Another history post, wow! So, let’s get you up to date. When we last left off, we had finished studying WWI. Now we’re studying a period called ‘the Interwar Years’. This is the period between World War One and World War Two, which would be 1919-1939.

We’re doing a large project on that, but today I’m writing about a smaller project we did, it only took a few days, called ‘The Namesake Assignment’. In groups of two or three, we had to pick a place in Vancouver. Then, we had to make a short 2-3 minute video about the history of it. This video had to include:

– The Location

– Images of said location

– Description of the location

– History of the namesake

– A few stories about the location (real or myth)

So my group, which included Hannah and Isobel, chose Stanley Park. For those of you who don’t know, Stanley Park is a large park in Vancouver, which is home to things such as The Vancouver Aquarium, Second Beach, and of course the wonderful view.

I didn’t realize how much history Stanley Park has. We had quite a lot of information, too much to fit into a two minute video. So, here are a few highlights that didn’t make it into the video:

– In 1888, an small island called Deadman’s Island off the shore of Stanley Park was chosen to be a quarantine spot for the small pox virus. They built a hospital and called it the ‘Pest House’. People to this day still think Deadman’s Island is haunted. I found some interesting stories, if you’d like to read them.

– Skipping to a few decades later, the Vancouver Gun Club gets permission to shoot crows in the park. The bounty was 5 cents per crow, and up to 5000 crows. For reference, that’s 250 dollars if you caught the maximum amount of crows.

– In 1905 they had to limit the traffic in the park from 2 pm to 5 pm, because the cars frightened the horses who ran the carriages.

There are other things, but those are all in our video.

We got a reference video, to see a style that we could use for our video. This video was about Granville Street, and you can watch it here. I really enjoyed the video, as it’s entertaining and informative. It helped get the ideas flowing for what our video should look like.

Then it came to making our video. We split up the tasks easily: Hannah was doing Audio, Isobel was making part of the visuals and music, and I made the other part of the visuals.

Our first draft had a few mistakes, such as “the late 18, 000’s”, but they were quickly fixed and we uploaded the final video again:

Personally, I really like projects like this. It’s really interesting to learn about the history of this place, and then make it an entertaining video for other people to watch. I’d really like to do more projects like this in the future. I guess that’s just me being a history nerd.

Anyways, I hope you learned something! I certainly did. Until next time

Read you later

Sincerely, Me