I'm pretty sure every homeschool mom here could do this better than me. But some learners are more hands-on and visual, not so much book readers necessarily, but like to be able to see what they're doing or to handle it. And I think that teaching with using artifacts is something that's interesting and exciting and is full of stories. And I like to do that. So I do that with some of my history tours. And I recommend it to people who teach, especially teach children. I'm often asked how I got interested in history. And when I was eight years old, my dad started building the house that I grew up in. And we lived with my paternal grandparents for one year while my dad built the house. And my grandfather had a drawer in his, we call them drawers, he had a drawer in his bedroom and it was full of photographs. And I constantly begged him to sit down with me and go through these photographs and tell me who all these people were. and how I related to them, how they fit into our world here. Because there were pictures of old men with double-barreled shotguns and deer, gutted deer hanging up, and there were people in wagons being pulled by horses and all kinds of stuff. Family reunion pictures from the early 1900s. Turned out we had a photographer in our family in the 1840s. on. So we had pictures, family pictures from the beginning of photography. And my grandfather had acquired a whole bunch of these. And I, it's what piqued my interest in learning about the past. And it started really with family. These people were relatives. That's, that's, you know, that's great uncle Irwin. And he was a crack shot. You know, he had stories for everything. And went through all these pictures. I've even managed to Managed to find one to bring just as an example. This was one of the images except it was a tintype. And this is a Civil War soldier who's my great-great-grandfather, one of them, that fought in the war. And a picture of him at the camp of instruction. There's a painted background behind him. He's got his gear on backwards. He just arrived at training camp. And he's older than everybody else, too, because it's late war, and they had to pay him a big bounty to go. Well, that was the sort of thing that just captured my imagination. A soldier with his rifle and bayonet and he's my great-great-grandfather and he survived the war and here I am and all that kind of stuff that I really ate it up and although I was only eight years old, but I was, you know, wrestling with the idea of the past and history. And my grandfather was born in 1899 and He was only 60, the age of my questions, so he knew Civil War veterans and he knew all about our family for 100 years. In third grade, my best friend, Douglas Kirkpatrick by name, had visited his grandmother who lived in Gettysburg. And this was during the centennial, during the 100 year anniversary of the war. And he came for a show and tell in my third grade class and he had a bunch of Civil War postcards. And I took one look at those soldiers in blue and those soldiers in gray, and it set off a fire that has not been quenched all of these years. And so, really, my interest in history began with photographs, began with images. The kind of thing you have around your house that can generate stories, and in this case, a history of your own family. So it set me off, the photograph set me on my quest of history. While I do not need material culture to inform me now, I have a few books and I like to read. Many people learn much better and remember the past if they have something tangible to associate with it. And all sorts of things have a story to tell. When the guy I work for, Kevin Turley, compels me to wear my general's uniform, which you saw last night, and has a whole story of its own. It creates a certain verisimilitude when I'm doing history tours and we're going to be standing at cannons and taking pictures with a bunch of children in gray or blue uniforms that want their picture taken with the general. So anyway, teaching with artifacts does not require photos and uniforms, necessarily, either. And some people just like to use flags, and I like to use flags, too. I brought a bunch with me. And this one I put on the table is a Hardy flag from the Army of Tennessee. It's a Civil War flag. It's a cross, as were many Southern flags. Years ago, I was a finalist to become the curator of collections at the Museum of the Confederacy in Richmond. And it boiled down to me and one other guy. And they had to choose between somebody that knew how to preserve artifacts, which wasn't me, and somebody who knew a few things about the Civil War, which was me. And they decided it was easier to teach history to an artifacts preserver than preservation to a historian. And so I did not get the job by the grace of God, as it turns out. So museum curators professionally manage artifacts. Their preservation is their middle name and they like to have the stories that go with them. Well, so do I. In Jackson Hall Museum at VMI, Stonewall Jackson's raincoat that he was wearing when he was struck. with the wound that eventually resulted in his death. You see the bullet hole right in the raincoat and his blood on it. His horse is stuffed and standing right next to her looking at the situation, a little sorrel. They display his field desk where he wrote out his orders. All these artifacts are just not very far from here at all, just up in New Market. We all have artifacts we can use to teach history. They don't have to be exotic or famous. It is interesting that every artifact not only tells a story or conveys something about the past, about history, that you can incorporate in explaining something. But it also has a history of its own. The artifacts came from somewhere and came into your hand in some way. And so what I did is I just collected up a handful of things that