history9

World History - Lesson 9

Jaron Summers

A history book for

Becki, 9, a distant cousin in Canada.

Hi, Becki,

I promised I was going to write a history book just for you. I hope you’re enjoying it. I am.

By the way, what’s the most important date in the history of the world for you? (We’ll get to that later.)

What I’ve tried to do is show you how history is exciting when you realize how it relates to you. This is why I told you about some of the people in our family that you never met.

Our great, ever-so-great, grandparents never dreamed that one day they would have someone like you reading about them.

They had never heard of plastic. They didn’t know what a microwave was. The idea that we could walk on the moon was science fiction. And watching someone on television talking from the other side of the world, well–that was magic.

And computers? They would have been flabbergasted if they could have seen you typing on yours and looking up things on the internet.

Even the people who invented computers had no idea that millions of people would end up with laptops. They though laptops were something you balanced your tea on.

But here you are and because we both have computers I can write a chapter on history and you can read it the next day. And so can a million other people if they wanted to look on my website.

In the old days there were no typewriters. Not even ballpoint pens. What you did was catch a goose, pluck one of its quills, then sharpen the quill and dip it in ink. Then you wrote with the quill.

They called that a pen. Why? Because the goose lived in a pen? Sounds good but it’s not true. (Pen is a Latin word, penna that means feather.)

It took a long time to copy a book with a quill. You usually had a whole roomful of people copying one page at a time. Then they would bind all the pages together. Boy, would they be surprised to see Xerox machines.

Then along came the printing press. Guttenberg printed the bible about five hundred years ago. (Remember, we talked about how important religion was in history?) He could do it faster and cheaper than any group of people with quills.

Today each of his Bibles are worth several million dollars.

In the old days only rich people could afford to buy books. Now you can read the bible and thousands of other books for free on the internet.

And you know what else you can do – you can look up you favorite things and how they relate to history. If you’re interested in food, Google: “food and timeline.” Dolls? Google “dolls and timeline.” War? Google: “war and timeline.”

All those dates. It makes your mind whirl, doesn’t it?

Oh, by the way, what is the most important date in the history of the world for you?

Your birthday.

Just think of all the millions of people who could have found each other and fallen in love? It happened to your mother and father.

Maybe if your mother or father hadn’t smiled at each other when they met, you wouldn’t have been born.

Maybe if your mother had scowled at your father, he would have gone into a hardware store and bought a pair of pliers instead of talking to her.

You would not be reading this because you would not exist, even though your father would have ended up with some good pliers. Wow!

But lucky for you, things worked out.

You got born! At a time when people can fly to the moon and talk to each other on the other side of the world. Why, if something went wrong with your heart, you could get a new one. That’s never happened before in the history of the world.

So what are the two most important birthdays after yours?

I bet it’s the one your mother has and the one your father has.

So make sure you write down their birthdays and remind yourself a week in advance to make each of them a nice card and give them a present, the ones you make yourself are always the best.

You can automatically send yourself an email to remind you of their birthdays. Just go here. (While you are at it you can send a note to yourself to remind you of your brother and sister’s birthdays.)

Have fun being nine years old, pretty soon you’ll be ten.