Long ago, in internet time, back in the early 1990’s, I remember that as the World Wide Web started out, most of the sites worth looking at were from Universities and Colleges. These sites from a time before the Web became commercial contained a lot of useful information (all free!). I realized that while the Web has changed profoundly since then, these sites are still out there, some have been attractively updated, but they still have the same information.
I recently became a social studies teacher (a few years ago…), and it always seemed to me that there were some basics which a history teacher should be reasonably conversant with. I have been a history buff for a long time, and the thought of spending time reading some original sources versus ‘commercial’ history has always seemed to be a pleasure. Consequently, the thought of having access to some of the bedrock works of western culture (that is, the culture ‘we’ have been living in for the last several hundred years here in the USA) have some real value.
I have a link here that contains sites which have many of these works: the Iliad, the Odyssey, Hesiod, and the works of Plato and Aristotle, Thucydides and Herodotus, Sophocles, Euripides, and Aeschylus, and so forth…Xenophon anyone?
Obviously there is little use for reading the whole of the Histories of Herodotus or the coverage of the Peloponnesian Wars by Thucydides, but teachers should be reasonably acquainted with these works, if only to better give a sense of what is important in history (something I never, ever got when I was in school…).
For the budding history buff, these works are in the public domain, so you could spend some money at a book store to get a nice paperback copy of the Iliad, or you could just download the whole works to your computer (and save in a format that would allow you to use one of the new e-readers (Kindle 2, the Nook, et.al.). It has always seemed a rather strange irony in that the original masterpieces are free for the taking, and lesser works, reviews, and perspectives of these works cost money…
In any case, the associated list I have here is only a beginner’s ‘smorgasbord’ of Greek Culture; there are more topics to cover on later posts…
