another history blog

How well do you know the 50 states?

2009-08-30T11:43:00.004-05:00

Steven Durham, over at Everything Is History, is hosting a contest, 50 Years of 50 States, starting tomorrow (as I write this--Monday, August 31). Great prizes (top prize is a $50 Amazon gift card!!), and it looks like great fun. Check it out!

that looks like "Peach Papers," doesn't it?

2009-08-07T16:06:00.004-05:00

Hot off the (University of South Carolina) Press: a new edition of Bill Arp's Peace Papers, with an introduction by me.

I almost spoiled the joke in the title

2009-07-29T18:01:00.001-05:00

I met for the last time yesterday with my methodology class. It was a good group of students. In lieu of a final exam, we talked about "what we've learned this semester." As part of the discussion, I read out loud the long list of course objectives. After the one about "students will learn to use Chicago style (Turabian) footnotes," one student said she had a great idea for a t-shirt slogan: "Historians do it Chicago style." Man, I'm going to miss them.

worst record ever?

2009-05-24T16:40:00.010-05:00

Bob Purse, writing at WFMU's Beware of the Blog, describes his experiences with what could well be the worst record ever made.

My story begins well over 25 years ago, back to the day when I heard Dr. Demento play an excerpt of a 45 called "I'm Surfing" by George W. Husak. This was during a segment on some of the worst records in his collection. I was intrigued, and was quite glad when, several years later, the good doctor played the record in its entirety, prefacing it with the following (edited) comments: "If you asked me, 'what is the worst musical performance that was ever actually released on a 45 … a record that somebody actually expected somebody to go out and buy,' this might well be my choice. It's from some time in the early to mid '60's, and it came out on a label based in San Francisco. The perpetrator of this truly incredible performance is one George W. Husak." Here is that record....

Bob Purse has posted an MP3 of "I'm Surfing," and oh my god, it's awful.

But that's not all. He found a copy of this LP, George's Album. A dozen songs, all in that inimitable Husak style. Hear Georga and Anton give Bob Wills's "San Antonio Rose" and Hank Williams's "Cold, Cold Heart" that special Husak treatment. Enjoy.

(On the WFMU blog, it's quickest to click on the little blue box in front of the title.)

The Food of a Younger Nation

2009-05-18T14:17:00.009-05:00

Mark Kurlansky, author of two of the best-known commodity histories
(Cod: A Biography of the Fish That Changed the World and Salt: A World History), is just out with a brand new book that should get a lot of attention. The Food of a Younger Nation “takes us back to the food and eating habits of a younger America: Before the national highway system brought the country closer together; before chain restaurants imposed uniformity and low quality; and before the Frigidaire meant frozen food in mass quantities, the nation’s food was seasonal, regional, and traditional. It helped form the distinct character, attitudes, and customs of those who ate it.”

From the publisher’s description:

“In the 1930s, with the country gripped by the Great Depression and millions of Americans struggling to get by, FDR created the Federal Writers’ Project under the New Deal as a make-work program for artists and authors. A number of writers, including Zora Neale Hurston, Eudora Welty, and Nelson Algren, were dispatched all across America to chronicle the eating habits, traditions, and struggles of local people. The project, called ‘America Eats,’ was abandoned in the early 1940s because of the World War and never completed.

“The Food of a Younger Land unearths this forgotten literary and historical treasure and brings it to exuberant life. Mark Kurlansky’s brilliant book captures these remarkable stories, and combined with authentic recipes, anecdotes, photos, and his own musings and analysis, evokes a bygone era when Americans had never heard of fast food and the grocery superstore was a thing of the future. Kurlansky serves as a guide to this hearty and poignant look at the country’s roots.

“From New York automats to Georgia Coca-Cola parties, from Arkansas possum-eating clubs to Puget Sound salmon feasts, from Choctaw funerals to South Carolina barbecues, the WPA writers found Americans in their regional niches and eating an enormous diversity of meals. From Mississippi chittlins to Indiana persimmon puddings, Maine lobsters, and Montana beavertails, they recorded the curiosities, commonalities, and communities of American food.”

The book reminds me of my friend Joe Dabney’s Smokehouse Ham, Spoon Bread, & Scuppernong Wine: The Folklore and Art of Appalachian Cooking, which won a James A. Beard Award (as Kurlansky did for Cod). I get hungry whenever I read Joe’s book, and now the same thing happens with Kurlansky’s. My North Carolina grandmother made “Kentucky Wilted Lettuce”--leaf lettuce, torn, covered with sliced green onions and then “wilted” with hot bacon grease. She taught me how to put crumbled cornbread in buttermilk. I haven’t had wilted lettuce or cornbread in buttermilk in a long time.

The book describes “Oyster Stew Supreme at Grand Central, New York” and oyster roasts in Georgia, Alabama, and North Carolina, as well as the other kind of culinary oysters--“Kentucky Oysters” and “Oklahoma Prairie Oysters.” I’m a big fan of the first kind of oyster.

It's hard to believe that these wonderful pieces have remained unpublished for seventy years. Kurlansky came across them when he was working on Choice Cuts, a best-of collection of food writing through history. I’m glad he did, and that he had the sense to put them together into this book. A friend who teaches American Studies saw the book on my desk and said that she might use it in one of her classes. I can see that. Students would love it, and I can imagine a class drawing all sorts of observations about American culture(s) from the book. Plus it would be fun, as the piece in the book goes on for nearly 400 words about Kentucky oysters without saying that they are hog testicles.

advertising: fooling all the people (8)

2009-05-17T14:38:00.011-05:00

Chicago Tribune, July 7, 1921

Yet another set of advertisements that used some variation of Abraham Lincoln's famous saying, "You can fool all of the people some of the time, and some of the people all of the time, but you can't fool all of the people all of the time." Click on images to make them bigger.

Chicago Tribune, April 6, 1910

New York Times, February 28, 1909

New York Times, November 30, 1907

those crass insurance companies

2009-05-05T09:25:00.008-05:00

Click image to embiggen.

On April 12, 1899, Alfred Cranford was allegedly murdered (and his wife, Mittie, raped) by Sam Hose, who would pay with his life in one of the most horrific lynchings in Georgia history. One of the generally unknown parts of that horrible story is the way the life insurance company used the event for advertising.

This ad, from the Atlanta Constitution, May 19, 1899, contains a letter from the Mittie Cranford thanking the Mutual Life Insurance Company of New York for its prompt and courteous payment of the claim. "I can truthfully say that the beneficent results of life insurance were never more fittingly bestowed than in my case," she wrote, "as this policy comes like a god-send to assist me in educating and bringing up my four little children."

My favorite part: the box in the upper right corner. "A Side Light on the Cranford-Hose Tragedy / The Thoughtful Husband -- The Thankful Widow." "A Splendid Investment"! For a $2,000 policy, Alfred Cranford paid only $84 in premiums, giving a "Profit over Cost" of $1,916.

spell checker epic fail

2009-04-29T16:43:00.003-05:00

Last week of classes, so I'm sitting here trying to grade three sets of papers while I take care of those students who stop by my office to ask (as the jailer at Philippi asked Paul), "Sir, what must I do to be saved?"

I think this is the winner for the semester. I can't believe anything will top this. A student referred in a paper to the Second Seminole War, and it came out "Second Seminal War."

advertising: fooling all the people (7)

2009-04-18T13:37:00.011-05:00

Chicago Daily Tribune, May 14, 1899

Yet another set of advertisements that used some variation of Abraham Lincoln's famous saying, "You can fool all of the people some of the time, and some of the people all of the time, but you can't fool all of the people all of the time." Click on images to make them bigger.

New York Times, Feb. 12, 1906

Atlanta Constitution, Jan. 1, 1911

Chicago Daily Tribune, March 22, 1920

Los Angeles Times, Nov. 14, 1909

an old joke, updated

2009-04-18T13:06:00.005-05:00

Rick Perry, Texas governor -- voted "most likely to secede" by his high school class

"There's a lot of different scenarios. We've got a great union. There's absolutely no reason to dissolve it. But if Washington continues to thumb their nose at the American people, you know, who knows what might come out of that."

advertising: fooling all the people (6)

2009-04-11T17:30:00.013-05:00

Atlanta Constitution, Feb. 15, 1898

Yet another set of advertisements that used some variation of Abraham Lincoln's famous saying, "You can fool all of the people some of the time, and some of the people all of the time, but you can't fool all of the people all of the time." Click on images to make them bigger.

Los Angeles Times, Jan. 20, 1897

New York Times, Dec. 25, 1893

Chicago Daily Tribune, Aug. 28, 1931

12-step program for apostrophe abuse

2009-04-09T15:05:00.011-05:00

"Programme," actually, because Lauren is British.

This is just beautiful. I'm reading and grading papers this afternoon, and I just wrote, for the umpteenth time, "Do not use an apostrophe to create plurals!" Since I can't drink for a few more hours, stumbling on this while taking a brief Apostrophe Abuse break was, from a mental health standpoint, most fortuitous.

Step 1 --

1. Admit you have a problem - It’s ok, you’re in the safety of your anonymous interwebbed life. I won’t know. Just admit to yourself, out loud:

My name is X and I don’t know how to use an apostrophe. I force them into plural words where they don’t want to go. Yes, that’s me, I commit these crimes because I don’t know any better. I want help.

Steps 2-12 here.

advertising: fooling all the people (5)

2009-04-09T09:03:00.005-05:00

New York Times, November 28, 1897

A special Macy's and Gimbels edition of advertisements that used some variation of Abraham Lincoln's famous saying, "You can fool all of the people some of the time, and some of the people all of the time, but you can't fool all of the people all of the time." Click on images to make them bigger.

New York Times, December 6, 1930

afromentioned

2009-04-05T09:18:00.017-05:00

Yesterday morning, on Car Talk, one of the guys (Tommy, I think) used the word "aforementioned," except he pronounced it "afromentioned." I've heard him do it before, and I've heard it from one or two other speakers.

OK, I understand that people sometimes reverse sounds when they talk, and it's especially believable when they're reading from a slightly-unfamiliar script. But no one would make this mistake in writing, right?

Wrong. A quick Google search turns up over 1200 "afromentioned" and variations. Not all are wrong. Someone uses "Afromentioned" as a screen name; a screen name "afro" leads to the construction "afro mentioned...."; and I think a few of these were intended as jokes. But most meant "aforementioned."

A few examples:

The Afro mentioned cowboy . . . . (This is from a transcript of a Katie Couric on-air piece. The short video is available, and yes, she says "afro mentioned.")

Next to the afro-mentioned McQueen and Robinson, there's the always reliable Karl Malden . . . . (from a comment on imdb.com)

This layer 27 may not be formed thick owing to the afro-mentioned reason . . . . (from a US patent)

A sixty (60) day notice explanation for vote will be made to the afro mentioned members.

i believe the afro mentioned list of songs is pretty good.

I searched the aforementioned "afromentioned" in the Eggcorn Database, but I don't see it there.

The Responsibilities of American Citizenship

2009-04-04T16:22:00.009-05:00

A short film I'm going to show my class on Monday. Produced by the National Education Program and distributed in 1955, the film vividly shows how the Cold War affected American society. There's so much to talk about here--religion (notice that "fundamental belief in God" is at the base of the building blocks that support "the American way of life"), economic prosperity, bad haircuts, and so much more. An infuriating line is at 6:25: "Private ownership diffuses the wealth and economic power over the very widest area." What??

video from the amazing Internet Archive

Booker T. and the DBTs

2009-04-03T13:58:00.024-05:00

Through the magic that is Internet Archive, four songs from a great show: Booker T. (formerly of Booker T. and the MGs) and the Drive-By Truckers, April 1 at Atlanta's Variety Playhouse. Booker T's new album, Potato Hole, will be released in a few weeks, and they're out promoting it. This was the opening show of the tour. From here, they go to Australia. "Pound It Out" is from the new album; "Green Onions" and "Time Is Tight" are Booker T. classics; "Gravity's Gone" is one of my favorite DBT songs. (DBT played a long second set.) The next day I told folks that I was smiling so hard for those first 75 minutes that my face hurt.

Pound It Out

Green Onions

Time Is Tight

Gravity's Gone

advertising: fooling all the people (4)

2009-04-02T12:42:00.017-05:00

Los Angeles Times, April 13, 1959

A fourth set of advertisements that used some variation of Abraham Lincoln's famous saying, "You can fool all of the people some of the time, and some of the people all of the time, but you can't fool all of the people all of the time." Click on images to make them bigger.

Chicago Tribune, June 7, 1921

New York Times, February 11, 1901

Boston Daily Globe, January 18, 1897

Los Angeles Times, June 19, 1907

advertising: fooling all the people (3)

2009-04-01T12:44:00.014-05:00

Chicago Tribune, May 1, 1955

For your enjoyment, another small collection of advertisements that used some variation of Abraham Lincoln's famous saying, "You can fool all of the people some of the time, and some of the people all of the time, but you can't fool all of the people all of the time." Click on images to make them bigger.

New York Times, February 12, 1902

Los Angeles Times, March 14, 1923

Los Angeles Times, March 3, 1895

Chicago Tribune, July 21, 1943

five Civil War historians

2009-03-31T11:41:00.008-05:00

Over at A. Lincoln Blog, Brian Dirck writes about his recent speaking engagements (see, he's a Lincoln scholar, and this was the bicentennial of Lincoln's birth, so he's had a lot of invitations to speak), including one here at Kennesaw State University. I especially like the photo, which shows the four speakers at our day-long symposium: William Cooper, Brian Dirck, Stephen Berry, and George Rable. The guy in the middle is my colleague John Fowler, director of KSU's Center for the Study of the Civil War Era.

Somewhere, over the Bridge to Nowhere

2009-03-30T13:46:00.005-05:00

An interesting update this past weekend on the old notion that characters and settings in L. Frank Baum's Wonderful Wizard of Oz (1900) matched certain real-life people and places in late nineteenth-century America: NPR's Weekend Edition has an interview with historian Quentin Taylor, who suggests a few analogies between the book and modern America:

Sarah Palin — whom Taylor describes as "attractive, wholesome [and] somewhat provincial" — could be Dorothy, while Rep. Barney Frank might be cast in the role of the Cowardly Lion. "Underneath all the bluster, [the Lion is] really a sweetheart," says Taylor.
Though Taylor's not certain where President Obama fits into Baum's novel, he does have a role for the speaker of the House: "There's ... one last character not in the film, but in the book — this is the queen of the field mice. I thought that Speaker Nancy Pelosi fit this the best. After all, she presides over a collection of diminutive, chattering rodents."

NPR has a link to the five-minute interview with Taylor. If you missed it last Satureday, it's worth checking out!

advertising: fooling all the people (2)

2009-03-27T10:15:00.016-05:00

Washington Post, December 4, 1946

For your enjoyment, a small collection of advertisements that used some variation of Abraham Lincoln's famous saying, "You can fool all of the people some of the time, and some of the people all of the time, but you can't fool all of the people all of the time." Click on images to make them bigger.

American Journal of the Medical Sciences, December 1893

New York Times, December 5, 1906

Christian Science Monitor, October 21, 1924

New York Times, May 29, 1934

Los Angeles Times, April 29, 1897

Dr. Seuss goes to war

2009-03-27T09:54:00.005-05:00

How about that? Dr. Seuss's wartime cartoons are available online. Good stuff!

hat tip to More or Less Bunk

advertising: fooling all the people (1)

2009-03-25T16:21:00.023-05:00

New York Times, February 12, 1910

For your enjoyment, a small collection of advertisements that used some variation of Abraham Lincoln's famous saying, "You can fool all of the people some of the time, and some of the people all of the time, but you cannot fool all of the people all of the time." Click images to make them bigger. More later.

