And people wonder why I homeschool...

I just ran into an astounding history lesson yesterday.

I really love the author Jean Fritz. She does a good job on history books, making historical stories of important people come alive. I was reading Around the World in 100 Years, which covers everyone from Henry the Navigator to Ferdinand Magellan. It's really fascinating stuff.

But then I came to this quote, and a couple of others, which rubbed me the wrong way. I decided to find out if they were true. In reading her biography, I find she was born in China in 1915, of missionary parents. It's possible her usually accurate history was colored by some anti-Christian/Catholic bias, like so many other people's. I mean, it is rampant, after all. I'm amazed at how much "history" is not even true, or at least extremely one-sided. And I'm fascinated with uncovering history from "the other side".

Here's the first, on pages 11-12.
"(After Ptolemy)... Then suddenly all this wondering and figuring stopped. Christianity was the new religion, fighting for survival, and in AD 391 Christians burned the city of Alexandria and its famous libraries, which contained, along with many ancient treasures of scholarship, the work of Ptolemy. Christians did not believe in scholarship. They thought it was sacrilegious to be curious. Anything people wanted to know, they said, could be found in the Bible. So when they drew maps, they put Jerusalem at the center of the world...."

First of all, the Bible was still being settled on, so there was not really a "Bible" yet. Secondly, not all Christians felt this way, but some of their leaders did, like most problems in history. Thirdly, that library had been attacked several times already, it turns out, and that was just one of the last of several attacks, and the only one by Christians.

Here is a link for you to read, so you can see what I mean.

http://www.straightdope.com/columns/read/2233/what-happened-to-the-great-library-of-alexandria

Don't even get me started on the Reformation or the Inquisition....