I got from the Civil War to WWII today in the textbook. The 8th grade text doesn’t cover WWII at all! I was surprised by that. No doubt, the subject is covered in High School. This might somewhat explain why I thought Vietnam was WWII for so long as a youth (until I started living on Guam – as a WWII site, I could hardly avoid the history!). Maybe the powers that be feel that WWII history is too harsh for K-8. I also went from the Civil War to the Wilson Era on the video lecture series.
Tomorrow, I’ll finish both video and text, going up to modern day, and then I have some US History Cliffs Review books to study before taking a practice AP US History test. We’ll see just how much US History I’ve retained over the week!
Both weird and sad news today: Lance Armstrong, a personal hero of mine, is giving up his fight against the USADA and their doping charges against him. Lance will likely be stripped of his seven Tour de France titles, but more importantly, it will likely lessen the donations to his LiveStrong foundation, which fights cancer. That’s the sad news. The weird news: Larry Ellison has just purchased 98% of the island of Lanai (Hawaii) from the Dole conglomerate. He inherits around 4K inhabitants, several restaurants, a gas station, two luxury resorts and a whole lot of scrub-grass (formerly the world’s largest pineapple plantation) and several beaches. The previous owner wanted to plant windmills everywhere and make Lanai a power plant. Larry likes the quiet seclusion of the place, and may not install the windmills. No one (maybe not even Larry) knows what he will do with the island.