New York Times, August 25, 1895

New York Times, February 10, 1915

Los Angeles Times, October 26, 1914

Boston Daily Globe, June 16, 1895

Los Angeles Times, November 2, 1931

y’all’s or y’alls?

2009-03-23T16:53:00.006-05:00

How’s that for an attention-getting title?

The question is, how does one form the possessive of y’all: with ’s, or with an s and no apostrophe? (Some readers might be saying that a better question is, who cares? To which I say, Who cares what such readers think?)

I sort of want the answer to be y’all’s, because I like the way it looks, and I like that it sometimes makes my students mad when I write it that way on the board (without telling them that it’s really wrong), and because it’s one word that illustrates both uses of the apostrophe (to form both contractions and possessives).

But alas....

Personal or definite pronouns--that is, pronouns that refer to something definite and that have a clear antecedent--do not have apostrophes in their possessive forms. Examples of these pronouns are he, she, you, and it. The possessive form of these pronouns: his, her, your, and its (not he’s, and of course not it’s, which is not a possessive but is a contraction for it is).

Some pronouns, called indefinite pronouns, do use an apostrophe to form the possessive. Example: anybody, a pronoun that, unlike those above, does not refer to anything specific and has no real antecedent. (“Anybody can grow up to be president.”) The possessive of anybody is anybody’s, with an apostrophe. Other examples of indefinite pronouns: everybody, someone, and nobody.

But y'all is not an apostrophe-taking indefinite pronoun; it is a personal pronoun, and hence the possessive does not get an apostrophe: y’alls.

Another good question: Why am I bothering with this? Because I came across the following today in Wikipedia’s entry on y’all: “There is some debate on the spelling of the possessive form of y’all. Some will spell it ‘y’all’s’ while others will spell it ‘y’alls.’ As there does not seem to be an official answer, it is a matter of personal preference.”

So here you have it, Wikipedia, the official answer: y’alls.

(And yes, I do claim to be official when it comes to y’all.)

the real reason I read Andrew Sullivan

2009-03-23T12:07:00.002-05:00

Sure, the Daily Dish offers a great discussion of political and economic matters. But what keeps me coming back is stuff like this (all links from yesterday):

dead people twittering: "Poke around and you'll find a whole bunch of dead people on Twitter, like Susan Sontag, George Washington and Sigmund Freud. It's fascinating to digest the life's work of a great thinker in 140 character chunks. Some are like performances — others are really trying to converse in the Twitterverse, ‘in the voice of’ or otherwise. Gandhi just uses the platform to spew quotes. Most fascinating is Charles Darwin, who is tweeting and blogging in real time on board the HMS Beagle (via his 1839 ‘Voyage of the Beagle’ diary).”

when Jesus rode dinosaurs: a page from a creationist coloring book

NASCAR as religion: “Is your spiritual engine running on fumes? Do you feel like you're falling behind in the race of life, or that you've hit the wall? Get ready to start your engine once again. In The Race: From Pit Row to Victory Lane, author Rick Lemons offers timely and comprehensive insights that will fuel your relationship with God. Join him as he parallels the Christian life to NASCAR racing.”

comparing Lincoln and Davis

2009-03-21T06:47:00.008-05:00

Today is Kennesaw State University's New Interpretations of the American Civil War Symposium. This year's topic: Envisioning America: The Leadership of Abraham Lincoln and Jefferson Davis. We have four of the best Lincoln and Davis scholars around: William Cooper, George Rable, Brian Dirck, and Stephen Berry.

Mildred Lewis Rutherford, state historian of the United Daughters of the Confederacy for Georgia, made that same comparison almost a century ago in a little booklet she published. Given her affiliation, perhaps it's not a surprise that Lincoln came in second. Davis, she said, was a Christian, a humanitarian, a philanthropist, a patriot, a statesman, and a scholar. As for the U.S. president: "Shall Lincoln be held up as an exemplar for the imitation of our American Youth? We cannot hold him up as a GENTLEMAN OF REFINEMENT AND CULTURE.... We cannot commend Lincoln for integrity of character.... We cannot hold him up as humane or tender hearted.... The evidence is very strong against him as a VIOLATOR OF THE CONSTITUTION." And so on.

Well, I guess that settles it. No need for the meeting now.

information age prayer

2009-03-20T13:26:00.003-05:00

I was trying to tell a student the other day about Dial-A-Prayer, the telephone service that you would call to hear a 30-second or so generic prayer. Needless to say, she had no idea what I was talking about. (Dial-A-Prayer started back in the 1950s. I remember it growing up. I guess it went the way of--well, the way of the dial telephone.)

Well, now there's Information Age Prayer, "a subscription service utilizing a computer with text-to-speech capability to incant your prayers each day. It gives you the satisfaction of knowing that your prayers will always be said even if you wake up late, or forget." $3.95 a month-- but check the "Popular Prayers" link for some special deals.

Everything you wanted to know about St. Patrick's Day

2009-03-17T07:32:00.002-05:00

... at Everything Is History.

the universe knows....

2009-03-11T16:49:00.005-05:00

Yesterday, early afternoon, I started to get hungry. It's spring break here, so nothing's open on campus, and I hadn't packed any lunch. I told a colleague I was going to walk to Wendy's, a little over half a mile away. By the time I got downstairs and started to leave the building, I'd decided to drive to a Chinese restaurant not far from campus. The fortune in my fortune cookie said: "Work on improving your exercise routine."

Everything is amazing, nobody is happy

2009-03-10T10:13:00.002-05:00

A former student sent this to me. At least he was kind enough not to say, "I think you'll identify with this guy; he reminds me of you."

Sunday afternoon

2009-03-08T12:03:00.026-05:00

Mid-70s today. I pulled out the sandals for the first time of the year.

Booker T. (formerly of Booker T. and the MGs) is releasing his first album in a long time next month--Potato Hole--and to kick it off, he's touring with his back-up band, which in this case was the Drive-By Truckers! First tour date, April 1 at the Variety Playhouse in Atlanta! Ought to be a great show!

The semicolon, properly used, is a thing of beauty. It is not always properl y used. This semester, I asked students in one class if they knew what we professors do when we see a well-used semicolon in a student paper. Answer: We check Google to find the source of the obvious plagiarism. I guess they took it as a challenge, because in a set of papers I returned this week, I must have written "Good use of semicolon!" a dozen times.

The GAH conference went well last weekend. The weather was bad--rain, at times pretty hard--but that was a good thing, because it kept everyone inside and at the sessions instead of out driving around the beautiful Georgia mountains. (The meeting was at Dahlonega.)

The only known color photograph of Lincoln. That's what I said when this popped up on the first slide of my PowerPoint presentation. A silly comment, I thought; the audience thought it was hilarious. I pointed to the corner with the little laser thing and said that if you look closely, you can see "Olan Mills." More laughter. I think the fact that I was giving the last presentation at the last session of the conference explains it.

Spring break has begun here at Kennesaw State. Woohoo! The first half of the semester passed quickly, but those last few days, I decided I was ready for a break from classes. I suspect my students felt the same way, at least about that last point.

The Inauguration String Quartet Revealed:

(hat tip to WFMU's Beware of the Blog)

In the Garden? Out the window

2009-03-04T15:56:00.009-05:00

Today in the history of American religion class we were talking about chapter two ("Sweet Savior") of Stephen Prothero's American Jesus: How the Son of God Became a National Icon. The chapter describes the move from the wrathful Calvinist God of the 18th century to the loving evangelical Jesus of the 19th.

Near the end of the chapter, Prothero quotes the first verse and chorus of "In the Garden," the hymn that perhaps best represents this new view of Jesus:

I come to the garden alone,
While the dew is still on the roses,
And the voice I hear falling on my ear
The Son of God discloses.

And He walks with me and He talks with me,
And He tells me I am His own,
And the joy we share as we tarry there,
None other has ever known.

"How many of you know this song?" I asked the students. There were 22 or 23 in the room; four raised their hands.

It's not that they're a bunch of heathens. I suspect the great majority go to church, or did until recently, on a pretty regular basis. And most of them, I suspect, are mainstream Protestants, the kind of people who would have heard this song often just a couple of decades ago.

I threw out the names of a few other hymns--"Softly and Tenderly, Jesus Is Calling," "O for a Thousand Tongues To Sing," "Jesus, Lover of My Soul," "Shall We Gather at the River," "What a Friend We Have in Jesus," "How Firm a Foundation"--always about four hands, the same small bunch of students. I didn't ask about "Amazing Grace."

How can one teach late 19th-/early 20th-century revivalism without "Softly and Tenderly"?

Fortunately there's NetHymnal, with over 10,000 hymns--not just lyrics, but tunes (midis) and brief sketches of the song writers.

I do love Prothero's book, though.

fooling the people earlier

2009-02-24T13:06:00.013-05:00

You can fool all the people some of the time and some of the people all the time, but you cannot fool all the people all the time.

Abraham Lincoln said that, right? Well, maybe, maybe not, but the first time we know the saying was ever attributed to Lincoln was August 26, 1887, in a political speech given by a man named Fred Wheeler in New York. I wrote about this here a couple years ago, and at greater length in an article for the Abraham Lincoln Association Newsletter.

This coming weekend, I'm giving a talk at the annual meeting of the Georgia Association of Historians about my efforts to track down old words and sayings. So this afternoon, taking a break after class, I was just fooling around on a new database--Gale's 19th Century Newspapers--and guess what I found.

The image might be hard to read. It's the Milwaukee Daily Journal, October 29, 1886. And on the front page, just under the date, is an article about another political speech, this one ending with

In the language of Abe Lincoln: "You can fool all the people a part of the time, or a part of the people all the time; but you can never fool all the people all the time."

How about that. I get to go to the conference with a brand new earliest date.

Like the 1887 date, this is probably not the first. My guess is that someone published an article or a book about Lincoln (and there was a LOT written about Lincoln in the 1880s) that put the words in Lincoln's mouth, like how Mason "Parson" Weems invented stories about George Washington.

Coloring 101; crosslisted as American History 101

2009-02-22T12:55:00.014-05:00

I just had the chance to see an advance copy of new American history textbook. (I'm not going to post author, title, or publisher.) This book is different. Publishers have to do this, of course--show why their books are different (and better) than all the others. Here's the gimmick for this book: the publisher asked students what they wanted in a textbook and gave it to them. "Textbooks get boring," said a student review quoted on the publisher's web site; "it is the same thing page after page." So this book looks like a nicely-produced glossy magazine. Chapters have lots of subheadings, many followed by one paragraph of four or five sentences (I kid you not) and then a new subheading. The book even has a half dozen or so full-page advertisements (for the book itself, or rather its special features).

I saw the Instructor's Edition, which means it comes with detachable cards, one for each chapter, that list the learning outcomes, useful web links, possible assignments, group activities, and the like. The following is a group activity from the card for the Progressive Era chapter:

As the instructor, you may be ready for a tension-breaker, since the chapter will be reached somewhere near mid-semester, when students are usually frazzled. Spring for several boxes of the original eight Crayola crayons, perhaps even one box per student. Print a blown-up picture of Teddy Roosevelt and the teddy bear. Make a copy for each student and give them free time to color the drawing.... Relate to the class the story of Roosevelt's Mississippi trip that gave the world the "teddy bear."

Really.

Yes, this is a college-level textbook.

Make sure you have plenty of gold star stickers.

I'm so sorry...

2009-02-17T13:04:00.004-05:00

Found, on the first day of the semester: a note left behind by a student in an earlier class that I kept and now re-found under a stack of papers on my desk:

I'm so sorry.... I only went by what people said on rate my professors. This can't be the same guy.

18 very funny seconds

2009-02-17T09:25:00.006-05:00

One of the worst (i.e., best) puns I've heard in a long time.

found at Language Log

UPDATE: I showed this to a couple of folks here, and apparently I greatly overestimated its funniness.

the Lost Cause

2009-02-16T16:57:00.004-05:00

I'll be teaching the Lost Cause in both my History of American Religion and Georgia History classes soon, so I paid particular attention to a video created by Caitlin GD Hopkins at Vast Public Indifference. This masterpiece gets at certain aspects of the Lost Cause as well as anything I've seen:

I don't know that I could do better than start class with that. Should provoke a bit of discussion, don't you think? Thanks, Caitlin! Good job. (I'm a little jealous that she can do all that.)

I've already told students in one class about Caitlin's "18th Century Connecticutian or Muppet?" quiz (see, she's really into old graveyards....).

She made the above video after reading a posting on Kevin Levin's Civil War Memory, so we have to thank Kevin as well.

Saying Good-bye on the Trail of Tears

2009-02-16T09:51:00.007-05:00

Several months ago, I became interested in old Georgia history textbooks. As I've said here before, history ain't what it used to be, and you'll come across some stuff in these old books that looks awfully strange today.

Take, for example, the picture below. It's from the first page of the chapter that discusses the removal of the Cherokee from Georgia in the 1830s.

(click for bigger image)

Last week, as we discussed Cherokee removal in my Georgia history class, I put this image up on the screen in front of the classroom. The students loved it. One asked when the book was published. 1950s, I said. Didn't they use the phrase "Trail of Tears" back then? Yes, they did. Another student suggested that perhaps the illustrator thought the phrase meant "tears of joy."

from Ruth Elgin Suddeth, Isa Lloyd Osterhout, and George Lewis Hutcheson, Empire Builders of Georgia (Austin, TX: The Steck Company, 1957), 141. Thanks to my colleague Stephen Bartlett for the image.

Queen Elizabeth lays up to 2,000 eggs a day

2008-02-03T16:19:00.000-05:00

Language Log has written on the Cupertino effect-- when a writer carelessly uses the suggestions of a word processor's spell-checking program, often with funny results. As Ben Zimmer describes it: "Some older spellcheckers had wordlists containing co-operation but not cooperation without the hyphen. So when a user typed in unhyphenated cooperation, the spellchecker would flag it as an error. The first suggestion thrown up was not co-operation, however, but Cupertino, the name of a city in northern California."

I had a great example of my own a couple years ago, when a student wrote a paper in my class about the American colonists fighting against Tierney. It's even funnier when it happens in the press.

But here's a neat variation:

How did the Boston Metro arrive at the following: "King's birthday is Jan. 15, but the federal holiday bearing his name is observed on the third yesterday in January."

And what exactly did Reuters mean when it said that "Queen Elizabeth has 10 times the lifespan of workers and lays up to 2,000 eggs a day."

Language Log has the answer.

more "Christian nation" nonsense

2008-01-22T10:20:00.001-05:00

Paul Harvey and others over at Religion in American History (a great blog) finally noticed House Resolution 888, a proposal sponsored by J. Randy Forbes (R-Va.) that would create an "American Religious History Week." Among the problems with this: on reading the thing, you'll immediately see that what is to be created is a Christian History Week; and second, to support the thing, there are about 40 "Whereas" statements, practically all of them lies and distortions.

I thought everyone knew about this already, but maybe that's because I read three of the best bloggers around: Ed Brayton, at Dispatches from the Culture Wars; Ed Darrell, at Millard Fillmore's Bathtub; and PZ Myers, at Pharyngula.

