Lois & Clark Forums Forums General Discussion Off Topic Need some help...

As some of you know, I homeschool my kids. And before, when I've needed help (the geography project- which has morphed into an ongoing 'book of centuries' kind of thing tied in with our history!), you guys have come to my aid. Anywho, the other day when we heard that Michael Jackson had passed away, I learned that my children are somewhat 'socially/culturally' ignorant. When my oldest son (who's 15) asked, 'Michael who?', I knew my poor kids need a little help! What I mean by that is that I feel that there are certain people (not necessarily related to history- e.i. MJ) that I feel my boys should at least have a passing knowledge of. Be it artists, singers, dancers, writers- I just feel they should know some of the people that has shaped their culture. And whether we like it or not, musical artists like MJ have done just that. What I need help with is a listing of people you feel have helped shape or reshape modern culture. Even certain criminals could be considered in this list because let's face it, Al Capone definitely reshaped American culture. Although, I'm not going to limit their exposure to America. Princess Di, for example, very famous, very influential to our world.

Here's a couple of names I've come up with... Norman Rockwell- while they would certainly know who Walt Disney is, Rockwell might not be as familiar. We've already established Michael Jackson. I've added Elvis, too. So, who do you feel has had major influences on our world? Someone you might not readily find in a history book. Like I said, include ALL examples- artists, writers, musicians, dancers, actors... and just anybody else that seems interesting.

Thanks in advance!
SQD

Hey Squid, Boy, that's a tall order. I can't wait to see who people come up with.
Living in the South of course we get a lot of Martin Luther King, of course since he has a holiday after him you probably already have him.

How about the whole man going to the moon. All the people involved in that.

Fred Astaire and Ginger Rodgers

The Wright Brothers
Pat Boone

I'll keep thinking
Sue

Take them to see the Night at the Museum movies, and then discuss Lots of fun historical tidbits in there.

PJ

I didn't mean Pat Boone. I meant Dick Clark.

The first man on the moon was Neil Armstrong. He landed on the moon almost exactly 40 years ago, on July 20, 1969. I remember gazing up at the moon at the time and imagining I could see the moon lander up there!

(By the way, your sons may want to know what Armstrong said when he set foot on the moon: "That's one small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind". And why not tell your sons that Armstrong's journey to the moon is still the longest journey that any human has ever made?)

Your sons absolutely need to know about the Beatles, too. John, Paul, Ringo and George. They were an absolutely huge phenomenon in the sixties and they made an incredible impression on the world.

How about painters? Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, Rembrandt, Vincent van Gogh, Picasso? Maybe even Andy Warhol?

I think your sons should know about the entire "Wild West" film genre. All those heroic movies about cowboys and Indians, where the story is set at the American frontier in the nineteenth century. Some of those movies were real masterpieces. Personally I loved "Shane" with Alan Ladd, but there were so many others. And some of the stars of those movies were so iconic, like John Wayne.

Speaking about movies, I think anyone should know about "Gone With the Wind" and "The Wizard of Oz". And of course you should know about Charlie Chaplin. And why not Alfred Hitchcock? And Marilyn Monroe. Hey, as a Swede, I vote for Greta Garbo!

(And if I may be at my most Swedish, maybe your sons should know about ABBA...)

Dancers? That's easy - Rudolf Nurejev was so iconic.

Opera singers? Luciano Pavarotti, absolutely! Personally I preferred Placido Domingo, but Pavarotti was a lot more famous. More charismatic too, I think.

If we speak about classical music, your sons absolutely must know about George Gershwin.

When I mentioned George Gershwin, I was reminded of his famous opera, Porgy and Bess. Since that opera is about black people, I found myself thinking of a few great black artists and entertainers. People like Billie Holliday, who sang the unforgettable and deeply disturbing "Strange Fruit". Another great black artist, but someone who seemed to be of a sunnier dispostion, is Louis Armstrong. There is of course Sammy Davis Junior, too, and his very famous white singer-actor friend, Frank Sinatra.

Well, that's all I can think of for now.

Ann

I saw MLK mentioned, and while on that theme how about Rosa Parks?

Susan B Anthony .

