First, we have a quiz coming up. This reminder has been brought to you by your grade point average.
Second, check this video from the Khan Academy on thinking like a (an, if being traditional) historian. It's less than 9 minutes long and provides an overview that students will benefit from.
https://www.khanacademy.org/humanities/us-history/precontact-and-early-colonial-era/how-to-think-like-a-historian/v/thinking-like-a-historian
Saturday, February 29, 2020
Thursday, February 27, 2020
U.S.S. Maine Sunk
The sinking of the U.S.S. Maine in the
Yellow journalistic newspapers loudly proclaimed Spanish responsibility, while privately the newspaper magnate Joseph Pulitzer said that no sane person would believe that Spain would take such provocative action.
Two months later, the
Below is a photograph of the wreckage visible above water in Havana Harbor before it was cleared.
Tuesday, February 25, 2020
A Few More Progressive Leaders
The following were not mentioned during class coverage or
received only a passing comment, but they had an enormous impact. Alternate
entries or lists are certainly possible; many reformers were at work during the
Progressive Era (roughly 1890 to 1920). I'll present the ones I selected
alphabetically by last name.
1. Jane Addams: established inner city
"settlement houses," which provided social services, education, and
all kinds of support for the poor. She later won the Nobel Peace Prize.
2. Louis Brandeis: this lawyer became a champion of
the powerless and helped push reform in both the courts and in public opinion.
Later, he would became one of the greatest Supreme Court justices ever to
serve.
3. William Jennings Bryan : he ran for
president as a major party candidate three times and lost all three, but is on
this list for his support of election reform and revised monetary policies. (He
also opposed imperialist policies.)
4. W.E.B. Du Bois: the strongest voice of the era for
civil rights for blacks. Du Bois's intellectual development of key ideas
inspired many African Americans. He was the era’s leading voice against racism
(which he tied to capitalism).
5. Charlotte Perkins Gilman: also a novelist and short
story writer, Gilman was known in the period for her study of gender and
economics. She troubled some because she demanded reforms far beyond the right
to vote for women.
6. Robert M. LaFollette, Sr.: he served as Wisconsin representative, governor, and senator and ran
for president, but is best known today for his tireless devotion to a variety
of Progressive causes. He spoke and fought against "vast corporate
combinations."
7. Alice Paul: she served as the main leader and
strategist for the final push for the Nineteenth Amendment, recognizing the
right of women to vote. She also continued to work on women's rights for the
rest of her long life.
8. Theodore Roosevelt: before, during, and after his
presidency, he pursued a number of Progressive causes, most especially in
conservation. Part of his legacy is our national park system.
9. Ida Tarbell: this muckraker journalist investigated
Standard Oil, John D. Rockefeller's monolithic corporation. Her findings helped
break up the massive organization following a trial on violations of the
Sherman Anti-Trust Act.
10. Booker T. Washington: a black activist, Washington
stood in strong contrast to W.E.B. Du Bois (see above) by emphasizing not civil
(political) rights so much as economic development. The Progressive Era was
somewhat more ready to listen to Washington ,
though many people today more greatly admire Du Bois.
Saturday, February 22, 2020
Beware of the Internet
The photo below appears all over the internet and is often
captioned, "Susan B. Anthony being arrested after voting."
But it's not.
This is Ada Wright being arrested after being knocked to the ground during a women's voting rights protest in London in 1910.
Just because an image appears online and is captioned does not mean that it's accurate.
But it's not.
This is Ada Wright being arrested after being knocked to the ground during a women's voting rights protest in London in 1910.
Just because an image appears online and is captioned does not mean that it's accurate.
The facts, briefly, are these. Anthony and 14 other women were
arrested for voting in Rochester, New York, in the 1872 election. Only Anthony
was brought to trial (though the election inspectors that did not prevent them
from voting were arrested, convicted, and jailed before Pres. Grant pardoned
them). At the trial, in 1873, the judge ordered the jury to deliver a guilty
verdict. Later this controversial move was ruled illegal. He fined Anthony
$100, but she announced that she would not pay the fine and he released her
anyway. This served both Anthony’s cause—to gain publicity for the women’s
rights movement—and the judge’s, because under those circumstances the court
decision could not be appealed to higher courts and the case was closed.