Chris Rodda, writing at Daily Kos, has posted a good and thorough analysis of the distortions in the resolution. [see update below] For example:

==================

"Whereas in 1789, Congress, in the midst of framing the Bill of Rights and the First Amendment, passed the first Federal law touching education, declaring that 'Religion, morality, and knowledge, being necessary to good government and the happiness of mankind, schools and the means of education shall forever be encouraged';"

Recently, the Christian nationalist history revisionists have begun to refer quite often to this unnamed first federal education law, quoting what Mr. Forbes has quoted here. But, the law they are referring to was not an education law. It was the Northwest Ordinance. Despite the careful phrasing such as calling it a "law touching education," this is a deliberately deceptive way to make the best use of the appearance of the words "religion" and "schools" in the same sentence by linking this to the framers of the First Amendment.

The education provision in Article III of the Northwest Ordinance was the work of a Massachusetts man named Manasseh Cutler, a minister, former army chaplain, and one of the directors of the Ohio Company of Associates, the land speculating company whose large land purchase necessitated the writing of the ordinance. But, the original wording of Cutler's education provision clearly gave the government of the Northwest Territory the authority to promote religion. As much as Congress had to go along with the demands of the Ohio Company, this apparently went too far. The following was the original wording.

"Institutions for the promotion of religion and morality, schools and the means of education shall forever be encouraged."(12)

And, this is what appeared in the ordinance.

"Religion, Morality and knowledge being necessary to good government and the happiness of mankind, schools and the means of education shall forever be encouraged."

Congress kept enough of the original wording to appease Cutler, but stripped the provision of any actual authority to promote religion or religious institutions. The final language that ended up in Article III only gave the government authority to promote education. The first part of the sentence was turned into nothing more than an ineffectual opinion of what was necessary to good government. When the Congress of 1789 reenacted the ordinance, they knew Article III didn't give the government any power to promote religion. There was no conflict with the First Amendment.

In addition to this, what few people realize is that Article III of the Northwest Ordinance was never even used. It was replaced in the enabling act for the state of Ohio, the very first state to be admitted under the ordinance. The substituted education provision in the 1802 enabling act for Ohio was similar to that in the 1785 Ordinance for ascertaining the mode of disposing of lands in the Western Territory, the ordinance that was replaced in 1787 by the Northwest Ordinance. It provided land grants for schools in lieu of the vague statement about encouraging schools in Article III of the Northwest Ordinance. The same provision was made for subsequent states.

==================

I'm hoping the thing never makes it out of committee.

********************
UPDATE:

Chris Rodda has posted a second part to the above. Just as good, just as important.
(Thanks to Ed Brayton)

Happy Birthday, Georgia Carnival!

2008-01-04T22:19:00.000-05:00

With its 26th edition, the Georgia Carnival is one year old! The host is Georgia on My Mind (the carnival's founder). Check it out! Among my favorite pieces is A Typical Joe's "Huckabee is right: gay behavior is a choice."

Congratulations to all who have made the Georgia Carnival's first year a success.

now I'm NEVER going to get any work done

2007-12-21T11:49:00.000-05:00

How have I missed this site?

Classic Television Showbiz has Christmas episodes of dozens of old TV sitcoms and radio shows. There's Dragnet, Milton Berle, Beverly Hillbillies, Addams Family, Howdy Doody, Brady Bunch, Honeymooners, Munsters, Three's Company, and more. Over twenty Christmas episodes of the Jack Benny radio show. (That's Benny playing the Christmas fiddle.)

Wow!

(I found this on WFMU's Beware of the Blog.)

well, hell

2007-12-20T01:45:00.000-05:00

I got home late tonight-- a few minutes after midnight. After a day in the office, getting ready for next semester, I had dinner at a friend's house and got home later than usual. And when I got home, the door to my apartment (I live in an apartment over a two-car garage) was open, broken in, with the wreckage of the forced entry (the siding of the door frame) on the floor.

The apartment was a mess. Drawers had been pulled out and emptied. I didn't have much worth taking. Several years ago, I developed the habit of saving quarters, because the washing machine would sometimes break down and I would have to take the family's laundry to the laundromat. That's not an issue any more, but I never dropped the habit of saving quarters, and I had a huge bowl full of them--maybe fifty dollars, I told the police officer--on the bar separating the kitchen from the living room. They were all gone, as was my father's old pocketknife--a cheap knife, but damn it, it was my father's--and an 1896 silver dollar that I had bought a couple years ago, both beside the quarters. A bottle of Lotrel, a prescription drug for high blood pressure, was gone, as was a new dvd player that I bought just last week and a couple of dvd sets, one borrowed from our local public library, one borrowed from another friend. As far as I can tell, that's all that's missing, except for a considerable chunk of my peace of mind.

UPDATE-- I discovered later that several cans of chunky soup are missing from my little pantry. This isn't a complaint, just perhaps a sad explanation for what happened.

born on Christmas Day

2007-12-19T14:03:00.002-05:00

According to Sitemeter, this piece, which first appeared here a year ago (and was originally published in the Cartersville Daily Tribune News in 2003), has been the most-read posting on Another History Blog.

Next Tuesday, we observe the birth of the man who brought truth and enlightenment to the world. I refer, of course, to Isaac Newton, born on December 25, 1642.

Newton’s father, an illiterate farmer, died three months before Newton’s birth, and Isaac was raised by a largely uncaring grandmother and various members of his step-father’s family. Nothing in his childhood indicated the greatness that lay ahead. But according to an old superstition, “The child born on Christmas Day will have a special fortune” (perhaps to make up for getting cheated on birthday presents).

Isaac Newton has been called the greatest scientist in history. He didn’t discover gravity (others had noticed it long before him), but he was the first to understand and explain it in mathematical terms. His three laws of motion remain the basis for classical mechanics. He invented calculus, the bane of high school and college students. His work on light became one of the two pillars of modern quantum physics.

Alexander Pope wrote of Newton’s accomplishments: “Nature and Nature’s laws lay hid in night; God said, ‘Let Newton be!’ and there was light.” But if he had been born a day earlier, Newton probably would have turned out to be a nobody.

Isaac Newton wasn’t the only Christmas Day baby. Clara Barton (born December 25, 1821) earned the nickname “Angel of the Battlefield” for her selfless nursing of the wounded during the Civil War. Later, she organized and led the American Red Cross.

Conrad Hilton (1887) was Paris Hilton’s great grandfather. I believe he also had something to do with hotels.

Believe it or not, Robert L. Ripley was born on Christmas Day of 1893.

I wonder if Joseph McCarthy, born on December 25, 1908, was somehow traumatized by red bows, red lights, red poinsettias, etc.?

The list of famous people born on Christmas Day includes bandleader Cab Calloway (1907); Egyptian president Anwar Sadat (1918); The Twilight Zone’s Rod Serling (1924); singers Jimmy Buffett (1946) and Barbara Mandrell (1948); and actors Sissy Spacek (1949) and Humphrey Bogart (1899).

One person who was probably not born on December 25: Jesus. Many scholars place that event in the Spring. So instead of “God rest ye merry, gentlemen, let nothing you dismay, Remember, Christ, our Saviour, was born on Christmas day,” perhaps we should sing “… was born some time in May.” (Try it.)

Christmas was moved to December 25 to allow retailers a chance to expand their after-Thanksgiving sales. Not really. Here’s what happened. Early church leaders paid less attention to Jesus’ birth than they did his death (Easter), and so at first no one really worried much about when to celebrate Christmas. But in the middle of the fourth century, Pope Julius I declared that Jesus’ birth should be celebrated on December 25. He chose that date because there was already a major holiday at that time: Saturnalia, a lengthy pagan festival tied to the Winter solstice. By placing Christmas at that point on the calendar, Julius hoped to preempt Saturnalia and gain instant support for his new holiday.

And that’s how Isaac Newton became a Christmas baby.

WWDeBD

2007-12-18T10:57:00.001-05:00

What Would DeBeers Do?

Bruce Barton, the "Barton" in the New York advertising firm of Batten, Barton, Durstine and Osborne, said in his 1920s bestseller The Man Nobody Knows that Jesus was the greatest salesman and best ad man in history: "He picked up twelve men from the bottom ranks of business and forged them into an organization that conquered the world." (I mentioned Barton in this post.)

But after reading Edward Jay Epstein's "Have You Ever Tried to Sell a Diamond?" (Atlantic Monthly, Feb. 1982), I think DeBeers is giving Jesus a run for the money: "The diamond invention is far more than a monopoly for fixing diamond prices; it is a mechanism for converting tiny crystals of carbon into universally recognized tokens of wealth, power, and romance. To achieve this goal, De Beers had to control demand as well as supply. Both women and men had to be made to perceive diamonds not as marketable precious stones but as an inseparable part of courtship and married life." It's an amazing story, as DeBeers and N. W. Ayer (an advertising agency) came up with the most effective advertising campaign in two millennia.

(I found the Atlantic article by following a link in Pharyngula.)

words, funny and otherwise

2007-11-25T12:47:00.001-05:00

Cake inscriptions gone wrong This morning I was surfing along, following links, and somehow I ended up at a page from Snopes.com about some pretty funny goofs. My favorite:

For my 40th birthday, my husband decided to surprise me with a birthday cake from our local bakery. "In the middle please print 'Happy Birthday Nita,'" he instructed them over the phone. "Then, 'you're not getting older' at the top and 'you're betting better' at the bottom." When he went to pick it up, he discovered that they had decorated the cake with the words exactly as he had said them. "Happy Birthday Nita, you're not getting older at the top, you're getting better at the bottom."

Unlike most entries at Snopes.com, this one doesn't try to get at the veracity of the stories.

British soldiers weren't called "lobsterbacks"--at least during the American Revolution. J.L. Bell, at Boston 1775, reports on research by Christopher Lenney that the first American use of that word, at least in print, came with the War of 1812. Only then did historians begin using the term in connection with the Revolution.

Like a ring in a bell Over at Language Log, Arnold Zwicky recently discussed a new eggcorn: "like a ring in a bell," a mis-hearing of the phrase in Chuck Berry's "Johnny B. Goode"--he "played the guitar like a-ringin' a bell." I love this stuff.

added later: I really dislike the "blockquote" function on Blogger. I'm sure there's a way to use it without messing up the formatting of the whole posting, but I haven't figured it out yet.

Georgia Carnival, y'all

2007-11-10T16:38:00.000-05:00

Georgia Carnival...The 22nd edition of the Georgia Carnival is up and ready for your visit. As always, good stuff, including You Know You're in Georgia When....

y'all...Occasionally someone will post a comment on something that's been up here for months. I just got a comment on a posting from last December-- "More than y'all wanted to know about 'y'all'". Turns out a North Carolina newspaper cited it a couple of weeks ago. It starts out funny-- I forgot about the redneck Norman Rockwell parody.

Happy weekend to all.

Steve Eberhart: See "Darkey, old-time"

2007-11-09T15:19:00.001-05:00

Old history books, I tell my students, might be pretty lousy history--but they are often great historical documents.

Years ago, when I was working on my dissertation, I read A History of Rome and Floyd County [Georgia], by George Magruder Battey, Jr. (1922). The book has a photograph of Steve Eberhart, an old ex-slave. In the picture, Eberhart is wearing a huge hat with feathers; a Confederate battle flag on one shoulder, the U.S. flag on the other; and a sash with stars and the words "Rome, Ga." He's carrying two chickens. The caption notes that he is the mascot of the local Confederate veterans organization.

The text consists of three items clipped from the Rome newspaper (I think). The third one, dated simply 1920, is a heartbreaker.

===================

GEMS FROM “UNCLE STEVE.” — Steve Eberhart, the slavery time darkey whose gyrations around Confederate veterans’ reunions with live chickens under his arm always stir up the ebullitions of guilty bystanders and others, yesterday submitted to an interview as he filled a place in the picket line at their meeting at the Carnegie Library.

“Steve, how does your corporosity seem to segashuate?”

“Fine as split silk,” promptly returned Steve, who had borrowed that expression in Cedartown.

“Well, Steve, do you suppose your opsonic index would coagulate should the Republican administration at Washington send down here and try to get you to accept an office?”

"It mout, boss, but dere ain’t no chance to git dis here Steve to ’cept no place wid dem folks.”

“Wouldn’t you like to represent your country in the jungles of Africa?”

“Lordy, boss, I’s skeered enuf o’ de varmints we have right here around Rome. And as fer dem cannibalists, you sholy don’t ketch dis old nigger furnishin’ de bones for none o’ dat missionary stew. Naw, sir, I’s bleeged to decline with profound deliberation. Dem ’publicans jes’ want de nigger’s vote. Steve Eberhart’s a lily white Democrat, Steve is!”—Aug. 7, 1921.

Steve Eberhart, the ancient Senegambian who dresses up in flags and feathers, mostly just before Confederate reunion time, has written a card in which he pours out his libations of joy and gratitude to the “white folks” for their generosity in giving him enough money to attend the state meeting at Albany. Steve hopes the fountain of satisfaction may overflow for his friends and the wax tapers burn brightly on high, while he stews in the sacred unction here below.—May 16, 1921.

“I want to thank the good white people of Rome for sending me to Texas to the Old Soldiers’ Reunion. I am thankful. I shall ever remain in my place, and be obedient to all the white people. I pray that the angels may guard the homes of all Rome, and the light of God shine upon them. I will now give you a rest until the reunion next year, if the Lord lets me live to see it. Your humble servant, Steve Eberhart.”—1920.

===================

"I shall ever remain in my place...."

Makes me think of the Cherokees in western North Carolina who wear the war bonnet and stand in front of the tipi with their hands out.

Steve Eberhart learned who he was supposed to be back in the days of slavery, and at some point after emancipation, probably decades before this picture was taken, he decided (perhaps without realizing it) that he needed to keep being the "old-time darkey"-- remain in his place, be obedient to all the white people.

Or is this "puttin' on ol' massa"? I don't know.

White folks loved Eberhart and other African Americans who shared the "remain in my place/be obedient to white people" approach. In fact, several pages after introducing Eberhart, the book's author offers a section that pays loving tribute to them (including another paragraph on Eberhart). Here's a lengthy selection:

=================

DARKEYS OF ROME, OLD-TIME. — Among the “segashuating corporosities” of the older colored folk of Rome may be mentioned the following, as mostly supplied by Richard Venable Mitchell:

Lewis Barrett: “Veteran barber, while an old timer, he says he is never too tired to entertain his friends.”

Allen Collier: “His occupation is that of a cook. He knows how to prepare something that will satisfy one’s bread basket. His wife, Alice Collier, washed many a garment in her younger days, but as she was suffering from the white swelling, she retired about 15 years ago and has always lived with her old man. She never knew she was an offspring of one of Col. Alfred Snorter’s slaves. Allen does not belong to the aristocratic Shorter crowd, however.”

Charlie Coppee: “Retired drayman. Some eight years ago Charlie quit and has since been doing pretty much as he pleases as a butler in a good family on West Eleventh Street, Fourth Ward. He is 80 years old. His team consisted of a small flat-top wagon drawn by a slow-moving ‘hard-tail.’ He leaped to this city in 1885 from Athens. When he talks to you he squinches out of one eye and smiles out of one side of his mouth. He can still do a plantation breakdown if you give him a young enough partner and a shot of mean licker. In size he is very low and stumpy, but can cover ground. His home is in the rear of the place where he works.”

