The findingDulcinea Blog

findingDulcinea and LineTime Partner on History Timeline App

We're thrilled to announce a new collaboration with LineTime, a German group that develops mobile apps.

LineTime 1.o was introduced through the Apple App Store in January 2011. It received rave reviews, including a "Pick of the Week" nod from Apple Germany, and the top award at Appbackrthon Berlin, an iOS Hackathon.

LineTime 1.0 offered users the ability to view the course of modern history on a timeline, and to drill down into each century, decade or year. It was populated with history content from Wikipedia, and was intended as a demonstration of the app's potential when populated with additional content, or used in conjunction with other apps.

We immediately saw the tremendous potential for this app in education. It literally changes the way students look at history, enabling them to view historical events in full context, in a way that textbooks never could.  Most history courses are narrow in scope, and review a limited set of events that fit the theme of the course. Thus, students of United States History often study the Roaring 20s, the Great Depression, and then World War II, while barely taking note of the troubles of the Weimar Republic and rise of the Nazi party in Germany, the rise of fascism in Italy, the Spanish Civil War, or the start of the second Sino-Japanese War. With the right content, the LineTime App has the potential to enable students to see what was happening all over the world in a particular decade, year, month or day.

The app's search function also enables students to trace history through a single word. Search on "earthquakes," "assassination" or "treaty" and you'll find a list of every entry in the app that contains those words. Students can then tab through these entries and see history through yet another lens.

We promptly began collaborating with LineTime on a partnership to add findingDulcinea's On This Day content to the app. Our On This Day content is comprised of more than 400 well-researched articles about important historic events, providing full context about the event and links to the best online resources about it. It's the basis of our Historic Headlines collaboration with The New York Times, and we're thrilled to introduce this additional way for students and history buffs to interact with our content.

LineTime 1.5 is now available in the App Store for the introductory price of $2.99 (with bulk discounts for schools). We plan to move quickly to offer updated versions with substantially more content. While these future versions will surely be priced higher than this introductory price, anyone purchasing LineTime 1.5 will receive all future updates at no charge. Watch this video to see LineTime 1.5 in action!

We're also contemplating additional apps that will complement LineTime 1.5, for a modest additional charge. Some may focus intently on a particular time period or event; for instance, we may offer a separate app with hundreds or even thousands of entries about the U.S. Civil Rights movement, or another with minute-by-minute details of the assassination of JFK. We are also contemplating another app that would enable users to customize LineTime with their own custom entries, whether about their ancestors, their country or their local area.

As always, we highly value the feedback of educators, who have essentially written our product roadmap the past three years. Please write me at Mark[dot]Moran[at]DulcineaMedia[dotcom] with suggestions for how we can make the LineTime App an even better learning tool.

Sincerely,

Mark E. Moran

Founder & CEO

 

 

 

 

Assassins and Their Fatal Fictions - A Common Thread Through History

Today's "On This Day" covers the assassination of President McKinley in 1901. He was killed by Leon Czolgosz, the anarchist son of Polish immigrants who took "class warfare" to an extreme. He later said “I killed President McKinley because I done my duty.” I didn’t believe one man should have so much service, and another man should have none.”

Our  "On This Day" for July 2 contained several fascinating, little-known facts about the assassination of President Garfield. The defense asserted by assassin Charles Guiteau at his trial: “Some of these days instead of saying ‘Guiteau the assassin’, they will say ‘Guiteau the patriot.’”

The beliefs of Czolgosz and Guiteau are hardly exceptional as assassins go. Self-delusion of a noble, heroic purpose is a common thread connecting murderous lone actors of history.

What convinces an assassin that he’s a national hero? How does one man, out of so many millions who might share similar political beliefs and passions, conclude that it is his destiny to commit murder for the greater good?

Guiteau defended his action as “a political necessity,” and was so confident of general approbation that he instructed General William Tecumseh Sherman, “I am going to the Jail. Please order out your troops and take possession of the Jail at once.”

Our “On This Day” about the assassination of Abraham Lincoln reveals a similar theme, as John Wilkes Booth was shocked at the public’s grief and failure to applaud the murder. His letters provide disturbing insight into his motivations, such as this excerpt printed by the New York Times: “When a country like this spurns justice from her side, She forfeits the allegiance of every honest freeman, and should leave him untrammeled by any fealty soever, to act, as his conscience may approve.”