Historians, first and foremost, need to establish and report
(and then consider and analyze) facts.
Thursday, February 20, 2020
Secret Presidential Surgery
Which president had
surgery to remove a cancerous jaw—and successfully kept it secret?
Check this short article
for the astonishing details.
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A Yacht, A Mustache: How A President Hid
His Tumor (June
6, 2011, report on NPR's Morning Edition)
It's In The Mustache: According to [historian Matthew] Algeo,
President Grover Cleveland believed that if anything happened to his trademark
mustache during his surgery at sea, the public would know something was wrong.
In the summer of 1893,
President Grover Cleveland disappeared for four days to have secret surgery on
a yacht. It was the beginning of his second term as president and the country
was entering a depression, a delicate time in which a president's health was
inextricably linked to that of the nation. So Cleveland decided to keep the
surgery a secret — and so it stayed for years.
Today, that secret is
the subject of Matthew Algeo's new book, The President Is a Sick Man.
Algeo tells NPR's Steve Inskeep about the presidential illness that launched a
cover-up:
"Shortly after he
took office for the second time in 1893, he noticed a little bump on the roof
of his mouth," Algeo says. "Around June ... he had noticed it had
grown quite large. And the doctor diagnosed it as cancer, [saying], 'It's a bad
looking tenant, and I would have it evicted immediately.'"
Cleveland worried that
news of his diagnosis would send Wall Street — and the country — into a panic.
According to Algeo, that wasn't an unreasonable concern.
"It would be a big
deal today," he says. "It was an even bigger deal then because at the
time there was a stigma attached to cancer. Newspapers would call it 'the dread
disease.'"
So Cleveland decided to
have the tumor secretly removed. The plan was for the president to announce he
was taking a friend's yacht, the Oneida,
on a four-day fishing trip from New York to his summer home in Cape Cod.
"And it was on that
yacht that this operation was performed," Algeo says. "They assembled
a team of six surgeons. [It] took about 90 minutes. They used ether as the
anesthesia and they removed the tumor along with about five teeth and a large
part of the president's upper left jawbone."
The surgeons managed to
extract the tumor through the president's mouth, which meant there was no
noticeable scarring and the president's trademark mustache was left untouched —
key conditions for keeping the public in the dark.
Algeo says the operation
was an extraordinary achievement in American medicine.
"The doctors took
incredible risks. I mean, it was really foolhardy," Algeo says. "I
talked to a couple of oral surgeons [while] researching the book, and they
still marvel at this operation: that they were able to do this on a moving boat;
[that] they did it very quickly. A similar operation today would take several
hours; they did it in 90 minutes."
The 'Press' Gets The
Scoop
Even back in 1893, Algeo
says, it was pretty unusual for the president to disappear for four days, so it
wasn't long before people started talking.
Two months after the
president's "fishing trip," Philadelphia Press reporter
E.J. Edwards published a story about the surgery which he had confirmed with
one of Cleveland's doctors. The president flatly denied Edwards' story and even
went so far as to launch a smear campaign to discredit the reporter.
"So nobody believed
E.J. Edwards," Algeo says. "He was dismissed as a disgrace to
journalism."
Edwards' story may never
have made its way into history books if one of Cleveland's doctors, William
Williams Keen, hadn't eventually come forward.
"Twenty-four years
after the operation — when all the other principals were dead — there were only
three witnesses left to the operation," Algeo says. "And [Keen]
decided it would be the right thing to do to publish an article to explain what
really happened and to vindicate E.J. Edwards."
The closest Cleveland
ever came to confessing to the surgery was in a letter he wrote to a friend
after the first doctor talked to Edwards. It reads, "The report you saw
regarding my health resulted from a most astounding breach of professional duty
on the part of a medical man ... I tell you this in strict confidence for the
policy here has been to deny and discredit this story."
(The story continues
briefly but the portion above is most relevant to our Gilded Age coverage.)
Thursday, February 13, 2020
Jim Crow: "A Way of Life"
As Reconstruction failed, Southern states began creating Jim Crow laws. Many students have heard this term but might not be familiar with its meaning. Here's a definition from the website of the Jim Crow Museum of Racist Memorabilia at Ferris State University in Michigan. (This museum site has a number of other helpful features for students who find Reconstruction and its aftermath particularly interesting.)
