further, because they're still in the 'picking a topic' stage of the process.)

- contemplated finding resources on Kurdistan and the role of Kurds in the history of Iraq (we don't have much, and I should find something to add probably.)

- and need to track down a decent and reliable book about the history of the European witch trials (we have tons on Salem, but not so much on Europe.)

- going through this, had a moment almost every time of going "Well, if I can't track stuff down, I can pick X's brain about it" and then going "Oh, right, this is why they talk about personal learning networks" - because really, dear readers, you are neat people who know tons of interesting things.

On the note of things I have looked up for people, I'm continuing to see a trend that's really noticeable in the last year: people crossing over into doing a major research project on something unfamiliar to their experience. We have two groups doing things on abortion related issues (non-US, as this is their World Cultures class): both are groups of boys. We've got several people from one minority group doing research about a different one. And we have remarkably few doing the Big Obvious topics, which is really lovely.

I am, however, still hoping someone in one of these classes will do a project about Zepplins. (this year's History Day topic is invention and innovation, so they're particularly applicable.)

And finally
... had many people admire my word of the day (We have a white board easel upon which either I or the minion puts up quirky things - sometimes trivia, sometimes brain teasers, sometimes words.)

Today's is colubrine, which is a word for things of, relating to, or referring to snakes, and is one I'd never heard before. (I was familiar with the two other ones of that kind: serpentine and ophidian). It meant I got to draw a nice picture of a snake on the white board. (And next time I'm by an office supply store, I need to buy markers in more colors. My artistic range is limited by the black/blue/green/red ones work stocks currently.)

Comments

[wild_irises]

I didn't know "colubrine," but I might have guessed it, because Madeleine L'Engle uses "Colubra" as a name her characters give to a snake.

[brock-tn.livejournal.com]

and need to track down a decent and reliable book about the history of the European witch trials (we have tons on Salem, but not so much on Europe

Allow me to suggest Brian Levack's The Witch-Hunt in Early Modern Europe. ISBN 0582419018

There is also a companion text by Levack, The Witchcraft Sourcebook, (ISBN 0582419018) which is a collection of primary source material on European beliefs about witchcraft and on the European witchcraft persecutions.

Levack, who is on the history faculty at UT Austin, uses these two books as texts for the elective he teaches on the witchcraft trials. They should not be beyond the capabilities of your upper school students.

[jenett]

See? It worked.

(I knew there was stuff out there, but not which were currently reliable.)

I just added the book to the order, but ended up with Ellen Breslaw's _Witches of the Atlantic World: An Historical Reader and Primary Sourcebook _ for the sources, because it touches on a bunch of other areas that I'd love better primary sources for on hand. (Useful for comparative religions, among other things.)

[brock-tn.livejournal.com]

When it works, the Interwebs makes us all smarter than we would be on our own. Unfortunately, the converse is equally true.

[jenett]

Yep! It is most excellent.

(More recent conversations with students have covered, for your amusement:

- Vikings
- Cleopatra
- The Munich Olympics
- The discovery of penicillin
- The Russian revolution
- the introduction of gas lights
- the Mexican-American war

It is one of the days I adore my job.

[ckd]

Now I'm trying to think of some way to start linking those topics. "The Vikings, led by Cleopatra, fought Black September for Alexander Fleming's original mold sample and a tissue culture from the Romanovs...."

[jenett]

... before arguing for oil expropriation from Mexico in order to pay for their fuel costs and their diversification into gas lighting?

[jinian.livejournal.com]

Colubrine!

[pameladean]

Oh, great word indeed. Reminds me of Madeleine L'Engle.

P.

Witchcraft

[woolysw.livejournal.com]

See also:

- Witchcraft: An Introduction to the Literature of Witchcraft, Rossell Hope Robbins, KTO Press, 1978, ISBN 0527758000
- (online) Cornell University Library Witchcraft Collection
The Cornell University Library Witchcraft Collection is an online selecton of titles from the Cornell University Library's extensive collection of materials on Witchcraft. The Witchcraft Collection is a rich source for students and scholars of the history of superstition and witchcraft persecution in Europe. It documents the earliest and the latest manifestations of the belief in witchcraft as well as its geographical boundaries, and elaborates this history with works on canon law, the Inquisition, torture, demonology, trial testimony, and narratives. Most importantly, the collection focuses on witchcraft not as folklore or anthropology, but as theology and as religious heresy
- (online) The Proceedings of the Old Bailey, 1674-1913
A fully searchable edition of the largest body of texts detailing the lives of non-elite people ever published, containing 197,745 criminal trials held at London's central criminal court.

Re: Witchcraft

[jenett]

Weirdly enough, I was looking at the Old Bailey proceedings for the first time earlier today (for the abortion case, which it doesn't cover, as that's 1938), and didn't even think about it for primary documents.

They were mostly looking for secondary sources today, but I assured them there were primary sources: we'd just need to get hold of them.

[magentamn.livejournal.com]

Witchcraft in Europe and the New World, 1400-1800 / P.G. Maxwell-Stuart. BF1584.E85 M39 2001 at the Henn Co library.

The night battles : witchcraft & agrarian cults in the sixteenth & seventeenth centuries / Carlo Ginzburg BL980.I8G5613 1983 ditto. This is the one I was looking for when I found the one above. Steve thinks highly of this. It's rather dense. Both show checked in right now.

[jenett]

I think I still have my copy of the Night Battles somewhere around here (it was required reading for my Renaissance Florence course, for various reasons.)

[hobbitbabe.livejournal.com]

I got a set of 12 whiteboard markers which are magnetic and which have little erasers on their caps. Alas, the cap got left loose on the brown one and now it doesn't work. It was great having brown!