Roanoke’s ‘Lost Colony’ Was Never Lost, New Book Says

Virginia Dare, the first Anglo child born in North America,
sustained herself on nuts, berries, and product endorsements.
(Virginia Dare Winery)

(NYTimes) In 1590, the would-be governor of a colony meant to be one of England’s first outposts in North America discovered that more than 100 settlers weren’t on the small island where he left them.
More than 400 years later, the question of what happened to those settlers, who landed on Roanoke Island, off the coast of modern North Carolina, has grown into a piece of American mythology, inspiring plays, novels, documentaries and a tourism industry in the Outer Banks. Continued

‘Horrific’ legacy: ‘Ghost River’ a ‘story of resilience’ of tribe after massacre

(Albuquerque Journal) Lee Francis and writing are a match made in heaven.
The Albuquerque-based writer was chosen to work on the graphic novel “Ghost River: The Fall & Rise of the Conestoga.”
It’s a project has kept him busy for the better part of a year.
The novel is a reinterpretation of the Paxton Boys massacre of 1763 and Pamphlet War of 1764. Continued

How Edgar Allan Poe Got Kicked Out of the U.S. Army

(Library of Congress)

(Daily Beast) In discussions of great American writers who were also military veterans, the name Edgar Allan Poe is unlikely to come up. Yet it should: the iconically doomed poet and inventor of the modern detective story served as a soldier for several of his formative years.
Furthermore, in considering a life often marked by painful loss and failure, it might surprise many readers to learn Poe was something of a successful and motivated soldier—that is, until he wasn’t. Continued

Teenagers Who Vandalized Historic Black Schoolhouse Are Ordered to Read Books

(NYTimes) After five teenagers defaced a historic black schoolhouse in Virginia with racist and anti-Semitic graffiti last year, a judge handed down an unusual sentence. She endorsed a prosecutor’s order that they read one book each month for the next 12 months and write a report about it.

But not just any books: They must address some of history’s most divisive and tragic periods. Continued

Who's Killing America’s Chain Bookstores?

(Lost Bookseller) Hastings, the country's third largest book retailer, has gone under. Hastings management blames the internet, but the internet didn’t kill Hastings. No mention of its ancient POS system or its bloated headquarters full of neurotics. No mention of their bright idea to buy an East Coast DVD retailer. When was the last time anybody on the East Coast bought a DVD? Let’s call internet retailers what they are: competition. Hastings couldn’t compete because it was a bad company.
Same goes for Borders, which was a tragic case as it started out as such a good company. Continued

The House that Mencken Built

(City Paper) ... To read “Happy Days” in Baltimore is a disorienting experience. Mencken brings the city, especially Hollins market, to such vivid life that to walk out into the actual city of the present feels both familiar and uncanny. It is almost like science fiction. He writes of his father’s cigar shop, the saloons, the African-American culture in the alleys, the Arrabers, the police, the country house in Mount Washington, and everything is at once familiar and different. As Mencken wrote in 1925, “the old charm, in fact, still survives, despite the boomers, despite the street-wideners, despite the forward-lookers, despite all the other dull frauds who try to destroy it.” Continued

Pickett's Charge

 
“For every Southern boy fourteen years old, not once but whenever he wants it, there is the instant when it's still not yet two o’clock on that July afternoon in 1863, the brigades are in position behind the rail fence, the guns are laid and ready in the woods and the furled flags are already loosened to break out and Pickett himself with his long oiled ringlets and his hat in one hand probably and his sword in the other looking up the hill waiting for Longstreet to give the word and it's all in the balance, it hasn't happened yet, it hasn't even begun yet, it not only hasn't begun yet but there is still time for it not to begin against that position and those circumstances which made more men than Garnett and Kemper and Armistead and Wilcox look grave yet it's going to begin, we all know that, we have come too far with too much at stake and that moment doesn't need even a fourteen-year-old boy to think This time. Maybe this time with all this much to lose and all this much to gain: Pennsylvania, Maryland, the world, the golden dome of Washington itself to crown with desperate and unbelievable victory the desperate gamble, the cast made two years ago.”

– William Faulkner

Image: Pickett's Charge from a position on the Confederate line looking toward the Union lines, Ziegler's Grove on the left, clump of trees on right, painting by Edwin Forbes 

Battle of Gettysburg - The Second Day

  The men who fought there

Were the tired fighters, the hammered, the weather-beaten,

The very hard-dying men.

They came and died

And came again and died and stood there and died,

Till at last the angle was crumpled and broken in…

Wheatfield and orchard bloody and trampled and taken,

And Hood's tall Texans sweeping on toward the Round Tops…

- Stephen Vincent Benet, John Brown's Body

Budget Cuts Hobble Library of Congress

 

(NYTimes) ... Just as military contractors, air traffic controllers and federal workers are coping with the grim results of a partisan impasse over the federal deficit, the Library of Congress, whose services range from copyrighting written works — whether famous novels or poems scribbled on napkins — to the collection, preservation and digitalization of millions of books, photographs, maps and other materials, faces deep cuts that threaten its historic mission. Continued

Author Rita Mae Brown talks about preserving history

 

(YDR) York, PA - Author Rita Mae Brown believes the past is prologue. If you don't know where you came from, you don't know where you're going.
That's why Brown, who grew up in the Hanover area, believes a Revolutionary War prison camp in Springettsbury Township should be preserved.
"It's such an important part of our history," she said during a phone interview this week. Continued