Ellen Pentecost Daniel: “A slave of Col. Alfred Shorter. She died in October, 1914, at the ripe old age of 73. One of the most appetizing cooks in her day. She was my nurse and I understand held the bottle for quite a number of Romans, all of whom remember her affectionately. Poor old soul; she never rusted, but wore herself out.”

Steve Eberhart (or Perry): “Profession, whitewasher. Steve came to Rome about 20 years ago from Athens, where he was the slave in the war of Col. Abraham Eberhart. He is the mascot of the Confederate Veterans of Rome, and in his attempts to attend every reunion of the Boys in Gray collects a lot of money under various false pretenses, and gets away with it. Some of his whitewash might well be used on himself, for he is as black as African midnight and nearly as small as a chinquapin, but he carries himself with an erectile strut that immediately becomes a dissembling shamble when he wants to pass around the hat. At reunion time he puts on his artillery uniform of red and gray, and lays a barrage of profanity that withers every new-fangled darkey that crosses his path. Under his arm is his pet rooster, borrowed from a convenient hen-house, and such feathers as are missing from the fowl’s tail can be found in Steve’s beaver hat. Steve is on the shady side of 80. His sideline is collecting clothes from the white folks so the women can wash ’em, and on his shiny dome he can balance a bag of clothes nearly as well as a watermelon. He is of the aristocracy, having been just after the war valet at Athens to Henry W. Grady and Ben Hill. He is a powerful orator, with ‘Fiddling Bob’ Taylor’s ability to cry on occasion, and if his education had not been cut short by Mr. Grady’s graduation from the University, he might have been the Daniel Webster of his race. While he has never been ordained as a minister, he can preach with the best of them. He served with his ‘marster’ in the war on the west Coast of Florida, and there learned how to fish.”

Ned Huggins: “Retired Armstrong Hotel barber and retired sexton of the First Presbyterian church. His good word was always ‘Call again.’”

Bob Lake: “Bob is only middle-aged but has old-fashioned ways. He still works when there is a chance to make an honest living. At Christmas time he helps the Rotary Club distribute baskets to the poor, and totes home a well-filled basket for himself. He is the handy man at Judge Harper Hamilton’s on East Fourth Street, but for 30 years has ‘drayed’ for the Simpson Grocery Company and is an expert at handling salt meat with a cotton hook.”

Mack Madison: “An old-time farmer who can always get together a mess of vittles like ham, cracklin’ bread, pot licker and turnip greens, in spite of the boll weevil and potato bugs. He is a shy old rascal, and when he comes to town, which is not often, he keeps out of the way of the police. If you eye him too closely or try to question him, he gets off like a rabbit through a brier patch. He has a sweet tooth, so keeps a bee gum, and is as industrious as anybody in the hive. Once he ignored a summons to court, and two officers brought him in. Asked by a friend why he finally went, he said his legs got in motion and his body had to go too.”

West McCoy: “Retired plasterer; uncertain age. He winks out of one eye because he has lost the other. He sits around on garbage boxes and holds out his hand for a penny, saying, ‘It takes only 100 to make a dollar.’”

Toi Reed: “Had a white beard and could cover lots of ground. His nephew was hanged near the old Rome railroad above the Southern crossing about 1900, and he was run out of Rome and is supposed to have died in Atlanta. He sometimes went by the name of Dr. Potter. He was a mortar mixer and boasted loudly that he helped build the Armstrong Hotel. His hobby was fine horseflesh, on which he was an authority.”

Augustus Sams: “Business is wood-chopper and age about 80. He chops wood all around the country, and for the want of a conveyance sometimes walks to Cedartown for a job, and then walks back. He will not quit chopping wood except to go ‘possum hunting or to eat a watermelon. He wears a black felt hat with a curve in it, only needs a turkey feather to make him look like a Dutch admiral; and he carries his lunch in a crocus sack. He has a keen sense of humor, but occasionally when outraged rears back on his dignity like an angry porcupine.”

“Mink” Sims: “A darkey of 25 years ago who hunted and fished a great deal, but was never known to hit a lick of work. He used to sing a song that started ‘Rabbit and the Hash,’ and which brought in the polecat, the jaybird and the other birds and animals of the menagerie.”

“Tip” Smith: “Passed to the other world Jan. 25, 1911, at the age of 77. He was an old slave who had belonged to Maj. Chas. H. Smith (‘Bill Arp’). After he got his freedom, he took up the trade of carpet and mattress stretcher and house cleaner, and made a very useful citizen. He hung shades, did wall-papering and generally helped many a housewife of Rome. At entertainments he was indispensable, whether it was freezing the pineapple sherbet or handing the guests their hats and coats; and many a grateful Roman said if he could have ‘Tip’ around at the final trumpet call, he would not bother to summon an undertaker. ‘Tip’ lived in peace and African plenitude on the gentle slopes of Blossom Hill.”

Martha Stevenson: “She is short and dark and wears a turban. For a long time she cooked for Mrs. Seaborn Wright, then served Mrs. Bessie B. Troutman at Pope’s Ferry, then was cooking for Mrs. Robt. Battey when Mrs. Battey died and now is indispensable at Mrs. Evan P. Harvey’s. She is nigh onto 75 and spry as a cricket, but occasionally complains of the misery in her side.”

“Uncle Towns:” Never seemed to have any other name, but worked many years around yard and flower garden of the I. D. Fords on Second Avenue. He wore a heavy gray beard, and his old back was bent from much cutting of grass and pruning of shrubs. He bore a closer resemblance to a certain large creature of the jungle than anybody in Rome. His fondness for little children was well known, but such as he didn’t like he would scarce with a fiendish grin.”

William Walker: “Not less than 80, but gets about like a man of 45. He is a retired plasterer and his earthly home is in Hell’s Hollow. He says he has mixed lots of Etowah River sand and slack lime for buildings in Rome, has always served the Lord and expects to make the acquaintance of St. Peter instead of the devil.”

====================

The whole book is available at Google Books; the above excerpts are from pages 302 and 370-374.

pink and yellow, blue and white, they're all precious in my sight

2007-10-14T14:01:00.000-05:00

I'm out-voted on hot pink blue books, but that's ok. Turns out pink blue books already exist. From Wikipedia:

Blue books typically contain several sheets of wide-ruled notebook paper and have the words "Blue Book" across the front. However, the books' covers do not necessarily have to be blue; some schools use pink, yellow, or white covered exam books.

But now I'm curious-- Why are blue books blue (usually)? Who started that? Maybe something as simple as the printer had a lot of blue paper stock.

more yellow ribbons than you can shake a stick at

2007-10-14T13:17:00.000-05:00

Ed Brayton, at Dispatches from the Culture Wars, links to a video from the Asylum Street Spankers titled "Stick Magnetic Ribbons on Your SUV" (to the tune, of course, of "Tie a Yellow Ribbon 'round the Old Oak Tree"). What got Ed started was all the bunkum on Barack Obama's decision not to wear an American flag pin on his lapel; the whole posting is worth reading.

Gerald E. Parsons, a folklorist with the Library of Congress's American Folklife Center, wrote a brief article on the origin of the yellow ribbon. Neat stuff. (There is a brief but updated bibliography at the end.)

On Educated & Poor, I saw this banner. It and more are available h ere.

Ibid., R.I.P?

2007-10-10T19:39:00.000-05:00

Tomorrow, students in my methodology course learn to do footnotes, and when I say "footnotes," I mean, of course, Turabian.

Historians, from undergraduate majors on up, will recognize the name. Turabian is our bible ("The Gospel According to St. Kate") for citation formats and style. (Miss Ash, who is going to be a history major but pretends not to know it yet, will soon have to learn the rigors of Turabian. She needs the discipline--no pun intended--as she recently came out for "hot pink" blue books.)

The 7th edition of Turabian was published this past April, and for the most part, it's good. But the editors for this new revision did a couple of things that I find disturbing. First, they made "ibid." optional. ("Ibid." is the abbreviation used in notes to indicate that the citation is the same as that in the previous note.) No, that's not exactly right. They don't really offer ibid. as an option. They say that in such circumstances one should give the name of the author (or author/title), and then they offer this little gem: "Some writers still use 'ibid.' to shorten a citation to a work whose bibliographical data appear in the immediately previous note." Did you get that patronizing tone? "Some writers still use...." The Sixth edition prescribed "ibid."; now it's "some writers still use...." Well, I'm an ibid. kind of guy, so I guess that makes me "some writer" (and it makes me feel like Dr. Fossil).

Second, the editors added a completely new section, "Research and Writing: From Planning to Production." Generally it's quite good, but in the chapter titled "Planning Your Argument," they employed the Toulmin method of argumentation, which includes "warrants," "claims," "qualifiers," and other bunkum. Students don't get it, and I understand it just enough to know that I don't, either. We do talk about logical fallacies, but that comes in a couple of weeks. Tomorrow, it's footnotes, and I'm going to let 'em know that ibid. is still OK.

those blue book blues

2007-10-08T08:56:00.000-05:00

Rate Your Students has ten midterm "forgot my blue book" excuses. Includes:

Muddled half-dressed coed: “Umm…I don’t have that blue sheet thing....”

Stoned young male voter: “What if I don’t have a blue book?”

Roaring Spring Paper Products recently came out with an examination book made of recycled paper. The cover is green, of course. We (faculty) got an e-mail message from the bookstore at the beginning of the semester to let us know that the new exam book was available and to alert us to a potential problem: "A large number of students are hesitant to purchase the 'Green Book' since you have specifically told them to buy a 'Blue Book.'"

I told my students either was OK. A colleague told his students that they might want to avoid the new one--"You don't know where that recycled paper has been."

I like the old blue books, though. Come exam time, a pile or two of blue books on the desk seems about right.

I got those blue book blues,
Lord, it's bluebooks all day long.
Said I got those blue book blues,
Blue, blue, blue books all day long.
Sometimes it seems like
Nothin' but blue books from now on.

I'd rather drink muddy water
And sleep in a hollow log,
Drink muddy water,
Sleep in a hollow log,
Than have to grade these blue books
And feel just like a dog.

Green books, on the other hand, sound too damn cheerful.

another word for "claptrap"

2007-10-07T14:34:00.000-05:00

A few days ago, I posted a brief note about John McCain's recent "claptrap" about the United States being a "Christian nation." And yesterday, in a conversation with a friend, I mentioned Asheville, North Carolina, where I was born. I wish those two events had happened in reverse order, because then I might have used a better word than "claptrap": bu******.

To explain, I will take the lazy blogger's approach and reprint a piece I wrote for my local newspaper a few years ago.

======================

From Buncombe to Bunk

In 1816, the people of western North Carolina elected Felix Walker to represent them in the U.S. House of Representatives. Walker was a colorful figure. He had traveled west with Daniel Boone to help establish the community of Boonesboro, Kentucky, and fought in the American Revolution and several Indian wars. He was a farmer, a merchant, and a land speculator. For several years, he was successful in state politics. Then, at the age of 63, he ran for Congress as a Republican (a Jeffersonian Republican--the modern Republican party wouldn’t form for almost forty years).

Although he was reelected twice, his career in Washington was less than spectacular. Realizing that he needed to keep reminding the folks back home that he was on the job, he made a speech in 1820 that ended up putting a new word into the English language.

The occasion was the congressional debate over the admission of Missouri as a state. The issue of slavery entered the debate when a northern congressman tried to amend the Missouri statehood bill so as to make slavery illegal there. Walker had little to say about what would become known as the Missouri Compromise, but he knew that his constituents expected him to say something. So on February 25, 1820, he rose to address the House.

Walker talked and talked, but said next to nothing. His colleagues, weary with the debate, urged him to sit down, but he kept going. Finally he admonished his detractors by saying that he was not speaking to them, he was speaking for the folks in Buncombe, one of the counties in his district. (Asheville is the largest city in Buncombe County, named for Colonel Edward Buncombe, a Revolutionary War soldier from the area who had been captured and died while still a prisoner.)

When people read the speech, reprinted in a Washington newspaper, they agreed that he had been “speaking for Buncombe,” and the phrase soon became popular for any frivolous, irrelevant, nonsensical, or questionable remark. By 1850, the word was often spelled “bunkum.” By the early twentieth century, it had been shortened to “bunk.”

Walker’s speech worked, by the way, at least for a while. He was re-elected in 1820, but lost his bid for a fourth term in 1822.

One of the most famous uses of the word “bunk” is, unfortunately, one that I as a history professor have to hear occasionally from disgruntled students: Henry Ford’s comment that “History is bunk.”

Actually, that’s a misquotation. In 1916, a reporter for the Chicago Tribune questioned Ford about his opposition to building up America’s military strength in light of the war in Europe. The reporter pointed out that, a century earlier, only England’s powerful military kept Napoleon out of Britain. “I don’t know whether Napoleon did or did not try to get across there and I don’t care. It means nothing to me. History is more or less bunk. It’s tradition. We don’t want tradition. We want to live in the present and the only history that is worth a tinker’s dam is the history we make today.”

Cultural critic Robert Fulford was perhaps being a bit generous when he wrote that Ford (who was actually something of a history buff) “thought that devotion to the past prevents us from grappling with the present and may encourage us to make war out of historical grievance. In 1914 all the European leaders knew history, Ford said, yet they blundered into the worst war ever.”

Still, I can tell my students that Henry Ford didn’t really say “History is bunk,” and he didn’t really mean that history is (to quote Roget) “balderdash, blather, claptrap, drivel, garbage, idiocy, nonsense, piffle, poppycock, rigmarole, rubbish, tomfoolery, trash, twaddle,” words that might be used in place of the “bunkum” inspired by Felix Walker.

The above first appeared in the Cartersville Daily Tribune News, August 1, 2004. Any of the listed words in that last paragraph could apply equally well to McCain's pronouncement.

Ed Darrell takes on John McCain

2007-10-06T12:29:00.000-05:00

... and McCain loses.

Ed Darrell, over at Millard Fillmore's Bathtub, has the best discussion I've seen of why John McCain was wrong with that "Christian nation" claptrap. Read the whole thing.

Random comments for Sunday

2007-09-30T10:34:00.000-05:00

The Drive-By Truckers brought their "Dirt Underneath" tour to Atlanta Friday night. The Variety Playhouse was rocking. They played for over two hours, the second more raucously than the first, due partly to a very enthusiastic crowd, but even more (I suspect) to the Jack Daniels and beer they were drinking onstage.

So I'll meet you at the bottom if there really is one
They always told me when you hit it you'll know it
But I've been falling so long it's like gravity's gone and I'm just floating
-- "Gravity's Gone," by Mike Cooley/DBT

John McCain's recent interview with BeliefNet shows that he's forgotten his Constitution--either that, or he's pandering. Or both.

Q. Has the candidates’ personal faith become too big an issue in the presidential race?

A. . . . I think the number one issue people should make [in the] selection of the President of the United States is, 'Will this person carry on in the Judeo Christian principled tradition that has made this nation the greatest experiment in the history of mankind?'

Q. A recent poll found that 55 percent of Americans believe the U.S. Constitution establishes a Christian nation. What do you think?

A. I would probably have to say yes, that the Constitution established the United States of America as a Christian nation.

The 19th Georgia Carnival is up and ready for your perusal at Georgia on My Mind. As always, good reading.

"What an idiot," one might be tempted to say after reading Michael Medved's recent piece at TownHall.com, "Six Inconvenient Truths about U.S. Slavery." But then his readers come to his rescue with comments that make Medved look almost brilliant by comparison. Timothy Burke's "Knowledge Is Inconvenient" provides a good scholarly smack-down.

