the universe knows....

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

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

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 properly 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

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

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

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...

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

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

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

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

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

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!

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

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

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

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

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.)