American History

[bosox18d]

Temps, when I was in the 6th grade I corrected Sister Roberta on where Francis Scott Key wrote The Star Spangled Banner.She insisted he wrote it while prisoner as the White House Burned.I told her it was up the road in Baltimore but at the same time period.Next day she told me I was right and I was a hero to my male classmates while the girls told me I was lucky or rude for correcting our Nun.I only knew because we made annual spring camping trips to the DC area to take in the History.

[nytempsperdu]

bosox, Just think of the contribution you made to Sister Roberta's subsequent students. Some say errors always get remembered.  When I was student teaching, I worked with a middle-aged guy who could still recall a question he missed in high school--about Zachary Taylor ("Old Rough & Ready").  Not sure what the implications are for educational policy... 

[madupont]

weezo:

To :  Date: 01/27/2008 04:42:19 PM Total Posts:  Msg 24189.51 in Reply To : 
   
 
 Elleanor Eldridge, businesswoman amid oppression! 

 Home
 
Donate to the Registry 
Benefactors 
What Happened on Your Birthday? 
Search the Registry
by Category 
Search the Registry
by Keyword, Name, and Month 
Registry
Poems or Lyrics
 
Registry Sources
 
What's New at
The Registry! 
Registry Store 
About Us 
Contact 
 
 
   

 
 March 26


Elleanor Eldridge
*Elleanor Eldridge was born on this date in 1785. She was a Black entrepreneur.

Eldridge was from Warwick, RI, the youngest of seven daughters and two sons born to Hannah and Robin Eldridge. Her father and two uncles, Africans brought to Rhode Island on a slave ship, earned their freedom by fighting in the American Revolutionary War. They had been promised 200 acres of land in New York. Instead, they were given a worthless sum; her father was eventually able to save for the purchase of a small parcel of land and build a home in Warwick. Her mother, who was part Indian, died when she was 10. Much to her father's disdain, young Eldridge began washing clothes as a live-in servant for the Baker family of Warwick, one of her mother's former clients.

This young girl, a favorite of Elleanor Baker, her namesake, made 25 cents a week doing laundry for the family. She also became skilled at spinning, arithmetic and weaving and became an accomplished weaver by age 14. Three years later, Eldridge began working as a dairy woman for the family of Capt. Benjamin Greene. She quickly became well-known for her premium quality cheeses. When Eldridge was 19, her father died and she put her skills and savvy to use settling his estate. She continued to work for Capt. Greene for five more years until his death. Eldridge then went to live with her sister in Adams, Mass. While there, she and her brothers and sisters started a business of weaving, washing and soap boiling.

Money from that venture enabled Eldridge to buy land and build a house, which she rented for $40 per year. After three years, she returned to Providence, where she contracted herself out for whitewashing, wallpapering and painting during warm months and laundering and miscellaneous work for private families, hotels and boarding houses during the winters. By 1822, she had saved enough to purchase another lot and built, for $1,700, a house for herself and a renter. While E

...[Message truncated]
 

[madupont]

weezo

Sorry those captions did not prove transferable. Here is the registry address, instead.

http://www.aaregistry.com/mail_list/signup.php

[madupont]

nytempsperdu and bosox18d
re: reprimanding nuns, here's material from the Ursulines Convent

http://www.lkwdpl.org/wihohio/fiel-mar.htm

[weezo]

weezo

Sorry those captions did not prove transferable. Here is the registry address, instead.

http://www.aaregistry.com/mail_list/signup.php

Thanks, Maddie. The link did not return to finish the same story, which was interesting, but the link is now a wonderful addition to the Famous African Americans page which is one of the pages visited most often on the site.

[madupont]

weezo  

Not all Virginia-born slaves fought on the side of the colonials against the British. Here's one,
                               Rose Fortune, a special Canadian!  

March 13


Rose Fortune
*The birth of Rose Fortune in 1774 is celebrated on this date. She was a Black law enforcement officer and businesswoman.

Fortune was born into slavery in Virginia, owned by the Devone family. They escaped to New York City then the Nova Scotia (Canada) town of Annapolis Royal in 1783 when she was ten years old. Fortune came from a family of Black Loyalists, (escaped slaves and free Blacks who joined the British army during the American Revolution to find liberty). The British army promised any slave freedom in return for their loyalty.

