Pledge of Allegiance--to the Georgia flag

Ed Darrell took time off yesterday from his celebration of Millard Fillmore's birthday to note that "Texas has a law that specifies how a soiled or tattered Texas flag should be retired." He gives the complete story, noting that the ceremony to retire such state flags ends with the recitation of the Texas Pledge. "So far as I know," Ed says, "Texas is the only state that has a pledge of allegiance for the state flag, separate from the national Pledge of Allegiance (if you know of others, please tell!)."

All right, Ed, since you asked-- The Georgia General Assembly passed a resolution in 1935 "that that the following be adopted as the pledge of allegiance to the State flag: 'I pledge allegiance to the Georgia flag and to the principles for which it stands: Wisdom, Justice, and Moderation.'" ("Wisdom, Justice, and Moderation" is the state motto.)

A 1943 resolution added that the state pledge should "be rendered by standing with the right hand over the heart. "

In 1951, the pledge was incorporated into the state's Military Forces Reorganization Act (Section 47).

In 2005, members of the state's Senate and House of Representatives, noting that "the existence and words of the pledge of allegiance to the Georgia flag are not well known among Senators [and Representatives] or other Georgians," introduced resolutions that "urged" the General Assembly "to adopt a custom of reciting the pledge to the Georgia flag in unison at appropriate times, including but not limited to the first and last days of the General Assembly session." As far as I can tell, the resolutions were not approved--although no one can dispute that "the existence and words of the pledge of allegiance to the Georgia flag are not well known."

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Jackson Day Race

I ran and I ran and I ran and about an hour later I ended up red faced, sweaty and 9 kilometers from where I began. It was wonderful and terrible all at the same time.

The Jackson Day Race is my longest race run so far - 9 K (5.6 miles) of relatively flat road on a relatively cool morning in New Orleans. This race is run to commemorate the Battle of New Orleans on January 8th 1915, when the British invaded the city and the brave American soldiers ran the exact same route in order to defend their city and fight off their attackers.

I ran with Noel and Mira; Lea and Rachel were our loyal supporters. We finished in about 55 minutes, which is a consistent 10 minute mile. This may not be extremely fast, but our goal was to finish and finish we did!

Next up: 10 K race - "The Wall" on January 28th.

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Day 35: Test Race Number One

Yesterday Noel, Mira, Kirsten and I ran the 100th Anniversary Jackson Day Race. This is a 9K race which goes from the top of City Park, near Lake Pontchartrain, to Jackson Square in the French Quarter. The Jackson Day Race is run to commemorate The Battle of New Orleans, which was fought on January 8, 1815 as part of the War of 1812. US Troops ran the same route that we ran in order to save the City of New Orleans from British invasion.

9 K is about 5.6 miles, which is good practice for the half marathon. There is one tiny hill and a couple of hard turns, but other than that, it is pretty straight forward. We ran at a pretty steady 10 minute mile, which is about what I had hoped and we finished the race without stopping once, which is what my goal was.

At the end of the race to celebrate your victory, you get a "free" 100th Anniversary sweatshirt and lots of food and...beer. You gotta love New Orleans. Where else could you exercise and then directly afterwards get drunk?

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Millard Fillmore's birthday!

Ed Darrell, over at Millard Fillmore's Bathtub, reminds us that today is Millard Fillmore's 207th birthday. I'm ashamed to admit this, but with all the hassle of a new semester starting tomorrow, it had slipped my mind.

Ed offers a quotation "attributed to Fillmore": "May God save the country, for it is evident that the people will not." But did Fillmore actually say it? As Ed points out, we don't know. He's searching, as is Elektratig, but nothing yet.

"Attributed to" quotations can be the bane of the historian's existence--or, we can see them as fun research opportunities. (Actually, they're both.)

New technology makes searching for words and phrases much easier than it would have been just a few years ago, as I pointed out a few days ago in a posting about the word "y'all." According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the first printed occurrence of "y'all" was in 1909, but through the use of a couple of new online databases, I was able, in just a few minutes, to find the word half a century earlier, in the April 1858 issue of the Southern Literary Messenger.

