Berlin Wall

We have been doing This Day in History daily with the big brothers and it's been amazing how much history I've forgotten (or possibly never learned). Today was about President Ronald Regan's trip to West Berlin in 1987 where he told Mikhail Gorbachev to tear down the Berlin Wall. This of course led to a long discussion at dinner about why Germany and Berlin were divided, who Mikhail Gorbachev was, why there was a wall, and how it was torn down. Dinner ended with looking up maps of Europe after the Warsaw Pact and finding a video of Peter Jennings in Berlin in 1989 when the wall came down. The kids were really interested and it was a great discussion. It would have been nice to actually study history past World War II when I was in school and I hope the boys end up with a better understanding of our modern world and relationships than I have. Luckily I have a second chance to learn it all again!