The 46th History Carnival
Saving Tammy's Soul
I titled it "Saving Tammy's Soul."
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I went to
We had Bible study once a week at school. The teacher was Miss
The son of a minister who had always preached in rural
Bible study was not required. Students could (with their parents’ permission, I suppose) leave the classroom and spend the hour in the library. In my class, all the students stayed, except one. Tammy was a pretty girl, smart and pleasant. I could never figure out why she left the classroom when Miss
Tammy always wore nice clothes. I didn’t know her parents. Perhaps they were professionals, maybe doctors or lawyers. I assumed they weren’t church-goers.
I wasn’t sweet on Tammy or anything like that, but I sure did hate knowing that she was going to Hell.
That was 1968. We moved away that summer, when my father was appointed to a church up in the mountains of
I thought of her this morning, during my Georgia History class at
According to Cherokee myth, the earth is an island floating in a huge sea. Hills and valleys were formed when the Great Buzzard, flying low over the earth when the ground was still soft, became tired and let his wings strike the ground. The first people were a sister and brother, who were alone until he struck her with a fish and told her to multiply. Animals developed diseases, which they aimed especially at hunters who failed to ask for pardon from the spirits of the deer they killed. Plants, more sympathetic to man, provided remedies for the diseases. And so on.
"What’s the purpose of myths?” I asked.
One student said, “To explain the inexplicable.” (She really said that. I have some sharp students.) We talked about Greek and Roman myths and how they helped people understand their place in the universe and how the world functioned--explaining the inexplicable.
Someone brought up the creation story from Genesis--Adam and Eve, the Garden of Eden, the serpent and the apple, why women now suffer in childbirth--and pointed out the similarities and differences between that and the Cherokee version of creation.
And that’s when I thought of Tammy.
The “liberal” in “liberal arts education” means “broad”--both a broad education (in the arts and humanities, rather than a narrowly focused vocational or professional education) and one that results in a more broad-minded perspective.
A liberal arts education teaches us that the people we study were the product of their time and place. In a very real and significant sense, and in ways they probably never realized, their culture dictated who they were and what they believed.
Once students understand that, I hope they take the next step and realize that the same thing applies to us: we too are the product of our time and place.
That’s a big step, and not always an easy one. The idea that we are tied to our culture just as much as were the people we study--well, it can be unsettling.
But it’s an important idea, one I wish I could go back thirty-five years and teach that boy at
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See, it wasn't Tammy's soul that needed saving ....
Paszkiewicz on Jefferson on Jesus
Back in November 2006, David A. Paszkiewicz, a high school history teacher in
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
This caught my eye, because I know
Here's what
(You can read the actual letter, in
These two sentences get exactly at
But I believe Paszkiewicz was actually quoting a different letter, one written later in which
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.
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
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
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
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
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 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
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
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.