Falmanac: The Fallston Almanac of American History
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(Aegis) Harford County Public Library’s World War I special exhibit has earned a $1,000 award from the History Channel.
The library was recently announced as a second place winner in the History Library Outreach Contest for its “Winds & Words of War: Posters & Prints from the San Antonio Public Library Collection” exhibit displayed earlier this year. Continued
Image: Library of Congress
(YDR) A divisive plan to build a casino near the site of the Civil War's tide-turning Battle of Gettysburg is in the mold of many other communities that have successfully meshed gambling with historical tourist destinations, the developer told state regulators Tuesday.
With opponents enlisting Hollywood power as they rally around the cry of "Save Gettysburg," developer David LeVan pitched his plan for the Mason Dixon Resort & Casino as a well-worn concept in places such as Vicksburg, Miss., and Deadwood, S.D., that can bring tourists, investment and tax revenue to the Gettysburg area.
... Dogged opponents responded with a polished video featuring filmmaker Ken Burns, actors Sam Waterston and Matthew Broderick, Pulitzer Prize-winning author David McCullough, and local residents suggesting that the casino's approval would betray the country's duty to protect the place where soldiers died to save the nation. Continued
Image: Library of Congress
(Slate) ... What makes "first rough draft of history" so tuneful, at least to the ears of journalists? Well, it flatters them. Journalists hope that one day a historian will uncover their dusty work and celebrate their genius. But that almost never happens. Historians tend to view journalism as unreliable and tend to be dismissive of our work. They'd rather work from primary sources—official documents, photographs, interviews, and the like—rather than from our clips. Continued
(Dictionary.com) Thinly dressed with yellow mustard and slapped between two slices of white bread, bologna is found in the lunchboxes of many American youth. But what does the cold cut have to do with baloney, a slang word that implies nonsense? Continued
(Wikipedia) Frank Robinson (born August 31, 1935 in Beaumont, Texas), is a Hall of Fame former Major League Baseball player. He was an outfielder, most notably with the Cincinnati Reds and the Baltimore Orioles.
During a 21-season career, he is the only player to win League MVP honors in both the National and American Leagues, won the Triple crown, was a member of two teams that won the World Series (the 1966 and 1970 Baltimore Orioles), and amassed the fourth-most career home runs at the time of his retirement (he is currently seventh). Continued
Photo: whitehouse.gov
(Baltimore Sun) Baseball has come a long way since 1864. In those days, there were no overhead pitches, bats were thicker and heavier, no one wore a glove, and uniforms were made of wool — no matter how hot the day was. The same ball got pounded through all nine innings, so the softer it got, the less it flew.
But when you play baseball by old-time rules, as a half-dozen teams did Sunday at a tournament in Harford County's Jerusalem Mill Village, your respect for history trumps everything else, including personal comfort and soaring, late-in-the-game fly balls. Continued
(Dover Post) Martha “Patty” Cannon, one of Delaware’s most notorious women, is about to get an autopsy of sorts, more than 180 years after her death.
There’s a lot of mystery surrounding Cannon, whose homestead on the southern Maryland/Delaware line served as a base from which she allegedly ran a gang that kidnapped free blacks in the early 1820s and sold them into slavery in the South. Continued
(LoC) At approximately 6:10 a.m., Central Daylight Time, on August 29, 2005, Hurricane Katrina, a Category 4 storm packing winds of 145 m.p.h., made landfall out of the Gulf of Mexico near Buras, Louisiana, and headed north towards the historic city of New Orleans, Louisiana, and the state of Mississippi. At 8:14 a.m., the New Orleans office of the National Weather Service issued a flood warning stating that the city’s Industrial Canal levee had been breached.
Within an hour, the neighborhood known as the Lower Ninth Ward was under six-to-eight feet of water. By then the 17th Street Canal levee had failed as well, and the waters began to rise relentlessly throughout the city. Other levees and floodwalls failed also. By the next day, eighty percent of New Orleans lay underwater, in some areas to a height of twenty feet. And Katrina had moved on, still bearing winds of 120 m.p.h., to wreak havoc across the central Gulf Coast of the United States. Continued
Photo by Walker Evans FSA/OWI (LoC)
(NYTimes) ... Martin Ernest Dannenberg was born in Baltimore on Nov. 5, 1915, and began working as a mailroom clerk at the Sun Life Insurance Company after graduating from high school. He attended Johns Hopkins University and the University of Baltimore School of Law at night.