The 2009 assassination of abortion doctor George Tiller once again echoed this same sad, deluded tale. Although many tried to link the murder to the heated rhetoric of our cable news culture, only one man translated this passion into violence.

FindingDulcinea Senior Writer Shannon Firth analyzed Tiller's murder and explored the motives of assassins, detailing the three types categorized by author Kris Hollington. There are “wolves,” who seek notoriety, “jackals,” who are hired hands, and finally “foxes,” who are “novices hoping to make a political statement.”

According to Hollington, these foxes are intensely passionate, but are also “ordinary, unremarkable people, often failures: the antithesis of the men and women they try to kill.” Although they justify their actions in political and often religious language, “it’s all within the troubled mind of the lone individual… almost a movie in their mind.”

Do their personal failures, then, prod them towards an alternate reality, in which they can play the film-star heroes? John Hinckley, Jr., possibly inspired by the movie Taxi Driver, believed that by shooting Ronald Reagan he could win the love of actress Jodie Foster. He later explained himself, according to PBS, with this rumination on fiction: “The line dividing life and art can be invisible. After seeing enough hypnotizing movies and reading enough magical books, a fantasy life develops which can either be harmless or quite dangerous.”

I suppose heroism, and even history, is always something of a fiction, a combination of reality and the myths built around it. But I can’t stop wondering what it takes to push an individual into a myth so fatal, so extreme, and so disconnected from the society he believes he is saving.

Mark E. Moran

Founder & CEO

"All of a Sudden This Thing Came to Me"

During the 2008 Presidential primaries, we published an article asking whether traditional political rhetoric is a declining art.  We analyzed several view points, and provided historical context by harkening back to a few of the finer political speeches in recent American history.

In a separate blog post, I recalled the sad spectacle of our political leaders reading the Gettysburg address at the first anniversary observance of 9/11. A Newsday columnist wrote that the"appropriation of a distant generation's tragedy strikes me as lame and uninspired"and asked why George Pataki wouldn't "offer a new Gettysburg address instead, one that he crafts himself from the heart and not from a hired speechwriter?"

I then concluded that the problem with political oratory today is that it is always so calculating, so negotiated, so cowardly. I recalled that when Ronald Reagan first met with Mikhail Gorbachev at a Geneva chateau, Reagan's team carefully planned every move. Gorbachev's limousine would pull up and Reagan would stand regally at the top of the steps, forcing Gorbachev to ascend while looking up at Reagan. When Gorbachev's car stopped and no one exited it for a minute, Reagan bounded down the stairs, helped Gorbachev from the car, and slipped his hand under Gorbachev's arm to support him up the steps.  A Soviet aide later said "I left like we lost the game during the first movement...We started with the wrong move."

I realized that is what I really miss - politicians who are willing to suddenly bound down the stairs.

Today's On This Day covers the "I Have a Dream" speech by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. on the National Mall in 1963. We developed the On This Day series because, no matter how well I think I know about an event in history, I learn something profound from nearly every article we publish in this series. And today I learned that nowhere in the manuscript King carried with him to the podium that day did it say "I Have a Dream."

King dutifully recited the first part of the prepared speech, but then "all of a sudden this thing came to me that. … I’d used many times before. … ‘I have a dream.’ And I just felt that I wanted to use it here. … I used it, and at that point I just turned aside from the manuscript altogether. I didn’t come back to it.”

Clarence B. Jones, who drafted the original script of the speech, asked in a recent Washington Post op-ed piece, "What could possibly motivate a man standing before a crowd of hundreds of thousands, with television cameras beaming his every move and a cluster of microphones tracing his every word, to abandon the prepared text of his speech and begin riffing on a theme that he had used previously without generating much enthusiasm from listeners?"

We'll never know how the public may have reacted to the original draft of the speech. But I'm willing to bet that, had King continued to recite it, our On This Day today would be about an event other than a speech he gave 47 years ago today. And the civil rights movement itself may not have accomplished nearly as much as it did.

Mark E. Moran

Founder & CEO

How We Help Social Studies Teachers Integrate the Web into the Syllabus

The Web contains millions of primary source documents, such as letters, diaries, photographs and videos, and contemporary news accounts. It also contains innumerable reflective essays written by experts who are much more conversant with the topic than a general writer for a textbook publisher.