"Funniest comic I've heard in a long time," says Blue Gal about Demitri Martin, and she has the proof.

2007-09-26T08:50:00.001-05:00

THE Little Rock picture.

I was looking at this photo a few weeks ago in my office with a couple of colleagues, and someone asked about the young white woman shouting at the African American student. None of us knew who she was or what had become of her.

Now, thanks to a tip from Ralph Luker, we know.

Her name is Hazel Bryan, and her changing relationship with Elizabeth Eckford, the African American woman, is the subject of "Through a Lens, Darkly," an article by David Margolick from Vanity Fair. The photo is from Will Counts/Arkansas History Commission; the article is thoughtful and thought-provoking. Bryan's words at the time are lost to history, but can be easily imagined.

Let's Do Something Constitutional on Constitution Day

2007-09-17T08:55:00.000-05:00

Two hundred and twenty years ago today, the Constitutional Convention met in Independence Hall, Philadelphia, for the last time. Since the middle of May, the 55 delegates had been writing a proposed new government for the United States of America. On this day, their work complete, they signed their draft of the Constitution and sent it out to the states for ratification.

Below, in honor of Constitution Day, is a brief essay by Dr. Joyce Appleby, emerita professor of history at UCLA. This piece was originally written for the History News Service and appears here with HNS's permission.

=====================================

Let's Do Something Constitutional on Constitution Day

by Joyce Appleby

On September 17, Constitution Day, in 2002, scholars presented a petititon, signed by 1,200 American historians, urging members of Congress to assume their constitutional responsibility to determine whether or not to declare war on Iraq. Reminding them that Congress had ignored this provision since its 1941 declarations of war on Japan, Germany and Italy, the petition explained why the Founding Fathers gave this power to them and to no other body.

As the petition explained: "Americans deserve to hear their representatives deliberate about a possible war, lest such a momentous course of action be undertaken by the president alone after a public airing filled with rumors, leaks, and speculations." It continued: "Leaving the president solely in control of war powers" has been "to the detriment of our democracy and in clear violation of the Constitution."

Now, four years into a disastrous war initiated without a congressional declaration, no member of Congress has publicly raised this issue since. A majority of Democratic representatives actually voted against the resolution giving President Bush the okay to invade Iraq, but none has announced that it was time to stop amending the constitution by selective neglect. No one has even suggested a congressional resolution to make the point.

The American people revere their Constitution. They can't seem to get their fill of books about the Founding Fathers either. Yet there's something empty about such reverence if our elected officials ignore key grants of power.

Take the case of the executive authority over the military. Article 2, Section 2, couldn't be clearer: "The President shall be Commander in Chief of the Army and Navy of the United States, and of the Military of the several States when called into the actual service of the United States." Nowhere in this concise document is there any grant of the sweeping powers now claimed for the commander in chief.

Indeed, the congressional power to declare war and the president's power to head the military in time of war go together. The men who submitted their constitutional draft to the several states for ratification on September 17, 1787, left the declaring of war to members of Congress because their constituents would bear the brunt of war should they make the awful choice of resorting to violence. The Framers made the president commander in chief for efficiency and to avoid a dangerous concentration of power in Congress.

Passing resolutions giving the president permission to invade a country instead of formally declaring war is an evasion of responsibility on the part of Congress and a disregard of duty, moral as well as constitutional, to the men and women they represent.

Denying writs of habeas corpus, spying on Americans, abrogating treaties have all excited attention in recent years, but no abuse of power has graver consequences than leaving the war-making powers exclusively in the hands of the president.

The national rumor mill is full of stories that President Bush is planning to attack Iran. If ever there were a moment for Congress to reassume its constitutional powers to determine when American forces go to war, now is the time. Let's stop this silent amending of the Constitution that we hold so dear.

Charles Wesley and two blind boys

2007-09-05T14:44:00.000-05:00

I'm reading Sing Them Over Again to Me: Hymns and Hymnbooks in America, ed. by Mark Noll and Edith L. Blumhofer. (Isn't that a great dust jacket?) My favorite chapter thus far is John R. Tyson's on "O for a Thousand Tongues to Sing," the Charles Wesley hymn that Tyson calls "the Methodist national anthem."

I grew up Methodist, and Tyson's about right.

O for a thousand tongues to sing
My great Redeemer's praise,
The glories of my God and King,
The Triumphs of His grace!

A later verse:

Hear Him, ye deaf; His praise, ye dumb,
Your loosened tongues employ;
Ye blind, behold your Savior come,
And leap, ye lame, for joy.

Years ago, when we sang that song in church, that verse always brought to mind a particular poem--and it still does.

One bright day in the middle of the night,
Two dead boys stood up to fight.
Back to back, they faced each other,
Drew their swords and shot each other.
A deaf policeman heard the noise
And came to arrest the two dead boys.
If you don't believe my story's true,
Just ask the blind man-- he saw it too!

slavery and the Civil War II

2007-08-22T14:49:00.000-05:00

I recently posted briefly about the connection between slavery and both secession and the reason Confederates fought.

In comments, Miss Kitty, of Educated & Poor, asked for more information.

All right, here goes--

Correlation does not equal causation, but the following is interesting. The first list shows the percentage of free households that owned slaves in the various states; the second is the southern states in order of secession.

Mississippi: 49%
S. Carolina: 46%
Georgia: 37%
Alabama: 35%
Florida: 34%
Louisiana: 29%
Texas: 28%
North Carolina: 28%
Virginia: 26%
Tennessee: 25%
Kentucky: 23%
Arkansas: 20%
Missouri: 13%
Maryland: 12%
Delaware: 3%

South Carolina (December 20, 1860)
Mississippi (January 9, 1861)
Florida (January 10, 1861)
Alabama (January 11, 1861)
Georgia (January 19, 1861)
Louisiana (January 26, 1861)
Texas (February 1, 1861)
Virginia (April 17, 1861)
Arkansas (May 6, 1861)
North Carolina (May 20, 1861)
Tennessee (June 8, 1861)

(I’ve seen this elsewhere, but I copied the slavery statistics from this site)

Georgia (where Miss Kitty and I both live) voted to secede from the Union on January 19, 1861. The secessionists explained their actions ten days later, in a document called Declaration of the Causes of Secession. Prominent among those causes: the victory of “abolitionists and their allies in the Northern States” who were guided by the principles of “prohibition of slavery in the Territories, hostility to it everywhere, and the equality of the black and white races.”

South Carolina’s “Declaration of the Immediate Causes Which Induce and Justify the Secession of South Carolina from the Federal Union” was more direct:

On the 4th day of March next, this party [Republican] will take possession of the Government. It has announced that the South shall be excluded from the common territory, that the judicial tribunals shall be made sectional, and that a war must be waged against slavery until it shall cease throughout the United States.

The guaranties of the Constitution will then no longer exist; the equal rights of the States will be lost. The slaveholding States will no longer have the power of self-government, or self-protection, and the Federal Government will have become their enemy.

From Mississippi's document:

Our position is thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery-- the greatest material interest of the world. Its labor supplies the product which constitutes by far the largest and most important portions of commerce of the earth. These products are peculiar to the climate verging on the tropical regions, and by an imperious law of nature, none but the black race can bear exposure to the tropical sun. These products have become necessities of the world, and a blow at slavery is a blow at commerce and civilization. That blow has been long aimed at the institution, and was at the point of reaching its consummation. There was no choice left us but submission to the mandates of abolition, or a dissolution of the Union, whose principles had been subverted to work out our ruin.

(All the above is from this website.)

Georgian Alexander Stephens, in a speech in Savannah on March 21, 1861, a month after having been elected vice president of the Confederacy, spoke of “our new government”: “Its foundations are laid, its corner stone rests upon the great truth, that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery--subordination to the superior race--is his natural and normal condition.”

(text available here)

Rebecca Felton, the first woman in the U.S. Senate (and, like me, a resident of Cartersville, Georgia), wrote in her memoirs: “We, in the South, honestly believed we could engineer a peaceable separation. There is no doubt of the sincerity of the belief. It was not an attempt at revolt or insurrection or anything else but a resolute intention to own slaves and regulate slavery just as our forbears had been doing for nearly a hundred years. . . . It was slavery and nothing but slavery that made Georgia secede.”

(from Country Life in Georgia in the Days of My Youth [1919], p. 80-81)

Here is the introduction to William Barney’s review of Charles Dew’s Apostles of Disunion: Southern Secession Commissioners and the Causes of the Civil War:

“Will the South give up the institution of slavery and consent that her citizens be stripped of their property, her civilization destroyed, the whole land laid waste by fire and sword? It is impossible. She cannot; she will not” (101). In these words Stephen F. Hale, Alabama’s secession commissioner to Kentucky, laid bare the core argument of the secessionists committed to the break-up of the Union and the creation of a separate Southern nation. The secessionists insisted that Lincoln’s election in November 1860 as the head of the antislavery Republican party posed a direct and an unconscionable threat to the stability and safety of the slaveholding South. Submission to that election meant the certain destruction of slavery and a calamity of horrors for Southern whites that included impoverishment, degradation, and racial humiliation.

In his aptly titled Apostles of Disunion, Charles B. Dew examines the arguments and rhetorical strategies of the special commissioners sent by the seceding states to preach the gospel of disunion to slaveholding states still wavering on the issue of secession. Appointed either by their governors or by the secession conventions, some fifty-two men served as commissioners. . . .

Dew’s analysis of the commissioners’ message yielded one central finding: the absolute centrality of concerns over slavery and race as the prime justification for secession and hence the coming of the Civil War.

(from Civil War History 48 [2002]: 366-67)

There was more to secession than slavery, of course, but slavery was clearly the BIG thing.

Slavery led to secession, which led to the war. But why did Confederates fight? That’s a very different question. In What they Fought For, James McPherson examined the diaries and private correspondence of hundreds of Civil War soldiers, both Union and Confederate. McPherson noted that unlike memoirs, often written long after the war with an eye toward justifying a particular cause, these more immediate writings--the diaries and letters home--“bring us closer to the real thoughts and emotions of those men than any other kind of surviving evidence.”

McPherson found that about two-thirds of Confederate soldiers expressed patriotic motives for fighting; they fought for their country, the Confederate States of America. “Sink or swim, survive or perish,” wrote one, “I will fight in defense of my country.” Another wrote to his wife: “I confess that I gave you up with reluctance. Yet I love my country dearly. . . . I intend to discharge my duty to my country and to my God.”

About forty percent (there were overlaps) said they were fighting for ideological principles such as liberty, constitutional rights, and resistance to tyranny. McPherson reported that he found hundreds of references in Confederate letters to phrases like “the holy cause of liberty and independence,” “southern rights and southern liberty,” “death before Yankee rule,” and “bursting the bonds of tyranny.”

President Lincoln noted that “the perfect liberty they sigh for is the liberty of making slaves of other people.” Still, only about 20 percent of Confederate soldiers explicitly said they were fighting to maintain slavery.

This is not to suggest that Confederate soldiers were antislavery, of course, or that they didn’t assume that the war would make the South safe for slavery. But it does suggest that the connection between slavery and “what they fought for” is not nearly as strong as that between slavery and secession.

There you go, Miss Kitty-- more than you wanted to know.

slavery and the Civil War

2007-08-09T16:41:00.000-05:00

Over at History News Network is a new piece by Robert Cook, author of the recent Troubled Commemoration: The American Civil War Centennial, 1961-1965-- "150 Years after the Civil War, Can We finally Remember It the Way We Should?"

"Southern whites," Cook writes, "must be shown what they were not shown in the 1960s: That they seceded and fought primarily to protect slavery and defend the racial order that was based upon it."

Cook--and everyone else--needs to separate the two. Southern whites seceded to protect slavery; they fought for a variety of reasons. It's two different questions. We can see this in other wars (Vietnam, for example), that there is an obvious distinction between the reason for the war and the reason individuals fought in that war. Why do we have so much trouble understanding that for the Civil War?

just in the nick of time

2007-08-03T11:01:00.000-05:00

I thought I was going to have to spend the hour before lunch working on the syllabus for my Georgia History class this fall when, just in the nick of time, I see that Georgia Carnival 15 has shown up at Georgia on My Mind. Yay!! I can read that instead!

And, hey, you should too. As always, good stuff, including the introduction of my favorite Educated & Poor adjunct from west central Georgia as well as postings on travel, "good eatin,'" and more--the best recent postings from Georgia blogs.

our newest (and oldest) graduate

2007-07-31T16:26:00.000-05:00

Something pretty cool happened at our graduation ceremony yesterday (we have graduation after every term, including summer): As reported in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Kennesaw State University awarded a diploma to our oldest graduate ever:

Arthur Harris attended college for barely two months--when he was 17--before dropping out and joining the Navy. Decades later, while he was working in the skin-care business, he went to Georgia State University.

Now, at 81, he's finally earned his bachelor's degree.

Harris . . . received his diploma from Kennesaw State University on Monday. In a school that always has attracted nontraditional students, Harris was as nontraditional as it gets: He is the oldest student ever to graduate from the Cobb County university. . . .
For the past three years, not unlike his classmates, Harris took two or three classes a semester and stayed up late to write papers on his computer. He even went to Italy this summer in a study abroad program.

He was an English major. Now, according to the story, Harris is considering going back to school to get a second degree in psychology. I guess he heard those rumors about how tough it is for English majors to get jobs.

A story that has bothered me even more than I thought it would

2007-07-31T16:09:00.000-05:00

This story (from The Primate Diaries):

The shocking news that four more critically endangered mountain gorillas were killed last week should make all primates of good conscience wince. Furthermore, one of the females was pregnant and another was nursing a five month old infant who is not expected to live.

According to the World Wildlife Foundation, there are an estimated 700 mountain gorillas alive in the wild. The loss of these six gorillas in the Democratic Republic of Congo represents 0.86% of the total population. This would be the equivalent of slaughtering 5,910 endangered African elephants or 60 million human beings in a single week. In human terms this is the death of every man, woman and child in England (and nearly as many as the population of Congo).

Actually it was probably the images rather than the story itself.

"Bush justice is a national disgrace"

2007-07-09T20:42:00.000-05:00

This past week, the Denver Post carried an op-ed piece by John S. Koppel, identified as "a civil appellate attorney with the Department of Justice since 1981." I came across it on TPM's Muckraker.com, and I've seen it nowhere else.

It begins:

As a longtime attorney at the U.S. Department of Justice, I can honestly say that I have never been as ashamed of the department and government that I serve as I am at this time.
The public record now plainly demonstrates that both the DOJ and the government as a whole have been thoroughly politicized in a manner that is inappropriate, unethical and indeed unlawful. The unconscionable commutation of I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby's sentence, the misuse of warrantless investigative powers under the Patriot Act and the deplorable treatment of U.S. attorneys all point to an unmistakable pattern of abuse.
In the course of its tenure since the Sept. 11 attacks, the Bush administration has turned the entire government (and the DOJ in particular) into a veritable Augean stable on issues such as civil rights, civil liberties, international law and basic human rights, as well as criminal prosecution and federal employment and contracting practices. It has systematically undermined the rule of law in the name of fighting terrorism, and it has sought to insulate its actions from legislative or judicial scrutiny and accountability by invoking national security at every turn, engaging in persistent fearmongering, routinely impugning the integrity and/or patriotism of its critics, and protecting its own lawbreakers. This is neither normal government conduct nor "politics as usual," but a national disgrace of a magnitude unseen since the days of Watergate - which, in fact, I believe it eclipses.

