Monthly Archives: September 2012

Book now.

05 Wednesday Sep 2012

Posted by in Civil War sesquicentennial, Libraries

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The sesquicentennial events of the Maryland Campaign are now underway. I know that the interpretive ranger staff at Antietam, among other places, has been preparing for months. I would love to be in Maryland for anniversary weekend but alas that will not be feasible. Still, the campaign had obvious consequences for the country and there are many events marking the occasion accordingly. The culmination of the military campaign was of course Lincoln’s release of the Preliminary Emancipation Proclamation on September 22, 1862. It had slipped under my radar but thankfully the Hayfoot noticed that the New York Public Library’s Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture is having a four-day-only exhibit to mark the occasion. The First Step to Freedom will be showing in the Harlem library’s exhibit hall from September 21-24. There have been several excellent exhibition marking the proclamation over the past year but this one is special: it includes the last surviving draft of the document written in President’s Lincoln hand. The exhibition is free but tickets are required. We just booked ours a few minutes ago.

Try to make this one if you can. And Sylvia’s is just down the street. What are you doing for the sesquicentennial?

(image/President Lincoln writing the Proclamation of Freedom, David Gilmour Blythe)

A Cemetery Special

03 Monday Sep 2012

Posted by in Uncategorized

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Yesterday a good friend of ours came over to spend the day and have dinner. We also took advantage of the beautiful weather to visit the garden cemetery  around the corner from where we live. It was a wonderful afternoon, one of the highlights of the summer, and topped off by the meal the Hayfoot had ready for us when we arrived home. Later in the evening she was scanning Netflix for something to watch (having finished our Ugly Betty run last week.) when she stumbled up a captivating documentary called, appropriately enough, A Cemetery Special. The PBS website has a snippet. Producer Rick Sebak travelled the country visiting cemeteries from Boston’s Mount Auburn down to Key West and up to Alaska. Cemeteries are ultimately places for the living and Sebak captures why we feel rejuvenated after visiting these resting places. Here is a 2005 interview with the filmmaker from the Washington Post. If you have a chance, check it out.

Oyster-tecture

03 Monday Sep 2012

Posted by in New York City

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Oyster dredging in Long Island Sound

Fifteen years ago, just a month after moving to Brooklyn, I was at a Christmas party when the subject turned to the revitalization of New York City. This was December 1997 and while The Turnaround had already been underway for some time this was the period of exuberance at its most irrational. The Dot Com boom was going full steam here in Gotham and the city was flush with young internet entrepreneurs spending money like no tomorrow before they eventually had to move back to Nebraska and live with their parents after it all went bust. This happened to someone who lived on my block. Many of the other guests were younger folks in their early 20s (I was thirty at the time.) and when I noted how clean New York City had become a few of them scoffed. One girl even challenged me, asking me if I truly believed New York City was “clean” and looking t me incredulously when I answered in the affirmative. It was then that I realized how much older I was than the others. Old enough to remember the 1970s, I considered it progress that the Hudson was no longer catching on fire. In the 1990s kayakers were again paddling the waters around Manhattan. 1997’s twenty-year-old, too young to remember the chaos that was New York in the 70s, had no concept of this. It was one of my first experiences on the other side of the generation gap. Things have improved since the 1990s as well. Just last month several hundred swimmers came to Governors Island to swim the circumference of the island. The waters are cleaner but there is still a ways to go. A major problem is the pollutants embedded in the much. Enter the humble oyster, once a staple of New York’s many island.

(image/Popular Science Monthly, 1893-94)

Hiram Cronk, cont’d

02 Sunday Sep 2012

Posted by in War of 1812

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In June I wrote the post below about Hiram Cronk, the last veteran of the War of 1812. Aging veterans are fascinating for their ordinariness. As it turns out Cronk’s descendants are still living in New York State and have more information about their ancestor who voted for Andrew Jackson and shook hands with Lafayette during his famous 1824 visit.

I have been boning up on my War of 1812 for the bicentennial and my volunteer duties at Governors Island. America’s Second War of Independence is not something I know a whole lot about and I am finding myself increasingly intrigued and intellectually excited. It is going to be a great summer. Below is some wonderful film footage of the funeral of Hiram Cronk, the last known veteran of that conflict. The one-time private died in 1905 and was given a funeral with full military honors in Manhattan. Afterward, Cronk was held in state in New York’s City Hall and subsequently buried in Brooklyn’s Cypress Hills National Cemetery. There was nothing unique about the man or his military service. As I have written before, aged veterans eventually become famous by virtue of their longevity. Cronk was born in 1800, a year after George Washington died, and lived into Teddy Roosevelt’s second term. He would have been sixty-five when President Lincoln was assassinated, and he still lived another four decades after that. Pretty crazy, huh?