When using Google Books Ngram Viewer, I've discovered that the term "yeet" was utilized a thousand more times during 1650-1660 than of today. https://imgur.com/a/KYMouzr . How could this be? Did the term "yeet" have any historical meaning or context? Did it symbolize something significant of that time? What makes the term "yeet" so popular during that time?

I know this is a very general question but it surprised me how many famines there have been in history just going through https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_famines, it affected societies in fundamental ways yet it seems most don't even have an article dedicated to them and finding any information is very hard. Why are famines not as prominent as they should be considering their influence? Are famines not an important part of historiography?

http://www.ancientdestructions.com/oronteus-finaeus-map-antarctica-fineus/

My question is:

Is this map genuine, does it depict Antarctica without ice and if so, how was it made?

Odds are good that at this point, you’re feeling overwhelmed. So, first, if you want permission to not teach your child/ren history or Social Studies, this is us, a group of historians saying, “it’s okay if you don’t teach your child/ren history.” Seriously. It’s okay. This piece in the New York Times from an education professor lays out a number of solid arguments for not worrying about explicit instruction and focusing more on just getting everyone safely through this.

Second, we encourage you to communicate honestly with your child’s teachers and school. This is especially important if you have more than one child and a finite number of devices in your house. If you find the work schools sent home to be overwhelming, let them know. Everyone is trying to figure this out, especially the educators who are parents themselves, unsure about consequences or state or federal mandates. The most important thing to keep in mind is open communication and letting them know what’s going on in your house.

However, let’s say you find yourself in the presence of a young person who is determined to keep up their Social Studies work or interested in learning history. Let’s start with the first scenario. In all that free time you likely don’t have, consider spending a few minutes with The Themes of Social Studies from the National Council for the Social Studies. The gist: school SS curriculum starts with the child and then moves outwards, mostly focused on patterns over time. One way to help your child is to support them in making connections between what they brought home and things they’d done previously in school or between themselves and the topic at hand. Dates and names are less important than understanding cause and effect and how things are related. But, if your student is more interested in completing worksheets that are mostly about dates and names, there’s no harm in them doing worksheets. (If time/space allows for it, it’s worth helping them learn to read like a historian – see below. Even textbooks and teachers can get things wrong or overly simplify complicated issues.)

In other words, if structure helps your student, structure is a good thing. If too much structure leads to a fight, it’s okay to let it go.

If your student is interested in pursuing their own learning related to history, there are some resources we can recommend. Let’s say they tell you they want to learn about a particular topic or person. We would strongly recommend AGAINST googling the person’s name or the topic, YouTube video, and then clicking play.

Think of history videos you can find online as existing on a continuum. At one end – the less good end – there are videos done by influences who are interested in hits and advertising (they tend to claim they are telling the unknown history about something or use phrases like, “What historians don’t want you to know!!”.) At the other end – the more good end – are videos from historians, universities, authors, and educators. In the middle are videos like Crash Course. It’s difficult for us to go through and assess the quality of each video that’s out there, though we’re always happy to host questions about different videos so the community can answer.

One approach to take is to consider questions like this for your student:

• How did the author of the video support their claims? What was their evidence?
• What details in the video have you heard other authors repeat? Or disprove?
• If you picked one detail from the video, how might you go about confirming it’s accurate?

Regardless of what video your student ends up watching or what website they end up reading, focus on encouraging them to be a critical reader. The “Reading Like a Historian” project out of Stanford has a number of lessons we strongly encourage your learner to engage in before they begin researching a topic. The goal is to get them comfortable with the differences between primary and secondary sources, how to check a citation or link, and a general sense of when a detail from the historical record has been accepted as fact. Basically, you want to make sure they are comfortable in the space between questioning what they read on the internet and trusting historians in order to develop their background knowledge. It’s also worth giving them practice in a skill known as “lateral reading.” (More here on what this skill looks like.)

You may also want to consider sending your student down the road of learning things schools sometimes struggle to teach. Teaching Hard History is a great starting point, though the podcasts are for teachers, not students. If you want a deeper dive into resources, Finding and Understanding Sources is a rich section of our wiki. Finally, JSTOR and Project MUSE have opened their paywalls and a great way to find texts authored by historians.

All of that said, please use this thread to ask questions, ask for more details, or wonder about things not covered! Everyone is welcome to post and share! Including teachers who are wondering about or thinking about setting up learning opportunities for their students.

Recently had a long conversation with a fellow quarantee and friend (who is a devout Catholic) about philosophy of science and the history of Darwinism. He pointed me to a few relevant encyclicals, in particular Humani Generis .

However, this didn't really answer my interest in how the Catholic Church got to Humani Generis in the first place; the behind-the-scenes theological wrangling is still mostly a mystery to me.