And while on the subject of famous Quakers, how about the role of the Quakers in developing the 'employee-friendly' side of what we now know as human resource management: educational and social-welfare programmes for their employees? In the US, the most famous example is Hershey\'s ; see the section on Building a Town, not just a Company , on this page. Similar stories come from the UK with companies such as Cadbury's, Lever Brothers, Rowntree (now owned by Nestlé), and so on. Homes were provided for workers; the children of workers - and even child workers - were educated, and illness and retirement care (including the earliest pension programmes) were provided. Other employers at the time claimed that this was too expensive a way to run a business... but look at what's considered normal by most employers these days. You'll find more about Cadbury and the village of Bournville here , and also on the Cadbury Philanthropy page on the Cadbury website - note all the links in the sidebar to further information.

Hope this helps! The websites of companies such as Hershey and Cadbury are very child-friendly, too, so that could be useful - Cadbury's website also has the Story of Chocolate, going right back to the discovery of the cocoa bean in South America and how it gradually became what we eat as chocolate today (did you know that chocolate when it was first invented was intended as a drink?)


Wendy

You need a few more musicians. Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart was in a way the Michael Jackson of his time! He was hugely talented and became an international star at a very young age. He wasn't a dancer or a singer, but his music "sang and danced". He died at the age of 35 or something like that. (I remember American singer Tom Lehrer saying, in the sixties, "When Mozart was my age, he had been dead for three years".) In spite of his fame and the fact that his music has lived on through the centuries, Mozart was so down and out when he died that it isn't even known where he was buried!

Eine Kleine Nachtmusik by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

Another famous classical composer is Ludwig van Beethoven. His ninth symphony, "An Der Freude", has been claimed by the European Union (the EU) to be the "anthem" of the EU. And you just have to know his symphony number five. Da-da-da-DAAAAA!!! Da-da-da-DAAAAA!!!

Ludvig van Beethoven, Symphony No. 5

(Can you believe that Beethoven grew deaf over time? In the end he was really stone deaf and couldn't hear any music at all. But he kept composing great music, because he could "hear" the music in his head!)

I'm sure I don't need to tell you that your boys must know of William Shakespeare, who is probably the most famous writer of all time. They must know of his two best-known tragedies, Romeo and Juliet and Hamlet. They should know of Homer, too, the Homer who isn't a yellow-faced cartoon! No, the Homer who wrote The Iliad and The Odyssey. Without that Homer, the movie Troy would never have been made.

Ann

I vote for Shirley Temple, Jackie Joyner-Kersee, Babe Ruth, Dorothy Hamill, Paul Bunyan (sure, he's a myth, but he's a famous myth), Johnny Appleseed (same here), Jackie Robinson, Chuck Barry, Louis Armstrong, and Gene Roddenberry, just to name a few.

Mother Teresa
um...

I'm out at the moment .

Oh - Jerome Seigel and Joseph Shuster of course .

Don't forget Nelson Mandela. I'm not Catholic but I'd also recommend Pope John Paul II. He really shook up the church in a number of ways. Oh, and Lech Walesa too and the Solidarity movement in Poland would be good to study as well.

Irene

I think E.D. Hirsch wrote "The Dictionary of Cultural Literacy" which was items that Americans were kind of expected to know to fit into our current culture.

I've skimmed through it and it's interesting.

I think the posters on this website are much more informed and knowledgeable than the usual American TV-watching dullards. For gosh sakes, I read somewhere that something like 40% of American high school seniors can't even give the dates of the American Civil War! (Not like that was important to our later history or anything.)

As an astronomy fan, I'd like to mention a few names and events that your sons should know of. It would be nice if they knew of Galileo, even though I guess Galileo is optional. Exactly 400 years ago, in 1609, Galileo revolutionized astronomy by looking at the night sky through a (primitive) telescope. Galileo saw mountains on the Moon and and four moons orbiting Jupiter. He concluded that the Moon is made of the same stuff as the Earth and that Jupiter is a planet like the Earth. The doctrine taught by the Church at the time, that everybody believed in, was that the Moon and everything else that could be seen in the sky was made of much more celestial stuff than the Earth, and that the Earth was the center of the universe, so that everything else orbited the Earth. Galileo said that the Moon was made of the same kind of matter as the Earth, and that Jupiter is a planet just like the Earth, and that there was no reason to think that the Earth was the center of the universe. Galileo said that the Sun was the center of the universe - well, he wasn't quite right about that, but he was right about the Moon and Jupiter and about the fact that the Earth is in orbit around the Sun.

