This Month in History, The Siege of Constantinople
April 28th, 2008by Peter R Posted in History, This Month in History | No Comments »
This Month in History: April
The Siege of Constantinople
On April 5, 1453, Ottoman Sultan Mehmet II pitched camp alongside his army outside the walls of Constantinople. His objective—the permanent conquest of Constantinople—was simple enough, but at the same time unprecedented and pivotal to the history of Greece, Islam, and the whole of Western Europe. Seizing Constantinople would mean the end of the Byzantine era, which had lasted since the fall of Rome a thousand years ago, and the completion of the Ottoman Empire’s conquest of the Balkans. With the Byzantine capital under his heel, Mehmet II would have the opportunity to expand his Muslim regime north and west into Catholic Europe.
In the fifteenth century Byzantium was a dying empire, still severely wounded by the disastrous Fourth Crusade. Nevertheless, Constantinople would be extremely difficult to subdue. The city was triangular and situated so that two sides lay against the sea; while those parts were surrounded by a solid stone wall, the land segment of the city’s border boasted the a set of three linked walls built by Emperor Theodosius II in the 400s, when the city was still under Roman authority. Although the development of artillery alleviated some of the challenge of breaching the renowned Theodosian Walls, the sheer mass and shelter these fortifications provided the defenders was undoubtedly one of Mehmet’s greatest obstacles.
When news reached Constantine XI Palaeologus, the Byzantine emperor, of Mehmet’s plans to seize the city, he called on Western Europe for assistance. The pope did his best to aid Constantine, but ultimately was unable to persuade the western monarchs to supply Byzantium with significant reinforcements. Still, small groups of soldiers trickled into Constantinople, most notably the Genoese mercenary Giovanni Giustiniani Longo, a brave, talented specialist in the field of siege warfare. Giustiniani brought seven hundred Italians with him and led the city’s defense for the duration of the siege. In total, the defending force of Constantinople numbered approximately seven thousand. Opposing them, encamped on the horizon, were probably eighty thousand Ottoman Turks, including thousands of Janissaries, the gun-wielding elite of the fifteenth century.
The siege commenced with the Ottoman capture of Byzantine forts beyond the city walls. Once these pockets of resistance were out of the way, Mehmet sought to secure the Golden Horn, a niche of the Bosphorus forming Constantinople’s northern waterfront. The inlet was inaccessible due to a barrier the Byzantines had built across its mouth, so Mehmet had to transport his navy over land on the northern side of the Horn—the shore opposite Constantinople—to get inside. The success of the operation gave the Ottomans total control over the waters around the city and forced the Byzantines to thin their defenders out across the sea wall as well as the Theodosian land walls.
With both the sea and the countryside under his control, Mehmet now turned to the conquest of Constantinople. Though he attacked the walls several times in April, he was unable to gain a foothold, and so the siege would be drawn out into May, when Mehmet would focus all his resources and all his men on the stubbornly defended prize.
*To be completed next month.
Go See Anything Goes!
April 17th, 2008by Beacon Staff Posted in Actual News! Sort of.. | No Comments »
The early reviews are in- The STA production of Anything Goes is fantastic. The show runs tonight (Thursday, April 17) through Saturday, April 19. The show is listed as starting at 7:00 in the announcements and at 7:30 on the webpage- it’s better to be early than late, especially to get a good seat!
Mail Delivery?
April 11th, 2008by Beacon Staff Posted in Actual News! Sort of.. | 1 Comment »
Out in the trees behind STA stand a pair of mailboxes. No, it’s not an attempt to make our mail carrier’s life more difficult, it’s part of the Kestrel Project, which is an attempt to provide nesting boxes for kestrels on the grounds of New Hampshire schools. Recently, Dr. Pike arranged to have Jeremy Phillips come talk to the Environmental Club about kestrels, which are small falcons.
After the presentation, the club went outside to install the nesting boxes, which are large mailboxes that have been converted into homes for Kestrels. (Ironically, the mailbox model used is the same one a certain blog’s faculty moderator uses as his mailbox).
