John Edwardses

Yes, "Edwardses" is the plural of "Edwards."

I thought I'd post something on John Edwards's speech at Riverside Church this afternoon (especially since I wrote a couple days ago about Martin Luther King, Jr.'s speech there in 1967), but I haven't been able to find a full transcript yet.

So I had a great idea: Why not dash off a quick piece about the various John Edwardses in history?

There's the Democratic presidential candidate, of course, and there was Jonathan Edwards, the preacher whose sermon "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God" (1741) epitomized certain aspects of the Great Awakening.... sorry, I started to sound like a teacher there, didn't I?

There was Jonathan Edwards, a singer whose anti-Establishment song "Sunshine" was a hit back when I was a kid. The song was about some man (THE MAN, I guess) who was trying to run his life. "He can't even run his own, I'll be damned if he'll run mine." Since I was a kid, the "damn" was the neatest part of the song; I was too young to be firmly anti-Establishment at the time.

And of course there's John Edward (no "s"), who talks to dead people in Crossing Over.

A fun little blog posting, I thought, but I wanted to be sure to be complete. According to Wikipedia (do NOT tell my students you heard me say that):
..........................................................

John Edwards may refer to:

Politicians

• John Edwards (born 1953), U.S. Senator from North Carolina, candidate for U.S. Vice President in 2004, candidate for U.S. President in 2008
• John Edwards (Kentucky) (1748–1837), U.S. Senator from Kentucky from 1792 to 1795
• John Edwards (Pennsylvania), Congressman from Pennsylvania from 1837 to 1842
• John C. Edwards, former Governor of Missouri
• John P. Edwards, executive director of the State Bar of Texas since 2005
• Lewis John Edwards (1904–1959), Labour Member of Parliament and junior Minister

Sports

• John Edwards (basketball) (born 1981), NBA basketball player
• Johnny Edwards (baseball player) (born 1938)
• John Edwards (cricketer) (1860–1911)

Others

• John Edwards (Technology Writer)
• John Edwards (American Civil War sailor) (born 1831), Medal of Honor recipient
• John Edwards (sailor) (1795–1893), sailor at the Battle of Trafalgar
• John H. Edwards, British medical geneticist
• John Edwards (musician), a musician of the band the Status Quo
• John Edwards (businessman), one quarter of the infamous Phoenix Four, who were involved in the MG Rover buyout
• John Edwards (academic), Sedleian Professor of Natural Philosophy 1638-1648

See also:

• Jonathan Edwards (disambiguation)
• John Edward (born 1969), psychic medium television show host
• John Edward, European Parliament representative in Scotland

[and when you disambiguate Jonathan Edwards:]

Jonathan Edwards is the name of a number of people:

• Jonathan Edwards (1703–1758), an American theologian.
• Jonathan Edwards (the younger) (1745–1801), also a theologian
• Jonathan Edwards (athlete) (born 1966), British triple jumper
• Jonathan Edwards (journalism), radio reporter
• Jonathan Edwards (music) (born 1946), American musician
• Jonathan Edwards (rugby player), Welsh rugby player
• Jonathan Edwards (comics artist), Welsh comics artist and illustrator

Jonathan Edwards may also refer to:

• Jonathan Edwards College, Yale University residential college

..........................................................

So never mind. My fun little blog posting bites the dust. It looks like every Tom, Dick, and Harry has been named John Edwards.

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The 46th History Carnival

Investigations of a Dog has just posted the 46th History Carnival, with pieces on the history of tea, Tim Abbott's grandmother (a figure in the 1934 World Disarmament Conference), and darned near everything else. Gerald Ford avoiding World War III over a tree in Korea! The origins of both human speech and drive-through banking! Coal shortages in Los Angeles! All this and more. Check it out.

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Saving Tammy's Soul

Yesterday a student reminded me of an essay I wrote a few years ago. With all that's been in the news (and on Another History Blog) lately, perhaps folks won't mind if I share the essay with a larger audience. It's a personal statement that touches on what I think are some pretty big issues.

I titled it "Saving Tammy's Soul."
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I went to Woodlief Elementary School when I was in sixth grade. Woodlief was a little farming community in piedmont North Carolina. My father was the Methodist preacher there. The people of Woodlief were conservative folks, in their politics, in their social outlook, and in their religion.

We had Bible study once a week at school. The teacher was Miss Brazil, a retired missionary. Miss Brazil conducted the class like she would Sunday School. It wasn’t “The Bible as Literature” or “Christianity in a Comparative Perspective”; the class was unapologetically evangelical, proselytizing, beginning and ending with prayer, full of the Lord’s sacrifice on the cross and the promise of God’s grace.

The son of a minister who had always preached in rural North Carolina churches, I saw nothing wrong with the class. And I liked Miss Brazil, a sweet and gentle soul.

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 Brazil came in.

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 North Carolina. I haven’t seen Tammy since, but I think of her from time to time.

I thought of her this morning, during my Georgia History class at Kennesaw State. The students and I were discussing Cherokee creation myths--how the earth was formed, the origins of suffering and disease, where the corn came from, that sort of thing.

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 Woodlief Elementary School, the one who was worried about Tammy’s soul.
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See, it wasn't Tammy's soul that needed saving ....

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I'm a library catalog card!

Everybody else is doing it....

and you can too.

Pretty perceptive comments, I think.

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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).

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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.

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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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