Reading High School teacher Brian Page, left, and former UC professor John Morris developed Awesome Island, a financial literacy board game.

Written by

Sarah Hardee
| Enquirer contributor

There's a place where jobs and good investments are plentiful, entrepreneurship pays off big and where playing your cards right always leads to financial success.

It's called Awesome Island, and it doesn't take long to get there. Classrooms around the globe have been taking students on short, two-hour journeys to the "island" via a financial literacy board game created by two local educators that puts students in the driver's seat. A new, online version of the game is in the works that will allow even more classrooms to take the journey.It has passed as fact among historians, journalists and politicians, and has been recounted everywhere from tourist guidebooks to the floor of the U.S. Congress: British forces used chemical weapons on Iraqis just after World War I.

But that claim has never been fully squared with the historical record, says R. M. Douglas, a historian at Colgate University. According to Douglas's research, forthcoming in the December issue of The Journal of Modern History, no such incident ever occurred.

Allegations of chemical bombings by the British erupted into the public sphere during the run up to the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003. Iraq's history of chemical weapons did not start with Saddam Hussein's gas attack on the Kurds, scholars and critics asserted. It was Great Britain when it controlled the