Monthly Archives: April 2022

The current state ofmilitaryhistory was the focus of theannual PritzkerMilitaryMuseum & Librarys On WarMilitaryHistory Symposium held March 31 and April 1 in Chicago.

Three panel discussions highlighted the second day of the summit, which was held in person and virtually.

During the final presentation, panelists addressed the challenges of documenting the history of the current Global War on Terrorism. The session, entitled Lessons to be Learned: Writing theMilitaryHistory of the Post-Cold War Period,covered how different audiences such as academics andmilitaryprofessionals use these histories.

Historians face multiple challenges include finding sources, achieving objectivity and conducting interviews.

Among the panelists was Daniel Marston,director of the Secretary of Defense Strategic Thinkers Program and professor of international studies at Johns Hopkins University. Marston did his PhD on the British 14th Armys Burma campaign. He conducted about 120 interviews with veterans in Pakistan and the United Kingdom, then matched those interviews with historical records.

We are truly at phase one with understanding the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, Marston said. But we are also going to be at a loss with the sources. We know the military relies now on PowerPoint. The war diaries that previous historians from Vietnam and going back used to match other records were missing a lot of that, which is a problem. How will we be really able to identify where the conflicts were? The decision-making is an issue as we know. Is it going to be peoples opinions versus the actual record that has to be unpacked?

Anthony Carlson, an associate professor of history at the U.S. Army School of AdvancedMilitaryStudies, pointed out a challenge he refers to as the invisibility of the adversary.

For example, Carlson cited the task in accurately documenting the history of what occurred during the war in Afghanistan without the perspective of the Afghans.

I dont know what the strategic aim of the Afghanistan military was or how they organized themselves at an unclassified level, he said. I can tease out an understanding of what their tactics were based on oral history interviews with American soldiers. But its difficult to get into and understand their intentionality.

Carlson noted the time it takes to be able to properly document history.

But its also one of the strengths of the discipline, he said. History can inform our judgment. It wont enable us to predict the future. It wont enable us to avoid war in the future. But history is the study of continuity and contingencies over long periods of time. And when you are able to do that, you are able to have a mind that looks at situations from multiple perspectives and develop some sort of empathy about how others who dont see the world like you understand time and space as they unfold.

An earlier session, Violence, Atrocity, and the Restraint in War, addressed topics related to the extent of violence employed by armed forces, how incidents of atrocity are treated and the contexts in which they occurred.

Panelist John Morrow, a professor of history at the University of Georgia, explained how the current invasion of Ukraine can be traced back centuries. The Chechens originally lived in Ukraine until Josef Stalin moved them east into Central Asia, he said.

The next thing you know, in the 20th century, (Vladimir) Putin is fighting a war in Chechnya and levels the city of Grozny as an example to them. There are historical antecedents between the Russians and the Ukrainians that go all the way back to the early history of the Middle Ages, he said.

The first session, Museums and Memorialization, featured a panel discussion that explored the roles museums play in the commemoration ofmilitaryservice and how they are impacted by popular and academic understandings ofmilitaryhistory.

Panelist Tammy Call is the director of the National Museum of the U. S. Army at Fort Belvoir, Va. The museum opened for 34 days in November 2020 before being closed due to the pandemic. It re-opened on the Armys birthday in 2021.

The museum tells the story of the Army through the eyes of the American soldier through all eras, and explore the symbiotic relationship between the soldier and society, she said.

Call was quick to point out the role of the museum.

We are not a memorial, we are a museum, she said. However, we have aspects of memorialization that any museum does. The campaign streamers, the campaign wall, certain items or artifacts that tell a certain story.

There are plans for the public-private funded museum for a memorial area outside and will host such remembrances. But its main focus will be to document the stories of soldiers.

Diversity is reflected throughout the museum, such as women who served and minorities, she said. We hope to serve as a repository for those precious stories.

Matthew C. Naylor is president and chief executive officer of the 47-acre National World War I Museum and Memoria in Kansas City. The museum does incorporate remembrances into its offerings.

Many people have an emotional connection to the site, he said. Whether they are there at 2 oclock at night or running the stairs at 6 a.m., people use it for memorializing in many ways.

To that end, the museum has added seven events called Taps at the Tower. These are brief remembrance services held as the sun sets during the summer.

