Sunday, April 23, 2006

Read Aloud Spartacus



The Putnam Valley library had a copy of Howard Fast's "Spartacus." I scanned one of the segments and then added a narration to it and made it into a quicktime movie. I figured I would give the kids a taste of the inspiration for the movie. One possible online assignment they could do is to try and match the story text with images they could find online. Here's my template version of it as a pdf I found the image above when I did a search for "Capua." I was also surprised to find the following on, of all places, channel4.com/realstories: "Contrary to the celebrated sequence in Stanley Kubrick's 1960 film, Spartacus, the survivors of the battle were never asked to identify Spartacus; he had died on the battlefield. The subsequent mass crucifixion scene, however, is historically accurate: Crassus had 6,000 men crucified along the Appian Way between Capua and Rome – a distance of about 200 kilometres." I'd like to still believe to in the Howard Fast version. After all, who was there doing the reporting, Fox News?

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