Hopefully, later in the spring, we’ll be able to report that kestrels are nesting behind STA!
Did you happen to notice the date?
April 1st, 2008by Mr. Christie Posted in Actual News! Sort of.. | No Comments »
Google announced today that it is offering the ability to roll back the sent dates on email sent through their popular gmail system. According to their announcement, one can “Just click ‘Set custom time’ from the Compose view. Any email you send to the past appears in the proper chronological order in your recipient’s inbox. You can opt for it to show up read or unread by selecting the appropriate option.”
If you’re interested you should visit their announcement page, it is definitely worth a look.
We hope you join us in celebrating this technological innovation, and celebrating the beginning of April at the same time 
In Like a Lion, Out Like a Lion
March 28th, 2008by Beacon Staff Posted in Call for entries, Actual News! Sort of.. | 1 Comment »
The STA Community is learning that old saying about March, “In like a lion, out like a lamb” might not be true this year as we were greeted this morning with several more inches of snow. The Beacon Bits Blog is sponsoring a contest for a new slogan for the month; our personal favorites so far are “Wow, that’s a lot of snow” and “Spring is overrated.” Post your suggestions below.
THE BRITISH EVACUATION OF BOSTON
March 24th, 2008by Peter R Posted in This Month in History | No Comments »
THIS MONTH IN HISTORY: MARCH 1776
THE BRITISH EVACUATION OF BOSTON
On March 27, 1776, the British garrison of Boston, Massachusetts abandoned its post and set sail for Halifax. They had held fast for eleven months in a siege that sparked the full force of the American Revolution, but when Henry Knox of the besieging colonial army arrived in January with fifty-nine cannon hauled from Fort Ticonderoga, the British knew there was little more they could do to properly defend the city. Preparations were made to depart.
The victory had not come without its prior setbacks, however. British General Howe arrived in May 1775 to reinforce Thomas Gage, the commander-in-chief, and promptly launched an attack on the colonials holding Breed’s Hill the next month. It took three assaults and a thousand killed or wounded men, but by the end of the battle the British had overrun the redoubt and won the hill, exacting four hundred American casualties. As winter approached, the colonials were stuck outside Boston, with no artillery, few experienced generals, and twenty thousand unproven soldiers cowed by a contingent of the best-trained soldiers in the world who had access to the sea.
The colonials’ savior came in the form of a twenty-six-year-old bookseller named Henry Knox. Fort Ticonderoga, in Vermont, had been captured in the same month as the Battle of Breed’s Hill, and with it a sizable collection of artillery. If a group of colonials could travel to the fort and bring back the artillery, George Washington and the colonials could bombard the British into submission, or at the very least scare them off by flaunting the cannon within range of the town walls. The success of the endeavor seemed unlikely—how can you drag fifty-nine cannon three hundred miles through the dead of winter?—but nevertheless Washington supported it, and the trek was underway with Knox at the helm.
They reached Fort Ticonderoga on December 5; the next step was finding a way to haul the pieces back to Boston. Knox liked the idea of sleds and oxen and gathered them from local allies. Winter had been kind to him on the way to the fort, but now the weather worsened, and Knox’s soldiers and engineers had to wage a campaign to row forty miles across Lake George with the corps, inventory, and beasts of burden intact. Once back on land, Knox retrieved the sleds and the long march back to Boston commenced. The weather alternated between life-threatening blizzards and unseasonable warmth that made crossing the frozen Hudson River perilous. When one of the cannon broke through the ice, a day of travel was sacrificed to retrieve it.
Miraculously, Knox showed up at Boston on January 24, 1776 with the fifty-nine cannon undamaged. On March 4, while the artillery fired on Boston, groups of colonials crept up Dorchester Heights and used logs to create replicas of the cannon; the British woke up next morning to the sight of countless pieces crowding the Heights, and decided it was time to pack up and quit the city.