The objective here is to allow people and introduce their families to the idea of memorializing when they dont have to give a two-hour commitment on Memorial Day, Naylor said. We do it to allow people to access the idea of memory and allow them to talk about the values of service, sacrifice.

See the article here:

Documenting the Global War on Terrorism for history - The American Legion

For over a decade, Jeffery Robinson has been telling an unvarnished history of the United States in an ever-evolving lecture presentation. His talks, now presented as part of his organization, the Who We Are Project, delve into how racism against Black people was bound up with the countrys legacy since its founding. The new documentary, Who We Are: A Chronicle of Racism in America, captures Robinsons eye-opening account (filmed at Town Hall in New York City) and intersperses interviews with civil rights figures and others from his travels across the country.

The film, directed by Emily and Sarah Kunstler, joins a lineage of documentaries that excavate race and the histories of marginalized people in America, like Raoul Pecks I Am Not Your Negro and Ava DuVernays 13th.

This is not Eyes on the Prize, Robinson said of the new movie, which is available on major digital platforms. But I think it is a call to us being something radically different going forward.

Reviewing Who We Are for The Times, Ben Kenigsberg made it a Critics Pick and wrote, Its a confrontational film, but never an alienating one.

Robinson, a criminal defense lawyer by profession, was the director of the A.C.L.U.s Trone Center for Justice and Equality in New York, and he remembers walking past the former Cotton Exchange on the way to work. I spoke with him and the Kunstlers (whose last feature, William Kunstler: Disturbing the Universe, was about their father, the civil rights attorney). These are excerpts from our interview.

Who We Are partly aims to chart the role of white supremacy in U.S. history. How did you approach that?

JEFFERY ROBINSON I say it as a rhetorical question in the film: What if I said America was founded on white supremacy? Somebody might say, Jeff, thats really extreme. But when you read the words of the people that founded our country and see what they did, I think its an inescapable conclusion. Some people have said the Constitution was a compromise between those who wanted slavery and those who didnt want slavery. This compromise protected the institution of slavery, gave the South extra congressional representatives and Electoral College votes to protect the institution of slavery, and made Black attempts to be free unconstitutional. It was unconstitutional for me to try and get away from my owner!

SARAH KUNSTLER And they accomplished all of that without using the word slavery. We have a history of hiding what we mean as a country. When we enact laws preserving and maintaining white supremacy, we dont actually say what it is that were doing.

ROBINSON There is no way you can associate white supremacy with a law that says you cannot change the name of iconic monuments in the state of Alabama until you understand that these are all monuments to slavery, essentially, and to people that enslaved people.

The film also uncovers the details of lived Black experience: for example, the fingerprints that enslaved builders left behind on walls they made.

EMILY KUNSTLER The facts in the abstract dont mean anything if you cant connect them to actual human experience. Those fingerprints are one example of a monument to a history of lived experience of enslaved Black people in Charleston, S.C., and in fact, all over this country, that despite the best efforts to erase them, persist. The same way the foundations for the houses in Tulsa, Okla., [site of the 1921 massacre], still exist where the homes were never rebuilt.

ROBINSON There was a moment when we were talking with Mother Randle [a survivor of the Tulsa massacre] and she was saying, There was a pile of bodies. There was just a chill that went up and down my spine this woman over 100 years old going back to that memory in her life.

Jeffery, how did it feel to share your, and your familys, experiences of racism, like the school basketball game where the hosts didnt want you to play?

ROBINSON We went to Dr. Tiffany Crutcher and asked her to talk about her feelings about her brother being killed on live television, practically, by the Tulsa police [in 2016]. And it felt like, All right, I should share something. Dick [a basketball coach who stuck up for Robinson] was 21 years old at the time this incident happened in Walls, Miss. This is just several years after civil rights workers got disappeared and murdered in Mississippi. Where he got the courage to handle that the way he did, I just dont know. But it was clear that if I didnt play, we were all leaving. And he wasnt going to put that on me at 12 years old. I think he saw me as essentially his younger brother.

Could you talk about including the conversation about slavery with a man you encountered at a Confederate statue who represented Flags Across the South, the pro-Confederate flag group?