He dropped out of law school when his boss pointed out the window at men selling fruit. “Each one of them used to be a lawyer before the Depression,” he said. Continued
(Wikipedia) Saint Elizabeth Ann Bayley Seton (August 28, 1774 – January 4, 1821) was the first native-born citizen of the United States to be canonized.... After some trying and difficult years, Elizabeth was able to establish a community in Emmitsburg, Maryland dedicated to the care for the children of the poor. She founded the first free school in America. Continued
(Wikipedia) Charles Calvert, 3rd Baron Baltimore (August 27, 1637 - February 21, 1715) was the second Proprietary Governor of the Province of Maryland, inheriting the colony upon the death of his father, Cecilius Calvert, 2nd Baron Baltimore, in 1675. He had been his father's Deputy Governor since 1661 when he arrived in the colony at the age of 24. Several years later, about 1667, Charles married Jane Lowe, widow of Col. Henry Sewall of St. Mary's County, Maryland. Continued
(Wired) ... The final eruption also threw pumice an estimated 34 to 50 miles into the sky. Dust fell more than 3,000 miles away 10 days later. Islands of pumice floated on the oceans for months. Sulfur in the ash reacted with atmospheric ozone to scatter sunlight, causing vivid red sunsets around the world. Global temperatures dropped, and climate disruptions lasted five years. Continued
(YDR/Lancaster Intelligencer Journal) A recent archaeological dig at Rotary Park has set Columbia Borough's historical clock back a few thousand years, revealing an American Indian community dating to a time when pharaohs ruled Egypt and Stonehenge was under construction.
"We've found spear points dating back to 3000 B.C. and pottery that goes back to the 1300s," said Meg Schaefer, curator with the Wright's Ferry Mansion in Columbia, said Aug. 10. "We've even found evidence of what Natives were eating, including carbonized nut hulls and fish scales, which we can carbon date." Continued
Image: Display of artifacts from the Susquehannocks, in the State Museum of Pennsylvania, Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, United States, March 2007. Photograph by Ruhrfisch, some rights reserved.
(Wikipedia) James Rumsey (1743–1792) was an American mechanical engineer chiefly known for exhibiting a boat propelled by machinery in 1787 on the Potomac River at Shepherdstown, now West Virginia, before a crowd of local notables, including Horatio Gates. A pump driven by steam power ejected a stream of water from the stern of the boat and thereby propelled the boat forward.
Little is known about Rumsey until he was living in Bath, Virginia, (now Berkeley Springs, West Virginia) in 1782. He likely had moved to the area with his family some years before the American Revolution, from Cecil County, Maryland, where he had helped to run the family water mill at Bohemia Manor. His cousin was Benjamin Rumsey, a notable Maryland jurist and statesman, who also grew up at Bohemia Manor. In Bath, he built houses, became a partner in a mercantile business, and helped to run a boarding house and tavern called the "Sign of the Liberty Pole and Flag." Continued
(HistoryBuff.com) Every History of American journalistic hoaxing properly begins with the celebrated moon hoax which "made" the New York Sun of Benjamin Day.It consisted of a series of articles, allegedly reprinted from the nonexistent Edinburgh Journal of Science, relating to the discovery of life on the moon by Sir John Herschel, eminent British astronomer, who some time before had gone to the Cape of Good Hope to try out a new type of powerful telescope. Continued
(WoCCP) One of the authors of a newly published Johns Hopkins University title, the War of 1812 in the Chesapeake, will be the guest speaker for the annual Historical Society of Cecil County meeting on October 18th. Dr. Ralph Eshelman spent years investigating sites connected with the conflict in Maryland so as the bicentennial of this chapter of our past nears, we’re pleased to have the opportunity to hear the distinguished historian.
His presentation will focus on the campaign in Maryland and our general area. Continued
Image: Attack upon George & Federick's towns by a detachment of boats from The R. Hon. Sir T. B. Warrens squadron under Rear Admiral Cockburn in April 1813. Topographical drawing shows the position of Rear Admiral George Cockburn's boat, as well as boats belonging to others, and the location of Georgetown, Fredericktown and the American batteries on the Sassafras River in Maryland during the War of 1812. (Library of Congress)
(LoC) The major financial catalyst for the panic of 1857 was the August 24, 1857, failure of the New York branch of the Ohio Life Insurance and Trust Company. It was soon reported that the entire capital of the Trust's home office had been embezzled. What followed was one of the most severe economic crises in U.S. history.