Koppel's piece deserves much wider circulation.

UPDATE: "I've seen it nowhere else" referred to a quick search of printed media. Turns out Koppel's piece has been reported in several dozen blogs in the last couple of days. Go blogosphere!

Neal Boortz is an idiot, and he's paid way too much

2007-07-08T15:02:00.000-05:00

Folks have noted Neal Boortz's ranting this past week in which he claimed--repeatedly, even after a caller tried to correct him--that "Scooter Libby and Bill Clinton got sentenced and convicted for exactly the same crime."

But what really got me is this Boortzism: "Scooter Libby was sentenced to pay a $250,000 fine. That's a quarter of a million dollars, that's more than a lot of people make in a year." No, Neal. $30,000 is more than a lot of people make in a year.

"Worrying about being fat may make you even fatter"

2007-07-02T09:36:00.000-05:00

Ain't that just peachy?

"peachy"

genealogies

2007-07-01T12:59:00.000-05:00

Last week, in response to a meme tag from Ed Darrell, I mentioned a couple of facts about my genealogy-- lots of Methodist preachers and at least one presidential assassin (alleged).

Of course, the family tree is just one sort of genealogy. There's also one's academic genealogy. In graduate school, I was a George Tindall student-- "Our father, who art in Chapel Hill," as Bob McMath, another Tindall student, once said. Bob's right; one's grad school advisor is much like a parent figure, guiding and protecting, shaping the student's research, preparing the student for the world of the profession, etc. Tindall was a Fletcher M. Green student, which makes me Green's academic grandson. (I never met him, but I have Grandpa Fletcher's original American Nation series.) Green was a student of Joseph Gregoire de Rhoulhac Hamilton, who in turn was a student at Columbia of William Archibald Dunning, a fact that amused more than impressed my students as we discussed Reconstruction historiography.

And then there's blog genealogy. Blaine Bettinger, writing at The Genetic Genealogist, recently announced that the site has been given a Thinking Blogger Award. Recipients of the award have to name the next generation of winners. Blaine is in the 70th generation, and if one traces his line back to the original (as Blaine does on the site), Another History Blog is number five, the great (times 60-something) grandparent. (And I just realized I'm late coming to this party. Elementary History Teacher, who is number six, has already left a comment at Blaine's site, "I'm one of your blog great grandmothers....") Those seventy blogs would make a very interesting evening's reading!

A Touch of Grey

2007-06-26T12:41:00.000-05:00

I had students in my US History survey class read L. Frank Baum's Wonderful Wizard of Oz (Ranjit Dighe's annotated edition, The Historian's Wizard of Oz). Discussion went well. To make sure they read the book before class, I told them they would have a little test on the book. I asked what color Dorothy's slippers were, of course, and I also asked what color Baum used at the very beginning to show the bleakness of prairie life. Most students got it right (gray), but over half spelled it "grey."

I blame it on Grey's Anatomy. What do you think?

I got memed!

2007-06-23T17:40:00.000-05:00

Ed Darrell, over at Millard Fillmore's Bathtub, did the Eight Random Facts meme and tagged me. Only for you, Ed....

The rules:

Players start with 8 random facts about themselves.
Those who are tagged should post these rules and their 8 random facts.
Players should tag 8 other people and notify them they have been tagged.

OK, here we go:

1. One of my favorite snacks (Ed started his list with food) is graham crackers with peanut butter, washed down with a big glass of cold milk.

2. For years, I thought I was born on the same day that Patsy Cline first recorded “Walking after Midnight,” which would be an interesting fact to include here. But I decided to check first, and it turns out I was wrong: according to a dozen web sites, Patsy recorded on Nov. 8; I was born on Nov. 28, same year (exactly which year isn’t terribly important here). I don’t know what led me to believe that she recorded her first big hit on the wrong day.

3. John Harrison Surratt was my third cousin, six times removed. His wife Mary was hanged for her alleged (alleged, I said!) participation to assassinate Abraham Lincoln.

4. I wrote an essay several years ago on how L. Frank Baum’s Wonderful Wizard of Oz reflected certain aspects of late-nineteenth-century American politics etc. It wasn’t a terribly original essay (nor did it claim to be), but it got picked up and cited/reprinted on a number of web pages and elsewhere. I still get letters and email messages about it. I especially like hearing from students who are doing Oz as a school project.

5. I was a science fiction fan in my younger days--and a huge fan of Isaac Asimov. When I was a senior in high school, some buddies and I went to a science fiction convention where I got to meet Asimov. I got him to autograph my program, and then, not satisfied with that, I picked up a copy of one of his novels from a table in the huckster room and asked him to sign it as well. But, wanting to keep a little of my dignity, I told Asimov that the book was for my English teacher. Asimov said he’d be happy to sign it--and he asked for the teacher’s name. Without a moment’s hesitation, I used my right arm to scratch my left shoulder, hence covering the name tag on my pocket, and said “Mr. Parker.” So my copy of Fantastic Voyage (Asimov wrote the novelization from the movie) is inscribed, “Dedicated to Mr. Parker, with best wishes, Isaac Asimov.”

6. I’m slightly tall (6’ 2”); my parents were both shorter by a foot (5’ 2”).

7. My father was a Methodist minister, as were three of his uncles and his grandfather on the Hamilton side, plus another uncle (I believe) on the Parker side. So when someone tells me I sometimes sound like a preacher, I tell them I come by it naturally.

8. Except when I’m driving, I generally listen to internet (rather than over-the-air) radio. I especially like WFMU.org.

And there you have it--Eight Random Facts about me.

I'm supposed to pass this on. Let's see. . . . I'd like to know 8 facts about: A Typical Joe; South Georgia Liberal; Sweet Georgia Blue; Southern Pasts; Michael at Silly Humans; Ross at Primordial Blog; Djamine at Dark Side of Mars; and Dr. History.

Monday morning

2007-06-11T08:21:00.000-05:00

A friend/colleague had a couple of grad school buddies in for the weekend, from Alabama and South Carolina. We spent a couple of hours on Friday afternoon at nearby Pickett's Mill Battlefield, a nice site. At one point, conversation turned to how various contemporary journalists might describe that and other Civil War battles, which reminded me of this: How World War II would look if it had been a real-time strategy game. I saw it on the web a couple of years ago, and fortunately I was able to find it again:

*Hitler[AoE] has joined the game.*
*Eisenhower has joined the game.*
*paTTon has joined the game.*
*Churchill has joined the game.*
*benny-tow has joined the game.*
*T0J0 has joined the game.*
*Roosevelt has joined the game.*
*Stalin has joined the game.*
*deGaulle has joined the game.*
Roosevelt: hey sup
T0J0: y0
Stalin: hi
Churchill: hi
Hitler[AoE]: cool, i start with panzer tanks!
paTTon: lol more like panzy tanks
T0JO: lol
Roosevelt: o this fockin sucks i got a depression!
benny-tow: haha america sux
Stalin: hey hitler you dont fight me i dont fight u, cool?
Hitler[AoE]; sure whatever
Stalin: cool
deGaulle: **** Hitler rushed some1 help
Hitler[AoE]: lol byebye frenchy
Roosevelt: i dont got **** to help, sry
Churchill: wtf the luftwaffle is attacking me
Roosevelt: get antiair guns
Churchill: i cant afford them
benny-tow: u n00bs know what team talk is?
paTTon: stfu
Roosevelt: o yah hit the navajo button guys
deGaulle: eisenhower ur worthless come help me quick
Eisenhower: i cant do **** til rosevelt gives me an army
paTTon: yah hurry the fock up
Churchill: d00d im gettin pounded
deGaulle: this is fockin weak u guys suck
*deGaulle has left the game.*
Roosevelt: im gonna attack the axis k?
benny-tow: with what? ur wheelchair?
benny-tow: lol did u mess up ur legs AND ur head?
Hitler[AoE]: ROFLMAO
T0J0: lol o no america im comin 4 u
Roosevelt: wtf! thats bullsh1t u fags im gunna kick ur asses
T0JO: not without ur harbors u wont! lol

And so on (available here, and elsewhere).

On Saturday, a cookout/birthday party with the same folks and others. A lot of fun. We ended up playing a board game. I don't think I ever saw the title, but the basic point was that players have to list as many examples as they can of certain categories. At one point, I had "sexy movie actresses." After one or two names, my mind went blank, and I said "Julie Andrews," which resulted in more ribbing than I thought appropriate. Another time, the category was "famous people whose first and last names begin with the same letter." The others didn't like my "Daniel DeLeon" (late 19th-cent. American socialist--not famous enough, they said), so I raised an objection about Woodrow Wilson (his first name was Thomas). I won on the first point, lost on the second.

A week and a half into summer classes, and things are going well. The pairing of Clio Bluestocking's posting on her town's trauma and Eric Foner's Who Owns History? worked very well for my methodology class-- Thanks again, Clio.

Off to class. This morning, the Populists!

Eric Foner and Clio Bluestocking

2007-06-04T17:55:00.000-05:00

The students in my methodology course this summer are reading Eric Foner's Who Owns History? Tomorrow evening we discuss the first couple of chapters, so I'm re-reading the book today.

In the preface, Foner describes how recent changes in the discipline "began to produce a long-overdue diversification of public history." As examples he mentions Boston, where the Freedom Trail "has now been supplemented by a Women's History Trail, a Black Heritage Trail, and a guide to the city's gay and lesbian history"; Greensboro, N.C., home of the sit-ins in 1960; and the Trail of Tears National Historic Trail.

As I read this, Clio Bluestocking's recent posting on "The Town Trauma" came immediately to mind. She tells how, in the 1880s, people in a town she has researched decided to erect a statue to the English military leader who, over two centuries earlier, had made the area safe for white settlement by getting rid of the natives, a feat he accomplished by a terrible massacre. His soldiers "surrounded the [native] village, set it on fire and killed anyone who tried to escape. The descriptions, written by the militia captains, are flat out chilling not just for the destruction that they describe, including the killing of children and elderly people, but also for the soldiers' expressions of deep conviction that they were doing the work of god."

Recently, Native Americans in the area expressed some dissatisfaction with the statue. The result was a confrontation that shows that, while Foner is correct about the "long-overdue diversification of public history," we still have a ways to go. I think I'll read Clio's posting to my class tomorrow.

PZ's "Double standards in the public schools?"

2007-06-03T09:34:00.000-05:00

P.Z. Myers's Pharyngula is one of the most popular blogs around, and I suspect that most of my dozen or so regular readers are fans. But just in case someone missed it, let me point the way to an interesting post this morning: "Double standards in the public schools? No, say it ain't so!" in which P.Z. describes and links to a couple of stories in the news.

In one, Shannon Spaulding used her valedictorian address at Wolfson High School (Jacksonville, FL) to try to save the souls of her classmates and their familes and friends. "I want to tell you that Jesus Christ can give you eternal life in heaven.... If we die with that sin on our souls, we will immediately be pulled down to hell to pay the eternal price for our sins ourselves."

P.Z. missed what was, for me, an important tidbit from the news story: "Spaulding told Channel 4 she was not aware of the controversy" her speech created. Here's a young woman smart enough to graduate at the top of her class, and yet she had no idea that her 20-minute sermon might be controversial?

The second story concerns a school in Albemarle County, Virginia, where Christian parents used the threat of a lawsuit to force the school to distribute a flyer advertising a local church's vacation bible school and other religious literature. The parents were then upset when other groups--a Unitarian Universalist church and a secularist summer camp--started sending their own literature home with the students.

Nope, no double standard there.

Mark Twain's "War Prayer"

2007-05-29T07:44:00.000-05:00

Over the last couple of days, several dozen bloggers have mentioned, linked to, or quoted Mark Twain's "War Prayer." I was behind on my blog reading and didn't see it until an hour ago on Daily Kos.

Twain wrote the story, which concluded with the following prayer, just over a century ago, in response to the aftermath of the Spanish-American War. The words are as pertinent now as they were then.

O Lord our Father, our young patriots, idols of our hearts, go forth to battle -- be Thou near them! With them -- in spirit -- we also go forth from the sweet peace of our beloved firesides to smite the foe. O Lord our God, help us to tear their soldiers to bloody shreds with our shells; help us to cover their smiling fields with the pale forms of their patriot dead; help us to drown the thunder of the guns with the shrieks of their wounded, writhing in pain; help us to lay waste their humble homes with a hurricane of fire; help us to wring the hearts of their unoffending widows with unavailing grief; help us to turn them out roofless with little children to wander unfriended the wastes of their desolated land in rags and hunger and thirst, sports of the sun flames of summer and the icy winds of winter, broken in spirit, worn with travail, imploring Thee for the refuge of the grave and denied it -- for our sakes who adore Thee, Lord, blast their hopes, blight their lives, protract their bitter pilgrimage, make heavy their steps, water their way with their tears, stain the white snow with the blood of their wounded feet! We ask it, in the spirit of love, of Him Who is the Source of Love, and Who is the ever-faithful refuge and friend of all that are sore beset and seek His aid with humble and contrite hearts. Amen.

Georgia Carnival

2007-05-27T15:05:00.001-05:00

The Tenth Georgia Carnival is up at Georgia on My Mind. Tenth? Has it been that long? Check it out--Elementary History Teacher, the carnival's founder and this edition's host, has done another wonderful job!

weekend reading

2007-05-27T14:09:00.000-05:00

A couple of pieces worth reading during this long weekend.

Andrew Bacevich, a politically conservative scholar who has long opposed the current war, has an essay in today’s Washington Post. “Memorial Day orators will say that a G.I.’s life is priceless,” he writes. “Don’t believe it. I know what value the U.S. government assigns to a soldier’s life.” Bacevich lost his son in Iraq a couple weeks ago.

D.R. Scott discusses and links to a recent column in the Boston Globe on “how and why enlistments of African-Americans are at their lowest numbers since the all-volunteer military was created in 1973.” Part of the answer: “This is not a black people’s war. This is not a poor people’s war. This is an oilman’s war.”

HWJS?

2007-05-27T12:22:00.001-05:00

. . . or, How Would Jesus Smell?

Attaturk links to a press release:

The world’s first spiritual perfume – Virtue® – was Premiered this week by IBI, a niche fragrance company in Orange, CA. Based upon an inspired Biblical formula, the perfume is designed to be a reminder of God, Christ, spiritual self and soul.

“We turned to the Bible to seek inspiration about which items to include and became convinced that a formulation would reveal itself,” explains Rick Larimore, IBI’s chief executive officer. “Creating Virtue® has been a journey and adventure through fragrance and scripture, with remarkable miracles confirming our choices.”

Virtue®’s subtle blend includes top notes of apricot (the real “forbidden fruit”), pomegranate and fig that transition to a gentle heart of iris, warming to a golden base of rich, exotic woods of frankincense, myrrh, aloe, and spikenard....

“The Bible documents that fragrance was associated with Christ and many of the ancient saints, including last century’s Padre Pio, gave off a fragrance that was associated with virtue,” explains Larimore.

IBI notes that “it will introduce a Biblically based moisturizing lotion soon.”

It just ain’t right. Or maybe I’m jealous that I didn’t think of it first.

Actually, IBI didn’t think of it first. A couple years ago, I read about a South Dakota couple who developed and marketed this:

Light up the candle called “His Essence” and its makers say you’ll experience the fragrance of Christ.