EMILY KUNSTLER I felt like it encompassed the thesis of the film. I asked Jeff, Do you think that that gentleman could be reached? And Jeff said, I dont know if he can be reached, but I know that if nobody tries, he certainly wont be. Theres value in making the effort, theres value in laying out the facts and continuing to do so. We cant be frightened into silence by people who think differently, speak very loudly, and come out in force and wave Confederate flags.

ROBINSON The conversation didnt go the way he perhaps thought it was going to go in terms of me getting angry at him or something. Theres a little twitch in his face as we were leaving, and I think we at least made some wheels turn in his head.

How does the movie relate to the controversy around laws banning the teaching of certain American history?

ROBINSON The first time we met in person to talk about this [movie] was June 20, 2017. No one was even talking about CRT [Critical Race Theory] back then. It would have been like, What is that, a breakfast cereal or something? So this was not done in response to those laws. But those laws coming up can tell you how afraid people are of the information thats in this film.

This goes to the concept of the minds of the rising generation. All the way back in 1837, John C. Calhoun, one of the most virulent racists in American history, was saying that we cant teach children in school about the abolition of slavery, because if we teach that, slavery is done for. The day before the [Trump] administration left office, they put out something called The 1776 Report that talked about a return to patriotic education, and they use the exact same quote that John C. Calhoun did: the minds of the rising generation.

SARAH KUNSTLER Before there were anti-CRT laws, there were textbook wars. So theres an unending battle of what and how much our children are taught in school about our nations history. One of the most compelling things about Jeffs talk is that he goes back to primary sources. You dont need to just learn it in school. You can seek it out for yourself.

Read the rest here:

Using Film to Tell a Personal History of America and Race - The New York Times

Photos courtesy of History Colorado, DenverCulture

From Blinky the Clown to bongs to statement headwear, these items reflect the ever-shifting diversity of Colorado.

Its been a decade since the Colorado History Museum, the states pre-eminent repository of the past, became the History Colorado Center, a rebranding officially capped off with the opening of the nonprofits giant, $111 million center on Broadway in Denver. Another significant part of the organizations transformation was a renewed focus on fleshing out its permanent collection to better reflect the states diversity. To that end, History Colorado has accepted some 1,201 donations since April 2012. Here are some of the most remarkable additions.

Blinky the Clownaka Russell Scottentertained and educated on the local Blinkys Fun Club show wearing his trademark tartan blazer for more than 40 years, making him TVs longest-running clown.

Along with used tear gas grenades, rubber bullets, and spray paint canisters, History Colorado staff collected posters after the first Denver demonstration against the murder of George Floyd.

Pink beanies became a symbol of 2017s Womens March on Denver after thousands of people wore handmade versions as part of a protest against the presidential election of Donald Trump, who infamously used the term pussy in an offensive manner during an Access Hollywood taping in 2005. The nationwide demonstrations were some of the largest in the countrys history.

Its likely most Coloradans have already seen this artifact: Governor Jared Polis wore it often during the early days of the pandemic, including at the April 2020 press conference where he first urged all Coloradans to wear masks when outside of home.

History Colorado owns blueprints drafted by Colorados first licensed Black architect, John Henderson, who designed Denvers Byron Rogers Federal Building and his own midcentury modern home in Skyland, which was designated a local historical landmark in 2018.

The papers of Linda Fowler, a champion of womens and LGBTQ rights and one of the plaintiffs in Romer v. Evans, reside in History Colorados collection. The lawsuit challenged Amendment 2, a 1992 voter initiative that banned anti-discrimination laws for gay people and earned Colorado the moniker the hate state. The U.S. Supreme Court struck the amendment down as unconstitutional.

This water bong was one of only 30 made by now-defunct Heady Glass Studios to commemorate the 2014 Denver County Fairs Pot Pavilion, erected less than a month after the state legalized the sale of recreational cannabis.

This article appeared in the April 2022 issue of 5280.

Nicholas writes and edits the Compass, Adventure, and Culture sections of 5280 and writes for 5280.com.