Almost immediately, New York bankers put severe restrictions on even the most routine transactions. In turn, many people interpreted these restrictions as a sign of impending financial collapse and panicked. Individual holders of stock and of commercial paper rushed to their brokers and eagerly made deals that "a week before they would have shunned as a ruinous sacrifice." As the September 12, 1857, Harper's Weekly described the scene on the New York Stock Exchange, "…prominent stocks fell eight or ten per cent in a day, and fortunes were made and lost between ten o'clock in the morning and four of the afternoon."
The Report of the Clearinghouse Committee, produced in the years following the panic of 1857, found that "A financial panic has been likened to a malignant epidemic, which kills more by terror than by real disease." Yet behind the reaction of New York's bankers to the closing of a trust company lay a confluence of national and international events that heightened concern:
To compound the problem, the SS Central America, a wooden-hulled steamship transporting millions of dollars in gold from the new San Francisco Mint to create a reserve for eastern banks, was caught in a hurricane and sunk in mid-September. (The vessel had aboard 581 persons—many carrying great personal wealth—and more than $1 million in commercial gold. She also bore a secret shipment of 15 tons of federal gold, valued at $20 per ounce, intended for the eastern banks.) Continued
"This clip shows some of the activities of the Armys Edgewood Chemical Biological Center's (ECBC) in Edgewood, Maryland. The Center was established in 1917, during World War One. Since that time, the Center has expanded its mission to include biological materials and emerges today as the nation's premier authority on chemical and biological defense. In 1917, the Bureau of Mines established the War Gas Investigations at American University in Washington, D.C. President Woodrow Wilson issued a proclamation that designated Gunpowder Neck, MD, as the site for the first chemical shell filling plant in the United States. The Bureau of Mines produced the first 25,000 gas masks for U.S. Army soldiers during World War I. In 1920, All chemical warfare functions were centralized at the Edgewood Arsenal, including the CWS chemical school, research division, and gas mask production factory. For more information on the history of the Center and its current activities, go to http://www.edgewood.army.mil/ . This clip is from the 1950s episode, the Unseen Weapon, from the The Big Picture documentary television program which ran on the American Broadcasting Company from 1953 to 1959. The program consisted of documentary films produced by the United States Army Signal Corps Army Pictorial Service." Link
(Wikipedia) - The 1933 Chesapeake-Potomac Hurricane was the 8th storm and third hurricane of the very active 1933 Atlantic hurricane season. The August storm formed in the central Atlantic, where it moved west-northwest. Aided by the warm ocean waters, the hurricane briefly reached Category 3 status on the Saffir-Simpson Hurricane Scale before making landfall along the Virginia/North Carolina coast as a Category 1 storm.The hurricane caused severe damage along the East Coast of the United States. The state hardest hit by the storm was Virginia, where the center of circulation passed directly over Norfolk.... In Washington, D.C., the storm produced a storm surge of 11.3 feet (3.4 m), rainfall of 6.18 inches (152 mm) and winds of 50 mph (80 km/h). In Maryland, the hurricane caused $17 million dollars (1933 USD, $230 million 2005 USD) in damage to crops and buildings. The storm also destroyed a railroad bridge heading into Ocean City and created the Ocean City Inlet between the town and Assateague Island. The storm killed 13 people and 1,000+ animals. On the coast, the storm damaged or destroyed several wharves and fishing piers. In Delaware, the storm caused $150,000 dollars (1933 USD, $2.03 million 2005 USD) in damage but no deaths. Continued
(NYTimes) ... The national parks’ history is full of examples of misguided visitors feeding bears, putting children on buffalos for photos and dipping into geysers despite signs warning of scalding temperatures.
But today, as an ever more wired and interconnected public visits the parks in rising numbers — July was a record month for visitors at Yellowstone — rangers say that technology often figures into such mishaps.
