For some time we have been adding days, weeks, or months of celebration and remembrance to our national calendar, some of them amusing or frivolous, others earnest and important, others profoundly serious. Truly, as you’ll see from these stories, we do need those cultural moments to celebrate and to contemplate.
Listen to the Recess! Clip https://recess.ufl.edu/wp-content/uploads/sites/42/Monopoly-Day.mp3 Author John Cech Air Date 8/22/2005 Monopoly Day Transcript Tomorrow is Monopoly Day, celebrating the world ‘s best-selling board game. Since its development during the height of the American Depression in 1934 by Pennsylvanian Charles B. Darrow, more than 200 million copies of the game have been sold in […]
Listen to the Recess! Clip https://recess.ufl.edu/wp-content/uploads/sites/42/George-Washingtons-Mother.mp3 Author John Cech Air Date 2/22/2001 George Washington’s Mother Transcript Today is George Washington’s birthday, an appropriate time to remember that the father of our country also had a mother — Mary Ball Washington. Her rather unconventional, and at times eccentric character is the subject of a new video […]
Listen to the Recess! Clip https://recess.ufl.edu/wp-content/uploads/sites/42/Robinson-Crusoe.mp3 Author Rita Smith Air Date 2/21/2001 Robison Crusoe Transcript February is Robinson Crusoe month, named in honor of the anniversary of the rescue on February 1, 1709, of Alexander Selkirk, a Scottish sailor who had been put ashore in September 1704, on an uninhabited island at his own request […]
Listen to the Recess! Clip https://recess.ufl.edu/wp-content/uploads/sites/42/International-Friendship-Week.mp3 Author Heather Tomasello Air Date 2/20/2001 International Friendship Week Transcript This is International Friendship Week. What can be more thrilling than receiving a postcard from a friend from another country thousands of miles away, with its mysterious journey and exotic postage stamps? For years, when I was a teenager, […]
It’s Presidents’ Day, and Kevin Shortsleeve has some thoughts about how to make this holiday meaningful for kids today.
It’s Valentine’s Day, and here’s Barry Stewart Mann with a story about love, and play, and imagination.
Listen to the Recess! Clip https://recess.ufl.edu/wp-content/uploads/sites/42/Esther-Howland.mp3 Author Rita Smith Air Date 2/13/2001 Esther Howland, Valentine Entrepreneur Transcript Esther Howland was the first person to take seriously the business of elaborate handmade valentines. As a teenager, in 1847 she received her first Valentine from England. It had an elaborate border of fine lace paper, and was […]
Listen to the Recess! Clip https://recess.ufl.edu/wp-content/uploads/sites/42/Laughter.mp3 Author Shelley Fraser Mickle Air Date 2/7/2001 Laughter Transcript This is Love May Make The World Go Round, But Laughter Keeps Us From Getting Dizzy Week. So it’s a good idea to arm yourself with a few jokes when you go out into the world today, because it’s no […]
Listen to the Recess! Clip https://recess.ufl.edu/wp-content/uploads/sites/42/Black-History-Month.mp3 Author John Cech Air Date 2/1/2001 Black History Month Transcript That’s Medicine Man Ya-Ya reciting the last part of Maulana Karenga’s Libation Statement that opens the CD, “Teach The Children,” a collection of songs and prose poems, that celebrates famous African American figures in our history. There’s Harriet Tubman, […]
You’re hearing one of the most maligned of instruments — the kazoo — being featured in that excerpt from Jim Queskin’s classic “Jug Band Music.”