The History of Valentine's Day & Commentary

Valentine’s Day History
As the story goes, Emperor Claudius (of Rome) wanted to have a large army. However, many of the men did not volunteer to serve in this army. Claudius assumed it was because the young men were in love and had families that they did not want to serve. As a result, he made it illegal for men to marry. Valentine, the Roman priest, did not agree with the emperor’s decree and continued to marry couples in secret. One day, Valentine’s secret dealings were discovered. Valentine was captured and imprisoned. While incarcerated, many of the townspeople continued to express their support for Valentine through small acts such as throwing roses and notes into his cell window. One of Valentine’s major supporters during this time of imprisonment was the daughter of one of the prison guards. They talked regularly and encouraged each other. The day Valentine was scheduled to be beheaded, on February 14, 269 A.D., he left a note for the prison guard’s daughter. He signed the note "Love from your Valentine." http://www.pictureframes.co.uk/pages/saint_valentine.htm. This is one explanation of the origins of Valentine’s Day.
Another source explains that Valentine’s Day originated as the eve of the ancient Roman festival, Lupercalia. Lupercalia was an ancient pagan festival in honor of Lupercus, the Roman God of Fertility. The original festival was held on the 15th of February in the Lupercal, a cave where Romulus and Remus, the legendary founders of Rome, were said to have been nurtured by a she-wolf. On this day, priest assemble at the cave and sacrifice goats and dogs—animals known for their strong sexual instinct- to the god of fertility. After the ceremony, the young Roman men would slice the goat's hide into strips, dip them in the sacrificial blood and run through the streets, slapping the women and the crops with them. Roman women liked being touched with the blood, goat hides because they believed that the strips would make them more fertile and make childbirth easier in the coming year.
As part of this pagan tradition, there was a lottery aspect to festival wherein the young women in the city would write their names on a piece of paper and place it in a big urn. Arbitrarily, the men would pick a woman's name and she would become his date for the remainder of the evening, typically the remainder of the year. These matches often ended in marriage. Over the years, the Catholic Church eventually substituted the names of women with the names of dead saints to shift the general population’s focus away from lustful, fleshly desires to more spiritual ones. Toward the end of the 5th century, Pope Galesius decided to dedicate the Eve of Lupercalia to the martyred Roman priest, Valentine.
Despite these efforts, the pagan ideals persisted as the British and French people recalled the ancient Roman traditions. Additionally, the bird mating season coincidentally began around the same date, February 14th. So February 14th continues to be a day associated with love, and its many different forms of expression. This is the history of Valentine as recorded on the following website: http://www.witchology.com/contents/february/valentines_static.php

Valentine’s Day Commentary
As I do customarily when researching a topic, I type the topic into Google. For this project, I typed “history of valentine” into Google and received results for about 4, 740,000 sites. So finding information on the history of Valentine’s Day was not difficult. The most difficult aspect of this research project was deciding where to start and where/when to end.
Since I am a firm believer in the idea that “Seeing History is Believing History”, I am usually hunting for pictures and videos of various historical events to bring into the classroom to supplement the textbook. For this reason, I clicked on “Images” on the Google screen to see if I could find something to help students visualize the history of Valentine’s Day.
The initial site was not wholly devoted to Valentine’s Day. The site is maintained in the United Kingdom. Although the homepage is actually about picture frames, there is a section on their site dedicated to the history of Valentine’s Day, the Valentine Story, and Valentine traditions. I assume the nice image that appeared on Google images was there promoting their frame, not really Valentine’s Day. Nevertheless, the site told the history of Valentine’s Day through the first person perspective, which I found interesting.
The second interesting Valentine’s Day image I found was a drawing of a she-wolf nursing Romulus and Remus, the legendary founders of Rome. This photo led me to my second source entitled, www.witchology.com which is a website dedicated to the study of Witches and Witchcraft, a site maintained by Dr. Leo Ruickbie. This site traced the origins of Valentine’s Day back to the ancient Roman fertility festival called Lupecalia. Dr. Ruickbie’s site was given more credence because of his distinguished credentials. He obtained a Masters in Sociology and Religion from Lancaster University and became the first person to obtain a doctorate in Sociology of Modern Witchcraft. Furthermore, Dr. Ruickbie has published books, conducted public speaking engagements, been interviewed internationally, and was commissioned to conduct special research assignments by BBC.
Overall, I think the research was painless. However, I did verify the major components of the Valentine’s Day story against a couple other websites. The stories were consistent. I was satisfied.