I have. to tell you maybe both stories, what it is, how I got it, and how it can be used, the subjects it can be used to teach with. And you get to use your imagination as to When you see the artifact and you hear the story of it, what topic could I teach about using this artifact? How can I see the providence of God in the existence of this particular thing? How can I use it to teach others? And so I picked a few things of interest, and I'll try to get through as many of them as I can. I've got more than I need, I think. First one I'd like to start with is I think one of the most unusual and oddest of artifacts that I have, and it is this thing. Now, does anybody know what it is, first of all? It looks like an axle. It looks like an axle. That's a good guess. but not an accurate one. Let me tell you what this is. And this particular item goes back to a class I had in graduate school. And there was another fellow in the class, his name was Dick Short. And he was, he was short. But he had lost his leg in Vietnam. And he was an employee of a underwater archaeology team. And he had discovered, he had discovered a ship, a famous Confederate ship in the bottom of the James River called the CSS Florida. And let me tell you a quick story of the CSS Florida. It was a Confederate commerce raider. It was built, I think, by Laird in England and smuggled to the south. Its headquarters was in Mobile, Alabama. It was a commerce raider that would slip out of the harbor and attack Union shipping. It was one of the most successful predators of the Confederate commerce raiding fleet. It was commanded by Captain Waddell, a famous Confederate captain. They slipped out of the harbor and were sinking ships and taking prizes all over the South Atlantic, especially around the Gulf of Mexico. They had sailed the ship, running out of fuel. needing to refill the bunkers and reprovision the crew, they pulled into a major city, a major port in Brazil. I think, I can't remember, I think it was Bahia, if that's on the coast, I don't know if it is. But it was a major coastal city, they pulled in, Half the crew got liberty, they went ashore. The other half of the crew stayed on board ship and drank themselves silly while they were in port. A Union capital ship, battleship really, was sailing by on the Atlantic Ocean and the captain was looking into the harbor with his glasses and he saw the silhouette of a ship and he knew who it was. And so Captain Woodson decided to pull a fast one on Confederacy and on Brazil. And during the night, with half the crew ashore, he had his Marines and his Navy guys lower their boats and row into the harbor. And they climbed up over the sides of the Confederate ship and they captured it. Captured the crew, captured the ship, set sail out of the harbor, and up to Norfolk, Virginia. The international outrage was loud and long, and Secretary of Navy Gideon Wells had quite a problem on his hand because Brazil had an army and a navy that were bigger than that of the United States. Don Pedro II, or whoever the, I don't remember who the president was at the time, was furious because the ship was under protection in a Brazilian harbor. And the result was that an international incident was on Abraham Lincoln's hands. Didn't know what to do with it. The ship, the Florida, had been added to the Union James River round water fleet. And so it was sailing up and back along the James River. And all of a sudden one night, it just sank to the bottom of the James River, just all by itself. And it was reported to Brazil that a storm had come and had sunk the ship. And that ended any claims that they had. And apologies, you know, apologies to Brazil. We don't want to fight you over this, but the ship has sunk accidentally and that's that. So it disappeared from history. It went down into the mud of the James River. There are a lot of wrecks in the mud of the James River to dive on. I mean, hundreds of them. My friend Dick Sweet had found the Florida and he dove it and confirmed it. This is the CSS Florida, found right where it sank. So they began diving it, his company, bringing up all the artifacts that they could find. And they brought up just a ton of stuff. And the US government found out about it. And they said, that's our ship. You have to give us everything that you've brought up and you have to You have to cease and desist from diving the ship, and you have to show us where it is, and blah, blah, blah. So I asked, they do this all the time. There's so many controversies with U.S. government and shipwrecks that you'd just be amazed. And I asked my friend Dick if they had, if he had turned over all the artifacts that he brought up. And I never heard anybody laugh so loud and so long. I said, can I have one? And he said, I'll bring you something tomorrow. And this is what he brought me. Thanks a lot, Dick. What is it? It's a brass bolt. And when they put, they sheathed the bottom of the commerce raiders with copper in order to keep them from fouling and to make them easier to clean when they were at port. And they attached They attach the copper, in the case of iron clad ships, they attach the iron plating to the oak with these rods. It's got a little bevel at each end. I had never seen one, but that's what he said it was. And then I was at the Naval Museum in Columbus, Georgia, which is the Confederate Naval Museum. And there they have a Confederate ironclad on display. The CSS Chattahoochee in 1865 had been built in Columbus and had not gone to sea yet when the Yankees attacked. The last battle of the Civil War, at least they claim it, the Yankees attacked, captured Columbus, burned it down. The Confederates set their gunboat on fire, the Ironclad, and just sent it down the Chattahoochee River. And it burnt down to the waterline and then sank. and a number of years ago some