Want ideas for how to enjoy history, for your kids, your class, or yourself from a professional historian with a proven track record of getting kids and adults excited about the past? Looking for advice from an experienced traveler and historian with a short attention span for historical sites that are actually fun to visit? Ever thought of visiting England...but were afraid to actually do it? Well, this Blog may be your dream come true. Or not, as the case may be, but it will at least be fun to read.
This blog is also for fans of my first book, Don't Know Where, Don't Know When, who are now hopefully SO HOOKED that they plan to buy Book 2, as soon as I get the wretched thing written…And for random folks who stumble over this blog while piddling away their lives in front of the computer…as I am now doing…Ah.
Anyhoo, my qualifications:
I'm Annette, I'm a native-born Brit, I have a Ph.D. in early American and early modern British history, and I write boring scholarly articles that only a handful of specialists actually reads (Any takers for my essay on latitudinarian religious behavior in eighteenth-century South Carolina? Noooo? See?). This came to be a bit depressing for someone trained as a journalist (B.A. Journalism and History, Sacramento State University, 1988, and Editor-in-Chief, The State Hornet, 1985-6), hence my second career as an author (see above and below.)
For the past 12 years, I have taught college students at a University in Georgia That Shall Not Be Named.
A few years ago, I realized that, fun though it was to turn jaded college students on to history, I wanted to reach kids earlier, so they wouldn't be so jaded by the time they got to college. That's when I started TimeShop, a day of exuberant fun in which kids and college students pretended to travel in time. It even got national attention, when the Associated Press ran an article about us!
I travel to Britain for several weeks every year, sometimes twice a year, and I'm always visiting museums and historic sites on both sides of the pond. I've been doing that since the 1980s.
My husband and I are the proud parents of Alec (age 8), and yes, the kid loves history... as well as science, art, reading (he's hooked on The Lightning Thief right now), Pokemon, and Lego.
Finally, I'm the author of a novel for ages 9 and up, as I believe I already mentioned, plug plug pluggity plug, and people who have read it apparently have liked it very much. Amazing. Yes, OK, it's with a small press and it's not a number 1 bestseller, and so on, but that's fine with me. I'm still trying to wrap my head around anyone liking it, much less a thousand people. Yikes.