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The Coolest Artifacts History Colorado Has Collected Over the Past 10 Years - 5280 - 5280 | The Denver Magazine

John Gurda| Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

Where do you get all that stuff?, Im sometimes asked. Particularly after a talk, some interested (or skeptical) member of the audience will come up and inquire how I knew that Allis-Chalmers had 24,862 employees at the peak of war production in 1943, including 434 Black workers. Or where I learned that in 1886 the champion brewery hand at Schlitz could down 100 short glasses of beer every day nearly a case and a half at a time when free beer (on the job!) was a coveted fringe benefit. Or that Emil Seidel, Milwaukees first Socialist mayor, once summed up his partys platform as clean fun, music, dance, song and joy for all.

The answer, of course, is research the process of finding salient facts, corroborating them with other data, and coming to informed conclusionsor sometimes just stumbling on cool things to share.

Ive always enjoyed research more than writing. It feels to me like gathering pieces of a puzzle whose exact dimensions and precise subject are largely unknown. Once those pieces are spread out before me, or at least safely in my laptop, I find the process of assembling them into a coherent whole that will attract and hold someones attention writing, in other words much harder. But, as more than one author has said, I love having written.

Given the wealth of historical resources in our community, the real problem is knowing when to stop. Those resources are there for everyone to use. Most of what I know practically all of it, in fact has been gleaned from materials readily available online or in local archives. Although Ive never written a how-to column in the 28 years Ive occupied this space, Id like to share a handful of my favorites, a trio of resources that are easy to find, easy to use, and quite possibly addictive.

At the top of my list in recent years are historical newspaper databases, two in particular. The 19th-Century Newspapers Database is a national resource with an especially strong Milwaukee presence. The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel Historical and Current Database is entirely local but has a broader chronological span. Both resources are fully searchable by keyword, and searches can by narrowed by date, newspaper section, and article type.

The results can be astounding. When I was working on a history of the local Jewish community for the Jewish Museum Milwaukee in 2008, I entered the keyword Jewish on the 19th-Century Database and got over 5,000 hits. I dutifully scrolled through every one of them and unearthed gems that probably hadnt been seen since the day they were published. The highlights included an 1882 account of assimilated German Jews housing their strictly observant Russian brethren in temporary quarters just after they immigrated to Milwaukee and then calling in barbers to relieve the males of their barbarous superfluity of hair. One Orthodox immigrant resisted so strenuously that a policeman was summoned to make him cooperate.

If youve always been curious about that saloonkeeper ancestor of yours or wanted an eyewitness account of the 1892 fire that leveled much of the Third Ward, the newspaper databases are for you. And how do you access them? As always, your library card is your key to untold riches. My Milwaukee Public Library website is a portal to both databases; check with your local system if you live outside Milwaukee County.

Maps are another indispensable research resource. My terminal degree is in geography, not history, and maps are the quintessential geographers tool. Fire insurance atlases are particularly helpful for studying urban history. Rather than paying inspectors to compile risk reports on individual buildings, the insurance companies found it cheaper to create multi-volume atlases that included all of them: every structure on every lot on every block in a particular city, along with information about construction materials, types (and frequently names) of businesses, and the location of the nearest fire hydrants. These Sanborn maps, as they are usually called, are analog prototypes of Google Earth. With a little imagination, you can practically walk through your old neighborhood or the vanished neighborhoods of your ancestors.

I find it most efficient to use the original atlases at the Central Library, where they are on open shelves, or at the County Historical Society. (Handling the massive volumes could almost qualify as aerobic exercise.) If you prefer to do your research at home, online versions of the 1894 and 1910 Sanborn series are available through the Wisconsin Historical Society, the UW-Milwaukee Libraries, or the Milwaukee Public Library. You might find it helpful to start at mpl.org/local_history/maps_atlases.php.

City directories contain a different type of information. Beginning in 1847, just one year after Milwaukee incorporated, and continuing to the present, private companies have published annual directories that list every adult male (women appeared only as spouses or widows for many years), every business, and every institution in the city. The individual listings include home addresses and usually occupations, and a classified directory in the back of each book is organized by business and profession. (Want to know how many euphemistically named soft drink parlors Milwaukee had in 1922, near the midpoint of Prohibition? A total of 1,358.)