People with cellphones call rangers from mountaintops to request refreshments or a guide; in Jackson Hole, Wyo., one lost hiker even asked for hot chocolate. Continued
(Wikipedia) - Edward Hugh "Ned" Hanlon (August 22, 1857 - April 14, 1937) was a 19th century Major League Baseball player and manager. He was born in Montville, Connecticut. Hanlon broke into the National League with the Cleveland Blues in 1880 and played until 1892 with several different teams. While his playing career was, for the most part, unexceptional he began what would be an illustrious career as manager when he took the helm of the Pittsburgh Alleghenys in 1889.Hanlon moved to the Baltimore Orioles in 1892 where, despite some growing pains, he would experience his greatest success. Baltimore won the National League title from 1894 to 1896 by playing inside baseball, using innovative strategies including the hit-and-run. Continued
(Baltimore Sun) ... Stepping into Crab Towne is, indeed, like setting foot inside a time machine, going back to a day before consoles brought video-gaming into the home, when the nimble-fingered had to plunk a quarter into a machine to play Pac-Man, Space Invaders or Galaga. Step into the annex the owners have built to house their arcade, one of the few left from a time when there was one in just about every mall and shopping center, and the first thing you see and hear is a Pac-Man merrily chomping away. Walk a few rows over, and there's Q*bert, merrily hopping from one square to the next. A few feet away, the original Super Mario Bros. are busy hammering away on their latest construction job, while one row over, Dig Dug is frantically digging away, blasting away at red and green monsters as he goes. Continued
Image: Wikipedia
(Wikipedia) The Battle of Summit Point, also known as Flowing Springs or Cameron's Depot, was an inconclusive battle of the American Civil War fought on August 21, 1864, near Summit Point, West Virginia.
The battle was part of Union Maj. Gen. Philip Sheridan's Shenandoah Valley Campaign, which took place between August and December 1864. While Sheridan concentrated his army near Charles Town, Confederate Lt. Gen. Jubal A. Early and Maj. Gen. Richard H. Anderson attacked the Union forces with converging columns on August 21. Continued
(Wikipedia) The Dumbarton Oaks Conference or, more formally, the Washington Conversations on International Peace and Security Organization was an international conference at which the United Nations was formulated and negotiated among international leaders. The conference was held at Dumbarton Oaks from August 21, 1944 through October 7, 1944.
The conference was chaired by U.S. Undersecretary of State Edward Reilly Stettinius. The British delegation was headed by Permanent Under-Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs Sir Alexander Cadogan, while the Soviet delegation was led by Soviet Ambassador to the United States Andrei Gromyko. Continued
Image: Library of Congress
(AP) North Carolina's claim that it lost the most men during the Civil War is getting a recount from a state historian who doubts the accuracy of the accepted, 144-year-old estimate.
"The time has come to get it right," said Josh Howard, a research historian with the Office of Archives and History in Raleigh. "Nobody has gone through man by man looking for the deaths."
Howard is reviewing the military records of every Tar Heel who served in the 1861-65 conflict, as the state prepares to mark its sesquicentennial, The News & Record of Greensboro reported Monday. Continued
(wweek) For most of America’s early history, when all food was local, the best of our emergent cuisine came from the wild. But almost as soon as some of our foundational foods were born from the rich stew of immigrant techniques and American raw ingredients, they had flickered into oblivion. In Twain’s Feast: Searching for America’s Lost Foods in the Footsteps of Samuel Clemens (The Penguin Press, 323 pages, $25.95), California food writer Andrew Beahrs tells the story of eight of Twain’s favorite American foods, among them “possum,” “coon” and “Philadelphia Terrapin Soup.” Continued
I've worked in the mill in my day, until nine o'clock at night, from seven in the mornin'…I wouldn't want to go back to it, and I don't think anyone else would. An eight hour day is long enough.Matthew White,
circa 1938-1939.
American Life Histories: Manuscripts from the Federal Writers' Project, 1936-1940
LANCASTER, Pa., Aug. 19 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- Beginning August 19, the Nation will see Presidential $1 coins bearing the image of James Buchanan, the Nation's 15th President. To commemorate the release of the new coin, the United States Mint hosted a launch ceremony on the grounds of Wheatland, Buchanan's beloved home, in Lancaster, Pennsylvania.
"In a few short weeks, Americans will begin to see James Buchanan Presidential $1 Coins and will be reminded of his place in history," said United States Mint Deputy Director Andy Brunhart.
The ceremony included commentary on Buchanan's legacy from Donald Walters, Emeritus Professor of Educational Administration at Temple University. Following the ceremony, children 18 years old and younger received a James Buchanan Presidential $1 Coin, and adults exchanged their currency for 25-coin rolls of the new coin.
