Below are current event articles that relate to events, topics, and people found in Spring Break Adventure.
World War One: 10 interpretations of who started WW1
bbc.com
2/11/2014
No one nation deserves all responsibility for the outbreak of war, but Germany seems to me to deserve most. It alone had power to halt the descent to disaster at any time in July 1914 by withdrawing its "blank cheque" which offered support to Austria for its invasion of Serbia. I'm afraid I am unconvinced by the argument that Serbia was a rogue state which deserved its nemesis at Austria's hands. And I do not believe Russia wanted a European war in 1914 - its leaders knew that it would have been in a far stronger position to fight two years later, having completed its rearmament programme.
A Long Toss Back to the Heyday of Negro League Baseball
Smithsonian.com
11/15/2013
Called Organized Baseball was still segregated. I leaned closer, bent an ear, telling myself: Listen carefully, Frank, because this is oral history, this is one of the last times old black and white players will ever be able to speak across that divide of time and race. And, in fact, Feller has passed on since then, although Irvin lives yet, age 94, one of the last survivors of the Negro Leagues—that shadow baseball government that managed to thrive for about a quarter of a century, allowing African-Americans the chance to play the national pastime for pay (if not for much). The heyday of the Negro Leagues was the ’30s, the cynosure of most seasons the East-West All-Star Game, which was usually played in Chicago at Comiskey Park, home of the white White Sox. Indeed, in 1941, just before America entered the war, that fabled season when Ted Williams batted .406 and Joe DiMaggio hit safely in 56 straight games, the Negro League All-Star Game drew a crowd of more than 50,000 fans. Buck Leonard hit a home run, driving in three runs in the game. He was one of the very best baseball players alive, a stocky 5-foot-10, 185-pound first baseman.
The Woman Who (Maybe) Struck out Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig
Smithsonian.com
7/23/2013
One spring day my son came home from school and asked, “Do you know about the girl who struck out Babe Ruth?” I smiled indulgently at this playground tall tale. But he insisted it was true. “I read a book about her in the library,” he said. “Must have been fiction,” I churlishly replied, before consulting the Baseball Almanac to bludgeon my 10-year-old with bitter fact. Instead, I discovered the astounding story of Jackie Mitchell, a 17-year-old southpaw who pitched against the New York Yankees on April 2, 1931. The first batter she faced was Ruth, followed by Lou Gehrig, the deadliest hitting duo in baseball history. Mitchell struck them both out. There was a box score to prove it and news stories proclaiming her “organized baseball’s first girl pitcher.”
A Brief History of the Baseball
Smithsonian.com
6/28/2013
From the fields and stadiums, to the uniforms, to the statistics, baseball is good design. There’s no better evidence of that than the iconic white and red ball. With its pristine white surface and high contrast red stitching, today’s baseball is a beautiful union of form and function, an almost ideal Modernist object. But it didn’t start out that way. The baseball didn’t emerge fully formed when the first batter stepped up to the first plate. Like the football, it’s hard to attribute its invention to one person, especially considering that in those heady, mustachioed, pre-professional days of baseball, balls were made by cobblers from the rubber remnants of old shoes, with rubber cores wrapped in yarn and a leather cover – if you were lucky. In some regions, sturgeon eyes were used instead of melted shoe rubber. In the 1840s and ’50s, it was anything but an exact science and pitchers often just made their own balls. Obviously, there was some variety in size and weight that resulted just from the nature of the handmade process and separate regional developments.
Introducing a Special Report on Energy
Smithsonian.com
5/25/2013
In a world hungry for power, a new wealth of innovation hopes to keep the engine of industry running for the foreseeable future.
Baseball Spoiled by Nature: Top 10 Moments
Nationalgeographic.com
3/30/2013
A new Major League Baseball season starts with opening day in April and ends in October or November with the World Series. Between those bookends, the 30 teams each play 162 regular-season games. That's a lot of baseball. That's also a lot of opportunity for Mother Nature to wreak havoc on America's pastime. With a new season upon us, we look back at the top ten moments when the natural world won.