The British generals, Gage and Howe, speedily came to terms with Washington. The deal was that if the British were allowed to evacuate Boston they would leave the city untouched. Otherwise, Boston would burn. The colonials agreed, the British set sail, and Washington won his first encounter with the British. A pivotal victory in the American Revolution depended on the foresight and ingenuity of an untested bookseller and his similarly inexperienced commander.
This Month in History THE BIRTH OF NICOLAUS COPERNICUS
March 11th, 2008by Peter R Posted in This Month in History | 1 Comment »
[Editor’s Note: Actually, this month in history is supposed to be last month in history, as this piece was submitted during February, but due to technical difficulties it didn’t make it to the blog until today. Happy Belated Birthday, Mr. Copernicus]
In the year 1533, Johann Albrecht Widmannstetter, secretary of the pope, delivered a group of lectures concerning the heliocentric theories of a Polish polymath named Nicolaus Copernicus. Mr. Widmannstetter conveyed Copernicus’ theory that Earth was, contrary to popular Renaissance belief, not the center of the universe. The lectures piqued the interest of the pope and some other high-ranking clergymen, causing one Archbishop Nicholas Schonberg to write a letter to Copernicus, in which Schonberg expressed special interest and asked that Copernicus allow him to make copies of the theoretical papers so he could read them at his leisure.
Copernicus, however, refused to publish the work. News of his heliocentric theory was beginning to spread throughout Europe, probably gathering as much criticism as interest, and he feared that it might draw too much disapproval. After all, people had thought for ages that the Earth was the center of the universe, a principle shared and sponsored by the Catholic Church. Should he publish the groundbreaking theory, Copernicus expected he would have to deal with numerous attacks from theologian and scientist alike.
The concept that the sun is the center of the universe stretches as far back as the seventh or even eight century BC, when the Indian scholar Yajnavalkya asserted that the sun was in fact larger than the Earth and even hypothesized that the sun is stationary which has been refuted; the sun accelerates in its movements as it orbits the Galactic Center of the Milky Way. Fifth-century Greek cosmologist Philolaus deemed the Earth mobile, and his intellectual successor Aristarchus was the first to plainly make the case of heliocentrism. However, better-known ancient scholars such as Aristotle and Ptolemy rebuffed these quantum leaps in astronomy and their geocentric theory was the common belief during Copernicus’ life. Aristotle went so far as to warp Philolaus’ premises by ridiculing them in Metaphysics, thereby adding to the false notion that Philolaus believed in a ‘Counter-Earth’ to accompany the nine bodies revolving around his hypothetical Central Fire.
For Copernicus, who was born on 19 February 1473, astronomy was at first little more than a hobby. He first became interested during his time at the Jagiellonian University in Poland, and soon started to amass an abundance of books on the subject, but after he left the university he devoted most of his time to medicine, law, and religion. But then he was once again swept up in studies of the cosmos when he met Dominico Maria Novara, a professor at Bologna, who set him back on track as a budding astronomer. Some two decades later, in 1514, Copernicus finally had his heliocentric work ready for viewing, and delivered it to a handful of his friends and colleagues. Finally, in 1543, the completed De revolutionibis orbium coelestium was published. Copernicus died in the same year, on 24 May, not long after the publisher handed him the first printed copy of his book.
Many years later, in 1616, the Church halted any further production of De revolutionibis because it spread the ‘false’ idea that the Earth was not the center of the universe, which was clearly contradicted in the Book of Genesis. ‘Corrections’ were made, deleting a number of statements, as disciples of Copernicus were hunted down and arrested, placed under house arrest, or even executed. However, the Church was fighting a futile battle. On 15 February 1564, Galileo Galilei, the future champion of Copernican doctrine, was born. Spending the last decade of his life under house arrest turned out not to be enough to prevent the spread of his ideas; Copernican heliocentrism came to be the commonly accepted state of the universe. As time passed, the world came to understand that Sol, our sun, is only one star in an incalculable crowd. This knowledge built on Copernicus’ massive advances.
Concert Pictures!