archaeologists found the ship and they raised it and they built this museum around it and it's just the substructure of the ship and then they built a metal framework above it so you can see what it looked like just in skeletal form. But they had all the original iron plating and the original oak of the hull and sure enough there were hundreds of these brass bolts embedded in the oak. And that's where they attached the iron plating to turn it into an ironclad ship. There were hundreds of these. So now I've actually seen an actual ship and they're all identical to this. So this is a kind of a really unusual sort of artifact, but it's not just any old ship. It's the CSS Florida. that it came off of. So when we go to Columbus, Georgia, which we do on some of our history tours, we go to the Civil War Naval Museum. I take this artifact along and I use it to tell the story of the Confederate Navy and some of the stories that are attached to that. And the big picture of how effective the Union blockade ended up being and all of those factors that went into the naval warfare in the war between states. So there's an artifact that You couldn't guess what it is, it looks like a bent axle. But when you hear the whole story, you realize this really is an interesting piece of history and it was attached to a ship that is a storied, famous naval vessel. The Battle of Newmarket, just down the road, Newmarket. I've got I've discovered postcards of reenactments there. One of them is 1912 and one of them is 1932 or 1936. Civil War reenactments on the battlefield at New Market. Usually it's New Market cadets dressed in Confederate uniforms firing at somebody off in the distance. Well, in 1964 was the centennial of the new market. This year, last month, was the 160th anniversary of New Market. But for the 100th anniversary, back in 1964, the VMI cadets all marched from Lexington to New Market and they all took part in this reenactment of the great battle in which the Institute was turned out and the boys fought and 10 of them were killed and 40 were wounded. But each of the boys that participated received a special patch for their uniforms for that day. It says New Market, 64. So the battle was in 1864 and this was 1964 and then it says VMI right here with a cannon past it. They don't even have this in their museum. They don't have any of these. I found this at an auction and decided that it was supposed to belong to me. And so it's an artifact just from 1964, but you tell the whole story of the battle of Newmarket with this. And it's a grand story. And there are some very interesting connections with students who are Christians. And the Christian faith comes into play in a couple different stories regarding Newmarket. And its influence and its importance in the war. It was a small battle. It wasn't hugely important. The fact that cadets were sent to Richmond to be congratulated and rewarded by the Confederate Congress. And while they were there, a Yankee army came storming down on West Virginia just two weeks after Newmarket and burnt down the Virginia Military Institute. They had to spend the rest of the war in Richmond. training troops and guarding positions and things. But a hundred years later, they were out marching on the battlefield that kind of made them famous. Something very simple, something very simple that doesn't cost anything. I like historic trees. And there are several that are famous. I have a piece of wood from the last living liberty tree from the time of the war for independence. Every colony, all 13 colonies had a tree that was designated as the liberty tree. That's where the sons of liberty would gather. The British chopped down the one in New York City, or the one in New York, and over the years, all the other liberty trees eventually died or fell down, whatever. But up until the early part of this century, 21st century, I think it was like around 2000 or 2001, One liberty tree was still standing, and it was on the campus of a Catholic college in Annapolis, Maryland. It was the Maryland Liberty Tree. I think it was called St. Joseph's. Anyway, a hurricane came through, blew down the liberty tree, and they were hauling it off to the dump. And some friends of mine who recognized what was happening followed the truck to the dump and asked if they could have that tree. And they said, sure, it's just an old tree. And so they collected it up and they turned it into guitars and pens and all kinds of souvenir things. But they also took cuttings from it and made 50 daughter trees of the Maryland Liberty tree. And then they had a contest. This is the Providence Forum. I don't know if any of you are familiar with that. The head of it was Peter Littleback, who was the president of Westminster Seminary in Philadelphia. And they had a contest, and all the towns in all 50 states could write an essay and compete to have the Liberty Tree planted at their town. And the winner in Georgia, where we were living at the time, was Dalton, Georgia. So they planted a liberty tree in Dalton, Georgia and it has flourished. And I was invited to give a lecture there just next to the tree inside on Liberty Day which they celebrate in Dalton, Georgia. They have a Liberty Day and they have a liberty tree. So that was sort of a creative, I have a piece of wood from the original one. So that's an easy one. But if you go to visit If you go to visit the battlefield of Brandywine, just not too far from Philadelphia, the battle that was fought to protect Philadelphia from the British, and Americans lost, George Washington lost the battle, but it was bravely won and it was a closely run thing. But on that battlefield, right next to Lafayette's headquarters, is a sycamore tree. And it was there during the time of the battle, right next to Lafayette's headquarters. And it's still there. It's huge. And it's, they