The Goddess of Liberty

"There would be floats in the morning and the one that got the eye was the Goddess of Liberty. She was supposed to be the most wholesome and prettiest girl in the countryside — if she wasn't she had friends who thought she was. But the rest of us weren't always in agreement on that…Following the float would be the Oregon Agricultural College cadets, and some kind of a band. Sometimes there would be political effigies.
Just before lunch - and we'd always hold lunch up for an hour - some Senator or lawyer would speak. These speeches always had one pattern. First the speaker would challenge England to a fight and berate the King and say that he was a skunk. This was known as twisting the lion's tail. Then the next theme was that any one could find freedom and liberty on our shores. The speaker would invite those who were heavy laden in other lands to come to us and find peace. The speeches were pretty fiery and by that time the men who drank got into fights and called each other Englishmen.
In the afternoon we had what we called the 'plug uglies' — funny floats and clowns who took off on the political subjects of the day…The Fourth was the day of the year that really counted then. Christmas wasn't much; a Church tree or something, but no one twisted the lion's tail." - Nettie Spencer

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

Battle of Chancellorsville

 

(Wikipedia) The Battle of Chancellorsville was a major battle of the American Civil War, and the principal engagement of the Chancellorsville Campaign. It was fought from April 30 to May 6, 1863, in Spotsylvania County, Virginia, near the village of Chancellorsville. Two related battles were fought nearby on May 3 in the vicinity of Fredericksburg. The campaign pitted Union Army Maj. Gen. Joseph Hooker's Army of the Potomac against an army less than half its size, Gen. Robert E. Lee's Confederate Army of Northern Virginia. Chancellorsville is known as Lee's "perfect battle" because his risky decision to divide his army in the presence of a much larger enemy force resulted in a significant Confederate victory. Continued

Photo: Roswell K. Bishop of Company I, 123rd New York Infantry Regiment, killed at Chancellorsville (LoC).

 

Henry Reed

(LoC) James Henry Neel Reed, known as Henry Reed, was born on April 28, 1884, in the Appalachian Mountains of Monroe County, West Virginia. Reed was a master fiddler, banjoist, and harmonica player whose amazing repertoire consisted of hundreds of tunes, as well as multiple performance styles. His music conveyed tradition while setting new directions, and became a touchstone for academic research into the history of U.S. fiddle music.
Henry Reed learned the overwhelming majority of his tunes by ear and retained them by memory. He learned from elderly musicians such as Quince Dillion, who was born around 1810 and served as a fifer in the Mexican War and the Civil War. As a youngster, Reed learned to read music, played alto horn in a local band, and picked up a few additional tunes from sheet music. Continued 

The Works Progress Administration (WPA)

(LoC) On April 8, 1935, Congress approved the Emergency Relief Appropriation Act of 1935, the work relief bill that funded the Works Progress Administration (WPA). Created by President Franklin Roosevelt to relieve the economic hardship of the Great Depression, this national works program (renamed the Work Projects Administration beginning in 1939) employed more than 8.5 million people on 1.4 million public projects before it was disbanded in 1943. The WPA employed skilled and unskilled workers in a great variety of work projects—many of which were public works projects such as creating parks, and building roads and bridges, and schools and other public structures. The Federal Writers' Project (FWP) was one of several projects within the WPA created to employ people with skills in the arts. Other arts projects included the Federal Art Project (FAP), the Federal Music Project, and the Federal Theater Project. When these projects were created, they were known collectively as Federal Project Number One—or more informally, “Federal One.”Among the well-known writers employed by the Federal Writers’ project were Nelson Algren, Saul Bellow, Ralph Ellison, Zora Neale Hurston, May Swenson, and Richard Wright. Continued

National Park Service

(LoC) Conservationists, civic leaders, and government officials submitted testimony before Congress in favor of the establishment of the National Park Service on April 5 and April 6, 1916. The congressional debate over the proper management of the growing system of national parks began in 1912 and culminated with the passage, in 1916, of the National Park Service Act. This legislation created the National Park Service within the Department of the Interior. Stephen T. Mather was named its first director. Continued

The Great Baltimore Fire

"Sunday morning, February 7th, about half-past 10 o'clock, while half of Baltimore was on its way to church, fire broke out in the large wholesale dry goods house of John E. Hurst & Co., at the corner of Liberty and German streets. From this point it raged until 5:45 o'clock Monday afternoon, when the exhausted firemen finally succeeded in bringing its destructive course to a halt among the lumber yards on Union dock, at the foot of Falls avenue, more than a mile from where it had started.
Its path, which today resembles nothing so much as a huge crescent, embraces eighty blocks in the heart of the business section; more than 2,500 buildings are in ashes, including the Chamber of Commerce, Merchants and Manufacturers' Association's headquarters; the Stock Exchange; more than half the banks and financial houses in the city, and practically the whole of the dry goods district, and the retail clothing district along Baltimore street, from Liberty street to the Baltimore street bridge over Jones' Falls, over a mile in length." Continued

Photos and text: Library of Congress

Rare 1865 Baseball Card to Be Auctioned in Maine

 

BIDDEFORD, Maine (AP) Six-figure bids are expected when a rare 148-year-old baseball card discovered at a rural Maine yard sale is auctioned.
Saco River Auction Co. in Biddeford is holding an auction Wednesday that includes a card depicting the Brooklyn Atlantics amateur baseball club. 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

Appointment at Fredericksburg

Marye's Heights, Fredericksburg, Va., Confederate fortifications (LoC)