Buchanan, the 15th U.S. President, was born on April 23, 1791, near Mercersburg, Pa. He was the oldest of 11 children. After graduating from college, Buchanan studied law and began a successful law career in 1812. During the War of 1812, he helped defend Baltimore against British attack. Buchanan, a gifted orator, became a state legislator, and later served as a member of the U.S. House of Representatives and Senate, and as U.S. minister to Russia. In 1845, he became President James K. Polk's secretary of state. His later service abroad as U.S. minister to Great Britain helped insulate him from the growing domestic controversy over slavery, which was reaching a crescendo by 1856, helping him secure the Democratic Party's nomination for President. Two days after Buchanan was inaugurated, the U.S. Supreme Court issued the controversial Dred Scott decision, which effectively legalized slavery in all U.S. territories. The decision was another factor that propelled the Nation toward civil war.
Buchanan served one term in office, from 1857 to 1861. He then retired to his Pennsylvania home, Wheatland, where he died on June 1, 1868.
The Presidential $1 Coin Act of 2005 (Public Law 109-145) directs the United States Mint to issue four $1 coins each year to honor our Nation's Presidents in the order they served in office. The James Buchanan Presidential $1 Coin is the 15th release in the Presidential $1 Coin Program.
The United States Mint, created by Congress in 1792, is the Nation's sole manufacturer of legal tender coinage. Its primary mission is to produce an adequate volume of circulating coinage for the Nation to conduct its trade and commerce. The United States Mint also produces proof, uncirculated, and commemorative coins; Congressional Gold Medals; and silver, gold and platinum bullion coins.
(Aegis) The following alphabetical list represents the 33 founding fathers of the Historical Society of Harford County in 1885.
According to genealogist and local historian Henry Peden, while not all shared equal prominence in the society's formation, they all were involved in one way or another during September 1885 while the society was being created under the leadership of Rev. George Armistead Leakin of the Maryland Historical Society: Continued
(Wikipedia) Frederic Ogden Nash (August 19, 1902 – May 19, 1971) was an American poet well known for his light verse. At the time of his death in 1971, the New York Times said his "droll verse with its unconventional rhymes made him the country's best-known producer of humorous poetry."
... Nash moved to Baltimore, Maryland, three years after marrying Frances Leonard, a Baltimore native. He lived in Baltimore from 1934 and most of his life until his death in 1971. Nash thought of Baltimore as home. After his return from a brief move to New York, he wrote "I could have loved New York had I not loved Balti-more." Continued
(Wikipedia) Virginia Dare (born August 18, 1587, date of death unknown) was the first child born in the Americas to English parents, Eleanor (or Ellinor/Elyonor) and Ananias Dare. She was born into the short-lived Roanoke Colony in what is now North Carolina, USA. What became of Virginia and the other colonists has become an enduring mystery. The fact of her birth is known because the leader of the colony, Eleanor Dare's father, John White, returned to England to seek assistance for the colony. When White returned three years later, the colonists were gone. Continued
(Slate) When Tai Shan, the Washington-born panda formerly known to the Internet as "Butterstick," was repatriated to China this past winter, the National Zoo called his departure "bittersweet" and said that he was a "true ambassador for the giant panda species." According to a report from the Xinhua News Agency, his new keepers at the China Conservation and Research Center for Giant Pandas, in Sichuan, were not as impressed by him as a representative of his kind: Continued
(Slate) The United States has a startling ability to take its most angry, edgy radicals and turn them into cuddly eunuchs. The process begins the moment they die. Mark Twain is remembered as a quipster forever floating down the Mississippi River at sunset, while his polemics against the violent birth of the American empire lie unread and unremembered. Martin Luther King is remembered for his prose-poetry about children holding hands on a hill in Alabama, but few recall that he said the U.S. government was "the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today." But perhaps the greatest act of historical castration is of Jack London. Continued
Images: Library of Congress
(Wikipedia) - John Wesley Powell (born August 17, 1941, in Lakeland, Florida) is a former first baseman in Major League Baseball who played for the Baltimore Orioles (1961-74), Cleveland Indians (1975-76) and Los Angeles Dodgers (1977). He batted left-handed and threw right-handed.
