Beth Wooden is the senior assortment improvement librarian for the Fort Vancouver Regional Libraries. Electronic mail her at readingforfun@fvrl.org.
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After I was younger, I by no means preferred historical past in class. It was all the time a dry matter, capped off by having to recollect a string of names and dates of issues that I wasn’t fascinated with anyway.
We by no means discovered something actually attention-grabbing, like the primary recorded occasion of a parachute (in a manuscript from the 1470s) or when folks began consuming snails (49,000 years in the past, in Africa).
At school, I needed to take a western civilization class, and finding out historical past lastly made sense to me. I had a beautiful professor, Dr. Moran, who would stride throughout the classroom, his tie swinging, wildly gesticulating as he recounted some main occasion and its aftermath. Dr. Moran tied causes and occasions collectively, and I may lastly see the relevance of studying in regards to the previous.
Now, “Guinness World Records” is, arguably, historical past — and we do have it within the library. It’s the form of historical past I needed to be taught again within the day: factoids as an alternative of details, curiosities and odd occurrences quite than names and dates. It’s nonetheless attention-grabbing and entertaining, however there are quite a lot of different fascinating books on historical past for adults to select from.