In honor of Galileo and his discoveries 400 years ago, the United Nations has declared that 2009 is the International Year of Astronomy. Really!

The next name that your sons should know, and in my opinion it isn't even optional, is Isaac Newton. Legend has it that Newton was sitting under a tree when an apple fell on his head. He looked up in the sky and saw the Moon - yes, you can see the Moon in the daytime sky, except when the Moon is full or when it's new - and he concluded that the Moon is "falling" towards the Earth for the same reason that the apple just fell to the ground. In both cases, it is the Earth's gravity that pulls the apple and the Moon downwards.



(So why doesn't the Moon crash down on the Earth? That's because the Moon has a "forward motion", too. If gravity didn't exist, the Moon would just leave the Earth and disappear into space somewhere, following its own "forward motion", and it is the gravity of the Earth that continually "bends" the path of the Moon into a circle - or actually an oval - around the Earth. As for the Earth, our planet would similarly just sail off into the blackness of space, following its own "forward motion", if the gravity of the Sun didn't force us to keep circling the Sun.)

The next name of astronomy and physics that your sons must know is of course Albert Einstein. With his theory of relativity, Einstein completely revolutionized physics and our understanding of the universe. Einstein said that the universe is "curved", and it can be visualized as a springy gridwork. Every massive body "weighs down" this springy "surface" and creates its own "indentation" or "gravity well" in it. If we think of the solar system this way, why does the Earth keep orbiting the Sun and why does the Moon keep orbiting the Earth? It's because the Sun creates a big and deep "gravity well" in the fabric of spacetime, and the Earth creates its own gravity well too, although it is much smaller than the Sun's. Think of the inside of a bowl. The Earth is running like a pin ball on the inner wall of the the Sun's gravity well. The Earth isn't falling down, because of its own forward motion, and it isn't slowing down because there is virtually no friction in space. But the Earth can't climb up the wall of the Sun's "bowl", and so it can't escape from the Sun. As for the Moon, it is trapped by the Earth's gravity well, and it is running around inside it.



Curved spacetime. Image the Sun being at the bottom of this "bowl", and imagine the Earth orbiting the Sun on orbit C.

Einstein concluded a lot of other things as well, such as the fact that nothing can move faster than light, and nothing made of matter (such as spaceships and people) can even move at the same speed as light, and your own "personal time" slows down as you move faster. When you approach the speed of light, your personal time creeps almost to a standstill, and as you try to move ever faster the extra energy that you use to try to increase your speed will actually mostly increase your mass instead. (Yes, it's true! If you move very fast your mass will increase. Particle physicists know that tiny particles like protons can become as massive as tennis balls if you increase their speed to close to the speed of light.)

There is so much more to know about space, but why not just teach your sons about Galileo, Newton and Einstein for now?

(Okay - I'll give your sons a crash course about the Big Bang, too, but that will have to wait until tomorrow... )

Ann

Painters: Picasso (Abstract Expressionism), Warhol and Lichtenstein (Pop Art), Bosch (Late Gothic Art), Durer (an awesome bridge between Late Gothic Art in Northern Europe and its contemporary Italian Renaissance in Southern Europe), Hokusai (Japanese art). Hokusai is a pretty awesome Japanese painter and woodblock printer who influenced a lot of movements like Art Nouveau and Impressionism.

Pope John the 23rd called the Second Vatican Council to reformat the Catholic Church and created what Cardinal Montini so aptly quipped, 'a hornet's nest.'

Jimi Hendrix is my guitar hero, and Scott Joplin is my king of ragtime on the piano.

Alice Paul is pretty awesome. She was arrested for picketing in front of the White House and led a hunger strike in prison all in the name of the women's right to vote.

