My father searched for decades.  Wanting to trace the roots of his side of the family back to Germany, the man scoured every database he could find, digital and manuscript.  He reached far into the past century and collected dozens of connections, most notably that I am a distant cousin to Joe Mauer, the catcher for the Minnesota Twins.  Beyond those connections, Dad hit a brick wall.  It seems several of my anscestors came through the city of Chicago before the fire of 1871.  All traces disappeared until all my father could surmise is that any records of them disembarking in the growing town at the southern end of Lake Michigan vanished in the conflagration that began in Mrs. O’Leary’s barn.

Dr. Marcus’s discussion allowed me to wonder: Why blame the cow?

Is it a way of reminding children to be careful with fire?  Is it a way to deflect attention from oversights and plottings of politicos and speculators?   Was it ethnic bias?  I’m pretty sure that the Peg Leg Sullivan story isn’t the truth.  Wouldn’t a guy with a wooden leg kind of avoid fire?

History myths hold our attention.  Should we dispel these myths too early, will we lose the ablility to catch the interest of very young little people.  I posed the same dilemma in one of my posts from Philadelphia (see “Childhood Myths- Shattered”): if a myth stimulates interest in historical subjects in young children throughout the early grades, should we shatter those illusions, or should we wait for the student to be old enough to shatter it himself?   We have fun in our classroom full of eleven-year-olds finding out the real story, but that would lose its luster if the children were brought up without the myths.

Ask and you shall receive!  My questions from yesterday’s blog were answered very ably in today’s early lecture on the origins of Chicago.  I never knew of the continental divide issue, how it was resolved, or even the growth of Chicago due to the distracted economies of St. Louis and Cincinnati during the Civil War.  It all makes sense.  A fabulous job on the website.  I can use that site to have students explore the origins of Chicago in relation to the Erie Canal , Hudson River, and the city of New York.  I may even do my final lesson plan on the World’s Fair of 1892- inspired by that url.