Dear
Readers:
The narrative histories for the 2009 to 2010 academic
year are edited and posted to the web in this eighth edition of “Tell Me a
Story.”
They represent the best narratives written by students
in the Spring 2009 class in Historiography at Lourdes College and are presented
here as a gateway to take readers on a trip through time.
Four of the tales in the 8th edition of our
journal take us back to Europe in the modern age – two tell the story of
England in the Age of Discovery while two more tell the story of 20th
Century dictators known for their incredible cruelty. We learn what events shaped Henry VIII and what motivated the Virginia Company to
found Jamestown. We also look into the personal lives of Adolf Hitler and Josef Stalin.
We turn to the United States for the remaining four
tales which take us from the founding of the nation to the present. Each history tells the story of crisis –
Alexander Hamilton’s fight to restore order in the Whiskey Rebellion, Abraham Lincoln’s desperate search
for a general for the Army of the Potomac,
the collapse of Toledo in the Great Depression and its rebirth with help from
the Works Progress Administration,
and the brave fight of baseball star Larry
Doby against racism.
This year special thanks go out to Alicia Murphy, a
history major who is working for the Department of History as a federal work
study student, for her editorial support!
-- Mary Stockwell
Clio, the Muse of History
Even the most painstaking history
is a bridge across an eternal mystery.
~ Bruce Catton, Prefaces to History
© Mary Stockwell 2010