Internet African History Sourcebook: Website Review

The Internet African History Sourcebook (IAHS)http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/africa/africasbook.html is a website designed for educational purposes. The African History (Sourcebook) site is actually one of eight subsets created from three major online sourcebooks. The major sourcebooks are entitled Ancient History Sourcebook, Medieval Sourcebook, and Modern History Sourcebook. The IAHS website has eight other history sourcebook subsets included on its main page listed as follows: East Asian, Indian, Islamic, Jewish, LGBT, Women’s, Global, and Science. The three major source books and the eight sourcebook subsets comprise the only hyper-linked heading section on this website, with one additional hyperlink to Halsall Home.
The redeeming quality of this site is that it links to the Halsall Home Page, a link which provides useful background info and additional guidance and resources (i.e. a search function) to make the Sourcebook experience an enjoyable one. The entire Internet History Sourcebooks Project [IHSP] was designed to provide easy access to primary sources and other teaching materials to the serious minded researcher in a non-commercial environment, meaning without excessive advertising or layout. This site, as well as the others, was developed and is edited by Paul Halsall with the aid of numerous other contributors. The web space and server support is provided by Fordham University, the History Department at Fordham University, and the Fordham Center for Medieval Studies, which lends credibility to the overall project.
The sites are maintained by Paul Halsall. However, it is more accurate to say that these sites are not, this spite specifically, maintained (well) by Paul Halsall. The IAHS site was last updated February 20, 2007, almost a year ago. The information on this particular main page remains static. Additionally, the Link Exchange (LE) Fast Counter does not work properly. Apparently this function is no longer supported because the website LE Fast Counter is stated to record the number of visits since June 10, 1998, approximately ten years ago, there is nothing provided.
The layout design is basic. There are three basic colors used: red, yellow, and green. The text is in black with links in blue. There is a kente cloth design banner that runs alongside the left border of the webpage. The colors in the kente cloth are red, yellow, and green. These colors may or may not draw upon the symbolic meanings of Akan kente colors. Red means political and spiritual moods, bloodshed, and/or sacrificial rites. Yellow means preciousness, royalty, wealth, and/or fertility. Green means vegetation, planting, harvesting, growth, and/or spiritual renewal. The background color for the rest of the webpage/website is a dull, shade of yellow.
There are no advertisements or banners on the main webpage which is supposedly an enhancement to the site. There is only one visual image, which is a (recurring) picture on the website, to the left of the major topic headings on this page. According to the Contents heading, which functions as a Table of Contents to the Webpage, there are thirteen major headings on this page.
The main page is very easy to navigate, since there is only one page dedicated to this particular site. Any link beyond the main page directs the user away from the African History Sourcebook website, without a link or option to return to the main page. This transition is obvious because every identifiable facet of the site changes, including the background, the color scheme, etc. The only way to return to the main page is to hit the computer’s back button. There is no back button implanted on the subsequent webpage. Each click on the IAHS main page holds uncertainty and suspense, much like a roll of the dice.
This uncertainty includes the reliability of the content as well as the credibility of the author/contributor/website. Whether or not the links worked at all was also uncertain. For example, the link to H. Kamuzu Banda (former President of Malawi): Apology to People of Malawi, Jan 4th 1996 [At Geocities] is a dead link.
Many of the links from this webpage directs users to other sites, non-discriminately. Some of the links direct the user to university websites (e.g. UGA, Fordham University, etc.), some to amateur websites (e.g. Mr. Dowling.com), some to professional websites (e.g. the Humanities & Social Sciences Online (HNet), The Atlantic Monthly (Online), and government run websites such as kenyaweb.com) , some credible(e.g. PBS), some suspect (e.g. geocities.com), and some to sites that require as much time and energy to verify the source as it takes to research the information originally sought after.
In a simplified attempt to make rhyme or reason of this site, there is a brief notes section prior to the Contents section which attempts to explain the coding system of the various links.
Aside from the links directly to documents, there are links labeled 2D to indicate the information provided is a secondary review, discussion, or article on a given topic. The links labeled MEGA lets users know they are being directed to a mega site which tracks resources on specified topics. Finally, there are links coded WEB which directs users to purportedly websites focused on a specific issue, offering serious educational value.
Though the site is not aesthetically enticing or organized to be user-friendly, there is much valuable information contained within its immediate and referenced pages to substantiate its existence and usefulness to the scholar and the scholarly.