Marshall McLuhan is kind of a big deal in one of my fields, web and programming. He basically predicted what all of our technology would be back in the 60s.

JD

Before I say anything about the Big Bang, I need to say something more about Albert Einstein. He is really most famous for his formula, E = MC2. It means that energy is equivalent to mass multiplied by the speed of light squared. This in turn means that mass and energy are aspects of the same thing, and that huge amounts of energy are locked up inside every ounce of matter. Just consider - energy is equivalent to mass multiplied by the speed of light squared, and the speed of light is 300,000 kilometers per second! You'll have to figure out how much that is in miles per second yourself, but I think it is something like 180,000 miles per second. But then you have to multiply that incredible speed by itself!

This means that if you can convert just a little mass into energy, you are going to release huge amounts of energy. That is the principle behind the atomic bomb. You take plutonium, which is a very heavy and unstable element, and send an extra neutron into the nucleus. The nucleus will promptly split, releasing a neutron that will hit another nucleus and split it, releasing another neutron and splitting another nucleus which in turn will release a neutron etc, starting a chain reaction. But it is also true that the "halves" of the nuclei, plus the extra neutrons that were released, contain slightly less mass than the original nuclei. The "missing" mass, though tiny, is converted into enormous amounts of energy. This is the principle behind the atomic bomb. Just a tiny amount of plutonium can release enough energy to flatten an entire city.

Ann

I'll just throw Bill Cosby into the mix.

On the flip side, you have O.J. Simpson.

Any of the Founding Fathers of our nation (or maybe that is already covered).

Thomas Edison, Winston Churchill, Douglas MacArthur (not just as a general; his influence shaped relations with the Far East for years.)

I would include people like Captain Cook and Sir Edmund Hillary, even Jacque Cousteau. These explorers opened the eyes and minds of the world...

In pop culture... Madonna would be as influential as MJ I would think. Arnold Schwarzenegger (sp) would be another cult icon if you forget about his politics. Elvis Presley and perhaps John Wayne would be others... but you could cover so many people...

Queen Elizabeth II, Nelson Mandela, Gandhi - all interesting in their own way. In high school in NZ we had to study Martin Luther King as a lead in to some of the history of the USA.

Arthur C Clarke would be an interesting one from a literary perspective.

There are so many potential people in society present and past....

Okay... the Big Bang!

The Big Bang is a catchy name for the scientific explanation of the beginning of the universe.

A catchy name, yes, but there is a catch! The name wasn't coined by a proponent of the Big Bang theory, but by one of its opponents, Fred Hoyle, who wanted to ridicule the idea. The name caught on because it is, as I said, catchy, but it does a poor job of explaining what scientists mean when they talk about the beginning of the universe. The name suggests that astronomers are talking about a mega-titanic explosion that, as it were, begat the universe, but the truth is that astronomers don't know what happened at the exact moment of the beginning of "the universe and everything" or what, indeed, caused this beginning.

What astronomers can describe, in fine detail, is what happened, pretty much, from a starting point a micro-milli-nano-second after the Big Bang and onwards. There is very good evidence that at the almost-beginning (because astronomers can't say anything about the very beginning), the universe was incredibly tiny, incredibly dense, and incredibly hot. How tiny was it? Smaller than an atom. How dense was it? Well, how dense will a sphere the size of an atom be if you cram it full of all the matter and energy in the universe? And finally, how hot was it? It was as hot as a sphere the size of an atom will be if you fill it with all the heat in the present-day universe (and that includes the heat from absolutely every blazing sun in the universe).

Why can't astronomers say anything about the very beginning of the universe, the moment of the Big Bang? It's because conditions at this time were so extreme that physics can't describe them. Astronomers don't understand what their science of physics can't tell them. So really, as to what happened at the moment of the Big Bang, astronomers are clueless.