Bob Tosterud and wife Karen say the formula is all spelled out in Psalm 45. “It’s a Messianic Psalm referring to when Christ returns and his garments will have the scent of myrrh, aloe and cassia,” says Karen Tosterud.. . . .

“You can’t see him and you can’t touch him,” says Bob Tosterud. “This is a situation where you may be able to sense him by smelling. And it provides a really new dimension to one’s experience with Jesus.”

I hadn’t thought of the Tosteruds and their candle for a long time, and when Attaturk reminded me of it, I did a quick Google search and discovered that “His Essence” was only the beginning. The original is still available, but two new candles have been added: Resurrection and Servanthood. According to the website, Resurrection is based on John 19:39-40: “Nicodemus brought a mixture of myrrh and aloes, about 75 pounds. Taking Jesus’ body, the two of them wrapped it, with the spices, in strips of linen.” From a marketing standpoint, I’d be concerned with trying to sell something explicitly based on masking the smell of dead people.

Servanthood, based on John 12:3, is more promising. “Mary took about a pint of pure nard, an expensive perfume; she poured it on Jesus’ feet and wiped his feet with her hair. And the house was filled with the fragrance of the perfume.”

Reminds me about that verse about how there’s one born every minute.

Meanwhile, back in Kennesaw....

2007-05-25T09:10:00.000-05:00

Forgive me, Father, for I have sinned. It's been a month since my last posting. . . .

No, wait, I'm not Catholic.

It's been a quiet month in Lake Wobegon. . . .

No, that's not right either.

A couple of things came up that kept me away from the blog for a while, and I just never got back to it. No excuses, no further explanation, I just took a long unannounced break.

Early this morning, I saw that One Blog a Day recently featured Ed Darrell's Millard Fillmore's Bathtub. I thought "Go, Ed!" He deserves the attention. And then, just a few hours after I read that, Ed added a comment to my last posting here: "'No students' means 'no posting?' Hurry back, please."

OK, I guess Ed's comment was all I needed. Here I am.

It's been a good month. Our Civil War Symposium went well. Good speakers, and a good crowd. I was happy to finally meet LeeAnn Whites, who has written on Rebecca Felton, a champion of women's rights and the first woman in the U.S. Senate (and, like me, a resident of Cartersville, Georgia--well, she resides in the city cemetery). LeeAnn didn't know that the old Felton home, built in the 1850s, burned down a few years ago. I go to the home site every once in a while as I drive around town, and I always pick up a few of the old nails (the ruins have not been cleared). I gave one of the nails to LeeAnn, and she was happier than I would have imagined to have it. She's a very pleasant person, as were all the speakers.

Spring classes ended. One, the senior seminar, I'm especially going to miss. I had a really great bunch of students, the sort of combination that you might expect maybe once in a half-dozen years.

Summer classes begin next week. I'm teaching three. Three classes is a full-time load during the regular year, so this is a killer schedule for the summer (8 weeks rather than 15). One of the classes is the second half of the US survey, and I'm going to use The Historian's Wizard of Oz, edited by Ranjit Dighe. (This edition contains the entire text of L. Frank Baum's book, plus Dighe's extensive annotations on how the story reflects late-nineteenth century politics, economics, and culture.) I've thought about using it before and always chickened out. We'll see how it goes. I'm also doing a section each of Georgia history and the methodology course. I get tired just thinking about this!

While I was away, Elle abd became Elle PhD! For non-academic readers, "ABD" is an informal designation for PhD students who have completed the coursework for the degree but not the dissertation--"all but dissertation." Sadly, ABD ends up being a terminal degree for some, but Elle made it!

All right, those syllabusses for next week aren't going to write themselves. See y'all next month. (Just kidding.)

my own little carnival

2007-04-26T08:35:00.000-05:00

Last day of class! Still have finals to give, papers to grade, etc. etc. But, today is my last day of class for Spring semester 2007!

"How are my favorite students?" I say that a lot at the beginning of class sessions. Students who have me for more than one course, or who were in a previous class of mine, realize that I say that to all my classes. (Well, most.) "So, Dr. Parker, really, who are your favorite students?" "My favorite students are the ones I have at that moment."

Which means, in a few days, I'm not going to have any favorite students, not for three whole weeks!

oh boy oh boy oh boy

Anyway, here are some neat things I've seen lately on the web-- my own little carnival, from my own little blogroll.

Field Negro says, "I wish I was a white person's pet."

Over at Playing School, Irreverently, Profgrrrrl tells about a colleague who apparently is being sued by a student who wants an A. Interesting comments.

Kevin, at Civil War Memory, has a good review of the History Channel's new documentary on Sherman's March.

My favorite Elementary History Teacher reminds us why it takes a very special person to teach in the public schools. See her 13 Episodes I Had Today..... Can You Figure Out Why I Had Good Cry?

Finally, Boston 1775 has a series on the Liberty Tree Flag. Today's installment: What Could Nine Stripes Mean? Read it and you'll see why I like J. L. Bell: he's not only smart and well-read, he can make anything interesting.

OK, I have to run. Did I mention that this is my last day of class?

A Better Day

2007-04-25T09:31:00.000-05:00

A new blog, just up, by a former student of mine: A Better Day. Kinda makes a man proud, to see this sort of thing....

Talladega Nights and Stephen Prothero

2007-04-23T08:40:00.000-05:00

I finally saw Talladega Nights last night. When Ricky Bobby says grace at the dinner table, he prays to the baby Jesus, prompting a discussion (from this page; wording is pretty close, if not exact):

Carley Bobby: Hey, um... you know sweetie, Jesus did grow up. You don't always have to call him baby. It's a bit odd and off puttin' to pray to a baby.

Ricky Bobby: Well look, I like the Christmas Jesus best, and I'm sayin grace. When you say grace, you can say it to grown up Jesus, or teenage Jesus, or bearded Jesus, or whoever you want.

Today, in class, we're talking about Stephen Prothero's American Jesus.

I love it when stuff comes together like this.

hiding sermon notes

2007-04-20T11:44:00.000-05:00

I'm reading Debby Applegate's The Most Famous Man in America: The Biography of Henry Ward Beecher, which just won the Pulitzer for biography.

Applegate says that Beecher, early in his career, used small pieces of paper, cut to fit into his Bible, so no one would know he was using notes when he preached. My father did the same thing. Dad used onion-skin paper; when his Bible was closed, the notes were invisible. I wonder if they taught that in seminary?

Bill and me

2007-04-20T10:40:00.000-05:00

A few days ago, somebody told me I look like Bill Gates. I'd rather have his money than his good looks, I said.

But really, I don't see it. That's Bill Gates on the right, me on the left.

I heard a story about a guy named Stan at a conference where Bill Gates was speaking. After Gates's talk, Stan approached the front of the room and asked Gates if, as he left the room in a few minutes, he would walk by him and say Hi, just so Stan could impress his friends. Gates said he'd be happy to help him out. So, Stan and his friends are standing at the back of the room, Bill Gates walks by, smiles and waves and says "Hey, Stan, How are you?" and Stan says, "Shut the hell up, Gates, I told you not to bother me any more."

Anyway, I wonder if Bill gets that? "Hey, you look like David Parker."

Actually both pictures above are of Bill Gates. I look like this (or rather this is what I looked like one hot day last summer when I was looking too much toward the sun, apparently just after a rather severe haircut). Nothing like Bill Gates.

I've got the "when will it all end" blues

2007-04-18T20:40:00.000-05:00

We're about to enter the last week of the semester, and it's neck-and-neck: who's more anxious for the end of the term, students or me? I'm pulling for me.

Tonight, a break to catch up on some things at home, with Wolfgangsvault.com and a couple of Southpaws. I'm just working through the list, from Joan Jett's "Bad Reputation" to Terry Reid (the Lord of Rock), to Neil Young and Crazy Horse and Dwight Yoakum, with a little CCR, Hot Tuna, and It's a Beautiful Day thrown in.... I'm feeling better, and just waiting for the weekend. It's all good.

You can get anything you want....

2007-04-15T11:40:00.000-05:00

I was at the Old Buttonwillow Church Civil War Dinner Theater in beautiful downtown Whitwell, Tennessee, this past weekend. I mentioned something about the church in "Alice's Restaurant." Blank stare. Sigh.

Here's a nice version Arlo did about 30 years after the original. I like it because he adds a nice Nixon story at the end. It's 22 minutes long, but hey, what else are you going to do on a Sunday afternoon?

It's all my fault....

2007-04-11T15:23:00.000-05:00

Each of my classes had a major paper due earlier this week. And there has been an alarming rash of major illnesses and car wrecks among my students and their loved ones in the past week. I sometimes think the world would be a safer places if we didn't assign so many papers.

Milledgeville in the Spring

2007-04-08T13:39:00.000-05:00

I started to title this “GAH conference report,” but then I figured folks would go right past it.

The annual meeting of the Georgia Association of Historians was this past weekend in Milledgeville, a beautiful town I had never visited. The ride there on Friday morning was as pleasant as any I’d had in a long time-- getting out of that Atlanta-area traffic, driving down highway 441 through Putnam County, “Dairy Capital of Georgia”-- the fields, the cows, the pecan trees, very pretty. About two Baptist churches every mile.

Milledgeville is fairly small, easy to find your way around, whether you’re driving or walking. I arrived at 10:30, too early to check into the hotel or register for the conference, so I drove around and ended up at the old Georgia Capitol. (Milledgeville was the state’s capital from 1807 to 1868.) The capitol building is now part of Georgia Military College, but the bottom floor is devoted to a museum of regional and state history. When I walked in, I was alone, no one there (that I saw) except Grant Gerlich, the exec director, and one of his staff. Grant reminded me of the Maytag repairman, sort of lonely, waiting for a call. He didn’t say so explicitly, but I got the idea that the Old Capitol Museum, as it’s called, doesn’t get a lot of traffic, and that’s a shame. It's worth a visit. Its American Native section is especially impressive.

Then, check in to the hotel and off to the conference. I got there just in time for the first round of sessions. I went to “Holocaust Fatigue: Is the Holocaust Losing in the Classroom?” The participants were from Kennesaw State University’s Holocaust Education program, and the session was quite thought-provoking--about how we teach not only the Holocaust but other subjects, and the differences between education in the classroom and in museums.

Second session, I went to “Politics and Law in the Antebellum South,” with papers on poor whites in Georgia and on Georgia’s opposition to the Tariff of 1828. The first, by Keri Leigh Merritt, was based on some impressive research in court decisions concerning vagrancy cases. The second, by Donald Clanton, suggested that the reason Georgia didn’t go along with South Carolina’s nullification of the tariff was to stay on Andrew Jackson’s good side, so he would carry through on his promise to get rid of the Cherokee Indians. I'm not fully convinced, but the notion is very interesting. Merritt and Clanton are both MA students, and they showed that grad students, even in the early stages of their research, can present at conferences such as the GAH and be not only welcomed but appreciated.

After a break, the evening plenary session, featuring Arnita Jones, executive director of the American Historical Association, speaking on “Trends in the Historical Profession.” It was a good and informative talk, but it got off to a funny start. After the program began, but before Jones was introduced, a cell phone went off in the audience. Great, I thought; we get mad at our students when this happens in the classroom, and here we are doing it ourselves. And then, two or three minutes later, another phone went off! There was laughter, and folks were probably wondering, as I was, why, after the first incident, everyone didn’t check their phones to make sure they were turned off. Then Jones started speaking, and guess what happened. Yep, it sure did.

Second day, I skipped the first morning session (I know, bad boy) and drove around town. My session was at 10:30. I talked about Georgia-born writer Marian Sims as an early “revisionist” novelist. Also on the session was an old friend of mine, Catherine Oglesby, who has just submitted a book manuscript on another Georgia writer, Corra Harris. Cathy talked specifically on Harris on race and the Lost Cause. She’s been working on Corra for so long, writing and presenting, that when she said “Harris was best known for her 1910 novel A Circuit Rider’s Wife,” I wondered how many times she has said and written that sentence. It was a good session, thanks in part to the good audience that attended.

Lunch/final plenary session: The chicken tasted funny, everything else was OK. My Kennesaw colleague Tom Scott had arranged the program, which featured two famous Georgia historians, Tom Dyer and Edward Cashin, talking about their “Lives in History,” as the program was titled. I thoroughly enjoyed it. I wish my students could have heard Cashin talk about historic myths-- how they come about and what uses they serve.

One of the best things about these conferences is being able to see and catch up with folks.

Anyway, that’s how I spent my weekend.

Kevin Levin and our Civil War program

2007-04-06T06:18:00.000-05:00

Kevin Levin, over at Civil War Memory, has just proven (if there was ever any doubt) that he is a gentleman as well as a scholar. I told him about a great Civil War symposium we're having here at Kennesaw State University in May, featuring George Rable, Victoria Bynum, Kenneth Noe, and LeeAnn Whites (how's that for a lineup?), and he posted an announcement on his blog to help publicize it.

Civil War Memory is both thoughtful and accessible; I urge readers to check it out.

And if you can make it to northwest Georgia the first weekend of May, join us for a great program!

Ashes in the news

2007-04-03T19:47:00.000-05:00

Scotty's are going into space; Keith Richards snorted his dad's.

Fiesta de Tejas

2007-04-03T07:12:00.000-05:00

Yee Haw! The first Fiesta de Tejas! is on the web! So says Ed Darrell over at Millard Fillmore's Bathtub. That's right, the inaugural edition of the blogosphere's newest carnival is up, and it's a dandy.

Sunday morning reading

2007-04-01T09:25:00.000-05:00

colonial dentistry-- Every day this past week, J.L. Bell, over at Boston 1775, has posted a new piece on colonial dentistry. (I'm not going to link to the individual articles; see entries for March 26-31.) Very interesting (as is everything J.L. does).

I got a haircut recently. Hardly newsworthy, but I'm going to a conference next weekend, and I wanted to look good. Except this turned out to be perhaps the worst hair cut I've ever had. But even as J.L. was writing about colonial dentists, I was visiting one--well, not a colonial dentist--for my regular exam and cleaning. So at the conference, people will say, "Did you see Parker's hair? What a mess!" "Yeah, but his teeth looked good."

Civil War photos-- Retouching History has a good piece on "The Modern Falsification of a Civil War Photograph," about "a Civil War-era posed studio photograph of unidentified black Union soldiers with a white officer.... The studio photograph has been deliberately falsified in recent years by an unknown person/s sympathetic to the Confederacy. This falsified or fabricated photo, purporting to be of the 1st Louisiana Native Guards (Confederate), has been taken to promote Neo-Confederate views, to accuse Union propagandists of duplicity, and to show that black soldiers were involved in the armed defense of the Confederacy."

"inefficient" history-- Eric L. Talley, an economist at UC Berkeley, has published a disturbing study that shows the study and teaching of history to be "inefficient." He concludes that educational resources should be directed elsewhere. (hat tip, for this and the above, to Ralph Luker)

Georgia Carnival-- And while I'm referring you to other sites, let me urge you to check out the latest Carnival for Georgia Bloggers. Among the treats you'll find is The Best Wildflower Walk in Georgia, with some of the prettiest pictures I've seen in a while. I know someone who would love that waterfall.

one of them's ??

2007-03-28T15:25:00.000-05:00

A headline in my local newspaper: "Men threatened with gun while working on one of them's car." (I don't know how long the link will remain active.)