estimate it's 400 to 500 years old, year old tree. and it was standing tall. So there's a living thing that was there when George Washington and the Marquis de Lafayette and the other generals gathered under this tree to discuss what they were going to do as the British were moving up from Delaware toward Chadds Fort and the Brandywine. There's a living thing. And it sheds branches like crazy. I picked up a couple sticks from the tree and I took them home with me and I gave one each to two of my grandsons. And they thought I'd handed them the crown jewels. when I told them the significance of this tree, this is a tree that saw George Washington and the Marquis de Lafayette. This is a stick from that tree. Well, that would have impressed me when I was 10 years old, I'll tell you that. And there's a free artifact that you can tell the whole story of the Battle of Brandywine using a piece of wood. If you visit Mount Vernon, there are two trees as you approach the house at Mount Vernon. There are two trees that were planted by George Washington. They're tulip poplars. They're huge, humongous, and they have a real rough bark. Here, stuff falls off, falls on the ground all the time. Here's three pieces of bark from a tree that was planted by George Washington. And it was one of his pride and joys to plant trees. And this one is still living. And I consider that an artifact. And it didn't cost me anything except to bend down and tie my shoes so I could pick it up without the cameras telling what I was doing. And it didn't cost a thing. And I don't know if they care or not, but I didn't take a chance. There are a bunch of trees like that around the country that are historic. Everybody knows what this is, right? This is a brick from Fort Sumter. Now you can't get one. because they're very touchy about removing bricks. But at Fort Sumter, a lot of the original brickwork of the fort, does everybody know what Fort Sumter is? It's where the first major shots of the War Between the States was fired in Charleston Harbor. It was a big brick fort out in the mouth of the harbor. And a Union garrison had gone out there from another Union fort and just took it over because it was empty. Nobody was there, and they went out and raised the U.S. flag, and South Carolina said, that fort belongs to us. It's in the contract. When the government built the fort, if it's not going to be garrisoned after a period of three years of it being empty, it reverts back to South Carolina. So the fort then technically belonged to South Carolina, but the federal government had sent troops. Actually, they hadn't even sent them. The commander kind of did it on his own hook and then informed the government what he did. He moved from Fort Moultrie, that's just north of the fort, over to Fort Sumter and determined he was going to stay there unless he was ordered out by the president. The president didn't order him out. And the old president became unemployed and the new president was Abraham Lincoln. And he was not about to order them out of the fort. because there was another plan afoot altogether. But eventually, Confederacy informed Lincoln's administration, Abraham Lincoln, through his Secretary of State, that any attempts to re-provision the garrison would be an act of war against the Confederacy. and the Secretary of State guaranteed the Confederate commissioners. Lincoln would not meet with them because he did not recognize the Confederacy as a legitimate thing. He said, there's no such thing. There's only rebellion. There's only revolutionaries trying to overthrow my government. So he wouldn't meet with them, but he sent the Secretary of State and his name was Seward, William Seward. He said, He said the government's not going to re-provision the fort. Well, he didn't know it, but Lincoln had already sent the boats, the fleet, to re-provision the fort, knowing that they were going to be fired on and then that would be used as propaganda by the government to say that the rebels fired the first shot, they want war, we're going to give it to them. And of course, it followed the script perfectly well. And so as they did that, the Confederate guns surrounding the harbor opened fire on Fort Sumter. Nobody was killed, and the fort surrendered. And a number of things happened as a result of that. One is, the country went to war with itself. Abraham Lincoln essentially declared war, called up 75,000 volunteers to march to the South and coerced the states back into the Union, which he said hadn't left the Union. And then one of the great symbols of American history was became the great symbol of America. And that was the American flag. Up until 1861, the American flag was not, did not really have the status and the emotional attachment that it has today. We watch the Olympics, and we see an American win, and they play the Star-Spangled Banner, and they put the flag up, and you get this very positive, emotional feeling for your country. Or if you serve in the Armed Forces, and the American flag stands for everything you're there for, protect your country, etc. There's an emotional attachment to the flag. It's just one of those symbols that doesn't have any peer. Well, that didn't really happen until Fort Sumter. when the Confederates fired on the flag. Now the garrison flag that was flying over the fort was 20 feet wide and 30 feet long, so it's not a little flag, it's as big as this room print here. And so when it came down and Anderson folded it up and took it with him, suddenly the American flag became the symbol of the Union. And American flags went up everywhere in the North, and everybody had to have one because it symbolized patriotism, commitment to the Union, and defeating the rebels, defeating these revolutionaries that are destroying the most perfect nation that's ever been created in the world. And