The Smithsonian digitized Horace Pippin’s notebook in the mid-2000s.

It’s a rainy Friday. I’m going to stay in a get some writing done. The academic year starts a week from today. Next week will be full of meetings and preparation. I had a meeting earlier this week with a faculty member in the English Department for a module we are doing this fall semester based on the World War One grant our library received from The Library of America and the Gilder Lehrman Institute. This past February The Library of America published World War I and America: Told By the Americans Who Lived It, an anthology edited by the Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer of Woodrow Wilson, A Scott Berg. We received a copy of the book as part of the grant. Over four class sessions students will first watch the film we are producing and then for homework read various passages from the LOA anthology. We are choosing a cross-section of fiction and non-fiction, as well as poetry and even some music by James Reese Europe. The lyrics to at least one song are included in the book. Students will read the lyrics and we will then listen to the song. We will then discuss how the war brought jazz to Europe and led to the Lost Generation in Paris and the Harlem Renaissance here at home.

When I was at the New-York Historical Society last week taking in the WW1 exhibit, I was touched to see that they had included a few works by Horace Pippin. The LOA anthology includes an excerpt from Pippin’s journal, which he composed immediately after the war. The students will read Pippin and learn about the Harlem Hellfighters. The LOA and Gilder Lehrman Institute provided a number of themes for exploration, to which we intend to hew closely. Why invent the wheel when someone has done it for you? At the end of the module students will write brief essays about what they learned and what they might like to know about moving forward. I think this is going to be a fun project.

(image/Smithsonian Institution)

George Lee Schulyer donated the America’s Cup to the New York Yacht Club in 1851. Ten years later he wrote this letter to President Lincoln with news about the Union Defense Committee’s efforts to provision Daniel Sickles’s brigade one month into the Civil War.

New Zealand defeated the United States in the America’s Cup off the coast of Bermuda yesterday. In a strange coincidence, for my book I am currently writing about George Lee Schuyler, father of Louisa Lee Schuyler. George Schuyler co-founded the New York Yacht Club in 1844. After his schooner America won a regatta in England in 1851, Schuyler and his mates donated the trophy to the New York Yacht Club. The club would henceforth own what was now the America’s Cup in perpetuity with the proviso that the club host competitions with “any organized yacht club of any foreign country.” Legal agreements in the late 1880s tightened the language and made the agreement more binding.

Louisa and her sister donated this portrait of their father to the N-YHS in 1925 along with about a dozen other works. The two women were descendants of both Philip Schuyler and Alexander Hamilton.

George Lee Schuyler was a member of John Dix’s Union Defense Committee and later an aide to General John E. Wool. His daughter was a good friend of Theodore Roosevelt Sr. and active in the Women’s Central Association of Relief. Louisa was going strong well into the twentieth century. During the First World War she performed some of the same relief functions she had in American Civil War over half a century earlier. She and her sister presented this portrait to the New-York Historical Society in 1925 and made the gift official in Louisa’s 1926 will.

(bottom image/New-York Historical Society)

{image/Library of Congress)

Governor Charles Seymour Whitman spoke at the 13th Armory in Brooklyn on 27 December 1918. He had just lost a narrow race to challenger Al Smith and had asked for a recount, which was ongoing at the time.

As I said yesterday I intend to do deeper dives into the various reviews that took place in late 1918/early 1919 when the time comes. In the meantime I wanted to note the 98th anniversary of Governor Charles Seymour Whitman’s 1918 visit to the Brooklyn 13th Armory. I knew that there were parades and such in the aftermath of the Armistice, but it did not occur to me until these last few days just how ubiquitous they were. I suppose that in those heady days after the Kaiser’s abdication and Germany’s surrender that people felt that war really might have been rendered obsolete. Wilson was certainly optimistic while in Paris.

These ads ran all week in the Brooklyn Daily Eagle announcing the date change.

Governor Whitman of New York had lost to Al Smith in the November 5 gubernatorial race. Smith was the Democratic candidate and Seymour the incumbent Republican and Prohibition candidate. It’s almost a cartoon of late nineteenth and early twentieth century New York politics: Smith was a Tammany man and Whitman a Union League Clubber. The old and new were mixing in this period. On Memorial Day 1918 Whitman was in Brooklyn’s Grand Army Plaza for the GAR parade; a month after he was at the state GAR encampment in Ithaca. Still, his Prohibitionism and Smith’s Catholicism show hints of what was coming in the 1920s.

(images/Library of Congress and Brooklyn Daily Eagle)

I took this picture from the third floor of the Brooklyn Public Library this morning. It got down to 37 degrees today.

Yesterday’s Doughboy Day at Governors Island National Monument drew over 12,000 visitors, a significant increase over a usual Saturday. Here with some capsule comments are a few images from the day.

The forty-eight star flag went up over Fort Jay to begin the day.

Ryan Hegg of the World War One Centennial Committee for New York City spoke of the significance of the Great War.

The Ebony Doughboys drew large audiences at venues throughout the island.

George King III and colleague Jeff Klinger spoke to many about Ambulance 255 and the role of the AFS in the war effort.

Neil O’Connor introduced The Lost Battalion and answered questions afterward.

Living doughboy historians of different units marched through the historic district for the closing ceremony.

Meuse-Argonne Point at the northern tip of the island was where several speakers made the closing remarks of the day.

The original Ambulance 255 tending the wounded in the Woevre, September 1916. Note the bell on the left, which was used to warn of gas attacks.

While you read these words this Friday morning George King III and his
colleague Jeffrey Klinger are loading George’s ambulance onto a
trailer and heading for Governors Island. It is a circuitous route
that will take the two from Connecticut, through White Plains, NY,
into Manhattan, and finally onto the Governors Island ferry sometime
in mid-afternoon.

George King III and his restored Ambulance 255, Paris 2014

Ambulance 255 is a 1916 Model T Ford ambulance representative of the
1,200 ambulances donated by Americans and driven by U.S. volunteers in
France prior to America’s entry in World War I. This life-saving work
was carried out by the American Field Service. Join the National Park
Service and World War One Centennial Commission tomorrow at Governors
Island National Monument in New York City tomorrow, September 17, when they host Ambulance 255, the Ebony Doughboys, film historian Neil O’Connor and others in a
commemoration of the First World War.

Images: Long journeys are nothing new for George King III and his
restored Ambulance 255. For six months in summer 2014 he and the
ambulance traveled 10,000 miles through France revisiting the places where
the American Field Service performed its life-saving work. See the
ambulance and meet George and Jeff tomorrow.

(images/contemporary image via George King III; historic image courtesy of the Archives of the American Field Service and AFS Intercultural Programs.
http://www.afs.org/archives)

I took the afternoon off yesterday to have lunch and hang out with an old friend, an architect who moved away from the city several years ago. Though born here in New York City, his mother is French and he brings a strong strong European perspective to his worldview. We got to talking about The Beatles and how through some force–coincidence?, luck?, divine intervention?–their rise coincided with the transition from Austerity Britain to Swinging London. In the grander scheme of things Britain’s transformation was a process that began in 1914 in the chaos and destruction of the Great War and ended with Britain bankrupt and stripped of its empire in the wake of the Second World War. I often tell my students that history is all around them if they care to look. This morning, relaxing with my coffee, and came across this trailer for a 2013 British film called How We Used to Live, which I had never heard of before.

Enjoy.

I am in a Starbucks on Lower Broadway getting ready to taking the Governors Island ferry in a few minutes. A few minutes ago I hurriedly took the photo above of Trinity Church as seen from the Wall Street stop of the 2/3 line.