01/26/2026
Reflecting on the year so far, we’ve been so pleased with our Forensic History Field Trips series. We emphasize primary sources, historical artifacts, and the real detective work historians use to understand the past. This approach adds rigor and objectivity to how our students think and write, while telling history as a compelling story—one filled with innovators who move civilization forward.
Our focus this year is the Middle Ages and the Renaissance: the drama of the Fall of Rome, the loss of knowledge in the West, its preservation and advancement in the East, and its remarkable recovery in Europe. We are deep in the astonishing Italian Renaissance, a period of renewed learning that spread across Europe.
Our Forensic History Field Trips have shifted history out of the abstract to a tangible, evidence-based practice.
In the fall, students visited the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, where they completed a scavenger hunt comparing Late Middle Ages to High Renaissance paintings. Through direct contact with original historical artworks, they could see artistic knowledge lost, recovered, and innovated upon.
Next, at the Texas Renaissance Festival, students worked with real blacksmith tools at a working forge, using historical techniques to create metal objects of their own.
Back in the classroom, students explored medieval bookmaking—parchment, ink, calligraphy, and illuminated manuscripts—creating their own illuminated poems on real vellum with quill pens and historically accurate ink. These experiences made clear why a single book could take months or years to produce.
This primed them to travel to Utah to work with a functioning Gutenberg press. They cast movable type from molten metal, inked the press, turned the screw themselves, and printed a reproduction of a Gutenberg Bible page.
This spring, our studies will culminate with a trip to Florence.
By the time they go, they’ll have learned more about extraordinary figures of the Renaissance and Age of Exploration—from the Medici family to Michelangelo, Leonardo, Galileo, Magellan, Shakespeare, and beyond.