In the late 1700s she appointed herself policewoman of the Annapolis Royal, located on the north shore of Nova Scotia. Although Fortune carried no badge, she had a unique way of dressing. Her petticoat showed under her dress, and over her dress she wore a man's waistcoat and an apron. She wore a lace cap which was tied under her hair and a straw hat on top of the lace cap. Her painted shoes had heels which were several inches high. She usually carried a straw basket and wore white gloves and mittens. Her dress was later adopted by many of the Black Pioneer women when they went to market.

Fortune also started a trucking service for ferry boat passengers using a wheelbarrow to carry luggage to their homes or hotels. Fortune died in 1864 at the age of 90. Her funeral was held at St. Luke's Anglican Church in Annapolis Royal. She is buried in an unmarked grave* in the Royal Garrison cemetery.

Reference:
From Slavery to Freetown
by Mary Louise Clifford
Jefferson, NC, 1999

The Black Loyalist Directory
by Graham Russell Hodges  

*The unmarked graves can be found throughout North-American history for those years if you notice the date of her death given 1864. Similar graves of runaway slaves on the Underground Railroad, moving up from Eastern-shore Maryland through Delaware and Quaker territory in Pennsylvania, can be found at the "Buchanan Church" on the frontier at the corner of 340 (to the west of the Kings Highway) and Rt.10. The church was renamed St. John's Episcopal Church and may be one of a series of churches on the Underground that had underground chambers that have led people to suspect, when there was no evidence written into church records, that this was a "Station".  Only the personal diaries of church members would have any evidence that this had been the case.

The  three graves off in the brush on the north-west end of the church property along Route 340 are those of three escaped slaves who were either left off here or came down from Welsh Mountain which was dense enough forest to provide cover that hid African Americans; today, only one Black man lives on the edge of the forest across from the Welsh Mountain old folks home. He is prominently noticeable because he collects "junk" for resale (as do white collectors along Rt.30 at Gap and throughout other choice locales in rural Lancaster).

Graves were always separated from the church-yard cemeteries of church members for good reason that they had to remain hidden in order for the church to remain a stop on the Underground. St. Johns, then Buchanan, is on the route continuing further west along what was the Philadelphia Pike along 340 to the north turn of 897 which somewhere near Spring Gulch campgrounds makes a turn heading back east and north up Welsh Mountain.

The deceased occupants of the graves behind the church were in life people who lived here at what is sometimes known as Cains crossing;the household which can still be seen on the north-western corner of 340 and 10 was the home of one of these refugees who became the  housekeeper for that homestead which is architecturally layered from pre-Civil War styles to post-Victoriana. It stands across from a mostly log structure with a dooryard of immense bleeding hearts by May  and has more of the architectural style of the pre-Civil War farm facing south to the position where William Penn positioned himself to do his surveying of what became the Chester/Lancaster counties line from the plattes of the 400 acre company packets of Penn's  Woods.  He aligned his tripod to a sight-line in the "Gap" on the mountains which takes the shape of a saddleback but was named by Swiss Mennonites for the Gap in the Haute-Savoie in the Alpes at the descent of the Rhone.

 

[madupont]

Rebecca Cole, pioneering doctor.

March 16




Rebecca Cole
(sketch)*
*Rebecca J. Cole was born on this date in 1846. She was the second United States African American woman physician and was the first Black woman to graduate from the Woman’s Medical College in Pennsylvania.

She was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania and received her secondary education from the Institute for Colored Youth (now Cheyney University), graduating in 1863. Rebecca Cole received her medical degree from Woman’s Medical College (now part of Allegheny University of the Health Sciences) in 1867. The Allegheny University of the Health Sciences no longer exists. Its parent organization, the school is administered by Drexel University. From 1872-1881, women physicians appointed Cole as a resident physician at the New York Infirmary for Women and Children a hospital owned and operated.