so the American flag was fired on it down at Kane. Well, that was at Fort Sumter. And over the years, the fort has deteriorated, and a lot of it has fallen into the ocean. And I asked, this was a long time ago now, you can't get me on this one, statute of limitations run out. I asked, what about all those bricks that have fallen off and are just engulfed by the ocean? They said, we just let that happen, that's the natural process of the deterioration of the fort. And you're not allowed to touch any of the bricks in the fort. So I promptly went down. down to the sand around the back side of the fort and saved one of these from the ocean. The ocean was about to engulf this brick and so I saved it. Like I said, it was a long time ago. I hid it under my coat. And I sweated the whole way back to Charleston on the boat. I just knew somebody was looking at me, but it didn't happen. So I have a brick from Fort Sumter. Don't do that. It's not wise. And then I've got something that's not a Civil War artifact. This is a World War I artifact. And there's a whole collecting industry of these kinds of artifacts and it's called trench art. In the First World War millions of rounds of artillery ammunition and billions of rounds of small arms fire scattered shell casings all over the landscape in France and Belgium and soldiers in the trenches, bored and restless, would get the brass from the artillery shells and they would make stuff with it. They'd make everything from chess sets to carving cartoons on shell casings. I've got one of those at home, a big one, 75 millimeters, and some artistic soldier drew cartoons on it. This was 1917. There are just all sorts of things made of trench art. And people collect. There are collectors of trench art. And some of it's very sophisticated, very artistic. This one's quite simple. This is German trench art. This is from the German army in World War I. And it's a hat badge, or it was a hat badge. And some enterprising soldier took the hat badge, and he turned it into a little souvenir a piece of trench art, maybe as an ashtray or to hold as paperclips. Who knows what it was designed for. It's a piece of trench art. What's interesting about it is it has the royal crown of Germany in the middle of it and around it it has these words, Gott Mittens. God with us. The German army in World War I marched to battle singing Ein Feiste Burg, singing Martin Luther's famous hymn, Mighty Fortress is our God. And all of their equipment, their belt buckles, their hat badges, say God with us. And they have the crown of Germany embossed on it. Gott mit uns. And so a lot of the German trench art has that symbol on it. And you know the way World War I isn't taught anymore at all in schools. or in college. But if you were to actually find a class that dealt with World War I, I can guarantee you that it doesn't say anything about Germany being a Christian nation. But because it was such a liberal nation even at that time, it was a fountainhead of liberalism, a disease that was spreading, an intellectual disease that was spreading all around the world because of the German academics. But at the popular level, The people were still attending their Lutheran churches or their Catholic churches or whatever in Germany. And when they marched off to war, it was a patriotic thing to do. And there were lots of Christians in the trenches, really on both sides. But usually the German soldiers are not associated with biblical Christianity. But a lot of them actually were at the time. And they sang the hymns. And they even embossed it, the government did, officially, on their equipment. God Mitinus, which I find a wonderful opportunity to teach about the First World War and the men who marched off to it, and how different they were, really, in many ways, from their government. that sent them off to mass butchery and mass slaughter on the battlefields changed history. The First World War changed history. It took a big turn. And of course, World War II was just an extension of World War I in certain ways. So the war was spectacularly important. and out of it came all sorts of different artifacts, but I particularly like the trench art because the war was fought in the trenches and the men who made the trench art, a lot of them didn't come back, but the things that they fabricated turned into collectibles and it's a nice artifact that didn't cost much in an auction and it teaches a lot. The last I think the last homely artifact that I want to tell you about is this one right here. Actually, before I get to that one, let me show you these. This is somewhat of a practical matter. Oh, and this too. Okay. I used to be the director of the Circa History Guild in Georgia, Roswell, Georgia. Every Thursday night I'd have a World War II veteran come and speak. And while I was sitting here earlier today I got a call from a guy who used to Every time the door was open, he would come. It's called the Circa History Guild. And he would come to listen to the World War II veterans. And he put me in touch with a couple famous World War II veterans that were in an assisted living home in Atlanta. And one of them, I had come and speak to our group two different times. And he's one of the most important men of World War II, although he didn't see himself that way. But he was the navigator on the plane that dropped the atomic bomb. He was the navigator of a plane called the Enola Gay. And Enola Gay was named by the pilot after his mother. And he got to choose, after he was told what they were going to do, they were going to drop the first nuclear weapon on Japan. he got to choose his crew, and he chose the navigator that had been with him in Europe. This guy was considered the number one pilot in the whole Army Air Corps, and he chose his own navigator, and his name was Theodore Van Kirk. He was known