An extremely useful feature was added in 1921: a reverse directory of streets listing every occupant of every address in the city. You can compile the names of all the residents of a given area and then, if you like, cross-reference them by occupation. For a 2019 column, I used the 1925 city directory to identify every occupant inside the two-block footprint of Fiserv Forum. The tally included seven soft drink parlors, sixrestaurants, threereal estate offices, two leather stores, twomachine shops, two auto repair shops, a horseshoer, a tea shop, a plumber, a printer, a shirt manufacturer, a clothes presser, a carpet cleaner, a billiard hall, an undertaker, a junk dealer, 103 households, and, at what is now center court, the Ambrosia Chocolate plant.

Although you can find selected city directory listings on Ancestry.com, the full series is currently available only on microfilm or microfiche at the Central Library or in hard copy at the Central Library or the County Historical Society. The publishers didnt waste money on expensive paper in most years; the older copies are slowly dissolving into piles of yellowed crumbs.

Newspaper databases, Sanborn maps, and city directories are obviously only three bright stars in a vast constellation of local history resources. There are innumerable others. Want quick but incisive information on nearly 700 Milwaukee history topics? Try UWMs online Encyclopedia of Milwaukee. Interested in a visual record of Milwaukees marine history? Google Milwaukee Waterways, a Milwaukee Public Library collection. Want to learn more about the local civil rights movement? UWMs March on Milwaukee is a great database. How about brewing history or the Socialist movement? The Milwaukee County Historical Society has excellent materials on both.

Although the balance is shifting to the digital side, local history research will be a hybrid of online and in-person study for the foreseeable future. Digital materials have the enormous advantage of being pandemic-proof. I still find it hard to believe that I spent more than a year without seeing the inside of a library, probably the longest stretch since I was an infant. During the worst of the shutdowns, when I was feeling like an orphan, online resources were a godsend.

But I think Ill always have a preference for in-person research. Not only do I love the smell, the atmosphere, and the silent camaraderie of libraries, but Im also a firm believer in adjacencies; browsing is most productive when all the materials you need are in one place and close at hand. Milwaukee has two excellent and indispensable historical archives: the Frank P. Zeidler Humanities Room on the second floor of the Central Library, 814 W. Wisconsin Ave.; and the research library of the Milwaukee County Historical Society, 910 N. Martin Luther King Drive. Both are open again, thank goodness, but their hours are still limited; check online for details.

Whether youre a student, a genealogist, an armchair historian, or a budding professional, unearthing new facts and developing new insights about the history of our community is a delight like no other. There are countless trails to follow. As you blaze your own, happy hunting!

John Gurda writes a column on local history for the Ideas Lab on the first Sunday of every month. Email:mail@johngurda.com

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Tools of the trade: Researching Wisconsin, local history is easy once you know where to look - Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

Margaret M. McGowan, a British cultural historian who created a new international area of academic study, now known as early dance, and received national honors in both Britain and France, died on March 16 in Brighton, England. She was 90.

Her death, in a hospital, was confirmed by her husband, Sydney Anglo, a fellow Renaissance historian. He said the cause was bladder cancer.

Professor McGowan, who was bilingual, exposed the collision of politics, ballet, design and music at the French court of the late Renaissance and early Baroque era in her first book, published in French in 1963, LArt du Ballet de Cour en France, 1581-1643. In that book, she analyzed the spectacular mixed-media genre in which kings and members of royal and aristocratic families performed in public. Her interdisciplinary approach, hailed by her fellow dance historian Richard Ralph as precociously modern, enlarged the field of dance history. Her devotion to research was lifelong and diverse.

Her scholarly work reached beyond Europe. Linda Tomko, a dance historian at the University of California, Riverside, wrote in an email, Margaret McGowans research on dance and spectacle in France, of the early to mid-17th century, vividly explored dancings connection to operations of power, modeling a research question that has since gained wide adoption in U.S. scholarly dance studies, and abroad.

In 1998, Professor McGowan was honored in Britain with the title Commander of the Order of the British Empire; in 2020, she was made a Chevalier de lOrdre des Arts et des Lettres in France.

Margaret Mary McGowan was born on Dec. 21, 1931, in Deeping St. James, Lincolnshire, England. Although she could have studied French at the prestigious University of Oxford, she chose instead to do so at the University of Reading because Reading, unlike Oxford, would give her a year in France.