Powell currently owns Boog's Barbecue, which sells barbecue sandwiches and ribs along Eutaw Street at Oriole Park at Camden Yards and along the Boardwalk in Ocean City, Maryland. Boog Powell is an avid angler, kicking off the Maryland Fishing season with the governor. Continued
Photo: Baseball Almanac
(NYTimes) The shipbuilders are long dead, their knowledge gone. The shipyard no longer exists. No blueprints survive, nor ship’s models. But the Charles W. Morgan is still here — the world’s last surviving wooden whaling vessel, built in 1841. And restorers are spending $10 million to turn the museum piece into a working ship able to ply the unruly sea. Continued
(Baltimore Sun) ... Scrimshaw is the art of decorating ancient materials such as woolly mammoth bone and preserved ivory with nautical images such as ships and sea life. The process of creating the image is "rewarding but time-consuming," according to Tukarski, and can take several weeks. Tukarski, who considers herself a purist, hand-engraves all her pieces. Continued
(Jacques Kelly) The other Sunday afternoon, the Natty Bohs were flying out of my local tavern. After a lunch, patrons were buying the six-packs of beer I knew as National Bohemian for home consumption. A few days later, I observed thirsty neighbors load up on cartons of the brew at a liquor store. Has 1964 come back again? Continued
image: falmanac
(NYTimes) For decades jazz cognoscenti have talked reverently of “the Savory Collection.” Recorded from radio broadcasts in the late 1930s by an audio engineer named William Savory, it was known to include extended live performances by some of the most honored names in jazz — but only a handful of people had ever heard even the smallest fraction of that music, adding to its mystique. Continued
(Wikipedia) - Henry Charles Bukowski (August 16, 1920 – March 9, 1994) was a German American poet, novelist, and short story writer. Bukowski's writing was heavily influenced by the geography and atmosphere of his home city of Los Angeles, and is marked by an emphasis on the ordinary lives of poor Americans, the act of writing, alcohol, relationships with women, and the drudgery of work. A prolific author, Bukowski wrote thousands of poems, hundreds of short stories, and six novels, eventually having over 60 books in print. In 1986 Time called Bukowski a "laureate of American lowlife"
.... After the collapse of the German economy following the First World War, the family moved to the United States in 1923, originally settling in Baltimore, Maryland. To sound more American, Bukowski's parents began calling him "Henry" and altered the pronunciation of the family name from Buk-ov-ski to Buk-cow-ski (the name is of Polish origin). Continued
(NYTimes) ... As GPS units and the automation of navigational tools have rendered traditional lighthouse keepers obsolete, the government has been decommissioning the properties it owns, nearly 50 over the last 10 years, and transferring ownership to new stewards at no cost, preferably nonprofit groups. When it cannot find a proper caretaker, the properties are auctioned to the highest bidder, which has happened 15 times.
Increasingly, people like Ms. Moore — history buffs and preservationists, youth groups and investors — are stepping up to do what the Coast Guard and old men of the sea have done for ages: tend to the nation’s lighthouses. Continued
Image: Stairs of the Concord Point Light, Havre de Grace, MD (Falmanac).
USS Ancon (ID-1467) was a screw steamship in the United States Navy. As SS Ancon, she was the first ship to sail through the Panama Canal.
Ancon was built in 1902 at Sparrows Point, Maryland, by the Maryland Steel Company as the SS Shawmut. About 1910 she was purchased and renamed SS Ancon, by the Panama Railroad Company for the construction of the Panama Canal. Named after Ancon Hill, home to the head of the Canal Commission, the ship was the first to officially transit the canal in 1914 [August 15], just before the outbreak of World War I. She was acquired by the Navy from the United States Army at New Orleans on 16 November 1918, five days after the armistice ended World War I. The ship was outfitted as a troop transport and commissioned on 28 March 1919, Lt. Comdr. Milan L. Pittman, USNRF, in command. Continued
(Wikipedia) Russell Wayne Baker (born August 14, 1925) is an American Pulitzer Prize-winning writer known for his satirical commentary and self-critical prose, as well as for his autobiography, Growing Up.
Baker was the eldest of three children born to Benny and Lucy Elizabeth Baker in Morrisonville, Virginia. His first sister, Doris, was born in 1927, and after three years his second sister Audrey was born. Unfortunately, due to being desperately poor during the great depression, his mother had to make a heartbreaking decision and gave Audrey up for adoption to her brother-in-law and his wife . Baker's father had died of diabetes by this point when Russell was five, so his mother had to move the family to Belleville, New Jersey to live with her brother and sister-in-law. Later they moved to urban Baltimore where he graduated from the Baltimore City College high school in 1943 and received his B.A. from the School of Arts & Sciences at Johns Hopkins University in 1947. At the age of eleven as a self professed bump on a log, he made the decision to be come a writer since he figured "what writers did couldn't even be classified as work". Continued
Clarence Algernon "Cupid" Childs (August 14, 1867 – November 8, 1912) was an American second baseman in Major League Baseball with a 13-season career from 1888, 1890-1901, playing for the Philadelphia Quakers, Cleveland Spiders, St. Louis Perfectos and Chicago Orphans of the National League and the Syracuse Stars of the American Association.
