Today I’m linking up with Emily P. Freeman to share the things I learned in April.
- Honey bees are native to Europe and were brought to North America in the 1600s.
2. “[T]here’s not a single documented case of a pirate drawing a map to buried treasure. This was a trope invented by the likes of Edgar Allan Poe and Robert Louis Stevenson, not Captain Kidd and Blackbeard.” (Ken Jennings in Maphead)
3. Geocaching was invented by Dave Ullmer in 2000. (You can read all about it in Maphead, which I hope to blog about soon.)
4. Bunnock is a lawn game invented by Russian soldiers and brought to Canada by Russian and German immigrants. It was originally played with the ankle bones of horses, though now synthetic “bones” are used. A 32 foot high statue of a bunnock (bone) stands in the town of Macklin, Saskatchewan.
5. Solomon Islands are where the Allies stopped the Japanese advance during World War II.
6. “Even during the First World War, British society was shocked when the American Doughboys arrived. The corn-fed farm boys who made up the army seemed like giants compared to the British lower classes, who had spent the last few generations ill-fed and ill-housed.” (This comes from an excellent article about considering social class in your fiction writing .)
7. Banff National Park was partly built by Ukrainian-Canadians who were sent to internment camps during World War I. These camps (24 across Canada) were not closed until 1920 and the government did not acknowledge the injustice until 2005.
8. Palm trees don’t have true wood (with growth rings).
What did you learn in April?
I am shocked and grieved at number 2.
I know. 🙁
Took the words out of my mouth Emily!
All new to me except #5 🙂 and #6. I’m startled to hear of those internment camps; never came across that in my Canadian studies to date.
I wonder why WWII internment camps for people of Japanese descent have received more attention. I found a few picture books about internment camps that I’ll have to blog about soon.