as Dutch Van Kirk, and he lived in Atlanta, and I had him come and speak to our group twice, and I asked him if he had any pictures that he could sign for people. And sure enough he did. And here's Dutch Van Kirk, Navigator, Nola Gay, 6 August 1945. It was also signed by the radio guy. And they got ready to, they were loading the crew up and they got ready to go and they realized they'd forgotten to choose a radio guy. And so they just pulled some young 21-year-old guy on Tinian Island who was just stationed there and put him on the plane to do the communications. And he's signed it here too. His name was Richard Nelson. And I have autographs of the pilot and his autobiography and all that stuff. But Dutch came and spoke to us two times about dropping the atomic bomb. His responsibility was getting the plane over the target and releasing the bomb. Those were the two things that he had to do. And he was a gruff character, kind of short and gravelly voice, just as spiritually lost as the day he was born. And he was pushing 90 when I knew him. He died a couple years ago. But Dutch would say, he'd say, when I'm done with my talk, you can ask questions. And he said, but I'm gonna answer two of them right now before I start. He says, the first question I'm gonna answer is, No, I've never lost one second of sleep over dropping the atomic bomb. And the second question, yes, I'd do it again if the government told me to. Those are the first two questions you didn't have to ask because he answered them to start with. He was a very ornery guy. But I had to drive for an hour. more than an hour to pick him up and more than an hour to take him back. And so I would ask him in the car, tell me some stories that you can't tell in public. Because he had plenty of those too. And he did. He told me some very interesting stories about their bombing missions in Europe and about the Enola Gay dropping the atomic bomb. I said, what did you think would happen after the bomb went off? He said, we did not know. He said, we dropped the bomb, we turned the B-29 as hard as we could, and we full throttle in the opposite direction. He said, and we all looked back and saw the mushroom cloud. And he said, and three minutes later, they're going as fast as they can away from it. Three minutes later, the shock waves caught up to the plane. And he said the plane just shot right, just took off through the air way faster than it was going anyway, just from the shock waves of the explosion. They didn't know really what, they didn't know if it was knock them down or what. And I said, what would happen if you got over the target and you couldn't see it, the target? What did they tell you? And they said, they said, do not bring that bomb back here. I said, what would you have done? He said, I do not know. That was up to the pilot to decide if he was going to dump it in the ocean. or what he would do with it, but he was not allowed to bring it back to Tinian Island. There are all kinds of ancillary stories that go with this whole episode in American history, and this is in world history because it changed another event, it changed world history in a number of ways, maybe none of them good. And I never got into an argument with him. I personally don't think we should have dropped the atomic bomb on civilians. And we never had that argument because he wasn't going to, and he would clam up probably after cussing me out if he knew what I believed about it. So I just let him ramble on and remember everything he said about dropping the atomic bomb. So I had him come twice, and the second time he had a stroke. while he was talking to us. He suddenly glazed over, what do they call it, TIA, is that what it's called? Temporary something. And one of our friends, his name was Dr. Payne, was sitting in the front row and he instantly recognized what was happening. And so he jumped up and he took care of Dodge, had him sit down on the stage. He just glazed over like he was in a trance. And then he came to, and he picked up where he left off. He was answering some boy's question. Some boy had asked him a question, and he was answering, and all of a sudden he went... And then when he came out of it, he just picked up where he left off. And the other funny thing about it, it's a hilarious episode, yeah. Stroke in my, you know, in the history guild. But as soon as it happened, you know, we called the medics. And of course, the MTs came roaring up and came in the back door and I said, you can see he's sitting there, he's okay. He's not going to go with you. I just want you to know this. I said, he fears neither man nor God. And you're asking for it if you get out of my way. I know it's this woman pushed me on the way. Goes up, said, sir, sir, we need to get we need to look you over and we need to get you to the hospital. And he said some unrepeatable things to her. And he said, I'm 90 years old and I dropped the atomic bomb. You're not going to make me do anything. And that's the way it ended up. She made him sign a waiver, went out with her tail between her legs. Because Dutch Van Kirk doesn't suffer fools gladly. And then I had to take him home after that. And we wanted to take him to the infirmary at the assisted living facility, and he wouldn't go. And so we just dropped him off at home and said, everything turns out fine. Yeah, well, I've done this before. So off he went. And he lived another couple years, long enough to write his memoirs. And I had a little bit to do with that, too. But anyway, the image, oh, he brought a big pile of these. I said, how much do you want for those? He says, I don't know, how about $5 a piece? I said, how about $5 a piece? I bought them all. So, anyway. Nobody ever found out about him except me. And the last thing I want to, that's a biggie, and I have other images, different ones. Signed by