A Netflix movie may soon tell the Garfield story

Coming soon on Netflix. The story of President James Garfield. But we had the story today in Lakeside from Todd Arrington, of the National Park Service and Site Manager of the James A. Garfield National Historic Site in Mentor, Ohio. I have visited most Presidential sites in Ohio, 2 in Illinois and one in California, I've been to Gettysburg and other historic state and national sites. I've been blogging for 21 years about some of the issues that Garfield focused on--slavery, race, education, nation building, etc.--yet I could count on one hand the number of times he's appeared on my radar of important events. Arrington, who has a PhD in history, did a masterful job of portraying a great man assassinated by a mentally ill person who was disappointed he did not get the job he wanted after he'd voted for Garfield. Well worth the price of admission (there's a gate pass for Lakeside). CLS: Celebrate Ohio: Presidential Museums - Lakeside Ohio

"Had he not been assassinated early in his presidential term in 1881, the history of the late 19th century might read very differently today. If the history of the late 19th century read differently, perhaps the histories of the 20th and early 21st centuries might, too."

Netflix Announces New Drama Series 'Death by Lightning' Starring Michael Shannon and Matthew Macfadyen - About Netflix

How far can we fall?

In the 19th century women led the way for the big three--abolition and then civil rights and education for former slaves, temperance with its strong social impact on families, and woman's suffrage which included custody of their own children. And now? In the 21st century women are demanding the right to kill their own children, more rights for criminals who are killing black citizens, and the right to gender transition so they don't have to be such silly, ignorant women.

Abolition, Women's Rights, and Temperance Movements - Women's Rights National Historical Park (U.S. National Park Service) (nps.gov)

Women and Abolitionism | The Abolition Seminar

Abolitionist Movement — History of U.S. Woman's Suffrage (crusadeforthevote.org)

History of the Movement | Westerville Public Library (westervillelibrary.org)

A tribute to women on Day 3

Day 3 of the RNC convention coincided with the 100th anniversary of the 19th Amendment and women’s constitutional right to vote.  So there were many tributes.  Let me say, I’ve never been that impressed with how women have used that right.  Particularly women in Congress.  They’ve pushed for killing the unborn; many have eschewed marriage; some have denied the importance of fathers and have denigrated men, who they outlive and women enjoy better health outcomes; women in Congress have insisted on affirmative action, yet want outsized government protection using the federal government like a step-father for their children. But the planners of the RNC convention really did give me a more positive view.  With the national right to vote (women were already voting in local and state elections in 1920) some women used it as a psychological boost even if they misused (in my opinion) their powerful vote.

It’s always been my opinion that it was the 19th century when American women were in their glory fighting for the rights of others and themselves.  They moved a nation with the BIG THREE—may American women someday live up to the expectations of those brave, strong women.

• Temperance, the fight to live without the scourge of addiction to alcohol,
• Abolition, the fight to end slavery in the United State, and
• Suffrage, the fight for women to be able to vote in federal elections.

A hymn to our collective mothers—birth, foster, adoptive and mentors

Faith of our  mothers, living yet
in cradle song and bedtime prayer,
In nurs’ry love and fireside love,
Your presence still pervades the air:
Faith of our mothers, living faith,
We will be true to you till death.

Faith of our mothers, lavish faith,
The fount of childhood’s trust and grace,
O may your consecration prove
The wellspring of a nobler race:
Faith of our mothers, lavish faith,
We will be true to you till death.

(A. B. Patton, public domain)

Thanksgiving, November 28, 1872

Whereas the revolution of another year has again brought the time when it is usual to look back upon the past and publicly to thank the Almighty for His mercies and His blessings; and

Whereas if any one people has more occasion than another for such thankfulness it is the citizens of the United States, whose Government is their creature, subject to their behests;

who have reserved to themselves ample civil and religious freedom and equality before the law;

who during the last twelvemonth have enjoyed exemption from any grievous or general calamity, and to whom prosperity in agriculture, manufactures, and commerce has been vouchsafed;

Now, therefore, by these considerations, I recommend that on Thursday, the 28th day of November next, the people meet in their respective places of worship and there make their acknowledgments to God for His kindness and bounty.