Dr. Cole worked with Dr. Elizabeth Blackwell, the first white American woman physician to receive a medical degree. Blackwell assigned Cole to the post of sanitary visitor, a position in which a traveling physician would visit families in their homes in slum neighborhoods and instruct them in family hygiene, prenatal, and infant care. Dr. Cole practiced medicine in Columbia, South Carolina for a time and returned to Philadelphia to open an office in the South Philadelphia section of the city.

In 1873, with assistance from fellow woman physician Charlotte Abbey, Dr. Rebecca Cole started a Women’s Directory Center to provide medical and legal services to destitute women and children in Philadelphia. Dr. Rebecca Cole practiced medicine for fifty years. Dr. Rebecca Cole died on August 14, 1922.

Reference:
Black Women in America An Historical Encyclopedia
Volumes 1 and 2, edited by Darlene Clark Hine
Copyright 1993, Carlson Publishing Inc., Brooklyn, New York
ISBN 0-926019-61-9

Image: U.S. National Library of Medicine, 8600 Rockville Pike, Bethesda, MD 20894
*for the sketch denoted above by an asterisk. They may be able to make it available
to become a doctor -- I have a link for this as well:
http://www.bls.gov/home.htm

ask for the Bureau of Labor Statistics handbook Occupational Outlook Handbook for Physicians and Surgeons. This link has the current date of March 19th. on the material.

Now I have to go plant peas!

[madupont]

One last for now. Somewhat better known in New Jersey, crossroads of the Revolution, as a contemporary of George Washington. Last saw her manuscripts on display  up at (I think it was, anyway...) Georgian Court, a college founded from the former summer home of a well known Manhattan banker of another era whose daughter(Peggy Guggenheim) was better known for her Manhattan art gallery.

The art person on duty that day in the College galleries was a mutual friend of mine and harrie's. She pointed out to me that Jankowski is involved with production on tv's Law & Order. That was a long span of time, although I did run into him at the New Jersey college possibly in late summer or autumn or 1982 or the following year because I first went out to their coffee house,The Inkwell, for New Year's Eve 1982/'83. Had not been previously seen since "maybe" December birthday party of Chuck Toman the previous year in the Midwest.

"Poet Phyllis Wheatley was a trailblazer."

July 11

Phyllis Wheatley
*This date celebrates the birth of Phyllis Wheatley in 1753. She was a black poet and one of the first black woman poets recognized in the United States.

Born in Gambia, Africa and sold in Boston on July 11th 1761. She was purchased from a slave ship to work for the family of John Wheatley, a merchant. The Wheatley’s soon recognized her talents and gave her privileges atypical for a slave, allowing her to learn to read and write. At the age of 14 she began to write poetry, and her first published work, An Elegiac Poem, on the Death of the Celebrated Divine... George Whitefield (1770), attracted a great deal of attention.

In 1773 her Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral were published in England under the sponsorship of the Countess of Huntingdon, and Wheatley's reputation spread in Europe as well as in America. A poem published in 1776, dedicated to George Washington, brought her further acclaim. The dissolution of the Wheatley family by death left Phyllis Wheatley alone, and in April 1778 she married John Peters, a free black man who failed in business and apparently also failed to support Wheatley and her children. At the end of her life, she was working as a servant, and she died in poverty. Wheatley's poetry, largely concerned with morality and piety, was conventional for its time.

Her significance stems from the attention that she drew to her successful education. Her poems were reissued in the 1830s by Abolitionists eager to prove the human potential of blacks. Her best-known poems are To the University of Cambridge in New England (1767) and To the King's Most Excellent Majesty (1768). Phyllis Wheatley died December. 5th 1784 in Boston, Massachusetts.

Reference:
Black Saga The African American Experience A Chronology
by Charles M. Christian
Copyright 1995, Civitas/Counterpoint
ISBN 1-58243-000-4

 

[weezo]

Maddie,

I put Phillis Wheatley on Famous Americans some time back.

Yes, of course there were African-Americans who fought for the British! The British could be counted on to honor their promise of freedom for those who took up arms against the Americans. Many and possibly most of the African Americans who fought in the Revolution were returned to their masters if they were slaves.

I think it was Jefferson in the Declaration of Independence who tried to assert that the Brits were responsible for establishing slavery in the colonies, but it was edited out before the final document.