all the members of the crew and stuff like that But this other this is this is my most prized artifact And I rarely get to use it for teaching purposes But I want to There's a a staff officer on Robert E. Lee's staff who came to him in late 1864. He was a young Christian staff officer who at the beginning of the war's name was Giles Buckner Cook. And at the beginning of the Civil War, he had enlisted. And he had certain friends that he knew in Confederate high command. And they knew his skills. And though he was young, I think he was only 18 at the beginning of the war, they assigned him to a president, to a general staff. So he served on General Bragg's staff, part of his official military family, served on General Beauregard's staff. And when General Beauregard came to the Eastern Theater in 1864, somehow or other, probably his best friend from college was also on General Lee's staff. And his name was Marshall. He was General Lee's main guy. He was like his chief of staff. And he was a friend of Giles Cook. And he probably, he's the one who got Cook onto General Lee's military family. Fast forward, he participated in a number of battles, young, handsome guy, and a devout Christian man. And he was at Appomattox when General Lee came there to surrender to General Grant. But Giles Cook was extremely ill at Appomattox. They thought he was going to die. And they had him laying in the bottom of a wagon. And after Lee signed the surrender documents, and after they made his general order announced to the troops, he then gathered up a couple of assistants and Giles Cook in his wagon and generally escorted Giles to Richmond after Appomattox. They slowly made their way from Appomattox to Richmond and there Giles Buckner Cook's mother and father were there and they knew he was sick and they were waiting for him and so Cook then was turned over to his family who nursed him back to health and in the course of his life he became a minister of the gospel. Over time, he decided that God had called him to gospel ministry. He was Episcopalian, Evangelical Episcopalian, as all Virginians were in the 1860s. And he became the pastor of the church in Petersburg. So he kind of went back to where he had originally joined General Lee's staff as a pastor of the church in town there. And he lived to be 90 some years old. He was the last Confederate staff officer. He died 1937. I think it was 37. And he lived in Surrey, which is right across the James River from Williamsburg. And we lived in the Williamsburg area for 30 years. And been to Surrey many times without realizing that Giles Buckner Cook was from Surrey and that's where he that's where he ended up his life back where he had started and we had a lady in our church in Richmond this is All Saints Reform Presbyterian Church and she came to me one day after church with a cigar box And she said, I've inherited all of this Confederate money, and it was carried by my great-grandfather, Giles Buckner Cook, when he was at Appomattox. When the Army surrendered, this was the money that he had in his pocket. And she said, it's passed on through the family, and now I'm the one who inherited it. Would you appraise it for me? And I said, sure. Are you sure you want to let this out of your sight? She said, yeah, if you just take it and do an appraisal. So I took this box of Confederate money and I appraised it and I put it in an album. I put the bills in sleeves, currency sleeves. and made a nice presentation thing and did a write-up on Giles Buckner Cook, who he was, what he did in his life, and the fact that this money had belonged to him and now belonged to this lady. And then a couple weeks later I returned it to her after church on one Sunday morning, handed it back to her with the valuation and all of that. And then a month or two later, after church on Sunday, because she lived She lived far away from the church. We lived equidistant from it. We both had to drive an hour to get to church, but from opposite directions. She came up after church, and she handed me the album that I had done. And I thought, maybe she went and got another opinion, and I didn't do so good. She said, my children have no interest whatsoever in Giles Buckner Cook or anything about our family in the past. And she said, I'd like to give you this money that belonged to Cook, this collection, because I know you won't sell it. And I said, you're right, I won't. I will treasure it. And she gave it to me. And I'll set it up here where you can look at it if you'd like. And if you have the question of which one's worth the most, let me make sure it's here so I'll make sure it's here when I come back. I'll leave it open. I'll leave it open to that bill. It's a Confederate States $500 bill and it's somebody told me it's worth X amount, ton of X amount. I don't know what it is now. This was 20 years ago when I did this. I don't know what the value of this bill is. But it has a picture of Stonewall Jackson on it. It's a beautiful, it's a beautiful $500 bill in Confederate currency. And I'm sure when he was carrying that at Appomattox, that $500 bill would not buy a loaf of bread. Inflation was so through the roof that there was no precious metals available, no gold, no silver, nothing like that available in the Confederacy. And so they were just printing money. That's called counterfeiting when you do it. It's called stimulating the economy when the government does it. So, Confederates stimulated the economy, all right, to the tune of money being worth absolutely nothing. But this is probably the most valuable thing that I have, is the money. It's not Confederate money, though. It's not just any old Confederate money. It belonged to Giles Buckner Cook, a young staff officer, Robert E. Lee. To me that is a very significant thing. And in an antique store one day I was just browsing