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Jim Crow was the name of the racial caste system which operated primarily, but not exclusively in southern and border states, between 1877 and the mid-1960s. Jim Crow was more than a series of rigid anti-black laws. It was a way of life. Under Jim Crow, African Americans were relegated to the status of second class citizens. Jim Crow represented the legitimization of anti-black racism. Many Christian ministers and theologians taught that whites were the Chosen people, blacks were cursed to be servants, and God supported racial segregation. Craniologists, eugenicists, phrenologists, and Social Darwinists, at every educational level, buttressed the belief that blacks were innately intellectually and culturally inferior to whites. Pro-segregation politicians gave eloquent speeches on the great danger of integration: the mongrelization of the white race. Newspaper and magazine writers routinely referred to blacks as niggers, coons, and darkies; and worse, their articles reinforced anti-black stereotypes. Even children's games portrayed blacks as inferior beings (see [link, active at the website] "From Hostility to Reverence: 100 Years of African-American Imagery in Games"). All major societal institutions reflected and supported the oppression of blacks.
The Jim Crow system was undergirded by the following beliefs or rationalizations: whites were superior to blacks in all important ways, including but not limited to intelligence, morality, and civilized behavior; sexual relations between blacks and whites would produce a mongrel race which would destroy America; treating blacks as equals would encourage interracial sexual unions; any activity which suggested social equality encouraged interracial sexual relations; if necessary, violence must be used to keep blacks at the bottom of the racial hierarchy.
Tuesday, February 11, 2020
What Else Was Happening?
This week in
class we confront the challenges of Reconstruction and its ultimate failures.
Daytime students started that on Monday and will finish it early in the class period on Wednesday. Nighttime students will ride that bronco starting at 6:00 p.m. Wednesday night.
But we
will also look at some more cheerful--or at least neutral--aspects of the time
period. Reconstruction overlaps with another period we'll start covering next
week; it's called the Gilded Age. It was a whirling mixture of progress, greed,
accomplishment, violence, cultural achievement, huge inequities of wealth, and
more.
We'll
look at several developments, many of them accomplishments, of the early Gilded
Age.
One hint
about that coverage which will spark the question, "Why is this
here?": barbed wire.
Thursday, February 6, 2020
Presidents Under Arms
The
following presidents served in the armed forces during the Civil War. All were
Union (Northern) officers.
Abraham
Lincoln: commander in chief
Andrew
Johnson: brigadier general, military governor of Tennessee
Ulysses Grant:
general of the armies (commanded Union forces for the last part of the war)
Rutherford
Hayes: major general, wounded in combat
James
Garfield: major general, commanded troops at the Battle of Shiloh
Chester
Arthur: brigadier general, administrative posts
Benjamin
Harrison: brigadier general, commanded a brigade during Sherman's March to the
Sea
William
McKinley: brevet major, fought at the Battle of Antietam
Other
presidents alive during the war were too young to participate (such as Theodore
Roosevelt, who was a toddler when the war began). One president, Grover
Cleveland, paid another man $150 to take his place when he was drafted in 1863.
This practice was legal at the time.
Below is
Ulysses S. Grant when he was a general (not later, when he was president,
having been elected principally because of his success in the Civil War).
Tuesday, February 4, 2020
California in the Civil War
Our state faced a serious secession crisis in 1860 and 1861.
Transplanted Southerners formed a majority of the voting population in Southern
California as well as in Tulare County. They also formed a sizable minority in
San Joaquin, Santa Clara, Monterey, and San Francisco counties.
California voted for Lincoln--just barely--because the Southerners
were split between other candidates. Attempts at pulling California out of the
Union were suppressed by moving military units, some of them Northern
California volunteers, to the strongholds of secession.
Violence erupted in several places throughout the state. As the
war progressed, however, California's pro-Union groups prevailed and
contributed substantial gold and manpower to the Northern war effort.
Below is a photo from July 4, 1862, of a clash between supporters
of the Union and of the Confederacy in San Francisco at the intersection of
Montgomery and California streets. That's Nob Hill (before cable cars) in the
background.
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