Colonial Williamsburg

VOLUME 7, ISSUE 9

Top Stories

The Hurricane in History

As long as men and women have lived along North America’s southeastern Atlantic coast, they have been beset by hurricanes. Until the twentieth century, there were no reliable warnings of where a storm would make landfall, or how strong the wind would be. Modern television news reports often highlight bright, clear skies and pleasant weather along the coast in the hours before a hurricane slams ashore. This calm before the storm should have made a hurricane the more surprising in early America.

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Primary Source of the Month: Photograph of Hurricane Damage in Galveston, Texas (1900)

The old saying "lightning never strikes twice in the same place" does not apply to hurricanes. They can and do strike the same areas repeatedly. For example, Galveston, Texas, has suffered many landfalls over the past century. In fact, the Galveston area averages approximately one hurricane every nine years. Two of Galveston’s major hurricanes—the Hurricane of 1900 and Hurricane Ike in 2008—offer an interesting study in similarities and contrasts.

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Teaching Strategy: Tracking Hurricanes

Over the past decade, hurricane activity seems to have intensified in both strength and frequency. Scientists are studying the causes and meteorologists are working on better ways to measure and track hurricanes so people can be given enough warning to protect themselves and their property. A key part of this effort is knowing where hurricanes are, predicting their paths, and calculating their strength and speed. In this activity, students research past hurricanes and develop presentations on them, including tracking maps and summary reports.

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Colonial Williamsburg Teaching Resources for Your Classroom

Colonial Williamsburg offers a variety of quality instructional materials dealing with 18th-century life, including:

• Hand-Blown Weather Glass
• Think Like a Historian (Primary Source CDs)
• A Day in the Life Series (DVDs/CD-ROM)

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Teaching News

The Colonial Williamsburg Journal
This e-newsletter often features articles from the content-rich Colonial Williamsburg Journal. Published four times a year, the full-color magazine offers articles and photography that showcase the life of Williamsburg’s Historic Area and its people—then and now. The Journal is a great classroom resource, and it is available to individuals and organizations who donate to Colonial Williamsburg.

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Integrating OurDocuments.gov into the Classroom
"Our Documents: A National Initiative on American History, Civics, and Service" . . . revolves around one hundred milestone documents drawn primarily from the holdings of the National Archives—from the thousands of public laws, Supreme Court decisions, inaugural speeches, treaties, constitutional amendments, and other documents that have influenced the course of U.S. history.

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Quotation of the Month

"The morning after the hurricane, the whole face of the earth seemed changed; the trees were all, without a single exception, disrobed of their foliage . . . Our roads were rendered impassable either by floods, gullies, or huge trees laid across them."

—An account of the late dreadful
hurricane . . . in the islands of
St. Christopher and Nevis . . .,
(St. Christopher, 1772).

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