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.
Please note that not all Indy chapters will contain current resources. Relevant articles are posted as they are found.
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Raiders of the Lost Ark |
Leonardo da Vinci – Paleontology Pioneer
6/11/2010
My First Adventure
Although he’s been dead for nearly 500 years, Leonardo da Vinci is still remembered as the quintessential Renaissance man, a polymath whose curiosity and creativity ranged widely among the arts and sciences. One of his interests was the study of fossils. In a new paper in the journal Palaios, Andrea Baucon shows that he was a pioneer in the study of both “body fossils,” or the remains of once-living organisms, and of “trace fossils,” such as the footprints, burrows and coprolites organisms left behind.
Oldest leather shoe steps out after 5,500 years
6/6/2010
My First Adventure
About 5,500 years ago someone in the mountains of Armenia put his best foot forward in what is now the oldest leather shoe ever found.
Bravery of British WWI 'suicide club' whose fighter pilots took on Germany and the Red Baron with only 15 hours' training and lasted on average just 11 days
6/4/2010
Attack of the Hawkmen
September 17, 1916. The sky above the Somme was quiet and still, and golden sunlight was seeping over the horizon, lighting up the mud, blood and broken bodies below. High in the sky, the German pilot in the Fokker Eindecker bi-plane had a knot in his stomach. But it was not borne of fear, even though this was his first combat mission - and could easily be his last. No, this pilot was excited to finally have made it to the killing zone.
EcoCenter Air
6/1/2010
Passion for Life
In December 1952, a deadly smog settled over London. Trapped by cooler air above, the dirty cloud enveloped the city for four days. Rich with soot from factories and low-quality home-burned coal, the Great Smog, as it came to be known, caused some 12,000 deaths that winter.
The Skull of Doom
5/27/2010
Kingdom of the Crystal Skull
Crystal skulls have long had a fringe following, and the most famous of them is one named for the explorer-author Frederick A. Mitchell-Hedges (see “Legend of the Crystal Skulls”). Mitchell-Hedges claimed to have found the skull somewhere in Central America in the 1930s, but his adopted daughter Anna later said she found it under a fallen altar or inside a pyramid at the Maya site of Lubaantún in British Honduras (now Belize) some time in the 1920s. Neither of their contradictory accounts is true. In fact, like all the other crystal skulls thus far examined, it is a modern creation, despite its nearly mythical place in the minds of devotees.
Digging up chemical weapons in D.C.
5/9/2010
The WWI Episodes
Reporting from Washington — Greg Nielson pushed a joystick, and a video camera zoomed in on three men in moon suits and gas masks as they prepared to blow up a weapon of mass destruction less than five miles from the White House.
Tinkering With History: Historic Aircraft, Winged Survivors
5/3/2010
Attack of the Hawkmen
On April 26, 1944, the 72-year-old Orville Wright posed for a photograph at the controls of a Lockheed Constellation, a triple-tailed, four-engined behemoth that could reach 340 miles per hour and had a ceiling of 24,000 feet. Only four decades earlier, Wright had taken the Flyer, a fragile creation of wire, wood, and muslin, on the first controlled, powered, and human flight in a heavier-than-air vehicle.
Saving the World's Most Endangered Sea Turtle
5/1/2010
Passion for Life
Cape Cod Bay churns as a frigid gust flicks froth into the air and the surf claws at the beach. I find a tangle of black seaweed on the sand, lift a handful of the wet mess and glimpse the lines of a shell. I grab more seaweed and uncover what I’ve been searching for: a Kemp’s ridley turtle, a member of the world’s most endangered species of sea turtle.
Wayne B. Wheeler: The Man Who Turned Off the Taps
5/1/2010
The Mystery of the Blues
On the last day before the taps ran dry, the streets of San Francisco were jammed. A frenzy of cars, trucks, wagons and every other imaginable form of conveyance crisscrossed the town and battled its steepest hills.
How Our Brains Make Memories
5/1/2010
Perils of Cupid
Sitting at a sidewalk café in Montreal on a sunny morning, Karim Nader recalls the day eight years earlier when two planes slammed into the twin towers of the World Trade Center. He lights a cigarette and waves his hands in the air to sketch the scene.