Apr 5, 2004

Cliopatria's Child ...

by Cliopatria

This is a fascinating idea: a history blog for 10 to 15 year olds. It was conceived by Duckling at Blackberry Picking and supported by K. M. Lawson at Munnin, who suggests it as a multi-authored project for graduate students in history –"Kind of like a Cliopatria for kids." It's all the more interesting in this age of the internet because Duckling posts from the U.K. and Lawson from Japan. They'd be happy to have any suggestions about it from our other readers posted on their comments boards. In any case, Cliopatria is flattered by the thought.

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More Comments:

Konrad M Lawson - 4/8/2004

I left comment on this on the more recent posting by Ralph Luker but just note here that I think the comment JD mentioned is right on the mark. There are a whole list of questions about this, and Claire's project should start us thinking. I have slapped up a forum to discuss these kinds of 'meta' issues here:

muninn.net/meta/viewforum.php?f=3

Forgive the horrible default style, I will fix this when I have more than a modem connection from a very old machine I am borrowing...

Claire Helen Louise George - 4/7/2004

When you say that you read history but didn't identify it as history I think you've got a good point. Even if you didn't realise what it was at the time it's still worth writing about it. Konrad mentions the Asterix and Mulan cartoons in his first posting today. Not obviously history but still history.

I want to avoid any Question and Answer thing because it strays into the territory of a lot of other sites and would attract people trying to get you to do their homework. I conceived of this as a site for young people who are fascinated by history, don't get enough of it at school and just want to talk about it for fun.

Jonathan Dresner - 4/7/2004

Honestly, I'm thinking and I'm thinking and I'm thinking and when I was a teenager, I was almost entirely uninterested in historical matters. Even the history I did read, both fact and fiction, I didn't identify as history until, honestly, much later. So I find it very hard to come up with stuff that would have attracted me to a history site. Perhaps some form of Q/A, where historians can register to become "on-demand" experts, and someone matches questions with answerers?

Just a thought.

Claire Helen Louise George - 4/7/2004

Thank you for your post. You can find the blog on http://www.17th-century.info/timetravel

I'd love to get as many contributors as possible from academia or other history related areas. If you're interested please email me at c.h.l.george at durham.ac.uk and I will give you a username and password. The only rule is to imagine yourself at that age and think about what you would have liked to read. It's not a school homework site as there are already plenty of those about.