Childs was born in Calvert County, Maryland. A career .306 hitter, he led the league in runs in 1892 with 136.
He died at age 45 in Baltimore, Maryland. - Wikipedia
Photo: Library of Congress
(Wikipedia) Opha Mae Johnson (February 13, 1900 – January 1976) was the first woman to enlist in the United States Marine Corps. She joined the Marine Corps Reserve in 1918.
Johnson was a United States Marine in the late 1910s. She became the first woman to enlist in the Marine Corps on August 13, 1917, when she joined the Marine Corps Reserve during World War I. Johnson was the first of 305 women to enlist in the United States Marine Corps Women's Reserve that day. Continued
(Lancaster Online) The Hans Herr House is primitive to modern eyes.
Compared to other houses in Lancaster County at the time, however, it was positively palatial.
Now, the 1719 Hans Herr House & Museum is raising funds to add a new structure to the Willow Street heritage site: a Native American longhouse that was typical to the area prior to European settlement. Continued
Image: Hans Herr House (Library of Congress)
(Wikipedia) The Expulsion of the Acadians (also known as the Great Upheaval, the Great Expulsion, The Deportation, the Acadian Expulsion, Le Grand Dérangement) was the forced population transfer of the Acadian people from present day Canadian Maritime provinces — Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, and Prince Edward Island (an area known as Acadie to the French). The Expulsion occurred during the French and Indian War. They were deported to other British colonies, Britain, and France, between 1755 and 1763.
Image: "View from the Packet Wharf at Frenchtown looking down Elk Creek" by Benjamin Henry Latrobe
(Slate) ... In fact, Tom manifests many disturbing behaviors. He blames his half-brother for his poor decisions, thus demonstrating an inability to take responsibility for his actions. He provokes his peers, often using aggression. He deliberately ignores rules and demonstrates defiance toward adults. He is frequently dishonest, at one point even pretending to be dead. Worst of all, he skips school—a behavior that might, in time, lead him to be diagnosed with conduct disorder, from which his friend Huck Finn clearly suffers. Continued
(Baltimore Sun) For months in the spring and summer of 1814, Commodore Joshua Barney and his ragtag flotilla of gunboats had harassed the mighty British navy on the Chesapeake Bay and its tributaries. But outnumbered and outgunned, Barney and his miniature fleet were bottled up in the Patuxent River with no escape and enemy forces approaching.
So following orders from Washington, Barney's men scuttled the estimated 17 vessels — including his flagship, the USS Scorpion — near a place known as Pig Point.
Almost 200 years later, a team of archaeologists have been combing the bottom of a stretch of the river separating Prince George's and Anne Arundel counties in search of artifacts from what they believe is the wreckage of the Scorpion. Continued
Image: Photograph of Charles Wilson Peale's 1788 (?) portrait of Barney shows Barney in the uniform of the Continental Navy. (Library of Congress).
(Wikipedia) ... The living symbol of Smokey Bear was an American black bear who in the spring of 1950 was caught in the Capitan Gap fire, a wildfire that burned 17,000 acres (69 km2) in the Capitan Mountains of New Mexico. The cub was in the Lincoln National Forest. Smokey had climbed a tree to escape the blaze, but his paws and hind legs had been burned. He was rescued by a game warden after the fire.
At first he was called "Hotfoot Teddy," but he was later renamed Smokey, after the mascot. A local rancher who had been helping fight the fire took the cub home with him, but he needed veterinary aid. New Mexico Department of Game and Fish Ranger Ray Bell took him to Santa Fe. His wife, Ruth, and their children, Don and Judy, cared for the cub. The story was picked up by the national news services and Smokey became an instant celebrity. He and the Bells were featured in Life, cementing his star status. Soon after, Smokey was flown in a Piper Cub to the National Zoo in Washington, D.C., where he lived for 26 years. Upon his death on November 9, 1976, Smokey's remains were returned by the government to Capitan, New Mexico, and buried at what is now the Smokey Bear Historical Park. Continued
(Lancaster Online) Fire struck an occupied motel room at the Red Caboose Motel & Gift Shop in Paradise Township early today.
