I don’t know if you know that Martin has a blog. He doesn’t write on it, as it’s a Tumblr blog. He does photo-editing and puts together collages and GIFs of things he’s interested in. Mostly, up until now, it’s been a lot of American Horror Story and a couple of other TV shows that he watches. But about a month ago, he started a really cool project, with the plan to launch it on his Tumblr.
He put together a collage…a huge one. A historical timeline of the 20th century illustrated by what he considered one of the most important events for each year. He didn’t do it because of school, or an assignment or for any other reason other than that he is interested in history and thought it would be fun.
Each decade was done as a single image, built of a picture of an event from each year with the year labeled on it. That’s 100 years worth of images. He spent hours researching, looking up historical events, checking Wikipedia, asking us “which of these did we think was most important”, choosing images, editing. He tried to make sure that each decade was a mix between cultural, political, social and scientific events in ALL parts of the world.
It is truly a labor of love and nerdiness.
He IS getting credit for his blog for his creativity requirement in IB, but even so, I hope his teachers see this. I hope he gets lots of comments and likes and notes or whatever it is you do on Tumblr. I hope it goes viral, because it deserves to. I don’t want him to be discouraged from such ideas and projects and passions if he doesn’t get the online attention that is so fickle these days.
I tried to get him to put my birthday for 1964 but strangely, he chose the Civil Rights Act.
Check it out: The 20th Century
(there is a link to a list of the selected events at the bottom)
*John W. Gardner