In witness whereof I have hereunto set my hand and caused the seal of the United States to be affixed. Done at the city of Washington, this 11th day of October, A.D. 1872, and of the Independence of the United States of America the ninety-seventh. U.S. GRANT

Republican Thaddeus Stevens changed his grave site

Shortly before he died on August 11, 1868, Thaddeus Stevens learned that the grave he'd purchased was located in a whites-only cemetery. Incensed, he bought another plot, this one in an obscure graveyard in Lancaster with no racial restrictions. Then he wrote an inscription designed to carve his creed into his headstone:

I repose in this quiet and secluded spot,
Not from any natural preference for solitude
But, finding other Cemeteries limited as to Race
by Charter Rules,
I have chosen this that I might illustrate in my death
The Principles which I advocated through a long life:
EQUALITY OF MAN BEFORE HIS CREATOR.

Story at History Net

About the Masons

From What Hath God Wrought by Daniel Walker Howe. Many of our founding fathers were Freemasons, including George Washington and Benjamin Franklin. But an incident in 1826 brought about the demise of the movement. In 1826, a man named William Morgan attempted to publish a book about the secret rituals of Freemasonry, much to the horror and strong objections of the masonic community. After his home was ransacked for the manuscript, Morgan disappeared. His kidnappers, including the Sheriff of Niagra County, were Freemasons who were never fully prosecuted, due to the protection and collusion of other Masons. Thus began the rise of Antimasonry as the first "third party" in American politics.

"Freemasonry, introduced into America from Britain in colonial times, had been an important force in the young republic. Its members had constituted a kind of republican elite, with Benjamin Franklin and George Washington prominent among them. The international Masonic brotherhood satisfied longings for status, trust, and metropolitan sophistication in an amorphous new society; its hierarchies and secret rituals offered a dimension lacking in the stark simplicity of much of American Protestantism. Freemasonry promoted the values of the Enlightenment and new standards of politeness. Its symbols of the pyramid and the eye had been incorporated into the Great Seal of the United States. Its ceremonies graced many public occasions, including the dedication of the United States Capitol and the construction of the Erie Canal. But in the Morgan episode, Masonic commitments of secrecy and mutual assistance led to disastrous consequences. To be sure, the Masonic brotherhood succeeded in the short run, protecting members from legal punishment and preventing Morgan from publishing all but the first three degree rituals, which appeared in print a month after his disappearance. But, as American Masonry's most recent historian has shown, 'it lost the larger battle in the court of public opinion.' During the decade after the Morgan affair, thousands of brothers quit the order and hundreds of lodges closed. Although Freemasonry recovered its numbers after the Civil War, it never recovered the influence it had wielded in the first fifty years of independence.”

This excerpt is from delancyplace.com which sends e-mails about a variety of books.  Sometimes I just skim, but this one was an interesting part of America history about which I knew nothing, except I’d always had a negative view of the Masons. As we say in libraries, to the victor belongs the archives.  http://www.delanceyplace.com/view_archives.php?2760&p=2760 

 

Coptic Christians in Libya. Why?

"The 21 Egyptian Coptic Christians were marched to a beach, forced to kneel and then beheaded on video, which was broadcast on a website that supports Islamic State. The victims were among thousands of unemployed Egyptians desperately seeking work in Libya, despite the risks. Egypt’s foreign ministry said it was banning travel to Libya and had set up a crisis centre to bring home Egyptians."

Have you wondered why they can't get jobs in Egypt? Christians in Egypt are the garbage collectors--can't get other work. A few years ago the government killed their pigs and gave their jobs to unions. Now the country is awash in trash and their businesses have been destroyed.

The U.S. has been at war with Muslim controlled states off and on since 1801. Jefferson refused to pay ransom for enslaved American sailors , and thus the line "From the halls of Montezuma to the shores of TRIPOLI. . ." memorializes that war in the hymn of the U.S. Marine Corps. Do you think that was just a pretty place to behead Christians in that video of a beach? These guys are all about symbolism. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tripoli_Monument_(sculpture)
 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AYPpGqBUTHg

What a real estate deal!