But few educators have the time to sorting through literally billions of Web sites to find the rare gems that lend students a greater understanding of a subject. Traditional search engines aren't helpful; they sort by relevance, not by credibility, and often can't filter finely enough to help you find what you're looking for.

What you need is expert human curators to highlight the material worth your consideration.

Click here to read reviews of our work by well-known educators and journals.

Our landing page for Social Studies reflects the effort of two dozen full-time researchers and an equal number of teacher consultants who have brought order to the best social studies content available online.

Begin each day by perusing our SweetSearch2Day, which is a daily curated assortment of the best content on the Web for current events, history, language arts, science, culture and other topics. Better yet, sign-up for our newsletter, and at 6:00 a.m. NY time, we'll send you links to the most intriguing content on that day's page. For examples of the newsletter, click here and here.

Our seminal article, "101 Great Sites for Social Studies Class," points you to gems such as:

• Rag Linen, which contains copies of original newspapers from the 18th century, including accounts of the French & Indian War;
• The Mike Wallace Interview, a collection of 66 interviews from the 1950s with luminaries such as Eleanor Roosevelt, Pearl Buck and Frank Lloyd Wright.
• Harp Week, which examines presidential elections, the Civil War, Reconstruction and other events of 19th century America through the articles and cartoons of Harper’s Weekly.

To provide a practical use for the many interview sites we've uncovered, we publish "Interview of the Day," which leads you to some of the most compelling video, audio and text interviews of the 20th century. Do you teach your students about Amelia Earhart? We found three newsreel interviews with her from 1928. How about Eleanor Roosevelt? Watch the interview she gave to Mike Wallace in 1957, in which she remarked about The Cold War, "I feel quite sure that the American people, if they have knowledge and leadership, can meet any crisis just as well as they met it over and over again in the past.”

The On This Day articles that we publish each day explain an historical event, what led up to it, what happened that day, and the long-term recriminations and echoes in history. We also publish it in Spanish, as Hoy en la Historia. We hope you'll encourage your students to elevate their research and critical thinking skills in our On This Day Challenge, which offers them step-by-step instruction, prizes, and a chance to be published.

Students need role models, right? We've written thousands of headline articles; high school librarian Joyce Valenza wrote on her School Library Journal blog that our "discoveries are  timely and seem to continually attack those topics my students research." We find additional background or reference information on the topic, related topics and opposing points of view. We integrate all this information into a cohesive, comprehensive look at the topic, and link to our sources, which we align in a single box.

When Iran violently suppressed protests last year, we wrote about the History of Iranian Revolutions. When a killer whale tragically drowned a Sea World trainer, leading to calls for its release into the wild, our article about it summarized and linked to a PBS documentary that provided a chart discussing all 133 killer whales that had ever been captured in the wild for use in shows, and an intriguing story about killer whales who cooperated with Pacific Island villagers to trap, kill and mutually share other whales. For other examples of how we help social studies teachers teach students to think for themselves about what we call the "fragile truth of history," read this blog post.

A white paper released in November 2010 by Temple University Media Education Professor Renee Hobbs, sponsored by The Knight Commission, included Beyond the Headlines in its "Portraits of Success: Powerful Voices for Kids" and wrote, "Finding Dulcinea... addresses the 'context deficit' that occurs with online searching."

Our Features section contains a wide range of articles of interest to educators. For example, we hear often that students struggle to find good material for country and state reports. So we published "Sites for Learning About Countries," which links to the best 18 sites we found, for younger and older learners, as well as "Sites for Learning About the 50 States." We also know that students often study inventors and inventions; our Innovations series discusses, and provides outstanding research resources about, the complex history behind the inventions of modern mainstays such as the bicycle, refrigerator, vacuum and autopsies.

Because our content is so vast and voluminous, we've created special collections pages. Teachers often tell us that students all want to write about the same events and people, year after year; Jackie and Rosa for African-American History Month; Eleanor, Florence, Betsy and Oprah for Women's History Month; Nelson Mandela and Mother Teresa for Global Studies. SweetSearch Biographies is an indexed collection of more than 1,000 biographies, sortable by profession, gender, and race/origin. Students using this will soon be teaching you about people you've never heard of. After a librarian told us that students all write about the same events and people from the Holocaust, we created this collection of Holocaust material as the antidote.