She remained in France to teach at the University of Strasbourg from 1955 to 1957, after which she took a position at the University of Glasgow, where she taught until 1964. She undertook postgraduate studies at the prestigious Warburg Institute, which is globally renowned as a center for the study of the interaction of ideas, images and society across international history.

Her topic was the ballet de cour at the courts of the French kings Henri III, Henri IV and Louis XIII; her adviser was the eminent Renaissance historian Frances Yates. The inspiration she derived from both the Warburg and Ms. Yates became a source of lifelong loyalty.

Speaking in 2020, Professor McGowan recalled Ms. Yatess guidance in her work on the ballet de cour. Ms. Yates realized that the material on which I was working had not before been considered in an interdisciplinary way, she said. Musicologists had explored the vocal music, art historians had begun to find drawings belonging to festivals, and literary scholars had recognized the importance of the court context for understanding lyric poems. Ms. Yates, the pioneering French scholar Jean Jacquot and Mr. Jacquots colleagues at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique all guided Professor McGowan in her endeavor to join those artistic elements in a larger European context.

The importance of Professor McGowans 1963 book on the ballet de cour was recognized by scholars in France, Britain, the United States and elsewhere. She joined the staff of the University of Sussex in 1964 and rose to deputy vice chancellor in 1992. She held that position until 1998, a year after retiring as a professor.

In 1964 she married Professor Anglo, who specialized in the parallel area of Tudor tournaments, and whom she had met while they were both students of Ms. Yatess at Warburg.

In an interview, Professor Anglo spoke of his wife with intense, affectionate and wry admiration: She was 75 percent of our marriage. I was 25 percent. (Writing two days later, he gave himself a lower percentage than that.)

Professor McGowan edited several books that brought together the latest work of a range of colleagues. One of those colleagues, Margaret Shewring of the University of Warwick, observed in an email that Professor McGowans retirement from university duties had brought new riches by allowing her to pursue many new lines of investigation.

Some of her books were primarily concerned with the literature of the French Renaissance: the poet Pierre de Ronsard, the essayist Michel de Montaigne. But she remained true to the interdisciplinary nature of the Renaissance itself.

Introducing her Ideal Forms in the Age of Ronsard (1985), she observed the pervasive importance of praise to Renaissance thought, as the dominant mode in public life, in literature and in art. She went on to put Ronsards verse into the complex context of the mid-16th-century reigns of the Valois monarchs. With The Vision of Rome in the French Renaissance (2000), she examined the vital significance of classical ruins to Renaissance Rome and, in turn, the importance of Rome to French culture.

Her Dance in the Renaissance: European Fashion, French Obsession (2008) won the Wolfson History Prize, given annually to a British subject for excellence in the writing of history; four years later, she published a companion volume in French, concentrating on source materials.

Catherine Turocy, artistic director of the New York Baroque Dance Company, wrote in an email that Dance in the Renaissance was a detailed analysis of 16th-century society and how dance was at the center of philosophical and aesthetic thought feeding current politics, and that she had been inspired and guided by Professor McGowans insights, passionate views and new research.

Her three final books showed the breadth of her understanding of the Renaissance. Festival and Violence: Princely Entries in the Content of War, 1480-1635 (2019) connected public performance to military politics. Charles V, Prince Philip, and the Politics of Succession (2020) addressed the dynastic politics of the Habsburg emperor Charles Vs use of spectacular festivities as propaganda in imposing the future king Philip II on the Low Countries. Her final book, completed just three weeks before her death, is yet to be published: Its title, Harmony in the Universe: Spectacle and the Quest for Peace in the Early Modern Period, indicates the characteristic scope of her historical vision.

Loyal to the Warburg Institute, Professor McGowan was chairwoman of its Review in 2006 and 2007. From 2011 to 2014, when she was in her 80s, she spearheaded the institutes case for independence from the University of London, taking it to the British high court with eventual success.

In addition to her husband, she is survived by a sister, Sheila.

Professor McGowan in 1993 was made a fellow of the British Academy, the national academy for the humanities and social sciences. In 2007 the British journal Dance Research, where she had been assistant editor for 25 years, honored her with a special Festschrift issue, hailing her as Pioneer of Academic Dance Research.