(NYTimes) When Gen. Ambrose Burnside took over the Army of the Potomac in November 1862, the Republicans had suffered major losses in the mid-term elections, and the pressure was on to strike the Confederacy hard and end the rebellion. But Burnside took over a command as divided as the Union itself: many soldiers, particularly in the lower ranks, were angry over the recent dismissal of their beloved but controversial leader, Gen. George B. McClellan, and had serious doubts about both Burnside’s competence and the North’s shifting war aims.
And yet the country rallied behind the bewhiskered new commander as someone who could win on the battlefield. The New York Times hailed him as “just the man, of all men now in the field, likely to illustrate by some daring act of war in which he has thrown all the energies of his chivalric soul.” Unexamined were his penchant for gambling, his failures to make his own reconnaissance of the terrain his soldiers were to fight on, and his publicly expressed doubts about his own abilities. Continued

Walter Johnson Dies

(LoC) On December 10, 1946, baseball great Walter Johnson died at the age of fifty-nine. Nicknamed "The Big Train," Johnson pitched his way to fame during twenty-one seasons with the Washington Senators. His fastball is considered to be among the best in baseball history.
Johnson joined the Senators in 1907. After a tentative first season, the former high school star found his ground eventually scoring more shutout victories (110) than any other major league pitcher. Johnson's 1913 record for pitching fifty-six consecutive scoreless innings stood for over fifty years until Don Drysdale bested it in 1968. His strikeout record (3,508) held until 1983. In all-time wins, Johnson is second only to Cy Young.
Honored in 1913 and in 1924 as the American League's Most Valuable Player, Johnson retired from play after the 1927 season after breaking his leg--being struck by a line drive during spring training. Two years later, he took over as manager of the Senators, a position that he held until 1932. Continued 

The Articles of Confederation

(LoC) On November 15, 1777, the Second Continental Congress adopted the Articles of Confederation. Submitted to the states for ratification two days later, the Articles of Confederation were accompanied by a letter from Congress urging that the document
…be candidly reviewed under a sense of the difficulty of combining in one general system the various sentiments and interests of a continent divided into so many sovereign and independent communities, under a conviction of the absolute necessity of uniting all our councils and all our strength, to maintain and defend our common liberties… Continued

The Lend-Lease Act

(LoC) The Senate passed the $5.98 billion supplemental Lend-Lease bill on October 23, 1941, bringing the United States one step closer to direct involvement in World War II. The Lend-Lease Act, approved by Congress in March 1941, gave President Roosevelt virtually unlimited authority to direct material aid such as ammunition, tanks, airplanes, trucks, and food to the war effort in Europe without violating the nation's official position of neutrality. Continued

Anchors Aweigh!

(LoC) On October 10, 1845, fifty midshipmen and seven faculty attended the first term of The United States Naval School. Five years later, the school became the United States Naval Academy. From the Mexican War to the Persian Gulf War, officers trained at the Academy served in every major U.S. war. President Jimmy Carter holds the distinction of being the sole Naval Academy graduate elected president and commander in chief. Continued

Photo: Bancroft Hall, Annapolis Naval Academy c1911. (Library of Congress)

F. Scott Fitzgerald

(LoC) Writer F. Scott Fitzgerald, best known for his classic American novel The Great Gatsby, was born on September 24, 1896 in St. Paul, Minnesota. Named for his distant cousin Francis Scott Key, author of the "The Star-Spangled Banner," Fitzgerald was descended, on his father's side, from a long line of Marylanders. His mother, Mary McQuillan, was the daughter of an Irish immigrant who made his fortune as a wholesale grocer in St. Paul. Continued

Photo: Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, Carl Van Vechten Collection

A Case of Yellow Fever

(LoC) On August 27, 1900, U.S. Army physician James Carroll allowed an infected mosquito to feed on him in an attempt to isolate the means of transmission of yellow fever. Carroll developed a severe case of yellow fever, helping his colleague, Army pathologist Walter Reed, prove that mosquitoes transmit this often-deadly disease. Prior to these findings, epidemics of yellow fever were common in the American South. Uncertain of how the disease was transmitted, many people would leave the South for the summer, the season in which the epidemics were most common, returning after the first frost. Continued

The Bonus Army

'On July 28, 1932, protesters known as the "Bonus Army," or "Bonus Expeditionary Forces (B.E.F.)," who had gathered in the nation's capital to demand an immediate lump-sum payment of pension funds (benefits) for their military service during World War I, were confronted by Federal troops (cavalry, machine-gunners, and infantry) following President Herbert Hoover's orders to evacuate. (While Congress had approved the payment in 1924, the bonus was not payable until 1945.)The presence of the Bonus Army was a continuing embarrassment and source of difficulty for Hoover. He sent in troops under the command of Brigadier Perry L. Miles and General Douglas MacArthur. The veterans faced tear-gas bombs, bayonets, and tanks.' - Library of Congress

Independence Day

(LoC) Joseph Jenkins Roberts declared Liberia, formerly a colony of the American Colonization Society, an independent republic on July 26, 1847. He was elected the first president of the republic in 1848. A native of Petersburg, Virginia, Roberts immigrated to Liberia in 1829 at the age of twenty under the auspices of the American Colonization Society. The Society was organized in late December 1816 by a group which included Henry Clay, James Monroe, Andrew Jackson, Francis Scott Key, Bushrod Washington, and Daniel Webster. The colonization scheme, controversial from the outset among blacks and whites alike, was conceived as an alternative to emancipation. Continued

Image: Joseph Jenkins Roberts (Library of Congress). 

Cardinal James Gibbons

(LoC) Roman Catholic Cardinal James Gibbons, champion of labor and advocate of the separation of church and state, was born to Irish immigrants in Baltimore, Maryland, on July 23, 1834.
Not long after his birth, Gibbons' ailing father moved the family back to Ireland at his doctor's suggestion. After his father's death in 1847, Gibbons' mother decided to move her family back to the United States. Continued