Our thousands of articles build upon the dozens of Web Guides you'll find in the left-hand column on the social studies landing page. Nearly all were created by outstanding teachers of the subject/grade level covered. The guides are comprehensive, narrated tours of the best content on the Web for teachers, students and parents, and directly link you to the best primary sources about a subject. The guides typically track the teacher writer's syllabus.

Overlaying it all is SweetSearch, A Search Engine for Students. It only searches 35,000 credible resources that our research experts and educator consultants have approved when creating all the content discussed above. We also spend our Saturdays trolling through lists of sites recommended by social studies educators, vetting them ourselves, and adding those that pass muster. Because we know that a great resource for a high school student is not necessarily a great resource for a fourth grader, we've also introduced SweetSearch4Me, which is the only search engine that prominently features on the first results page the high quality Web sites created for elementary school students. Read this blog post to understand more about how we created SweetSearch, and its integration with Yolink, a remarkable tool that helps students quickly browse through rows of search results without opening them.

Though your students will now be using the best search engines for students, they should still learn the Ten Steps to Better Web Research. To help them, we've published this presentation on Teaching the Ten Steps, which has gotten more than 12,000 views in its first two month.

Once you've found all these great Web resources, you'll want to share them with your students, and colleagues. So we created findingEducation, a bookmarking and sharing tool that we describe in this blog post as your digital classroom. If exploited by educators to its full potential, findingEducation will become the free, paperless successor to those expensive, landfill-busting textbooks that burden your students backpacks each year.

At this year's annual conference of the National Social Studies Supervisors Association, we gave this presentation on "A Practical Approach to Integrating the Web and Technology into the Social Studies Classroom." Feedback on the presentation has been stellar, and indeed we've already been invited to present at next year's conference, as well as a half dozen state and regional conferences. This blog post has links to the many stellar examples of effective use of the Web by educators, as well as other outstanding social studies resources.

Please send me feedback, questions, suggestions, etc. on our Social Studies content and tools, to Mark.Moran@DulcineaMedia.com

Sincerely,

Mark E. Moran

Founder & CEO

Dulcinea Media

How to Help Haiti? Understand it.

Bebeto Matthews/AP Photos Luna Charles wipes away tears as she attends a vigil in Brooklyn, New York, Wednesday Jan. 13, 2010. Charles, who has not been able to reach her family in Haiti following a 7.0-magnitude quake, said, "I hope people will extend a hand. Haiti needs us more than ever."

The news of Haiti’s earthquake and the devastation it continues to wreak is shocking, but the tragedy has also reminded me of how little I know about the small, impoverished country.

Why has Haiti been left so vulnerable, and how did it get to this point? Anyone who’s picked up a newspaper or trolled for news online lately has seen images of the injured, of bodies covered in sheets and left in the streets, of buildings crumbled to bits. We’ve read of shantytowns sliding away—killing, maiming or leaving homeless thousands of people who’d never had a fair shot to begin with. Why weren’t they given a fair shot?

Despite being so physically close to the U.S., Haiti might never have crossed Americans’ minds had it not been so harshly thrust into the international spotlight. But if ever there was a time for us to learn more, and to actually put effort into understanding Haiti, it is now.

FindingDulcinea’s Focus on Haiti article, which we first published back in 2008, is an excellent starting point for further research. Beginning with colonization in the late 1600s, the sources we’ve cited provide information about Haiti’s early successes (it was the world’s first African American-led republic), and sad failings, such as brutal dictatorships and questionable treatment of Haitian immigrants and their children by the Dominican Republic. Child slavery is also a horrific reality for many Haitian families.

Many of us, myself included, may now feel the urge to actually go to Haiti and lend a hand. But unless properly trained, whether as a medical professional or relief worker, we’d only be getting in the way. In a post for community site Gather, Kimberly Ripley writes, “Unfortunately if everyone who wanted to volunteer in Haiti simply packed up and flew to that country, more chaos would ensue.” She provides information on what it means to be a trained and qualified volunteer, and which relief organizations are reputable.

Former President Bill Clinton, the U.N. special envoy to Haiti, discussed with NPR the importance of sending monetary aid. “What we need now is cash to buy water, food, shelter and first-aid supplies. That's what we need,” Clinton said. 

Most of us can spare $5 or $10 for Haiti, and it’s easier than ever thanks to text message donation campaigns. More information about donating to legitimate organizations is featured in this findingDulcinea article, as well as on the Clinton Foundation Web site.

