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I'm a library catalog card!

Everybody else is doing it....

and you can too.

Pretty perceptive comments, I think.

Paszkiewicz on Jefferson on Jesus

Back in November 2006, David A. Paszkiewicz, a high school history teacher in Kearny, New Jersey, was caught on tape telling students, according to one account, "that the Christian Bible is the word of God, and that dinosaurs were aboard Noah's ark. If you do not accept Jesus, he flatly proclaimed to his class, 'you belong in hell.' Referring to a Muslim student who had been mentioned by name, he lamented what he saw as her inevitable fate should she not convert. In an attempt to promote biblical creationism, he also dismissed evolution and the Big Bang as non-scientific, arguing by contrast that the Bible is supported by what he calls confirmed biblical prophecies" (from The Lippard Blog).

The story was widely reported and discussed, but Paszkiewicz was, for the most part, quiet. This past week, however, he wrote a letter (also available here) to his local newspaper defending his actions in the classroom. In part of the letter, Paszkiewicz argues, through the use of quotations, that the Founding Fathers were Christian and sought to make this a Christian nation.

Example: Thomas Jefferson said, "I am a real Christian, that is to say, a disciple of the doctrines of Jesus." Paszkiewicz cites as the source of this quotation "Letter to Benjamin Rush April 21, 1803."

This caught my eye, because I know Jefferson's 4/21/03 letter to Rush, and this isn't it.

Here's what Jefferson wrote: "To the corruptions of Christianity I am indeed opposed; but not to the genuine precepts of Jesus himself. I am a Christian in the only sense in which he wished any one to be; sincerely attached to his doctrines, in preference to all others; ascribing to himself every human excellence; & believing he never claimed any other."

(You can read the actual letter, in Jefferson's own handwriting, here; scroll down just a bit to "Jefferson's Opinion of Jesus" and click on the accompanying image.)

These two sentences get exactly at Jefferson's thinking on Christianity and Jesus: Jesus was a great teacher, and his words provide a good ethical guide; Jesus never claimed to be anything but human; and organized Christianity, by ascribing divinity to Jesus, has corrupted what Jesus was all about. It's simple and straightforward. But if you pull out just a few of those words--"I am a Christian"--you can easily get a very different impression of Jefferson.

But I believe Paszkiewicz was actually quoting a different letter, one written later in which Jefferson discussed the cut-and-paste job he had done on the New Testament, tossing out all the supernatural miracles that he couldn't accept and saving Jesus' ethical teachings. "It is a document," Jefferson said, "in proof that I am a real Christian, that is to say, a disciple of the doctrines of Jesus." Again, by pulling out a few words and ignoring the context, the quotation can be used to show something Jefferson never intended.

I wonder if Paszkiewicz is aware of all this. Classroom proselytizing is bad enough; I hope he's not also teaching his students that it's all right to take someone's words out of context to prove a point.

Thanks to PZ at Pharyngula for the inspiration.

UPDATES:


Alison, at Alison Blogs Here (where else?), has an interesting take the Paszkiewicz affair.

A posting by People for the American Way suggests that
Paszkiewicz got his quotations from David Barton, who is well-known for misquoting, pulling words out of context, etc. I suspected as much--Paszkiewicz's letter had Barton written all over it--but I didn't take time to track it down.

UPDATE (2):

Ed Brayton, at Dispatches from the Culture Wars, has the most thorough analysis. Thanks to Jim Lippard for the tip (in comments).

Martin Luther King, Jr.: Saving the Soul of America

This weekend, we pause to remember and honor Martin Luther King, Jr.

We remember his determination to make Americans understand the injustice of racial discrimination. We remember the marches he led--and we remember the police dogs, the fire hoses, the beatings.

We remember his “I Have Dream” speech, one of the great treasures of American oratory: “I have a dream that one day, on the red hills of Georgia, the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slaveowners will be able to sit down together at a table of brotherhood."

But probably not one American in a hundred will remember another speech he made, exactly one year before he was assassinated. And that’s a shame, because the other speech shows that we have even more reason to honor King.

On its face, the speech he delivered at Riverside Church in New York City on April 4, 1967, was simply an eloquent plea against the war in Vietnam. King had won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1964 for his work in the civil rights movement; now he expanded his work for peace by speaking out against the Vietnam War.

King explained that part of his opposition to the war rose from his growing concern with poverty in America. There had been a time in the early 1960s, he said, when poverty programs offered “a real promise of hope for the poor, both black and white.” But King saw that hope dwindle as “Vietnam continued to draw men and skills and money like some demonic destructive suction tube."

He opposed the war also because of the racial contradictions he saw: “We have been repeatedly faced with the cruel irony of watching Negro and white boys on TV screens as they kill and die together for a nation that has been unable to seat them together in the same schools. We watch them in brutal solidarity burning the huts of a poor village, but we realize that they would never live on the same block in Detroit."

He oposed the war because of connections he saw between the militancy of the Black Power movement and American actions in Southeast Asia. He could not condemn violence in the ghettos, he said, “without having first spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today: my own government."

But most important, he opposed the war because of the motto he and others had chosen for the Southern Christian Leadership Conference in 1957: “To save the soul of America.” For King, America’s soul was endangered not just by racism, but by poverty, greed, and the quest for international dominance and military glory. “We as a nation must undergo a radical revolution of values,” he said. “We must rapidly begin the shift from a ‘thing-oriented’ society to a ‘person-oriented’ society. When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered."

A year or so later, other Americans would begin to catch up with King’s anti-war sentiments. But in the spring of 1967, most didn’t welcome his outspoken opposition (King was one of the first prominent Americans to speak out). Life magazine labeled the speech a “demagogic slander that sounded like a script for Radio Hanoi.” But it was “time to break silence,” King said; he could be still no more on this matter.

With the Riverside Church speech, the civil rights leader moved beyond concerns of racial injustice. But the speech is more than just an outcry against the war. When King spoke of “the giant triplets of racism, materialism, and militarism,” he got at the very core of the American character; when he said we need to shift from a “thing-oriented” to a “person-oriented society,” he offered a broad critique of what American society had become in the middle third of the twentieth century.

For King, saving the soul of America meant not just freeing African Americans from the bondage of segregation; it also meant freeing the nation from the bondage of avarice, poverty, and what he called “the deadly Western arrogance that has poisoned the international atmosphere for so long."

King’s death silenced a voice that had been so effective in the area of civil rights, and then for a brief moment promised to address even larger problems as he sought “to save the soul of America."

Note: This piece first appeared as a column in the Cartersville Daily Tribune News and other newspapers in January 2002.

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."

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.

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?

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.

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.

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

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