Madera Method

08/12/2023

The “Staying Sunny - How the Nishimotos Persevered Through WWII” Madera Method book is available as a free download from the Madera Method projects’ website:

The Madera Method historians, in Mrs. Shelton’s historical literacy course at Madera South High School, are seeking community submissions to aid in our current project on the Nishimoto family. As part of this project, we plan to conduct oral history interviews with family members as well as those ...

01/09/2023

People called Ferdinand Waldo Demara the world’s greatest con man and for good reason. He had such persuasive skills that his life story was made into a book and a movie, the titles of which were, not surprisingly, “The Great Imposter.” Born in 1921, by the time he was thirty years old, Fred D...

12/19/2022

For the first time in the history of Madera High School, in 1905 its senior class did not graduate in Athletic Hall on Yosemite Avenue. The commencement exercises took place in the assembly room of the brand-new High School building on L Street. Therefore, it is entirely understandable that exciteme...

12/07/2022

More than a teaching tool, a community conversation / Más que una herramienta de enseñanza, tambien es una conversación comunitaria

12/05/2022

It was Sunday night, and all was calm in Madera, or at least it appeared to be. No one at the shooting gallery on Yosemite had any idea what was going on in the mind of Charles Hensley. They didn’t know that he would be dead before midnight. The 32-year-old lumberman, son of Thomas Jefferson […]

11/21/2022

By Frédéric Martin, Editor-in-Chief, We Believe Newspaper Later This year, the Madera Method will be thirty-five years old. History teacher Bill Coate launched the innovative and prolific practice at the onset of the 1984-1985 school year in his 6th-grade class at Howard school. Earlier that year,...

11/17/2022

The Minturn Scholars come home Thirty-four years after they made national news and drew a world-renowned author to Madera, Howard School’s Minturn Scholars met again Thursday to celebrate the latest chapter in the story of their uncommon achievement. As honored guests of Madera Unified, School Dis...

11/16/2022

When Pete Cardoza died in May 1967, The Tribune called him a legend, and indeed he was, but not for the reasons the local newspaper cited. True enough, three years earlier he was honored as the Grand Marshal in the Old Timers parade. True enough, everyone remembered him as the man who tied his horse...

11/09/2022

Pictured in 1940, this barbershop was located on the north side of Yosemite Avenue, near the site of Y.V. Preciado’s pioneer barbershop. Unlike this shop, one could get a haircut, shave, and bath at Preciado’s. Madera’s premier barber closed his shop after the San Francisco earthquake of 1906....

11/03/2022

Free - Download the book here!

On June 12, 1963, Medgar Evers pulled into his driveway at Decatur, Mississippi, after returning from an integration meeting where he had conferred with NAACP lawyers. Emerging from his car and carrying NAACP T-shirts that stated, “Jim Crow Must Go,” Evers was struck in the back with a bullet th...

11/02/2022

Joe and Frank Crappa owned the Crappa Brothers Grocery, which stood on the northeast corner of 4th Street and Gateway Drive in the 1920s. It was a prosperous little Italian market until Frank Crappa got himself in trouble during prohibition. There is no evidence that the law ever had its eyes on Joe...

11/01/2022

Madera Method Fall 2022 photo essay contest