Sarah Amandolare

Senior Writer

The Wright Brothers and the Meaning of "Inventor"

Today is the 106th anniversary of Wilbur and Orville Wright’s flight at Kitty Hawk. The event is considered the first-ever motorized flight, and the Wright brothers are considered the inventors of the airplane, but those distinctions are disputed.

German Karl Jatho claimed that he successfully flew his own plane in August and November 1903. However, Jatho did little to publicize his flights, and the world knew nothing about it when the Wrights took flight that December.

Disputes over famous inventions are fairly common. In a 2008 article for The New Yorker, Malcolm Gladwell examined the phenomenon of ideas being developed by different people in different areas at the same time.

Many famous inventions and theories, he notes, came in “multiples”: Alexander Graham Bell and Elisha Gray inventing the telephone, Isaac Newton and Gottfried Leibniz inventing calculus, Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace discovering evolution, and Elwood Haynes and the Duryea brothers building the gas-powered car.

In most cases, history remembers only one of the inventors. Similarly, inventions that developed over years of work by multiple people are usually credited to one man who made a famous advancement.

Thomas Edison didn’t invent the incandescent light bulb; he was the first to create one that was practical for everyday use. Guglielmo Marconi didn’t invent the wireless telegraph; he was the first to send a signal across the Atlantic. Alexander Cartwright didn’t invent baseball; he and his fellow members of the Knickerbocker Club modified the rules of contemporary stick-and-ball games to make it more like modern baseball.

Credit for an invention often depends on the publicity it received. Whereas Jatho’s flights were known by only a handful of people, the Wright brothers’ flight was reported across the world and its coverage launched an era of aviation.

In many cases, an inventor’s self-promotion is as significant as his ingenuity. As the satirical newspaper The Onion recently quipped, although Edison did not invent the light bulb, he did “devise the groundbreaking new process of taking ideas pioneered by other scientists and marketing them as his own.”

Denis Cummings

Getting Acquainted With Blake Harrison of Flocabulary

Remember watching “Sesame Street” and learning the alphabet and some basic math skills? How about “Schoolhouse Rock” and learning the difference between an interjection and a conjunction, or how a bill becomes law? Did you forget how much fun learning could be?

Blake Harrison didn’t forget. Harrison, along with Alex Rappaport, founded Flocabulary, a teaching curriculum that uses educational hip-hop music to teach reading, vocabulary, math, science and social studies. The duo has taken their music on the road, held teaching workshops and created a current events series called The Week in Rap.

FindingEducation, a new tool that helps teachers save and share their favorite Web sites and assignments, spoke with Harrison about his inspiration for Flocabulary, how music enhances education and why teachers are seeing value in this unique approach. Read the full interview with Blake Harrison at findingEducation’s blog, Digital Teachers’ Lounge.

Sweet Sites | Finding News in New Places

Part of my daily role at findingDulcinea is to find news stories that are provocative, educational and informative. We take these stories and try to answer other questions readers might have about the topic. For example, North and South Korea appear to have reached a new chapter in their relationship since the death of former South Korean President Kim Dae-jung in August. But what of the countries’ relationship with the U.S.? How have relations fared since the outbreak of the Korean War in 1950?

We choose stories from a variety of sources, and in our own stories, include information from an even wider variety. But how do we find such a diverse collection of headlines? Below are five interesting sites that I recommend to Web newshounds new and seasoned.

Current has expanded from being an online television station of provocative, user-submitted content; it is also a social bookmarking tool. Users post stories from all over the Web, and the selections speak to the users’ inquisitive eye for quality, thought-provoking stories.

DailyMe syndicates news stories from newspapers around the country, and allows you to customize your own start page. This is a nice full-text alternative to an RSS reader. See the whole story, not just the headline, and see stories in only the topics that interest you.

Smithsonian Magazine isn’t about breaking news or sensational stories; it covers big ideas on a range of topics, loosely categorized into sections such as “People & Places” and “History & Archaeology.” Last week, the magazine’s article on micronations prompted us to profile a few eccentric and innovative micronations in a feature called “What is a Micronation?”

Bing News is Microsoft’s answer to Google News. At first glance, there are a lot of similarities, but Bing has a column off to the left that reads your IP address and brings you local news. The design of the site is cleaner and easier to read, there is a special section for news videos and I often see headlines here that I don’t see elsewhere.