However, when astronomers look around them in the universe, they see signs of expansion everywhere. The light emitted by galaxies has been "stretched" or redshifted by the expansion of the universe, and it has been more stretched the further away the galaxies are. The galaxies are being carried away from us, all the galaxies we can see in every direction, carried away as if on a huge wave sending everything hurtling away from us. The galaxies are being carried away on the "fabric" of the universe itself, because the universe just keeps getting bigger. (Well, there are a precious few nearby galaxies which are approaching us, most notably our big neighbour, the Andromeda galaxy, which is in fact on a collision course with us! But astronomers estimate that we are not going to collide with the Andromeda galaxy for another three billion years!)

But anyway, like I said, the universe was once smaller than an atom and just incredibly hot and dense, but it has been expanding and cooling ever since that time. To say that the universe has grown bigger than the human mind can comprehend doesn't say much, because the human mind can't really comprehend the size of our own solar system. But the size of our solar system is perhaps a couple of light-days if you count the swarm of distant comets which mark its outer borders - that is, it takes light a day or two to go from the Sun and reach the most distant comets orbiting the Sun. (For comparison, it takes light eight minutes to go from the Sun to the Earth, since Earth orbits about 150 million kilometers from the Sun.) As for the size of the present-day universe, I read somewhere that it is around 80 billion light-years, which means that it would take light 80 (or would it be 160?) billion years to cross it. And as far as astronomers can see, the universe just keeps expanding.

The universe is also full of a "background radiation", a radio signal corresponding to a "gas" with a temperature of 3 degrees Kelvin, close to but not at absolute zero. This background radiation fills the universe, as I said, and astronomers say that this is the remnant of a time 300,000 years after the Big Bang, when the universe was filled with a hot opaque gas. But it was at this time that the hot gas became transparent, and light shone through the universe in every direction. The hot opaque gas that filled the universe has become a thin, thin soup of cold radiation that still fills every nook and cranny of the ever-expanding universe.

By the way, astronomers believe that galaxies exist because the hot dense tiny universe that existed almost from the beginning contained miniscule irregularities. Some parts of the original "universe soup" were just a tiny bit hotter than others, and some parts were just a tiny bit cooler. As the universe expanded and cooled, the hottest parts of it remained slightly hotter and denser than their environment, and matter became ever more concentrated in these hot spots. Here is where galaxies were born.

Let's summarize. The universe is expanding. All the galaxies in the universe except a very few nearby ones are being carried away from us. The very fabric of the universe is stretching. But whether or not there really was a true explosion at the beginning of time that set off the chain of events that have led to our present-day universe, astronomers can't say.

Ann

I was going to suggest Dean Cain and Teri Hatcher.

Kidding aside, maybe you should not only mention Neill Armstrong, but also the crew of Apollo 13 (the mission with the problem).

Concerning musicians - is it me, or is it true that nobody has mentioned ABBA so far?

Moving over to astronomy... How about Stephen Hawking? And, although it's not in the least astronomy-related, but the name sounds so similar: Stephen King!

Another important scientist on my list would be Charles Darwin (On the Origin of Species) and maybe Mendel (the geneticist with the peas).

And one physicist whose most important discovery is used in every hospital: Wilhelm Conrad Röntgen (he discovered the X-rays), though that's not the only thing he is famous for.

WOW! Already tons of information to keep us busy the entire year! I was thinking of only a semester, but why not the whole year? And I already know how I'm going to do it. At the beginning of each week, I'll let my boys choose that week's topic (e.i. music, art, literature, astronomy, etc.). Then I'll give them each a name from a HUGE list I'll have compiled from all the great tips from you guys.

He is also the founder of the Core Knowledge Foundation, writer of several educational books, and an influental educator. It's his belief that America needs to drastically change the way in which we educate our children. He writes the 'What Your Child Needs to Know...' series. Huge name in the homeschool community.

My youngest is interested in all things presidential. I'm not sure why. I'm trying to figure out how to use this obsession to my advantage. Anywho, I don't believe I'll have trouble getting him to learn about the Founding Fathers. I might have trouble getting him to stop!

Not to leave anyone out, these are fantastic suggestions. I have a definite direction to head in now when I get ready to plan out this course. Any suggestions what we should call it? Cultural Influences 101

Thanks again and keep the ideas coming!
SQD

I had such a rotten education, I think I'd like to come take your class. LOL I know you're somewhere around here in the South!
Sue