I can imagine "one of them's" as a contraction for "one of them is" or "one of them has." But as a possessive?

UPDATE: The link still works, but the newspaper has changed the headline to "one of their cars." Some might say this implies the men owned the cars collectively--I'm not sure about that--but in any case it's much better.

Elektratig picked up on this posting, as did Pillage Idiot (which has a screenshot of the original, in all its glory).

"set" no longer on top

2007-03-28T08:38:00.000-05:00

A recent update from the folks at the Oxford English Dictionary tells us that "set" has suffered a setback: it is no longer the longest entry in the OED. "Make" has taken its place, but "set" could return in a few years when the OED editors get to it in their revisions. (There is an update to the OED every three months; the latest covered the words "Prakrit" to "prim.") Currently, the top five words, in terms of length of entry in OED:

make
set
run
take
go

(in each case, the verb form of the word)

faith healing, Charles Atlas, Kate Turabian, and more

2007-03-27T13:23:00.000-05:00

Faith healing-- Parts I and II of Brian Lardner's series on faith healing are up, and as we wait for the third and final posting of the trilogy ("in which we help to make Benny Hinn a very rich man"), he teases us with a bonus: Brian Lardner as faith healer! (Instead of clicking these individual links, you could just go over to Primordial Blog; as I write this, they're all still on the front page.)

Charles Atlas and sexy chimps-- Brian also writes about the "Sexiest animal on the planet: Chimpanzees." Somehow, it doesn't make me feel better knowing the biological reason girls ignored me in high school.

"Many females (especially the young and inexperienced) are subconsciously drawn to the strongest competitor, regardless of their manners. At times they will actually incite competition between two males. In the movies it is the stuff of tragic love triangles, but in real life it can often be brutal and ugly. It kind of reminds my of those old Charles Atlas ads in the back of the comics from when I was a kid - the 98lb weakling getting sand kicked in his face by the bully who then steals his girlfriend."

Ahh, Charles Atlas. Now there was a cultural icon. And today, my students have no idea who he was. Not too long ago, I could mention "Charles Atlas" in class and know that a significant number of students would understand. If I mention him today-- nothing. That's a shame, isn't it? Or am I being an old fuddy-duddy? (I feel sort of fuddy-duddyish today.) But what symbol do we have to replace him? Rambo isn't quite it.

Turabian-- A new edition, to be published April 15. I got an early copy last week. Oh, I do love St. Kate. When she died, in 1987, her obituary in the New York Times noted that she never received a college degree. Did she ever go to college? I don't know. But I think it's pretty neat that the woman who wrote the book that has guided hundreds of thousands of academic papers, from research papers to doctoral dissertations, never graduated college.

The obit explained the book's origin: "In 1930 the university [of Chicago] appointed Mrs. Turabian as the dissertations secretary. She was charged with coordinating the administrative logistics for graduate dissertations. Noticing that some students could not afford the University of Chicago Press Style Manual, Mrs. Turabian boiled down the larger volume into a pamphlet."

Turabian (as we all call it) is said to be the most profitable book ever published by the University of Chicago Press.

I've got Kate on my mind today. In my methodology course this semester, I assigned, on the advice of a colleague, a different book. And now my students have no idea how to do footnotes. I know, because we had that class this morning. It's not their fault, it's the book; I didn't realize how bad it is.

Fiesta Texana!-- Clio Bluestocking joins the well-wishers for Ed Darnell's upcoming Texas blog carnival. Pressure's on, Ed. We're expecting a Texas-sized success when the inaugural Fiesta Texana appears on April 2.

pollen, H-Net, mythstory, and more

2007-03-26T09:02:00.000-05:00

Pollen-- I washed the car on the way in this morning. It's green! Of course, by lunchtime, it'll be yellow again. I really don't remember pollen this bad before moving to Georgia.

H-Net-- I told my senior seminar and methodology students about the H-Net (Humanities and Social Sciences Online) discussion groups the other day.

In case you don't know: "H-Net is an international interdisciplinary organization of scholars and teachers dedicated to developing the enormous educational potential of the Internet and the World Wide Web. Our edited lists and web sites publish peer reviewed essays, multimedia materials, and discussion for colleagues and the interested public." "H-Net's e-mail lists function as electronic networks, linking professors, teachers and students in an egalitarian exchange of ideas and materials. Every aspect of academic life--research, teaching, controversies new and old--is open for discussion."

There are nearly 200 discussion networks. They range from very broad to specific. H-Teach is for those who teach college history, H-AmRel is American religious history, H-Albion is British and Irish history, H-South is the history of the American South, H-CivWar is Civil War, etc. There is a list for high school history/social science teachers. And on and on.

Go to the H-Net main page and check it out. (Click on the "discussion networks" link at the top to see the list.) All kinds of good resources.

Mythstory-- Ed Darrell, at Millard Fillmore's Bathtub, directs us to This Day in Mythstory, "just enough facts to ring true," Ed says, "enough humor to make the parodies appealing and likely to be repeated as fact." Chris Regan, formerly a writer for "The Daily Show with Jon Stewart," write Mythstory. Good stuff.

Fiesta de Tejas-- Talk about excitement! After seeing how the Carnival for Georgia Bloggers has grown and what it has become in just a couple of months, Ed is getting together the first Texas blog carnival. He says, "It may take us a couple of months to get up to speed, of course, but this is the state that produced Molly Ivins, John Henry Faulk, J. Frank Dobie, Kent Biffle, and Dwight Eisenhower — not to mention Stevie Ray Vaughn." We're expecting great things, a carnival big and grand enough for Texas, on April 2, when the first edition is scheduled to post.

Britannica Blog-- In case you've missed this: "Britannica Blog is a place for smart, lively conversations about a broad range of topics. Art, science, history, current events – it's all grist for the mill. We've given our writers encouragement and a lot of freedom, so the opinions here are theirs, not the company's."

Chronicling America-- Another new database, with all sorts of potential for research and teaching. "This week, the Library of Congress and the National Endowment for the Humanities unveiled their 'Chronicling America: Historic American Newspapers' joint venture which debuted on-line with more than 226,000 pages of public-domain newspapers from California, Florida, Kentucky, New York, Utah, Virginia and the District of Columbia published between
1900 and 1910."

Description from a posting yesterday on H-SHGAPE, the H-Net list (see above) for the Gilded Age/Progresive Era. See, I told you it was useful!

Catching up

2007-03-23T09:29:00.000-05:00

It's been a long week.... Last round of candidates in for a position in the department, conference week for students in my senior seminar, and the pollen's got me down.

This is the longest break I've taken from posting here, and it wasn't intentional; in fact I didn't really realize how long it had been.

I'll get something up soon, but for now, a few quick notes:

Eddie Hunter is a wonderful guy. Look how nice he is! He lives down the road in Marietta, Georgia, home of the Big Chicken and Eddie's blog, Chicken Fat. Eddie writes about his people-- family and friends-- and recently he posted a photo of himself as a kid with Smiley Burnette. Wow.

Jeremy Boggs, of the Journal of the Association for History and Computing, has a column titled "History Blogosphere: An Introduction." Boggs lists a handful of the best history blogs, and two of them, Civil War Memory and Cliopatria, are on my short blogroll (to the right). I knew I travelled in good company! (Kevin Levin's Civil War Memory has a good and thoughtful bunch of postings up now.)

The conference paper got finished and sent off to the commentator on time; the conference is in a couple weeks. Now I'm working on an encyclopedia entry on William Ellery Channing, who might be called the father of American Unitarianism. Umm, well, in fact he IS called that.

Clio Bluestocking presents a very interesting new reading of The Last Supper in Another DiVinci Code. I don't want to spoil it TOO much, but her posting was prompted by the Bong Hits 4 Jesus controversy and an article in Slate.com asking "What Would Jesus Smoke?" A bumper sticker here in the parking lot: "What would Scooby Doo?" Clio says something about a Ganga interpretation of Scooby Doo. I have no idea what she's talking about.

J.L. Bell reminds us that the bicentennial of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's is fast approaching. J.L. posts a lot of good, solid stuff, both at Boston 1775 and at Oz and Ends, on children's literature (which I just realized contains a different Longfellow posting!).

The Carnival of the Decline of Democracy, Edition 2.6, is up at The 13th Story. Again, good stuff! And don't miss the first appearance of Blog about Your Blog.

All right, back to work.

Ayllón in Georgia, 1526

2007-03-17T19:06:00.000-05:00

as promised....

What was the first European settlement in Georgia? James Oglethorpe founded Savannah in 1733. But over two centuries before Oglethorpe reached the Georgia coast, another settlement existed here: San Miguel de Gualdape, established in 1526.

St. Augustine is often called the oldest European city in the present United States, but San Miguel de Gualdape preceded it by almost 40 years. In fact, it is now considered the earliest European settlement (after the Vikings, a millennium ago) on mainland North America.

San Miguel was the work of Lucas Vázquez de Ayllón, a Spanish-born nobleman who came to Hispaniola (present day Haiti and the Dominican Republic) in 1504 as a judge. Columbus had “discovered” Hispaniola just a dozen years earlier, but the Spanish had developed it quickly, because of the island’s gold and its native population (which the Spanish found they could easily enslave). Judge Ayllón was able to win the favor of some of the wealthy Spanish officials on the island, and he soon began to build up his own landholdings and personal wealth. As the island’s gold began to peter out, Ayllón and others shifted to sugar plantations, still using the natives as slave labor.

The Spanish on Hispaniola found that they were using up the island’s natives at an alarming rate. Ayllón saw the potential profits of slave trading and entered that business, importing natives kidnapped from the Bahamas and other islands and selling them on Hispaniola.

Meanwhile, the Spanish in the Caribbean remained generally unaware of a much larger land mass just north of them. A few explorers had visited mainland North America (Columbus never did). Knowledge of the continent was very sparse, however, and in fact it was often referred to as just another “island.”

In 1521, Francisco Gordillo, one of Ayllón’s chief slave raiders, was unable to find a sufficient number of natives in the Bahamas, so he decided to try his luck elsewhere. He sailed northwest, making landfall near present day Myrtle Beach, South Carolina. He briefly explored the area (called “Chicora”), then lured 60 natives onto his ship and set sail for Hispaniola.

In his report to Ayllón, Gordillo described Chicora as a beautiful place, full of natural resources, looking much like Spain itself, and full of natives. Ayllón was fascinated by the potential of Gordillo’s discovery. Who knew there were so many possibilities there? Earlier voyages, such as Ponce de Leon’s, had not begun to hint at such a thing. Ayllón quickly went to Spain and asked King Charles for the right to colonize Chicora. Charles granted Ayllón's wish.

In July 1526, Ayllón left Hispaniola with 600 people (including several African slaves), along with supplies and animals, on six ships. He reached the Carolina coast in early August, but failed to find any Indians there. The ships moved slowly south, hugging the coast, looking for a location that contained both a good site for a new colony and the native Americans Ayllón was so interested in finding. Finally they stopped in what is now Georgia. The exact location is still unknown. Historian Paul Hoffman put it near Sapelo Island; Douglas Peck puts it further north, near the mouth of the Savannah River. In any case, on September 29, Ayllón found his spot, named it San Miguel de Gualdape for the festival of Saint Michael (celebrated that day), and began building his colony.

The houses and the church at San Miguel went up quickly, as did the storage buildings for food and the livestock pens. But the new church’s graveyard began to fill up as Ayllón’s people started to die, from starvation and disease. Ayllón himself succumbed to an unknown disease on October 18. Surviving colonists tried to keep San Miguel going, but it was no good. Indians attacked, black slaves rose up and burned some of the buildings (the first slave revolt in what would become the United States), political disputes split the people, and a cold winter arrived much earlier than anticipated. A few weeks after Ayllón’s death, the colony disbanded. Of the 600 who had left Hispaniola to start the colony, only 150 returned.

And San Miguel de Gualdape, the first European settlement on mainland North America, was no more.

Ed Darrell calls for Fiesta Texana

2007-03-17T14:28:00.000-05:00

Ed Darrell, who runs Millard Fillmore's Bathtub, took one look at our Georgia Carnival and got a bit jealous. Texas needs a blog carnival, he says, except, Texas being what it is (or rather Texans being what they are), they'll have to call it "fiesta."

Well, Ed, Texas is further behind than you know. It has to catch up not only with Georgia; in addition to our carnival, there's the Carnival of Maryland, the Carnival of Ohio Bloggers, the Virginia Blog Carnival, and the Tarheel Tavern (that's my native state of North Carolina).

The Carnival of New Jersey Bloggers seems to have been inactive since last August, and the Illinois Carnival was last seen even further back.

(All of these are from the list of blog carnivals at-- well, at Blog Carnival.)

"If Georgia, with its dull, almost-landlocked, not-found-by-Europeans-until-the-17th-century and having-only-peaches-instead-of-peppers history can do it," Ed says, "Texas should be able to do it better."

Ed-- "Dull" is in the eye of the beholder; peaches vs. peppers is a matter of personal preference; "almost-landlocked," well, I'm not sure of your point there. But "not-found-by-Europeans-until-the-17th-century": that's a statement that can be verified, a point on which a real comparison can be made.

According to Wikipedia, "On November 6, 1528, shipwrecked Spanish conquistador Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca became the first known European in Texas."

That's 1528.

On September 29, 1526, Lucas Vázquez de Ayllón landed with several hundred people on the coast of what would become Georgia and began erecting a colony, named San Miguel de Gualdape, the first European colony in the New World.

1526.

So, Ed, you can have your peppers and your shoreline; we have our blog carnival and the distinction of the first European colony.

Good luck getting a Texas blog fiesta together!

(I wrote something about San Miguel a few years ago. I'll see if I can find it and post it here later.)

Dylan Hears a Who

2007-03-17T12:31:00.000-05:00

UPDATE: Apparently the site's down-- "at the request of Dr. Seuss Enterprises." For the time being, you can still hear "Green Eggs and Ham" here.

FURTHER UPDATE: More on the missing page here.
---------------
Dylan does Dr. Seuss. This is brilliant. "Green Eggs and Ham," "The Cat in the Hat," "The Zax," and more

from WFMU's Beware of the Blog.

Carnivals!

2007-03-17T10:01:00.000-05:00

The Sixth Georgia Carnival is up at Provocative Church.

Early Modern Notes has the 50th History Carnival.

UPDATE: Check out Black Sun Journal's Carnival of the Godless #62, and the 110th Carnival of Education is available at The Education Wonks.

Good stuff all around!

Comments NOT made in 1955

2007-03-14T11:38:00.000-05:00

A friend just sent around an email titled "Comments made in the year 1955."

I'll tell you one thing , if things keep going the way they are, it's going to be impossible to buy a week's groceries for $20.
Have you seen the new cars coming out next year? It won't be long before $2000 will only buy a used one.
If cigarettes keep going up in price, I'm going to quit. A quarter a pack is ridiculous.
Did you hear the post office is thinking about charging a dime just to mail a letter?

Cute, but as soon as I started it, I had that same feeling I mentioned last week. This time, Snopes.com has it covered. A sample:

Did you hear the post office is thinking about charging a dime just to mail a letter?

In 1955, first-class postage cost 3¢ per ounce, and that rate had been unchanged since 1932. The first-class rate was not raised again until 1958, and even then it went up only one cent, to 4¢ per ounce. It was not until 1974, nearly two decades after 1955, that the cost of first-class postage was raised to 10¢ per ounce.

Ahhh, the good old days that never were.....