[madupont]

http://www.salon.com/books/nonfiction/index.html?story=/books/feature/2010/03/22/history_of_white_people_nell_irvin_painter

Nell Irvin Painter has apparently written quite a lot of books; on the faculty at Princeton but, I think that she graduated from Harvard.  One of these I noticed  was, Slavery and Soul Murder; which is about the little mentioned (or, unmentionable) fact that child abuse sexually was an important component of slavery in  the Colonies which later became the US.

I'd say that this was a prominent concern of Toni Morrison at the time that she took her house at Canadaigua (that was later burned to the ground including a manuscript which she had been working on for a long time and was readying for publication ) after working as an editor --I think it may have been at Doubleday; but it is so long ago that I tend to mix up publishing houses.

When I got here,
they had already finished filming of Thandie Newton as,the "ghost" in Oprah Winfrey's production of the film, here in Pennsylvania: Beloved.

And Toni Morrison had left the Finger Lakes Region, where she did so much of her historical research when planning a novel, and was now at Princeton on faculty because she had won a Nobel Prize.

The major premise of Beloved which she had been researching was the case of a woman who murdered her baby rather than having her brought up in slavery.  Rather ingeniously, Morrison turned the somber topic into the story,Beloved, set in Ohio, where Oprah's character is living as a runaway slave(similar to the Hemings' family members), but they needed Pennsylvania for the spacious fields in their filming while at the same time being able to revert to Philadelphia(the oldest big city in the US, which was filled with free Blacks; topic of another story by Richmond reporter, Edward B. Jones, that we read and discussed at nytimes.com, concerning the existence of the paddyrollers as well as Black slavery by Black owners and how these cities came to be culturally gathering places for Abolitionist liberated Blacks). For Film purposes Philadelphia still had cobblestone streets in certain areas where the market-scenes could be shot.

Beloved, as a person, played by Thandie Newton, whose father is African, turns the direction of the story from a somber topic of runaways slaves to a haunted thriller, in her ability to manifest a disembodied spirit who has taken possession of a young woman's body to communicate with the living.  It sends shivers down your spine while you are sitting in the theater watching it, more so than Odetta did in  embodying a Faulkner novel for film.  ( of course, Odetta. as a younger woman than that, could have turned into somebody physically like "Precious",  Gabourey Sidibe, except for the fact that she was strongly muscled from having been a field worker as a young woman; although, when I met her, she was married and more zophtic even while on the road performing as a folk singer.  

So, although I recall that your wrote about the Niagara Movement and Frederick Douglass, it may have escaped you that 18th.century born Rose Fortune, born into a family of escaped slaves and "... free Blacks who joined the British army during the American Revolution to find liberty)", had already escaped and had merely to cross New York state from the city of New York, which was quite recently renamed from its Dutch precedent. Being helped to become a Loyalist was one thing --

I originally was going to reply to the assertion " that the Brits were responsible for establishing slavery in the colonies, but it was edited out before the final document."; and had already written out what I had learned to do with George Bush's assertion to the Queen when she came to Virginia for the 300th.anniversary of the Colony, when I slipped on the wrong key and it went. I had a saved document at one time of an African-American teacher who claimed the Bush family were merchants in Maine definitely involved in the "three cornered hat" analogy for conducting the slave trade. Our former president declared to Her Majesty,while his mother, Barbara(who is a Walker), was having a private conversation with Queen Elizabeth, that they were cousins but he had forgotten how many generations "removed" although then she asked his mother if she always "removed" him to the far end of the table where he was imbibing the wine at luncheon.

What I was getting at was history, taught to Blacks as valuable to Blacks, was one of escape routes for a couple of hundred years of escaping and one could choose to become or remain Loyalist or continue evading by crossing another border into another culture just as it continues to be done today.  Some periods of time are better than others depending which party is in control in each country and how much power is still asserted by the country that claims to be the higher power.

So I was not surprised at the history of Rose Fortune, after having  visited the barracks and the smallness of the grounds at Fort Erie for instance, perhaps not as comparatively large as British head-quarters in Nova Scotia but in either case one was reasonably close to Quebec, particularly on the New York side.  So that nothing any longer surprises me.

