April Fools' Day

April Fools' Day (April 1) is a "holiday" celebrated in many english-speaking countries in the world, and it's widely recognized and celebrated as a day when people play practical jokes on each other.

Many possible origins have been discussed throughout the years, some of them are as follow:

• In Chaucer's Canterbury Tales (1392), the "Nun's Priest's Tale" is set "Syn March bigan thritty dayes and two". It is believed to be a copying error, the right transcription being, "Syn March was gon". Thus, the passage originally meant 32 days after April, i.e. May 2. Readers apparently misunderstood this line to mean "March 32", i.e. April 1.
• In 1508, French poet Eloy d'Amerval referred to a poisson d’avril (April fool, literally "April fish"), a possible reference to the holiday.
• In 1539, Flemish poet Eduard de Dene wrote of a nobleman who sent his servants on foolish errands on April 1. In 1686, John Aubrey referred to the holiday as "Fooles holy day", the first British reference.
• On April 1, 1698, several people were tricked into going to the Tower of London to "see the Lions washed".

However, the most plausible one took place during the ruling of Charles IX of France (1550 - 1574).

During the Middle Ages, all through France and many other European towns, the New Year was celebrated on March 25. In some places of France, the festivity lasted for one week, thus ending on the 1st of April. In 1564, it was decreed that New Year's Day should be moved to January 1st, following the calendar of Pope Gregory XIII, however most of the french colonies in the United States kept on celebrating the festivity from March 25 to April 1.

By the 18th century, people following the Gregorian calendar made fun of those who celebrated the New Year during the first week of Spring, and considered them to be "fools". Afterwards, to avoid being ridiculized and treated as fools, people decided to turn the day into a "mocking day", and thus was born the tradition of making jokes on the first day of April.

[Source: Wikipedia.org]

The Declaration of Independence

I have watched this short video about The Declaration of Independence which could be interesting to know more about it in an easy way:

Clara Ruiz Estela

DFTBA

John Green, alongside with his brother Hank, started making videos on YouTube on January 2007, as a way to keep in touch with each other. 6 years from that, they have created a huge community of people, called "Nerdfighters", who work together towards decreasing "Worldsuck" (that is, the amount of bad things in the world) just by doing good things for others.

Very recently, the Vlogbrothers (as they are worldwide known now) started a channel called Crash Course, in which they post videos about academic topics such as Literature, Chemistry, Biology, History, and Ecology. This is a fun and interesting way of learning new things or adding knowledge about the topics you may be studying at school/university at the moment.

As this is a class of US History, I decided that it would be a great idea to post the list of videos that John Green has done about the matter, given that we have already seen all these topics in class.

Influenced Art and Literature

This is our powerpoint presentation, it is about how historical periods can changed and have influenced Art and Literature. We are Bernat Cuenca, Jose Úbeda and Joana Bastidas, we hope you enjoy it. http://www.slideshare.net/mobile/JoanaBastidasFernandez/historia-y-cultura-pwp

The Enlightenment

This is our digital storytelling about the Age of the Enlightenment.

We are Victoria Aragonés Mena, Nerea Blasco Sáez and Arantxa Estruch Ripoll.

The Witch Trials

The Witch Trials took place during the end of the 17th Century in Salem, Massachussetts. Here we present a video on this interesting topic, made by Tomàs Canet, Daniela Leonte and Andreea Marasuica.

FUGITIVE SLAVE ACT , 1850

This is our digital storytelling and it focuses on THE FUGITIVE SLAVE ACT, 1850.

Created by: Mª Amparo Gabarda Benetó, Sonía García Balaguer, Maria Rodilla Simeó, María Tovar Pérez