Everglades National Park

The Hayfoot and I returned from Florida this afternoon. We had a good time visiting my mother, laying on the beach, watching bad tv, and just relaxing after a long semester. Now we are ready for a good 2012. A few things I am looking forward to beyond blogging and spending more time with my wife now that she is out of grad school are

the reopening of The New American Wing at the Metropolitan Museum of Art,

visiting Gettysburg and Antietam in June,

catching the exhibit on Jews and the Civil War to be held at the American Jewish Historical Society/Yeshiva University this spring,

meeting my six week old niece for the first time later this winter.

Here is to a fun and productive 2012.

Hey everybody, I hope you are enjoying your day. Our dinner is in the oven. Earlier in the week the Hayfoot went to a small butcher shop in Little Italy and got a nice roast. I can smell it now. Earlier, after pancakes, I walked up to the bodega and bought a copy of the New York Times. The Times’s annual Lives They Lived is one of life’s small pleasures. The final Sunday of the year the paper’s magazine honors a cross section of people who have passed on during the year. What makes the annual tradition so intriguing is that the paper’s choices are intentionally counterintuitive. Thus Elizabeth Taylor, Jane Russell, and Andy Rooney are not here. Instead one finds marathoner Grete Waitz, fitness guru Jack LaLanne, and Dennis Ritchie, creator of the C Programming Language. The point is to focus on individuals who were not necessarily celebrities, but who contributed to the fabric of their–and our–times in some way. I usually just read two or three a day, all the better to savor between now and New Year’s.

We hope you enjoy the rest of the day. Remember, light blogging only between now and January 8th. Merry Christmas.

(image/Jane Russell, 1921-2011; 1945 photo courtesy U.S. Army)

Hey everybody, I wanted to take a few moments to wish you a Happy Holiday. Blogging will be sporadic at best here at The Strawfoot over the next two weeks. I turned in the draft of a magazine article to the editor yesterday. With the draft complete and today being the last day of class at the college where I work, it seems a good time to take a respite.  If the article gets published I will let you know.

Here is something one doesn’t hear me say too often, but I need a break from the Civil War. I am going to see a few movies, visit some museums, and just relax in general for the next two weeks.

I am looking forward to a fun and productive 2012. In January I will be writing some pieces for Governors Island’s website in my capacity as volunteer there with the NPS. The Governors Island season will resume in late May. I am submitting a proposal for The Conference on New York State History in June, and I have a few ideas for future magazine and journal articles as well. I believe I am finding my niche. I am going to make some improvements to the blog as well. Video, podcasting, better photography, and greater use of social media are some things I will be working on.

I’ll be checking in between now and early January, but only periodically. Regular posting will resume January 8th. Have a happy and safe holiday.

Keith

(image/Thomas Nast’s A Christmas Furlough, Harper’s Weekly January 3, 1863)

Adah Isaacs Menken

Call me ignorant if you wish, but Adah Menken was a name I had never heard until yesterday. Menken it turns out was a circus performer, published poet, and theater actress who played Broadway in the early 1860s. The starlet was hugely popular in her time and, like the World War 2 sex symbols who came two generations later, often entertained the troops. Madonna circa 1983 has nothing on Menken. The artist and bohemian had five husbands and was a personal friend of Walt Whitman, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and Samuel Clemens. Twain nicknamed her “The Great Bare ” for her often risqué roles. Born in the sexual gumbo of Louisiana, Menken was of mixed Irish and African-American lineage. She later converted to Judaism. Menken died in Paris in 1868 at the tender age of thirty-three and is buried in Pere Lachaise Cemetery. I may add this to my winter 2012 reading list.

(image/Charles D. Fredrick & Co.)

In recent weeks there has been much in the news and on the blogosphere about the successful effort to ban the Sons of Confederate Veterans (SCV) license plate in Texas.  Now a Native American group is protesting the just-approved plate that pays tribute to the Buffalo Soldiers.  The relationship between Native and African Americans was and is a complicated one and this is just the latest skirmish between the two groups.  Future disputes are likely.  In a guest post last month my friend Susan Ingram outlined the ongoing dispute between the Cherokees and Cherokee Freedmen.

(image by Chr. Barthelmess/25th Infantry, 1890)

My idea of Thanksgiving wasn’t instilled by an artist. That happened on a plane ride over Iowa, many Novembers ago. My wife and I were flying to Cedar Rapids to spend the holiday with her parents. Propeller planes then flew low over America, and around midday I noticed a recurring pattern on the snow-covered landscape below. Cars and pickup trucks, presumably loaded with husbands and wives and their kids, kept turning off the arrow-straight county roads and into the yard of the ancestral farmhouse—the one that had a barn. America was coming home.

Hey everybody, no Civil War here today. Someone woke up at 7:00 to dress our turkey. The bird is now in the oven and we are relaxing with our coffee and our Kindles and Pink Martini on the record player. Thanksgiving has always been my favorite holiday, probably because I have much to be thankful for. Wherever you are, we hope you enjoy your day. Happy Thanksgiving.

(above/theHayfoot’s homemade cranberry sauce)

Your humble writer lived in North Texas for a number of years and is married to someone who went to college in Oklahoma.  In the decades just after the Civil War there was a sizable movement of African-Americans from the Deep South to the state of Texas and what was then the Oklahoma Territory.  All-Black towns thrived during this era.  Some of these locales became so successful that whites reacted violently to them in what were, in effect, pogroms.  This history was lost, often intentionally so, for decades and is only now being rediscovered.  Other times these towns declined for less dramatic reasons, such as changes in the economy.  These places, so far removed from many parts of the country, have fascinating stories that will hopefully be told before they are lost forever.  Here is a small clip from one of them.

Many, even most, Americans today find it difficult to believe there was a time when millions fought and died for Union.  A reason for this lack of understanding is that many Americans simply take for granted that their country is a fixed entity, permanent and indissoluble.  That it could be otherwise is, literally, inconceivable.  Things will not be changing anytime soon, but nowhere is it written that ours will be a nation of fifty states in perpetuity.  Forever is a long time.  Some social scientists compiled data from the Where’s George? project to understand better how Americans currently live their lives in and across the state borders.