Read more from the original source:

Margaret M. McGowan, Who Expanded the Field of Dance History, Dies at 90 - The New York Times

It wasnt just an ordinary department visit for American Legion National Commander Paul E. Dillard April 1. The former petty officer and Vietnam War veteran toured the oldest commissioned ship in the U.S. Navy, the USS Constitution, during his visit to the Department of Massachusetts.

Its amazing, Dillard said. Ive read about the ship but going on board and seeing how the sailors lived back then, along with the gun power of the Constitution, is mindboggling.

Dillard and American Legion Auxiliary National President Kathy Daudistel led a delegation of prominent Massachusetts American Legion Family members during a morning visit to Old Ironsides, and the adjacent USS Constitution Museum, in Bostons Charlestown district.

Launched in 1797, the three-masted wooden-hulled frigate is the worlds oldest ship that is still afloat.

Shes still sea-worthy, said Lance Garrison, who guided the tour. Though the ship is towed when it makes about seven short trips each year to sea, the tugging is a cautionary measure to preserve the historical floating monument to early Navy history.

Navy Commander Billie J. Farrell added to the Constitutions illustrious history in January by becoming the first woman to captain the 225-year-old ship. Every sailor is interviewed and hand-selected to come here, she said of her 80-member crew. I can honestly say that I have the best sailors in the U.S. Navy today.

She was also recruited by Dillard as the newest member of American Legion J.W. Conway Bunker Hill Post 26 in Charlestown. She was complimented an additional American Legion Auxiliary membership courtesy of Daudistel.

Past National Commander Jake Comer pointed out that The American Legion supported an initiative for Massachusetts school children to donate their penny collections toward the refurbishment of the Constitution in the 1990s. The pennies added up to a significant amount, according to Comer.

If the national commander didnt visit the Constitution, it wouldnt have been worth having him to come to Massachusetts, Comer added. Were very proud of this ship. Hes a Navy veteran and to walk in to the Constitution is like walking in to history.

Originally posted here:

'Walking into history,' Dillard tours USS Constitution | The American Legion - The American Legion

GLOVERSVILLE When the Gloversville Public Library reopened in 2018 following a $9.1 million renovation, the contents of the Local History Room still sat in boxes.

To prepare for the construction phase of the renovation, the contents of the room had to be packed away, and once the library reopened, the staff had to get used to operating a facility with three times the public space, said Christine Pesses, a Gloversville Public Library Board Trustee.

We were understaffed and just trying to figure out this much larger facility. When you go from one floor with public access to three and a half floors, its a big change, Pesses said. The Local History Room really had to wait.

On Saturday, the wait is over. The new Local History Room is now open after volunteersguided by professional state archivistsspent the last six months organizing the extensive collection to get it ready once again for public use.

The opening of the Local History Room marks one of the final chapters in the decade-long renovation project, which was paid for through a combination of grants and private donations.

On Friday, library leaders, community members, politicians, state officials and others celebrated the opening of the Local History Room as well as the librarys prestigious 2021 New York State Preservation Award. One of just 10 recipients to be bestowed with the honor last year, the award recognizes the library for excellence in historic rehabilitation for the recently completed work transforming the 1904 Carnegie library.

One hundred and eighteen years after construction, this library and your diligent and long-serving efforts are being recognized for an excellence in historic rehabilitationwork that has rehabilitated, transformed and modernized this library with full respect for its historic character, said Daniel Mackay, New York State deputy commissioner for Historic Preservation.

The renovation included everything from the addition of an elevator, structural supports and air conditioning to finishing the once dank basement to outfitting the Carnegie Room with tools for those with hearing differences.

Thats a big task. You have honored this building. You have stewarded this building as well as the library mission so effectively, and I think the agency recognized the effort and the obligation that you felt to honor and recommit to the 1904 gift from Andrew Carnegie, Mackay said during Fridays ceremony.

Of the nearly 1,700 libraries that Carnegie funded in the U.S. between 1883 and 1929, 106 were in New York state, including the libraries in Gloversville and Johnstown, Mackay said.

The Gloversville librarys Local History Room, which can be visited on Saturdays and by appointment on Tuesdays and Thursdaysis a treasure trove of materials pertinent to the history of Gloversville, Fulton County, the Mohawk Valley and the Capital District. It contains documents ranging from Fulton County cemetery records, Gloversville High School yearbooks and local newspapers on microfilm to old atlases of the Mohawk Valley and genealogy resources.