We can use this same searching capability to look for quotations in the printed record. For example, one of the most famous "attributed to" Lincoln quotations is: "You can fool all the people some of the time and some of the people all of the time, but you cannot fool all the people all the time." Did Lincoln say that? It certainly sounds like Lincoln, but there are no contemporary accounts that put those words in Lincoln's mouth. In fact, the saying was not even attributed to Lincoln until 1901, in a book titled Abe Lincoln's Yarns and Stories.

At least, that what's everybody said. And then Dr. Y'all here decided to have a go at it, using those same databases, and guess what? Yep, there it was, in the New York Times, August 26, 1887, in an account of a conference of Prohibition supporters meeting in Syracuse. Fred Wheeler, one of the conference organizers, made a speech in which "he quoted most aptly Lincoln's remark that 'you can fool all the people some of the time....'" There it is, fourteen years before it should be there: a direct connection between Lincoln and the quotation.

If anyone is interested, you can read more on this in the Autumn 2005 newsletter of the Abraham Lincoln Association.

All this sounds pretty cool, but it's not nearly as big a deal as it might sound; all I did was type a few words into a search form. And I'll point out that these databases can't do everything. They allow you to search only a relatively limited number of sources, which means that there might be even earlier occurrences of "y'all" or the saying about fooling all the people. They aren't forgiving with syntax; searches generally return hits only for exact matches, so any variation in spelling or word choice can leave you with "false negatives." (A search for "fool the people" will not return an occurrence of "fool all the people.") The databases don't necessarily tell us if Lincoln ever said it; that question is still up in the air. And they're often not available unless you're asssociated with a college that has purchased a subscription.

Of course, all this doesn't help Ed in his search for the alleged Fillmore quotation.

Ed, I really wanted to give you, as a Fillmore birthday present, the source of the quotation. But I can't.

A quick search for the quotation (in several variations) in American Periodical Series, a ProQuest database that covers some 1,200 popular magazines and journals that began publishing between 1749 and 1900, shows nothing.

The New York Times: Nothing until Sept. 21, 1962, when Brooks Atkinson, in a "Critic at Large" column, attributed the quotation to Fillmore without further citation.

In Making of America, a free (yay!) database which "currently contains approximately 9,500 books and 50,000 journal articles with 19th century imprints," is a book titled Speeches in the Second and Third Sessions of the Thirty-seventh Congress, by Benjamin F. Thomas (1863). On page 185, Thomas says: "If the spirit of party cannot be subdued or chastened in the presence of our imminent peril, God save the country; for he only can." That's not the Fillmore quotation, but it's the closest I could find.

Happy Fillmore Birthday, Ed; I wish I could have done better.

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the Carnival of Georgia Bloggers

Classes start today, but my first isn't until Monday. I should be ready by then.

Meanwhile, the first edition of the Carnival of Georgia Bloggers is up. Good stuff, including a nice piece on cemeteries. Check it out! Thanks to Elementaryhistoryteacher for her good work getting this together.

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Another One Bites The Dust

And there we have it, another year down, many more to go. Strange to think that last year at this time I was in Sydney, Australia. It seems so long ago.....

This year we were silly and we went out on the 30th, one night before New Years Eve. First we went to a Japanese restaurant, had a lot of sake and then came back to my hotel for some wine and karaoke (courtesy of Mrs. Batenga). Security was finally called on us at 1 a.m. because we were still singing “Living on a Prayer” at the top of our lungs. I thought it was about 9:30, I swear! The next day I thought I would just skip New Years and stay in bed; I was so tired…

Regardless of our stupidity and thanks to the rejuvenating comfort of the W bed, our New Years was great! Not too crowded, good music, good food, "free" booze (we paid a hefty fee to go to a private party), great view of the fireworks over the Mississippi at midnight, bathrooms with no wait (yeah, that is VERY much a plus!).... All in all, it was a good time. However, Nicole decided to stay home after all and Matt ran off to Florida at the last minute to hang out with his friend and his friend's fiancée and her friend and her friend's fiancée or some sort of tangled web of pre-marital bliss...so we were a small group compared to last year.