John O'Hara

(Wikipedia) John Henry O'Hara (January 31, 1905 – April 11, 1970) was an American writer born in Pottsville, Pennsylvania. He initially became known for his short stories and later became a best-selling novelist whose works include Appointment in Samarra and Butterfield 8. He was particularly known for an uncannily accurate ear for dialogue. O'Hara was a keen observer of social status and class differences, and wrote frequently about the socially ambitious. Continued

 

Drawings by a long-dead soldier to assist Camp Security fundraising efforts

York, PA (YDR) Friends of Camp Security are hoping that a man who's been dead for 183 years will help them raise money to purchase the site of the Revolutionary War prison camp.
Sgt. Roger Lamb, an Irishman who served with a regiment of Welsh riflemen during the Revolutionary War, was captured at the Battle of Saratoga in 1777 and eventually -- two escapes later -- wound up incarcerated with other British prisoners at Camp Security.
Lamb wrote about his incarceration in his memoirs. His notes -- or perhaps manuscript -- include drawings of the camp and depictions of his eventual escape. Continued

Zelda Fitzgerald

(Wikipedia) - Zelda Sayre Fitzgerald (July 24, 1900–March 10, 1948), born Zelda Sayre in Montgomery, Alabama, was a novelist and the wife of writer F. Scott Fitzgerald. She was an icon of the 1920s—dubbed by her husband "the first American Flapper". After the success of his first novel This Side of Paradise, the Fitzgeralds became celebrities. The newspapers of New York saw them as embodiments of the Jazz Age and the Roaring Twenties: young, rich, beautiful, and energetic. Continued

Photo: Zelda and Scott's grave in Rockville, Maryland (Wikipedia).

Howard Pyle

(Wikipedia) Howard Pyle (March 5, 1853 – November 9, 1911) was an American illustrator and writer, primarily of books for young audiences. A native of Wilmington, Delaware, he spent the last year of his life in Florence, Italy.
In 1894 he began teaching illustration at the Drexel Institute of Art, Science and Industry (now Drexel University), and after 1900 he founded his own school of art and illustration called the Howard Pyle School of Illustration Art. The term the Brandywine School was later applied to the illustration artists and Wyeth family artists of the Brandywine region by Pitz (later called the Brandywine School). Some of his more famous students were Olive Rush, N. C. Wyeth, Frank Schoonover, Elenore Abbott, and Jessie Willcox Smith. Continued  

Lew Wallace

 

(Wikipedia) Lewis "Lew" Wallace (April 10, 1827 – February 15, 1905) was a lawyer, governor, Union general in the American Civil War, American statesman, and author, best remembered for his historical novel Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ.
... Wallace's most notable service came in July 1864, at the Battle of Monocacy, part of the Valley Campaigns of 1864. Although the some 5,800-man force under his command (mostly hundred-days' men amalgamated from the VIII Corps) and the division of James B. Ricketts from VI Corps was defeated by Confederate General Jubal A. Early, who had some 15,000 troops, Wallace was able to delay Early's advance for an entire day toward Washington, D.C., to the point that the city defenses had time to organize and repel Early, who arrived at Fort Stevens in Washington at around noon on July 11, two days after defeating Wallace at Monocacy, the northernmost Confederate victory of the war. Continued

Lucille Clifton

(Wikipedia) Lucille Clifton (June 27, 1936 Depew, New York – February 13, 2010 Baltimore, Maryland) was an American writer and educator from Buffalo, New York. ... In 1967, they moved to Baltimore, Maryland. Her first poetry collection Good Times was published in 1969, and listed by The New York Times as one of the year's 10 best books. From 1971 to 1974, Lucille Clifton was poet-in-residence at Coppin State College in Baltimore. From 1979 to 1985, she was Poet Laureate of the state of Maryland. Continued

Engineers of Victory

(NYTBR) The historian Daniel Boorstin once complained to me about the Smithsonian Institution’s decision in 1980 to delete the final two words from the name of its Museum of History and Technology. Boorstin had a point. Scholars of other fields do often tend to underestimate the influence of technology. Although most of us know that World War II brought us radar, the literature of that titanic conflict is by no means exempt from this phenomenon. For instance, the biographer Joseph P. Lash subtitled his 1976 wartime account of Franklin Roosevelt and Winston Churchill “The Partnership That Saved the West,” in response to which I once heard a British scholar carp, “If Lash is right, then why did all those scientists and intelligence officers and factory workers bother working so hard?” Continued

F. Scott Fitzgerald's Baltimore house up for sale

(Baltimore Sun) Calling all literati and English majors with decent paychecks: You have a chance to own a home once graced by F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald.
The Bolton Hill home where Fitzgerald lived during a stint during the 1930s and wrote "Tender Is the Night," just went on the market in an estate sale.
The handsome rowhouse at 1307 Park Ave. has four bedrooms, four baths and 3,600 square feet of pure conversation starter. Continued

Jefferson's Library

(LoC) After capturing Washington, D.C. in 1814, the British burned the U.S. Capitol, destroying the Library of Congress and its 3,000-volume collection. Thomas Jefferson, in retirement at Monticello, offered to sell his personal library to the Library Committee of Congress in order to rebuild the collection of the Congressional Library.
Jefferson's library not only included over twice the number of volumes as had been destroyed, it expanded the scope of the library beyond its previous topics—law, economics, and history—to include a wide variety of subjects in several languages. Continued

Died this day in 1956: H. L. Mencken

"Puritanism is the haunting fear that someone, somewhere is having a good time."