I will contact the Head of History accordingly.

Funniest thing I’ve read for a long time.

and for answers 1. is Trotsky, who was born as Leon Bronstein (his patronymic escapes me)
2 is Kamenev and Trotsky
3 is Stalin. He also housed him for an night whilst his escape was planned.

sorry if i’ve ruined your competition.
Ironically I am actually reading a Simon Sebag Montefiore book at the moment.

Great book. I just want to say what a fantastic thing you are doing! Good luck!

Bye

It would seem that post-modernists would reject the premise of an account of history as sommething that is ‘not the truth’. However, surely they would go further. The fact that language is mired in bias, conscious and subconscious embellishments, gaps and social and political influences (amoung others) coupled with the notion of intertextuality, would the post-modernist not simply claim history, no matter how ‘objective’ is only ever going to be a grossly biased, incorrect (fictitious) set of accounts of the past? The historian, largley, does attempt to provide an explanation of the past and while he may produce some form of explanation, the impractical nature of language plainly renders his attempts as being useless and in fact a terribly inaccurate explanation.

It is difficult to pinpoint the most important man in the process of the creation of modern day technology. Is it perhaps Bill Shockley; the man who invented the transistor and thus gave the potential for normal size computers, computers that weren’t the size of houses (or even countries, if the power was to equal our modern day computers.) Of course this is massively important, in fact, probably the most important event in computer history, however I find it difficult to relate to since it was before my time. However one massive milestone that occurred during my time was the invention of the World Wide Web (otherwise known as the internet for those of you who aren’t so up with the computer lingo). I cannot imagine a world without the internet and the man who invented it is my unknown hero British hero. He is known among certain folk however, I believe that for what he created, he deserves far more credit and recognition.

Tim Berners-Lee was born in London, the son of Conway Berners-Lee and Mary Lee Woods. His parents, both mathematicians, were employed together to built one of the earliest computers. As one would expect, he was taught to love maths and use it at all times, even in the shower apparently. Berners-Lee learnt computer science at school and completed his later education at Oxford (where he played tiddlywinks for Oxford, against its rival Cambridge). There he built a computer with a soldering iron, TTL gates, an M6800 processor, something which is apparently quite special, and an old television. While at Oxford, he was caught hacking with a friend and was subsequently banned from using the university computer. Had they known that he was to invent the World Wide Web they would have thought twice about doing that! He graduated in 1976 with a degree in physics.

While at CERN, from June to December 1980, Berners-Lee proposed a project based on the concept of hypertext, to facilitate sharing and updating information among researchers. While there, he built a prototype system named ENQUIRE. This was the basis of what was about to change the world.

Having left CERN in 1980, he returned in 1984 as a fellow. By 1989, CERN was the largest Internet node in Europe, and Berners-Lee saw an opportunity to join hypertext with the Internet: “I just had to take the hypertext idea and connect it to the TCP and DNS ideas and — ta-da! — the World Wide Web.” He wrote his initial proposal in March of 1989, and in 1990, got the green light from his manager for the go ahead. He used similar ideas to those underlying the Enquire system to create the World Wide Web, for which he designed and built the first web browser and editor and the first Web server called httpd.

The first Web site built was at http://info.cern.ch/ and was first put online on August 6, 1991. It provided an explanation about what the World Wide Web was; how one could own a browser and how to set up a Web server. The site is still there for anyone eager to visit the first ever website!

Berners-Lee made his idea available freely, with no patent and no royalties due. The World Wide Web Consortium decided that their standards must be based on royalty-free technology, so they can be easily adopted by anyone. He didn’t make it for his own benefit, he wanted to help everyone; that was his goal and he achieved it. He is a remarkable man who deserves much more recognition that he is currently being given.

In the book there are many accounts of violence and racism which teach the reader about life at this time. An example of this was when Mr Morrison injured a White man in a fight and although he claims not to have been at fault, he is fired and needs a place to live. The White men are not fired and the author suggests this is because they are White.

I agree with Subon that it can be harder to get into historical fiction but this book is well suited to our age group. The vocabulary was not difficult but Subon does have a point that many historical books are challenging in their vocabulary. Cassie is a teenager at school and her experiemces can be compared to our own. Her Black school had 7 teachers for 320 students and there was a chronic shortage of black boards, desks, paper, chalk and maps-text books were at least 10 years old White “hand me downs.”

I believe Mildred Taylor is a well respected and known author, contary to Subon’s opinion. This book is treated by Penguin Publishers as a “Modern Classic”, not many text books get that accolade. It was a great choice of book because it can really increase our understanding of what life was like for Black communities in early 20th century America in a way that a dry factual text book could not. I don’t think we should have been forced to finish the book as it is our own loss. In not reading this book Subon may have damaged his chances of following Dr Sloan and becoming a history teacher!