Indy Connections

In this section you will find current event articles that relate to the real-life events, topics, and people found in The Adventures of Indiana Jones. Educators can use these current events to connect our past with the present day. To see current articles for a specific Indy Adventure, please click the appropriate link below. For the most recent articles, please scroll down.

Young Indiana Jones Connections


**Choose the appropriate film below to see relevant articles.



Feature Film Connections

Raiders of the Lost Ark
Temple of Doom
Last Crusade
Kingdom of the Crystal Skull


Recent Articles

Anti-suffragette propaganda

9/3/2016
Love's Sweet Song

The movement for women’s suffrage began in earnest with the Seneca Falls convention of 1848 and faced fierce resistance for decades. In Britain and the United States, suffragettes calling for the right to vote were regularly arrested and subjected to brutal imprisonment and torture.

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The Long-Lasting Legacy of the Great Migration

9/1/2016
The Mystery of the Blues

In 1963, the American mathematician Edward Lorenz, taking a measure of the earth’s atmosphere in a laboratory that would seem far removed from the social upheavals of the time, set forth the theory that a single “flap of a sea gull’s wings” could redirect the path of a tornado on another continent, that it could, in fact, be “enough to alter the course of the weather forever,” and that, though the theory was then new and untested, “the most recent evidence would seem to favor the sea gulls.”

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Keeping the Blues Alive

9/1/2016
The Mystery of the Blues

It’s a Friday afternoon in Memphis and we’re in the midst of the 32nd annual International Blues Challenge, at a barbecue joint on the legendary Beale Street, where 150 people are waiting for a musician named Redd Velvet. I have been told she’ll be worth the wait, that there may be nothing more important onstage this week. So I’m there when this 40-something black woman walks onstage with a no-frills blue dress and an unmistakably regal bearing. There’s no band behind her. No instrument in her hands. It’s just her and a mike. She sits. Folks in the audience are still chatting, there’s a small din, so Redd looks around the room with piercing eyes, letting you know she’s not talking until it’s quiet. The flock who came to see her says, “Shhh!” The crowd settles down. With that Redd has set a high bar for herself—if you demand everyone to shut up before you start talking, you’d better have something to say.

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The National Park Service celebrates its 100th anniversary

8/25/2016
Passion for Life

2016 marks the centennial of the National Park Service, the mission of which is to preserve “unimpaired the natural and cultural resources and values of the National Park System for the enjoyment, education, and inspiration of this and future generations. The Park Service cooperates with partners to extend the benefits of natural and cultural resource conservation and outdoor recreation throughout this country and the world.”

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Archaeologists have uncovered a massive palace at the legendary birthplace of King Arthur

8/5/2016
My First Adventure

British archaeologists have reported the discovery of massive walls that appear to be part of a Dark Ages palace complex that existed around the same time and place as King Arthur’s birthplace in the famous legend of Camelot.

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Scientists Uncover a “Hidden” Portrait by Edgar Degas

8/4/2016
Passion for Life

For decades, art conservationists have relied on methods like the chemical analysis of miniscule flecks of paint and detailed knowledge of the exact pigments used to restore paintings faded by the years. Now, using a powerful X-ray scanner called a synchrotron, a group of researchers have uncovered an early draft of a portrait by Edgar Degas.

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It's Easy to Forget That Just Fifty Years Ago, Equality for Women Was a Strange Concept

7/6/2016
Love's Sweet Song

In our current moment, stars like Beyoncé, Lena Dunham and Taylor Swift tweet their feminism loud and proud, Hillary Clinton stands a very good chance of being elected president, Facebook’s Sheryl Sandberg urges women to “lean in,” and Nigerian novelist Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s TED talk “Why We Should All Be Feminists” has been viewed 2.9 million times. Which makes it hard to believe that not all that long ago a woman needed a man to get a credit card, emplorers advertised for "male" and "female" jobs, and the only way for a woman to end an unwanted pregnancy was via an illegal, often dangerous back-alley abortion.

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The Discovery of a Roman Gladiator School Brings the Famed Fighters Back to Life

7/1/2016
My First Adventure

Wolfgang Neubauer stands in the grassy clearing and watches a drone soar low over distant stands of birch and white poplar, the leaves still speckled with overnight rain. Vast fields of wheat roll away north and south under a huge dome of sky. “I’m interested in what lies hidden beneath this landscape,” says the Austrian archaeologist. “I hunt for structures now invisible to the human eye.”

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The Lost City of Cambodia

4/1/2016
Treasure of the Peacock's Eye

Jean-Baptiste Chevance senses that we’re closing in on our target. Paused in a jungle clearing in northwestern Cambodia, the French archaeologist studies his GPS and mops the sweat from his forehead with a bandanna. The temperature is pushing 95, and the equatorial sun beats down through the forest canopy. For two hours, Chevance, known to everyone as JB, has been leading me, along with a two-man Cambodian research team, on a grueling trek. We’ve ripped our arms and faces on six-foot shrubs studded with thorns, been savaged by red biting ants, and stumbled over vines that stretch at ankle height across the forest floor. Chevance checks the coordinates. “You can see that the vegetation here is very green, and the plants are different from the ones we have seen,” he says. “That’s an indication of a permanent water source.”

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How a German Archaeologist Rediscovered in Iran the Tomb of Cyrus

2/16/2016
My First Adventure

Alexander the Great rode into the city of Pasargadae with his most elite cavalry in their bronze, muscle-sculpted body armor, carrying long spears. Some of his infantry and archers followed. The small city, in what is today Iran, was lush and green. Alexander had recently conquered India. Greece, Macedonia, Asia Minor and parts of Egypt were all part of his new empire. The people of Pasargadae likely expected the worst—when the world's most dangerous cavalry shows up on your street, you are probably going to have a bad day. But he hadn't come to fight (the city was already his).

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