The history of Gabriel Sidonie Colette is equally interesting for a woman whose father,Captain Colette, was a ship's captain descended from Epiciers who lived along the Atlantic coast of France smuggling cigarettes as previously they had smuggled a variety of things off larger ships arriving from Martinique in the Caribbean. They would ply small open skiffs from the port to the ships in the harbor before trading in the market.  Captain Colette is shown in daguereotype sitting around in the garden in a chair with his  sea-captain's cap; in a garden in Burgundy, very much like the paintings of the mailman at Arles in his uniform by Van Gogh.

[MrUtley]

It must have been a terrifying experience to be on that ship, trying to find a port, only to be rejected over and over again.

Whatever did Jewish people do to the world population as to be so unwelcome?

They did nothing but live among Christians and other bigots.

If that is your answer, then why did the Jewish people choose to live among bigots?

Sweet Jesus, you are an idiot.

You aren't stereotyping alll people who are not Jewish as bigots, are you?

32% of the world's population is Christian. 1% is Jewish. What is so hard to figure out? Tell you what. Go watch "The Reader". Kate Winslet plays you.

[MrUtley]

When I taught h.s. I found that making an error in front of the class was one of the most effective teaching tools--kids love correcting the teacher--if the ol' ego can take it!

HS kids do love catching the teacher in a mistake. It is best to admit it with a grin, and let the kids have their fun --- in other words, be a "role model" for how to make a mistake!

I can not imagine you doing this. Wonder why?

[madupont]

It must have been a terrifying experience to be on that ship, trying to find a port, only to be rejected over and over again.

Whatever did Jewish people do to the world population as to be so unwelcome?

They did nothing but live among Christians and other bigots.

If that is your answer, then why did the Jewish people choose to live among bigots?

Sweet Jesus, you are an idiot.

You aren't stereotyping alll people who are not Jewish as bigots, are you?

32% of the world's population is Christian. 1% is Jewish. What is so hard to figure out? Tell you what. Go watch "The Reader". Kate Winslet plays you.

The proof of the pudding is generally brought home to me at this time of year, the moon is full and floating peacefully along ready for Passover.

This year in a fleetin' moment of some passing nostalgia, I recall a wine.  So I begin calling the usual round of logical materialization.  First you call up the Jews of Lancaster Community Center and you get Shelly, Shalom. Who gives you the phone number of the woman who runs the wine shop at the synagogue; and when you tell her that  you are looking for Abarbanel, she outlines a trip you should take to Philadelphia on the other end of the main line.  In fact, she has a number and a name of a place known as Blue Star.  And as you have thanked her and begin looking this up, it is not where she had been describing it.

You opt for going straight at Abarbanel which is a family that was around in the time of King David and then somehow ended up in Portugal. They have family somewhere in the United  States but it seems they are keeping that just between they and friends and those friends with whom they do business. But, the Abarbanel wine is handled by Admiral which is in Cedar Grove, North  Jersey, on Sand Park Road, at least just north of Verona with which I am familiar. 

Why, because you can call Wine and Spirits stores here in Lancaster(which are State stores) all you want to and you will run into that same gloating and proud of it female voice that is trying to tell you that you will never get any help here; because "we only carry...", yadda,yadda,yadda.

This lets you know that everything you have heard about how the Jews arrived in Lancaster when it was being settled as a rural area and then a colonial city, and how few signs of their being here are here at present after three centuries , are things that still prevail.  The population in this county are anti-semitic and let you know it. They were rather hoping that they left this behind in Europe where as Christians they were the only persecuted.  So forget about this part of Penn's Woods being the home of brotherly love.  People here take personal pride in being Christian (apparently unlike any Christians that previously existed).

[weezo]

When I taught h.s. I found that making an error in front of the class was one of the most effective teaching tools--kids love correcting the teacher--if the ol' ego can take it!

HS kids do love catching the teacher in a mistake. It is best to admit it with a grin, and let the kids have their fun --- in other words, be a "role model" for how to make a mistake!

I can not imagine you doing this. Wonder why?

You have chosen to manufacture a stereotype of what you think I am, and when I post little pieces that do ot fit your stereotype, you wonder why?