An Easton couple were sleeping in one of the cabooses which have been converted into motel rooms when the husband awoke to the smell of smoke at about 4:30 a.m., Strasburg Fire Company Fire Chief Rick Wentz said. Continued
Image: MDRails
(NYTimes) Ours is a nation that has given the world baseball, the airplane and the electric light, but also Kool-Aid (Edwin Perkins, 1927), Pizza Hut (the Carney brothers, 1958) and Doritos (Arch West, 1966). The history of junk food is a largely American tale: It has been around for hundreds of years, in many parts of the world, but no one has done a better job inventing so many varieties of it, branding it, mass-producing it, making people rich off it and, of course, eating it.
The death of an obscure New York entrepreneur on July 27 — Morrie Yohai, 90, a World War II veteran who was the man responsible for Cheez Doodles — was a reminder that the world of junk food is no different from celebrated American industries. Continued
(YDR) They didn't look like the tomatoes sold at the supermarket.
Some were barely larger than a marble, while others were nearly the size of softballs. Instead of being smooth across the top, many were cracked with valleys and gorges. They were streaked and speckled with shades of blue, violet, green, orange and yellow. Continued
Image: Library of Congress
(Sports Illustrated) - All day long, from 10 in the morning until 10 at night, the line of mourners stood four abreast along Madison Avenue in Baltimore . They had come from all over, thousands of them—black and white, young and old, men and women and children—and at times they reached such numbers that the line from the mean streets to the open steel-gray coffin extended more than two blocks. So many people, so many mournful faces. Cheek by jowl, for 12 hours, they filed into old Charlie Law's funeral home. In one door and out another. In one mood and out another. In one era and out another.In all his years Lenny Moore had never witnessed a spectacle quite like it. "It was overwhelming," recalls the Baltimore Colts ' Hall of Fame running back. "You'd have thought it was a big movie star in there. Or a head of state. Biggest thing I ever saw like that in this town." Continued
(WoCCP) As speeding vehicles dash across Cecil County on I-95, Our Lady of the Highway watches peacefully over motorists zipping past a tranquil hillside in Childs, MD. The guardian of travelers, a 14-foot high white marble statue of the Virgin Mary, was placed there after a massive pileup took three lives one foggy October morning in 1968. Hearing the vehicle piling up, seminarians and priests from the Oblates of St. Francis de Sales, the first outside aid to reach victims, tended the injured and dying while waiting for emergency crews to make their way through the dark mist. Moved by the sad tragedy that took place that unforgettable autumn day, the Oblates erected the shrine in 1973. Continued
(Wikipedia) Wilbert Robinson (June 29, 1863 – August 8, 1934), nicknamed "Uncle Robbie", was an American catcher, coach and manager in Major League Baseball. He was inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame in 1945.
Born in Bolton, Massachusetts, Robinson was a catcher in the minor New England League in 1885 and made it to the major leagues in 1886 with the Philadelphia Athletics of the American Association, where he remained until 1890. He lasted in the majors until 1902, playing much of his career with two separate Baltimore Orioles franchises – from 1890-99 with the Orioles team which folded after the 1899 National League season, and in 1901-02 with the American League team which moved to New York City in 1903 and became the Yankees. Continued
(NYTimes) ... “The historian’s task is not to disrupt for the sake of it, but it is to tell what is almost always an uncomfortable story and explain why the discomfort is part of the truth we need to live well and live properly,” he told Historically Speaking. “A well-organized society is one in which we know the truth about ourselves collectively, not one in which we tell pleasant lies about ourselves.” Continued
(Lancaster New Era) The bone-handled table knife might have been used by Revolutionary War Gen. Edward Hand at a meal.
A piece of broken china might have been held by George Washington in 1791, when he visited Hand's Lancaster home.
And some of the beautiful but deadly muzzle-loading rifles could well have been used against the British by Hand's battalion of Pennsylvania riflemen.
Rock Ford Plantation, Hand's luxurious late-18th-century home, is about to open an auxiliary museum featuring an array of Pennsylvania rifles, artifacts from a series of archeological digs at the site and items from a local historian's collection of Pennsylvania German folk art. Continued
(Wikipedia) The Washington Star, previously known as the Washington Star-News and the Washington Evening Star, was a daily afternoon newspaper published in Washington, D.C. between 1852 and 1981. For most of that time, it was the city's newspaper of record, and the longtime home to columnist Mary McGrory and cartoonist Clifford K. Berryman. On August 7, 1981, after 130 years, the Washington Star ceased publication and filed for bankruptcy. In the bankruptcy sale, the Washington Post purchased the land and buildings owned by the Star, including its printing presses. Continued
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