After Pat O's we went to the Gold Digger or Gold Nugget or Gold something-or-other, which was PACKED and smelled of smoke and you had to stand at the bar for twenty minutes to get a drink, but they had good music. We hung out for a while but all the girls had high heels on and our dogs were barking so we went home around 3:30. Canal St. was A MESS, with sleazy people making out and groping all over the streets, everyone drunkity drunk drunk, passed out, slobbering, swerving, fighting and yelling. There was trash EVERYwhere. Ick. After attempting to solve a random dispute between a young Japanese girl and her white boyfriend (they came up to me and asked me to), I finally got back to the hotel and sank into my 350 thread count, pillow top, cloud-like W bed and slept until it was Slim Goodie time the next morning.

LAST YEAR STATS:
Resolutions made: 0
Regrets: 0
Months traveled: 6
Different countries visited: 12
New foods: too many to count
New friends: too many to count

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Day 32: There is No "Easy" or "Conversational" About it

Well, hip-hip-hoorah! I think I finally figured out what an “easy conversational pace” is! The first time I experienced this so called “easy” pace was when I went running with Noel. Luckily, he runs about as fast as a turtle, which I was under the impression was wrong, but because of this I found out that the old saying “don’t knock it until you try it” really is true. The turtle run is the way to go! The day I ran with him, I ran about 5 miles with no problem. We even talked! Ha-ha! Conversation! And Running! At the same time! So this is what it is like!

Unfortunately, this pleasant new discovery eluded me when I ran by myself the next day. All of the other sports that I have done in my life have trained me to be fast, to be aggressive and to go get ‘em! This makes the attempt to set an easy, steady pace a difficult thing for me. I want to win; I want to be first; I want to go fast. Unfortunately, I don’t have the stamina to go fast for more than about a minute. So I set about trying to learn to be a turtle even when Noel wasn’t there with me. Yesterday I believe I may have been onto something. I ran 4 miles without even breaking a sweat. Whew. Of course I had to talk to myself a lot to prove that I had actually accomplished the “conversation” element of the easy pace, but hey, I think I got it down!


WEEK 5: HALFWAY POINT
Miles to run this week: 19
Miles run so far: 4
Miles to run today: 7

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It's a doggy dog world

Profgrrrrl, over at Playing School, Irreverently, recently wrote on "taking it all with a grain assault," about students who hear a word or phrase but get it wrong when they try to reproduce it on the page: "grain of salt" becomes "grain assault," "dog eat dog" morphs into "doggy dog," and so on. Her readers added other examples in comments: putting women on "petal stools" (pedestals), someone looking for an "escape goat" (a scapegoat), for all "intensive purposes" (intents and purposes), and more.

I've seen "deep-seeded" for "deep-seated," I think more than once. That one almost makes sense, at least more than that escape goat.

If you like this sort of thing, check out The Eggcorn Database (for "acorn," of course), which includes: giving up the goat (ghost), chickens coming home to roast (roost), French (fringe) benefits, and 566 others. (And you can submit new ones.)

Sometimes the problem isn't mis-hearing a word, it's relying too much on spell check. I'm sure that was the problem when a student wrote a paper for me a year or so ago about the American colonists fighting against Tierney.

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Historians Are the Best Teachers

But you knew that, didn't you?

I'll admit that I'm surprised at the margin, though. Historians finished on top, 79%. English professors were a very distant second, 11%.

Exact numbers here, from eSolutions Data, "The Global Leader in Statistics and Data Research." Gaze at the chart at the top of the page for a moment before you read the fine print.

Thanks to Dr. History for the link--and the numbers.

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"175-Ton Sculpture Collapses At Kennesaw State"

A couple days ago, I mentioned the "crash" (as a colleague called it) of Spaceship Earth.

WSBTV.com has photos. Click on "slideshow" under the picture.

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