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Monthly Archives: October 2020

John Birks “Dizzy” Gillespie, 1917-1993

21 Wednesday Oct 2020

Posted by Keith Muchowski in Jazz, Those we remember

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Ooff. Long day. It was leavened somewhat when someone emailed me around noontime and told me that today was Dizzy Gillespie’s birthday. It had totally escaped me that today was the 103rd anniversary of Gillespie’s birth. In a nice piece of serendipity I was listening to Charlie Parker when I opened my friend’s message. In this case Bird was accompanied not by Gillespie but the young Miles Davis. Here is something I wrote on this date nine (!) years ago commemorating Dizzy Gillespie. My gosh, has he really been gone twenty-seven years. Though I never saw him live, I am glad I lived during his time. I stand by what I said all those years ago about Dizzy Gillespie being underrated and under appreciated despite the plaudits he received during and after his lifetime. Here is some listening for an autumn evening. . .

Yorktown, 1781-1881

19 Monday Oct 2020

Posted by Keith Muchowski in King family book manuscript, Rufus King

≈ 2 Comments

This past Thursday in the early evening I attended a virtual writing event at which we the participants wrote in bursts of twenty minute increments with a brief break in between to check in on how we did. For me it was a chance to get back to my manuscript about the Rufus King family, which I had to put aside in mid-August to prepare for the academic year. I mention it because the book begins with a brief telling of the October 1881 centennial observation of the Siege of Yorktown. Cornwallis surrendered to Washington on October 19, 1781. In what seems a lifetime ago I wrote a little bit about this five years ago in August 2015, though from a different angle from which I will be focusing in the King book.

The reason I mentioned all this here is because John Alsop King, Jr., Rufus King’s grandson, was one of the leaders of the New York delegation. He was hardly unique: the grandsons of many of the leading figures of the Revolutionary War Era participated in the Yorktown observation, which proved hugely important in late nineteenth century diplomacy.

(image/Norman B. Leventhal Map & Education Center of the Boston Public Library)

Happy Canadian Thanksgiving

12 Monday Oct 2020

Posted by Keith Muchowski in Uncategorized

≈ Comments Off on Happy Canadian Thanksgiving

Today is Canadian Thanksgiving. I have always assumed that it comes six weeks earlier than the American version because the growing season ends earlier north of the border, the holiday being based on the end of the season’s harvest. For this Thanksgiving observation I thought I would share this extraordinary photograph of Canadian troops Cambrai Cathedral (Notre-Dame de GrĂ¢ce chapel) taken on October 13, 1918. As the image suggests this was in the midst of some of the hardest fighting of the Great War. This was less than a month before the Armistice though these members of the Canadian Expeditionary Force obviously had no way of knowing that at the time, 102 Thanksgiving ago.

(image/Archives of Ontario)

Fiorello La Guardia: Italian-American

12 Monday Oct 2020

Posted by Keith Muchowski in Uncategorized

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Fiorello La Guardia in uniform, circa 1918

It’s a rainy holiday Monday. I am off but doing a few things in preparation for the coming week, which is filling up quickly. They posted my article at Roads to the Great War about Fiorello La Guardia, the second of two after one I did in April near the start of the shutdown. I wanted to return to La Guardia in recognition of Italian-American Heritage Month. Enjoy the day.

(image/Library of Congress)

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