The room is of personal importance to Thomas Ruller, State Archivist at the New York State Department of Education.

A Gloversville native, Ruller first visited the Gloversville library as a first grader in 1970. He still remembers the book he checked out Katy and the Big Snow.

Throughout his life, the library played a central role, with the former Local History Room taking on added significance. Even as a teenager looking at old documents in the room, it was not lost on him that if, say, the writing on a tombstone had eroded, the only records of someones life were in files he could find inside the Local History Room. He said his time spent in that room and in the library itself paved the way toward his career as an archivist.

So when he found out that members of the state archivist team that he now leads would be helping advise the reopening of Gloversvilles Local History Room, he was tickledeven after his team texted a photo of him that they found in his old high school yearbook.

Its making the connection from where you were to where you are, Ruller said.

The opening of the new Local History Room helps ensure the story continues, Ruller said.

Having the Local History Room reopened means that researchers will now be able to explore these resources, add to them and make sure that the story of Gloversville can continue to be told, Ruller said.

Several speakers and audience members spoke generally about the importance of libraries and specifically about the importance of the Gloversville library.

Gloversville Mayor Vincent DeSantis said hes been coming to the library since he was a kid, when the tradition was to spend Saturdays picking out books before heading to the YMCA.

But the mayor said its only been within the past few years that hes recognized the full scope of what the library means to other people. Thats because DeSantis said a lot of new faces have moved to Gloversville over that period, and part of the introductory process is that the mayor hand delivers welcome packets and chats with new residents.

I ask, What brought you to Gloversville? DeSantis said during Fridays ceremony. And a significant number say, I saw the beautiful library, and I knew this was a place where I wanted to live.

Andrew Waite can be reached at [emailprotected] and at 518-417-9338. Follow him on Twitter @UpstateWaite.

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Opening of Local History Room closes the book on Gloversville library's historic renovation - The Gloversville Leader Herald - Gloversville...

This week president Joe Biden signed the historic Emmit Till Anti-Lynching Act.

The legislation has failed multiple times throughout the past century. The bill now acknowledges lynching as a federal hate crime and is punishable for up to 30 years in prison.

Dr. Lynn Greenwood Associate Professor of Criminal Justice at Texas A&M Central Texas said, "Hate crime legislation, in general, has been relatively easy to pass but because we don't really think of lynching as a modern type of crime.

I think that's part of the reason it's been more difficult to pass anti-lynching laws because it's directed towards a very specific type of behavior versus just hate crimes in general."

Here at home one organization has been working to acknowledge one of Waco's darkest moments.

In 1916, Jesse Washington was accused of raping and killing a white woman, Lucy Fryer, in Robinson. She was the wife of a farmer he worked for.

Fryer was found bludgeoned to death inside her home.

Washington was arrested and put on trial. Harrison said the all-white jury deliberated for just four minutes before finding Washington guilty. Quickly after the verdict, an angry mob rushed into the courthouse, seized the man, and pushed him in front of city hall.

Nearly 15,000 people gathered around, watching and cheering as the mob burned Washington alive. They, then, dragged him through the streets of Waco and black neighborhoods.

Washington's story has resonated with many in the Waco community including Jo Welter the Chair of the Board of Directors with Community Race Relations Coalition Waco.

Welter said, "Were very much a heart-to-heart organization. We promote respect acceptance and inclusion for everyone in our community."

In alignment with their mission, Welter and several other community members have been working since 2016 to get a state historical plaque to acknowledge the lynching of Washington.

Greenwood said, "Traditionally, lynching is you know, sort of that illegal mob action people taking matters into their own hands and targeting people mainly on the basis of their race. The current bill is an anti-lynching bill and so it has a lot of history backing it up."

Welter said just a few weeks ago the plaque was finally on its way, but it was damaged in shipping. Now, they will have to wait once again. However, the is already a spot dedicated to the plaque.

"When we have the completed marker undamaged it will be installed at city hall," said Welter. "When we started this project the City of Waco gave us a place to put it right in front of city hall not too far from where Jesse was burned and tortured."

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Jesse Washington historical marker in the works on the heels of history - 25 News KXXV and KRHD