through a stack of old Confederate veteran magazines and this one, Yeoman's in the Fork, this one belonged to Giles Buckner Cook. And it has his name stamped on it. And it was written up by a historian as to the significance of this particular issue of Confederate Veteran, but it belonged to Giles Cook. So I put it in the album with the money and a biographical article about him from Blue and Gray magazine that I took in years gone by. So there are so many different things you can teach with. with money, far beyond even history. You can teach economics, all kinds of government, all sorts of things just with the money in your wallet. If you have an understanding of the significance of money and the economy and such. And this is a good example of hyperinflation during the war between the states. It happens in a lot of wars, most wars. And it doesn't happen to every single country that's involved, but usually it happens to the losers. And it certainly happened in the Confederacy because they didn't have gold and silver. And I have one last thing in light of that, since I'm talking about money. This just has a cool story with it. This is a penny, and it says on the penny, Confederate States of America, 1861. And it turns out, I knew very little, I'd never heard of the Confederate coinage. I knew all about Confederate paper money but I didn't know much about the coinage. One day I got a call from, it was either my wife or my daughter. My wife was at my daughter's house and she just bought a big old upright piano. It was made in the early 1900s and they had been cleaning it out and in the bottom of it in the back, in the back of the upright piano in the bottom, they found this confederate penny. I said, no, they didn't. Confederacy didn't have coins. It says Confederate States of America on here, 1861. And I said, well, you must be mistaken. Well, it's pretty plain. That's exactly what it says. So I started researching it and looking it up. And I found out that Just as the war was beginning, 1860, the Confederate government made a contract with a company in Philadelphia to coin Confederate money through the war. And the company in Philadelphia minted, they don't know how many Confederate pennies, they think 25. And 12 of them have turned up. And the last one at auction fetched $225,000. It's a pretty penny. It's a pretty penny, alright. And whatever you do, when you run across one, don't clean it. Because that cuts the value in half. It's got to have that antique patina on it. Well, there's more to the story. So, we lived in Atlanta. Atlanta area, and I asked around who knew about coins, old coins, especially Confederate money, and they said, oh, you have to talk to whatever his name was, John Barker. He's a banker, and he does all of the counterfeit evaluation for the U.S. government. He's the president of a bank. His expertise is counterfeit money, and he knows all about Confederate coinage. So I called him up. And I could hear on the other end of the line the quivering excitement. But I'd since found out, since I had called him up and told him about the penny, I did a little more research and found out that the machine that they used to stamp these pennies in Philadelphia had disappeared after the war. And someone bought it at an auction or in an antique shop or something, And they did a second strike in the 1870s or 80s, a second strike of Confederate pennies, and I don't know how many they made, a lot of them. And then they did a third strike 20 years later, the same machine, the same die-cast machine. So there are three strikes of the Confederate penny. There's 12 of the original 25 that have turned up, and then there are a couple thousand of the second strike and multiple thousand of the third strike. And I took it to the guy and I said, can you tell me what strike this is? And he got out of his jeweler's eye and studied it. And he said, this is a second strike penny. And you could just hear the music go down. And it's still worth 20 bucks or something like that. But it is the second strike of the original Confederate pennies. And then the other, so he explained to me how you tell that. And it's a very subtle thing and you have to examine it under a microscope. The other day, one of my other daughters called and said, I was cleaning out my husband's change drawer and there was a Confederate penny in there. He doesn't know where it came from and he's had it for years and years and what do you think about that? And I said, I think you better bring it over to my house. She came over and I examined it. It's a second strike, same as this one. I've got two of them. I don't have them. She has that one. But they're both second strike pennies. So if you run across a Confederate penny, if it's the original first strike that's worth A ton of money. I told her on the phone, I said, you know, if that's an original first strike, you don't have to, you can stop saving for your children's college education. Because all you have to do is auction that penny off. Kind of remarkable. Remarkable thing that a little coin like that would cause such a hoo-ha, but it does. So teaching with artifacts is a fun thing to do. And it doesn't require sophisticated things. It might just be a photograph. That's what started me off. It might be a dollar bill in your pocket. It might be something that's been passed down through your family. Something really interesting. But there are lots of things just in your own home that are really teaching tools, if you look at them that way, providentially speaking. These are just a few that have come into my hands over the years. I thought it would be interesting to let you see them, just to prove a point, I guess. Well, thank you for your kind attention. That's teaching with artifacts. I'll leave this stuff up here if you want to look at it, including the money.