"Napoleon sold the Louisiana Territory [to the USA in 1803]  because he was waging war with Britain and was strapped for cash. He wrongly believed the area a wasteland and hence strongly preferred to retain instead the French colony of Saint-Domingue, which occupied the western half of the island of Hispaniola (the eastern half being the Spanish colony of Santo Domingo). Saint-Domingue boasted a population of 500,000 and plantations of sugar cane, indigo, coffee, and cocoa rich enough to fill 700 ships a year. The French then promptly lost the colony when, in 1804, a successful revolution by black slaves led to the independence of the new nation of Haiti.”

From Financial Founding Fathers: The Men Who Made America Rich (2006)

A haunted painting?

When you live with an artist (or two if you count me), you have a lot of art in the closets (we also buy it), so we're always rearranging. Last week we did a major shift. I've been hearing really creepy noises in the living room in the early a.m. I’ve decided it is the painting of the big house near Delaware, Ohio,  It is so large it has acrylic instead of glass in the frame to reduce the weight. When the heat comes on it makes expanding noises, then contracts.

He was an architect before he was a painter, so as architects will do, he remodeled it a bit for the painting--took off an addition that detracted from the original bones of the house. I think he also gave it a coat of paint. It had been refurbished about 20 years ago, but had fallen a bit in recent years. So if you drive by this house, it may not look quite like this.

The environmental regulations have become so restrictive that it is very difficult to save homes like these—lead paint, sometimes buried fuel oil tanks, etc.  Plus the heating costs with 12’ ceilings is often prohibitive. 

Do numbers matter?

In the 16th through the 19th centuries Arab Muslims captured and sold black Africans to European slavers who then shipped them to the “new world” for resale in the various colonies of Spain, Portugal, France and England.

"By the end of the seventeenth century, slavery and the products of slave labor comprised the single largest economic enterprise on earth. Over the course of more than two hundred years, European carriers -- British, Spanish, French, and Portuguese -- had shipped more than 2 million Africans across the Atlantic in chains. But that was just the beginning. Spurred by an explod­ing European demand for sugar, traffic in slaves surged, and in the eighteenth century alone more than 6 million Africans were taken from their homeland to plantations in Brazil, the Caribbean, and, to a much smaller extent, British North America. ... Sons of Providence by Charles Rappleye

Guttmacher Institute, the research arm of Planned Parenthood, estimates 54,559,615 abortions since Roe v. Wade in 1973, and about 40% of those are black. Life Site News

Abortion is legal and approved by the state and federal governments of the United States, and has been a plank in the Democrat party political platform for decades.  Legal abortion  has killed more blacks than four centuries of the Atlantic slave trade.

Planned Parenthood President Cecile Richards, whose organization invested $15 million in the election, was overjoyed by the results of Tuesday’s election of a pro-abortion president, as was NARAL President Nancy Keenan.

On reading Hegel and Marx

After struggling through Julie's manuscript to Chapter 8 (she's writing a book), I've decided that if you read and understand nothing but 18th and 19th century philosophers, historians, theologians, and educators--looking back to who influenced them and forward to whom they influenced in the 20th century--you'd pretty well understand the mess we're in today and the causes of WWI and WWII, and the pervasive weakness in the churches who subscribe to "social justice," which sets them up to be helpless to confront Islamists. Not sure who the big name thinkers of the 20th-21st centuries are, but they mostly seem to be scientists and not people in the arts, humanities and social sciences. Yesterday as I noted below, I was reading ScienceHeroes website about the 2 guys who invented chemical fertilizer in 1909--credited with "saving or creating" 3 billion lives.

Anyway, we got to all the 'isms of today--progressivism, liberalism, communism, materialism, environmentalism, Darwinism, multiculturalism, fascism, fundamentalism, conservatism--with the help of Kant, Fiehte, Schelling, Schleiermacher, Hegel, Strauss, Nietzsche, Feuerbach, Marx, Darwin and Dewey. What is it about the Germans. . .

Monday Memories--Posting bond to get married in early 19th century in Tennessee

Charles A. Sherrill, Tenn. State Library & Archives; has furnished the following information on this subject according to his understanding of the material he has read at the TNGenWEb Project.

"The groom had to assure the State that he was able to be legally married (was not already married to someone else, under age, or ineligible because of close blood relationship, etc.)

This assurance was given in the form of a bond for a certain amount of money. The friend or relative signed as the groom's security on the bond, commonly known as becoming a bondsman.

