Now that spring is coming soon, it might serve as a reminder that the end of winter can be just as turbulent as the rest of the season.
March 11, 1888, was shaping up to be another unseasonably warm day. It had been remarkably mild for the previous week. Yet as the rain fell, the temperatures dropped.
By midnight of March 12, the Great Blizzard of 1888 was in full fury. It would snow nonstop for 36 hours, finally leaving the East Coast on the 14th. When all was said and done, parts of Connecticut and Massachusetts received 50 inches of snow, while parts of New York and New Jersey had up to 40 inches, with drifts as high as 50 feet. 48 inches dropped on Albany, 45 inches in New Haven, and 22 inches in New York, which recorded a temperature of between 6 and 9 degrees Fahrenheit throughout the storm, thanks to wind gusts that reached almost 80 miles per hour.
The blizzard had an enormous impact, even before the age of electricity. The telegraph and telephone lines were in tatters from Montreal and the Maritime provinces of Canada to Maryland and northern Virginia. 200 ships were grounded or wrecked. Roads and rail lines were impassible for days. It even froze the East River in New York so solid for a time that locals walked from Manhattan to Brooklyn across it, bypassing the 5-year-old Brooklyn Bridge which was deemed impassible due to ice.
Attached is a firsthand account of the Blizzard of 1888 by Albert Hunt of Winsted, Connecticut. Recorded in 1949, he recalls the day the storm first hit as if it were yesterday. It’s an amazing piece of oral history-and I wish there were more from that time period.
A Lesson on WWII Primary Sources; or, how eBay Finds some Educational Value
New websites are like new toys.
We can’t seem to find enough ways to play with them until they either break or get discarded for the next big thing.
In the early 2000s, eBay was my new toy—and a purchase from those early days found an unusual role in my classroom.
One day, while I had some down time at my office, I puttered around eBay looking for whatever crap struck my fancy. In those days, it was THE place to find hard-to-find knickknacks, doodads, and whatnot—a veritable treasure chest.
I didn’t find treasure, but I did find a map.
For some odd reason, I needed an old map to frame for my den (even though I lacked a den, a yacht, and Sperry Top-sider footwear). Though there were plenty of old maps of Maine, Bermuda, Aruba and other preppy hangouts, but I was drawn to a 1940s WPA map of New York City given to servicemen during World War II.
Never mind that it was folded, wrinkly, yellowed and with a funny double-print font that’s hard to read; I needed it for $20.
Let’s say I really didn’t need it. This relic of wartime Gotham sat in my desk for a decade.
A few months ago, one of my fifth grade classes was wrapping up their unit on US History. World War II seemed as good a finish as any. A half-decade of Call of Duty games certainly prepared them with enough content knowledge to teach a military history class at West Point.
To end the unit, I decided to whip out this old relic of a map. It couldn’t be mounted on a wall, since it was double-sided. Nonetheless, I made copies of it and gave it to the class. They examined the map, automatically finding the places they recognize (it’s easy since all the sports stadiums use a ballpark icon).
To really analyze the map, I split the class into groups. One group made a top-10 list of places a soldier would visit on leave. Another planned out a 24-hour day for a soldier, detailing where he would visit and for how long. Still another group came up with places that weren’t on the map.
Some of the responses were downright hilarious.
The top-10 list included places like the George Washington Bridge and the YMCA. One group gave a soldier five minutes to get from the Statue of Liberty to Harlem. The list of places not listed on the map ranged from pizza places to bars to…strip clubs and “love motels” (which we decided to lump into the generic term of “adult establishments.”)
The results, though, were some pretty damn good essays. They covered about not only about what soldiers did on their free time in New York, but also prevailing attitudes about how soldiers were supposed to behave i.e., the lack of “adult establishments.”
All from an impulse buy on eBay so many years ago.
Here is the link to WWII Lesson Plan. It includes worksheets and graphic organizers. Try it out in your own classroom.
This is the Essay Planning Page for the culminating project.
Here’s also a PDF of the WPA New York City Map for Servicemen that goes with it.
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