Why the Best Success Stories Often Begin With Failure
Smithsonian.com
2/1/2013
Long before the iPhone made him the god of gadgets, Steve Jobs launched his tech career by hacking land lines to make free long-distance calls. Bob Dylan’s band, the Golden Chords, lost a high-school talent competition to a tap dancing act. Behind every success story is an embarrassing first effort, a stumble, a setback or a radical change of direction. It’s these first clumsy steps on the road to fame and fortune that fascinate writer Seth Fiegerman, who edits the blog OpeningLines.org, a collection of case studies on the origins of famous careers.
President Obama’s Autopen: When is an Autograph Not an Autograph?
Smithsonian.com
1/8/2013
President Obama was in Hawaii when he signed the fiscal cliff deal in Washington D.C. last week. Of course, it’s now common for us to send digital signatures back and forth every day, but the President of the United States doesn’t just have his signature saved as a JPEG file like the rest of us lowly remote signatories. Instead, he uses the wonder that is the autopen – a device descended from one of the gizmos in Thomas Jefferson’s White House.
Elon Musk, the Rocket Man With a Sweet Ride
Smithsonian.com
12/4/2012
“Five, four, three...” At T-minus three seconds white flames explode from the 22-story rocket. “Two, one. Liftoff.” The night sky erupts with light and fire and clouds of smoke, as nine engines generating 1,320,000 pounds of thrust push the vehicle skyward at NASA’s storied Cape Canaveral launchpad. The road to orbit is short but marked with a series of technical miracles, and the rocket hits them all: 17,000 miles per hour to break from Earth’s atmosphere. First and second stage separation. Second stage ignition. In minutes it’s over: The capsule carrying 1,000 pounds of cargo is in orbit, racing toward a docking with the International Space Station, itself traveling so fast it circles the Earth 15 times a day, the second such flight of the Falcon 9 and its Dragon capsule since May. “It proves that we didn’t just get lucky the first time around,” says the rocket’s chief designer, Elon Musk. “Next year we expect four to five launches, the year after that eight to ten, and the launch rate will increase by 100 percent every year for the next four to five years.” At that rate Musk, a self-taught engineer and Internet whiz kid, will be launching more rockets than even China or Russia.
Uncovering the Truth Behind the Myth of Pancho Villa, Movie Star
Smithsonian.com
11/6/2012
The first casualty of war is truth, they say, and nowhere was that more true than in Mexico during the revolutionary period between 1910 and 1920. In all the blood and chaos that followed the overthrow of Porfirio Diaz, who had been dictator of Mexico since 1876, what was left of the central government in Mexico City found itself fighting several contending rebel forces—most notably the Liberation Army of the South, commanded by Emiliano Zapata, and the Chihuahua-based División del Norte, led by the even more celebrated bandit-rebel Pancho Villa–and the three-cornered civil war that followed was notable for its unrelenting savagery, its unending confusion and (north of the Rio Grande, at least) its unusual film deals. Specifically, it is remembered for the contract Villa was supposed to have signed with a leading American newsreel company in January 1914. Under the terms of this agreement, it is said, the rebels undertook to fight their revolution for the benefit of the movie cameras in exchange for a large advance, payable in gold.
The Rise and Fall of Ken-chan, the Robot Waiter
Smithsonian.com
6/12/2012
While the robot waiters of mid-’80s Pasadena were serving up chow mein at the Two Panda Deli in sunny California, another robot waiter 5,400 miles west was slinging spaghetti at Grazie’s Italian Restaurant in Tokyo.
Don’t Let Your Money Fly Away: A 1909 Warning to Airship Investors
Smithsonian.com
5/31/2012
Today, new futuristic-looking technologies often attract investors hoping to make gobs of money. And airships of the past were no different. In the first few decades of the 20th century people scrambled to figure out how they might cash in on these exciting new inventions, which were slowly beginning to prove themselves technologically reliable.
A Death at Home Plate
Smithsonian.com
5/9/2012
The Chicago Bulls and their fans watched in horror as their star guard, Derek Rose collapsed on the floor toward the end of a recent playoff game against the Philadelphia 76ers. Just days later, the New York Yankees and their fans watched Mariano Rivera, the greatest relief pitcher in baseball history, fall to the ground while shagging fly balls before the start of a game in Kansas City. Both athletes suffered torn anterior cruciate ligaments in their knees, putting their futures and their teams' prospects in doubt. Sportswriters called the injuries "tragic."