If indeed the groom had been sued for violating the marriage contract, the bondsman would have had to pay any legal damages if the groom defaulted.
No money actually changed hands at the time the bond was issued. This bonding procedure was used across Tennessee and in other southern states in the 19th century.

It's a good thing no money actually changed hands--I doubt that James or John (Polly's brother) could have come up with $1250.

Mary "Polly" Gresham Corbett died in 1884 at age 96. Two of her brothers married two of James' sisters, Martha and Polly. As near as I can tell from the records handed down, James Corbett and his siblings were 2nd generation Americans, and their father, an Irish immigrant, fought in the Revolutionary War, and received a pension. Although in the 19th century they all lived in Tennessee, originally they lived in North Carolina, the western part of which became eastern Tennessee.

Henry Clay ran for president 5 times and lost each time

He also served in the Senate before he was 30 (the age stated in the Constitution). However, he's an important American statesman. The Contenders starts tomorrow night on C-SPAN with the story of Clay.

C-SPAN The Contenders

3528 Browsing in libraries

When I visit a city, I try to make a stop at the public library. Often I can't get inside because I get up too early and am on my way to or from the coffee shop! But today, you can visit some of the most fabulous libraries on line. I keep a link at the left to the New York Public Library. In the early days of my career in the mid-1960s, when libraries were just beginning to figure out how computers could help store and access information, the card catalog of the NYPL had been photocopied and bound into huge volumes. It was a good source for slavic material, as I recall, so I would often take my handful of slips and cards into the huge reference room of the University of Illinois Library (I used to get very light-headed and thought it was excitement but later learned I had atrial fibrillation), write out the transliteration, and search the many possibilities of the authors' names. This was called doing an "authority search," and if you found the author, you made a little check mark. NYPL was considered a reputable authority and we trusted the toiling, underpaid librarians who had worked the decades before us.

February in the United States is called Black History month, and I'm awfully tired of the same old PSAs I've been hearing on the radio. Someone has not put much thought into the historical riches, particularly poetry, literature and music, that are available on-line. ("Hello! There are topics other than slavery and misery to show accomplishments!" she says to the radio.) I went to the NYPL home page and typed in "poet" in the search window, and received a huge number of photographs of African-American and Afro-other literary figures. I looked through the photos and selected this woman, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, from the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture:

I then went to Google and looked up her biography and some of her poetry. She had a very interesting life (born to free parents in 1825 and raised by a relative) and received an education far better than most white women of her time. I really enjoyed her poem about Moses, which you can find and read, but she also wrote several novels and this essay was included in a Unitarian sermon source, still worthy of being read today:

True and False Politeness [by F.E.W. Harper]

False politeness can cast a glamour over fashionable follies and popular vices and shrink from uttering unpalatable truths, when truth is needed more than flattery.

True politeness, tender as love and faithful as truth, values intrinsic worth more than artificial surroundings. It will stem the current of the world's disfavor, rather than float ignobly on the tide of popular favor, with the implied disrespect to our common human nature, that it is a flaccid thing to be won by sophistry, and satisfied with shams.

False politeness is an outgrowth from the surface of life. True politeness is the fair outflowing of a kind and thoughtful life, the sweet ripe fruit of a religion which gives to life its best expression and to humanity its crowning glory.

True politeness is broadly inclusive; false politeness narrowly exclusive. …

True politeness has no scornful epithets for classes or races, who, if not organically inferior, have been born under, or environed by inferior conditions. Humanity is God's child, and to fail in true kindness and respect to the least of His "little ones" is to fail in allegiance to Him.

Contemptuous injustice to man is treason to God, and one of the worst forms of infidelity is to praise Christ with our lips and trample on the least of His brethren with our feet,-to talk sweetly of His love, and embitter the lives of others by cold contempt, and cruel scorn.

Beyond the narrow limitations of social lines are humanity's broader interests…

If today you believe that your faith is simple and vision clearer than that of other forms of belief, should not the clasp of your hand be warmer, the earnestness of your soul greater, and the throbbings of your heart quicker to clasp the world in your arms and bring it nearer to the great heart of God and His Son, Our Lord Jesus Christ?