February 18th, 2008by Mr. Christie Posted in PhotoBlog, Music | 2 Comments »
Here are a few pictures from the recent Instrumental Solo and Ensemble Concert at First Parish Church in Dover. The Photographer is, we believe, our own legendary Mr. Collins.
Skateboarding in Society
February 8th, 2008by Beacon Staff Posted in Student Writing, Op/Ed | No Comments »
As an assignment for Dr. Harkness, students had to research a topic and present their opinion. Here is one student’s paper about skateboarding.
If people take some time to get to know a skateboarder, they will realize that not all skateboarders fit the punk stereotype. If we provide skaters with skate parks, and integrate skateboarding with after school activities, almost none of them will turn out that way. As long as we give them a positive environment with positive enforcement they will have a good feeling towards skateboarding and a happy outlook on life. The first skateboarders did not grow up in a good environment. They grew up in a world of violence, drugs, and broken homes. They didn’t have any positive enforcement and for those two reasons, I attribute their behavior and actions. Skateboarding was not the cause of their attitude; the environment in which they grew up was. People need to ignore the past and get rid of the skater stereotype.
A lot of the time the complaint from people is, “They’re wrecking the street and destroying public property.” Well what does that person have to say about a 10 year old kid hitting a baseball through a car windshield? Some argue that the baseball is accidental and the skateboarding is intentional. Skateboarding does damage property, that part is true, but in no way is it intentional. Skateboarders don’t go out looking for things to skate thinking, “I want to go make that curb crumble.” It’s an outcome of the skateboarding, just like a broken windshield is an outcome of playing baseball.
People complain about the destruction of public property, but they never do anything to counteract it. From an article in the Walton Sun, I learned that Connor Clauson, a 14 year old who lives in the Walton county area of Florida, has nowhere to skate around his home. He and his friends go out skating in the streets, but they constantly get kicked out. Occasionally, he makes the trek out to Tallahassee to go to the skate park there. Although a two-hour ride, to him, it is worth it. Personally, I compare this to my friends and me traveling up north every weekend in the winter to ski. Since there isn’t anywhere close to where we live to ski, we drive two and a half hours or more to mountains in northern New Hampshire, Vermont, and Maine. I wish there were a mountain around where we live or a skate park around where Connor lives, but there isn’t one. We can’t make a mountain, but we can build a skate park. Some places build skate parks, but they do it without the input of skaters to save time effort and money. The features in the skate park aren’t what the skaters want, so pretty soon they are back out skating on the streets again. By building a skate park, we reduce the amount of gas consumed by travelers to go to far off skate parks, we keep kids occupied and out of the streets, we keep them in a controlled environment, and best of all, away from drugs. Even though it is costly to build a skate park, in the end it pays off (Magliano 1).
Skateboarding in some cities is looked down upon and even illegal. When my friends and I skateboard in Portsmouth, we get kicked out of spots and people call the police. On the other hand, there is Chicago. Chicago has grown a reputation as a “skate-friendly city.” In 2006 on national “Go Skateboarding Day,” thousands of skateboarders gathered in Chicago for a day of fun. Chicago already has two skate parks, but they also plan to build more. The skaters said that people in the city have become more and more friendly towards skaters and skateboarding in general. To show their gratitude, the skaters made a banner that read “Thank you mayor Daley and Chicago for embracing skateboarding.” In addition to Chicago, I learned from another article that Providence, Rhode Island was also very skateboarding oriented. The city has a skate park in the center upon which everything else in the city is focused. Other cities need to use the example of these cities and try to make their city “skate friendly.” After all, the number of skateboarders has skyrocketed in recent years and we need to accommodate all of them (Noel 1).
According to the article from the Walton Sun, skateboarding was the third most popular sport in a teenage survey (Magliano 1). The only two sports that beat it were football and basketball. An estimate from the Walton Sun said that while there were approximately 16 million skateboarders, only 9 million kids played little league baseball.