The Slatest is Slate Magazine’s top 12 list of news stories from around the Web. It’s frequently updated, stored for archival perusal and includes the top stories from major news sources in a separate box to the left.

Liz Colville
Senior Writer

Remembering the Start of World War II

A war veteran stops by the monument of World War II casualties in Sheffield, Yorkshire, United Kingdom

On Sept. 1, 1939, World War II began with Nazi Germany’s invasion of Poland. This week’s 70th anniversary commemoration of the event saw diplomatic gestures between former enemies. The war killed 6 million Poles, Christian Science Monitor’s Elizabeth Pond reports from Gdansk, Poland, in an assessment of “old enemies” on the 70th anniversary. Half of them were Jewish.

Poland is the center of this year’s commemoration because it “suffered the highest ratio of war deaths per population.” But today, “Poles and Germans are friends and allies,” Pond notes, and another old foe, Russia, this week made efforts to denounce the Hitler-Stalin pact forged just before the outbreak of the war. Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany described her country’s role in the atrocities of World War II at a ceremony yesterday, saying Germanybears an “‘eternal’ responsibility” for what happened, Bloomberg reported.

“There are no words that could even remotely describe the suffering caused by this war and the Holocaust,” Merkel said at the Westerplatte peninsula in Gdansk. “I bow before the victims.”

This week also saw British wartime songstress Dame Vera Lynn reemerging on the UK album chart at number 20, becoming the oldest living singer on the chart (she is 92).

As her Allmusic biography explains, the “mere mention of Vera Lynn's name evokes images of London skies filled with barrage balloons, and Britons riding out the German blitz in shelters and subway stations.” Wartime songs like “Auf Wiederseh’n Sweetheart” became hits in the U.K. and U.S., and Lynn became the British troops’ “sweetheart” when she travelled to entertain them, “often at great personal risk,” AFP explains.

Learn more about the circumstances surrounding the outbreak of World War II with findingDulcinea’s article, “On This Day: Nazi Germany Invades Poland, Starting World War II.” Then, read about the final day of the European portion of the war with “On This Day: V-E Day Ends World War II in Europe.”

Liz Colville
Senior Writer

What I Didn’t Know About Tiananmen Square

Photo: Elizabeth Dalziel/AP

In the spring of 1988, I traveled to China with a small group of other high school students and a much larger group of older adults. I’ve always liked to say that I learned more about American tourists during that trip than I ever learned about the Chinese. There were the two ladies who refused to eat anything but white rice. The woman who had to keep purchasing new luggage to fit all the souvenirs she was buying. Her daughter, who was so focused on videotaping everything, that she never seemed to look at anything with her own eyes. The man who thought it was funny to kick the back of my seat on every short plane flight, and who apparently decided that the very real machete fight that we inadvertently witnessed and which left one man with serious head wounds was light entertainment put on for his benefit.

That’s not to say that I didn’t have any encounters with the people who actually lived there. Unlike my trip the previous year to what was then the Soviet Union, no one tried to block us from making contact. The other students and I talked with young people on the streets of Shanghai who were anxious to practice their English, waved to an adorable, rosy-cheeked kindergarten class who chanted “Good morning! Good morning!” as we passed, ignored the desperate vendors who tried to sell us trinkets through the windows of our bus and watched an elderly woman with bound feet painfully limp down a flight of steps in the Forbidden City, leaning on the arm of a soldier.

Although my high school friends and I felt that we were obviously better behaved travelers and more open to truly experiencing the country than the adults with us, that did not mean that we ever really had a clue about any of China’s most pressing political issues. One peaceful evening in Beijing, we lay in the middle of Tiananmen Square and sang “You Can Call Me Mao,” parodying a song popular at the time, Paul Simon’s “You Can Call Me Al.” A little more than a year later, that spot was overrun with protesting students, tanks and soldiers firing on civilians.

It was deeply upsetting to me that a site I associated with a silly memory became associated in the eyes of the world with such horrifying bloodshed. It’s equally upsetting that in the 20 years since, the Chinese government has made significant efforts to obliterate all recall of that terrible event, and have forbidden people to commemorate it in any way. During the days leading up to the anniversary this year, authorities have tried to block discussion about it on the Internet.

Learn more about what happened in June 1989 by reading findingDulcinea’s Web Guide to the Tiananmen Square Massacre.

Amy Goldschlager
Editor