Roberto Clemente: The King of Beisbol
Smithsonian.com
4/1/2012
After Roberto Clemente disappeared in a plane crash off the coast of San Juan, Puerto Rico, on New Year's Eve 1972, his body was never found. U.S. Coast Guard rescue and recovery teams probed the Atlantic waters for several weeks, but the ocean offered them a lone remnant of the brilliant baseball player: a single sock. Inanimate objects take on meaning only in the context of the story they evoke. That sock, banal yet gruesome, symbolized a sense of profound loss and mystery at Clemente's tragic end. But here we are looking at another object in his story, an artifact from an earlier time that, considered on its own, seems utterly ordinary, yet also carries a deeper meaning in its attachment to the career of a remarkable athlete - his batting helmet.
11 Thomas Edison Predictions That Came True Or Didn't
Nationalgeographic.com
2/15/2011
A hundred years ago this month, Thomas Edison whose 164th birthday is celebrated with a Google doodle Friday laid out a long series of predictions as to how technology would transform the world. Writing in Cosmopolitan then a general-interest magazine the U.S. inventor was spot on about some things, such as speedy airplanes, but "absolutely wrong" on others, said Paul Israel, director and general editor of the Thomas A. Edison Papers Project at Rutgers University in New Jersey.
How Exactly Did They Think of That?
AmericanHeritage.com
1/8/2011
Sometime in the 20th century, public perception of the American inventor converged with the image of the mad scientist into a wild-eyed caricature of a raving lunatic, steam pouring from his ears, hair askew, slide rules or calculators falling out his pockets: Albert Einstein too brilliantly distracted to put on socks; Thomas Edison curled up exhausted on his desk in his lab coat and shoes; or the unforgettable "Doc" Brown muttering under his breath as he fiddled with the DeLorean's flux capacitor in the Back to the Future film trilogy.
Baseballs Bat Man
Smithsonian.com
10/5/2010
Chuck Schupp has delivered alchemy to major-league players for 27 years, listening to their wishes for the perfect bat and then getting his team at the Hillerich & Bradsby plant in Louisville, Kentucky to produce one that fits their fancy.
Tom Swift Turns 100
Smithsonian.com
7/1/2010
That's just one more marvel from the fictitious boy inventor, who modestly but quickly took on ventures ambitious enough to entertain generations of readers. Along the way, he inspired more than a few actual innovators, such as Apple Computer co-founder Steve Wozniak and Jack Cover, who developed the Taser.
The Little League World Series' Only Perfect Game
Smithsonian.com
4/6/2010
They came to be known as "Los pequeos gigantes," the little giants. In baseball, a game full of real and imagined fairy tales from Bobby Thomson's "Shot Heard "Round the World" to Bernard Malamud's fable The Natural, no story may be more inspiring or surprising than the story of the 1957 Little League team from Monterrey, Mexico.
Play Ball!
AmericanHeritage.com
7/2/2009
The game of baseball was not always the well-ordered sport we know today, played on elegantly manicured fields bordered by crisp white lines. As historians have debunked the widely held myth that Abner Doubleday of Cooperstown, New York, invented the sport out of whole cloth in 1839, they have discovered its deeper American origins.
For General Patton's Family, Recovered Ground
Smithsonian.com
5/20/2009
In 1986, the year I turned 21, my father accidentally set fire to our basement. Until then he could often be found down there, in the office he'd carved out for himself in a far corner, smoking a cigar and working on his diaries. He'd been keeping themdozens of identical volumes bound in red canvasfor most of his adult life.
Proud Supporters of |
 |
 |
Copyright © 2007- IndyintheClassroom.com
Send questions & comments toWebmasterThis website is owned and operated by EDventure Quest Learning LLC. It is not hosted, operated, endorsed, sponsored by, or affiliated with, Lucasfilm, Ltd., Paramount Pictures, or CBS or any of their affiliates. Indiana Jones and all related indicia are TM & © Lucasfilm Ltd. All rights reserved. COURTESY OF LUCASFILM LTD. |
Disclaimer | Site Map | Search