So while skateboarding is more popular than baseball and soccer, still there aren’t any “skate teams” in school and far more soccer and baseball fields than skate parks. Why is this? Mostly, soccer and baseball are “normal sports” that are accepted by society. They are part of America’s tradition; therefore, they are accepted and cherished. Skateboarding is not considered normal and has not been around that long. Parents think of it as a fad that their kids will soon grow out of just like Pokemon and Power Rangers. The fact of the matter is it is a hobby that most kids keep with them until they are too busy to do it anymore. The other day, I saw a forty year old at the Hampton skate park. If he stuck with it until he was this old, won’t the kids skateboarding now do it too? Instead of going out for a round of golf with your buddies at the country club on Sunday morning, will you go out to the skate park instead? Who knows? Skateboarding certainly has the popularity.
If schools started integrating skateboarding into their extracurricular activities, I am sure that there would be a lot of interest. At my middle school there was a skateboarding club that would go to Hampton Skate Park one day a week after school. Everyone wanted to join but there was limited space, so it was decided by who got his or her permission slips in first. If all schools had programs like this and the programs were big enough to accommodate everyone who wanted to be in it, then there would be a lot of interest and a great alternative to day care or YMCA. Also, if they get into skateboarding while they are young, it very well could develop into a hobby that they take with them into their forties.
The standard stereotype of a skateboarder is a punk kid who wears tight jeans and hates all of society. Although some skaters fit that stereotype, most skateboarders are good kids that are honest and hard working. There is probably the same if not more “bad seeds” in the world of traditional sports than in the world of skateboarding. A lot of people involved in “normal sports” get into the habit of taking steroids to make them look and feel stronger. Since being strong and bulky doesn’t really do any good if you are a skateboarder, no one really feels the need to use steroids. A lot of people would say that skaters use other drugs. This may be true for some skaters, but it is also true for some football, baseball, and basketball players. It isn’t the sport that is influencing kids to do drugs. It’s their peers. Skateboarding has nothing to do with it. It’s the pros of the sports that are the biggest influence on the kids. Parents need to blame the pros, not the sport itself.
I can’t say that I blame society for the stereotype they have of skateboarders. Some of the founders of the sport, the Z-boys fit the stereotype perfectly. They grew up in broken homes on the California coast in a town called Venice. Some entrepreneurs had started Venice as a mini replica of its counterpart in Italy. Pacific Ocean Park, more commonly known as P.O.P, was a grand theme park with many piers going out into the ocean. It was a bustling place until it died practically over night. The abandoned piers wasted away and became a giant playground for the teenage Z-Boys. The waterfront around the piers was a heavy local surfing spot. The locals were extremely protective of it and wouldn’t let anyone else surf it. The Z-Boys grew up trying to fit in with the surfers and be like them. One day after surfing, they took a board and a roller skate, cut the roller skate in half and mounted the trucks to the board. They carved around like they were on a surfboard. It became the standard after surfing activity. Soon, corporations started producing commercial skateboards and it caught on with the rest of America. Almost as quick as the fall of P.O.P, skateboarding went quiet. Almost no one skateboarded except the Z-Boys. Soon it caught on again and competitions and other skateboard companies sprung up almost out of nowhere. The Z-Boys were punks who stole from stores, did drugs, and ran away from home, and they weren’t about to change their image. Somehow, their image was portrayed as what all skateboarders were like even though 90% of the skateboarders at that time wore short shorts and practiced tricks like hand stands and one-footers. The Z-Boys were also surfers and surfers were generally thought of as being slackers who do drugs. The Z-Boys also fit that stereotype and that carried on to the stereotype of skateboarders today (Dogtown).
Encouraging kids to skateboard and including it in school activities can assure us that the sport will grow to be both popular and accepted by society. Skateboarding is one of the most popular sports for teenagers, yet there is no support for it from the general public. We need to show them that skateboarding isn’t bad and neither are the people that do it. By building more skate parks, we can keep skaters out of areas where they are not welcome. Also, cities can take Chicago as an example and try to become “Skate-Friendly” cities. After all of that is said and done, skateboarding will become a “normal sport” just like basketball and soccer.