Exactly one year ago today, I posted my first article of ‘historical news’. The article was entitled ‘Channel Tunnel: Midway Meeting‘ and it referred to the event on 1st December 1990 when the English and the French tunnels beneath the English Channel finally linked up 75 metres below the sea bed. For me it was the start of my own one-year ‘tunnel’ which finally came to an end with yesterday’s article about the abolishing of the death penalty in The Grand Duchy of Tuscany on 30th November 1786.
I must admit, it has been quite an odyssey and on more than one occasion I became concerned that I had bitten off more than I could chew by setting myself the target of an article a day for a full year. But here I am at the end of it, none the worse for wear and decidedly more knowledgable than I was at the beginning.
I have tried to make the project a balanced mix, ranging from the more portentous, often earthshaking, mainstream events to the less dramatic, sometimes frivolous, marginal stories that all contribute in their own way to the variegated history of mankind. I hope that I have been reasonably successful in this.
All 366 stories are linked in to a specifically designed ‘calendar page’ which can be found here (link) but which is also available in the sidebar and on the Resources (link) page under the title “Looking Back”.
I hope this ‘calendar page’ may prove useful in the future both to autonomous students of English as a miscellaneous reading exercise and to English language teachers as a possible cue for a brief class discussion.
Congratulations, Tony! It was so long and demanding for you. We truly appreciate the beautiful work. Thanks đ
Thank you, Dany, for taking the time to comment. Yes, it was ‘long and demanding’ as you say, but it was also good fun and an interesting challenge. đ
Great!!!
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Tony, what an achievement – and what a tunnel to have travelled through for a whole year.
Keeping up a daily writing schedule of this quality is brutally hard work, and the fact that you have done it for 366 consecutive days is quietly extraordinary. The way you have woven together âearthshakingâ moments with smaller, more eccentric stories has made the series feel like a living scrapbook rather than a dry chronology.
As a resource, your âLooking Backâ calendar is a gift: it is the kind of archive teachers dream of stumbling across the night before a lesson, and that autonomous learners can dip into when they want something rich but manageable to read. Hereâs hoping it continues to do exactly what you hoped for – sparking curiosity, fuelling discussion, and making both history and English feel a little more alive, one day at a time.
Thank you so much for your enthusiastic feedback, Bob. Now it’s time to take a deep breath and come up with something new for the new year. Mind you, my other ongoing rubrics continue to keep me busy enough! Time will tell…