Daily Archives: May 3, 2021

VINCENNES, Ind. (WTWO/WAWV) Gunfire, crowds and military gear were just part of the excitement over WWII weekend at the Indiana Military Museum.

Bryan Andrews studied history in college and begin his reenactment career when he was only two years old. He believes teaching the next generation about the countrys history is very important.

Were all living historians as the term is, said Andrews. Were the ones who come out here and basically were the ones who try and bring history to life. Were educators first and most importantly.

The museum took over the WWII reenactment after a company in Illinois was unable to do so due to COVID restrictions.

Museum staff say this year they saw more reenactors than in years past.

It about equals our largest number of reenactors ever and these guys go out, set up camp, said Jim Osborne, curator for the Indiana Military Museum. They set up different displays and exhibits and twice a day they have put on some fabulous battle reenactments.

Andrews has traveled the country taking part in different reenactments including the Civil and Vietnam War.

In my Revolution War reenactment unit Ive been as far as the east coast to Virginia, said Andrews. So lots of reenactors travel all over because we live all over the country and we converge on sites. Tour sites and museums to reenact and engage with people from different communities.

Osborne hopes to see everyone back for the museums own annual WWII event which will be Labor Day weekend.

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WWII Weekend Shares U.S. History with the community - MyWabashValley.com

Buchtel Hall rose from the ashes of a devastating fire.

Then it had to do it all over again when history repeated itself.

Fifty years ago, the University of Akron came close to losing its iconic building.

Custodians James Granlee and Nora Guy were taking a snack break at 2:30 a.m. May 8, 1971, after cleaning the first two levels of the administration building.

As Granlee nibbled on food and read a book in a lower-level office, he heard a sharp knock. It was a puzzling sound since it was the middle of the night.

At first, I thought somebody had walked by the door and hit it with their fist, he later told the Beacon Journal. I looked out the window and then down the hallway, but didnt see anything. So I went back to my book.

A few minutes later, Granlee and Guy heard two more thuds. They checked the offices of President Norman P. Auburn and other administrators, but found nothing unusual until they took their search outside at 2:45 a.m.

The custodians were shocked to see heavy smoke pouring out of three windows on the second story. When Akron firefighters arrived, the roof of Buchtel Hall was engulfed in orange flames.

More than 50 firefighters from 11 companies battled the blaze. They entered the front door and climbed to the second floor, but debris rained down on them and they had to evacuate the building.

The roof collapsed with a loud crunch. Firefighters used three ladder trucks and seven pumpers to pour tons of water on the structure to prevent the fire from spreading to other buildings, and finally got the blaze under control by 4:30 a.m. Fortunately, no one was hurt.

Besides the presidents office, Buchtel Hall housed the offices of admissions, university publications, new construction accounting, equal employment opportunity, vice president of business and finance, treasurer, university news service, development, vice president for student services, director of institutional research and vice president of academic affairs.

All were out of a home.

Fire officials estimated damage to the building at $503,000 and $186,000 to its contents. Adjusted for inflation, that would amount to nearly $4.5 million today.

Buchtel Hall was the last surviving building from Buchtel College, the forerunner of the University of Akron. Designed by architect Frank O. Weary, it replaced the colleges original 1871 hall, which was destroyed by a fire Dec. 20, 1899.

Buchtel College dedicated the building in June 1901 at commencement. The new hall contained two cornerstones: its own in the northeast corner and the stone from the original building in the vestibule wall of the main entrance.

Seventy years later, the charred building was mostly a shell.

Apparently the flames shot up through an old shaft which had been enclosed, and then broke out in the attic, explained George W. Ball, director of university relations. Theres nothing to indicate at this time that the fire was purposely set.

Most of the offices are intact, but the water damage is extensive. Were taking the contents out now and attempting to dry them out.

State and city fire investigators searched for a cause.

At this time, Id have to say it was either defective wiring, careless smoking or arson, in that order, Akron Fire Chief Carl E. Best said a day after the fire.

He added that the chance of arson was remote. Months later, the cause had still not been determined. If it ever was found, officials apparently didnt tell reporters.

Adding to the intrigue, the building was not insured. The previous year, campus unrest during the Vietnam War led to a series of arson fires and bomb threats. In November, the insurance company issued a 30-day cancellation notice.

Even though we tried, insurance companies considered the buildings high risk in view of the past incidents, Ball explained. All the auxiliary buildings dormitories, and Gardner Student Center are covered, but not the academic buildings.

President Auburn said it wasnt customary for state universities to insure their buildings. The insurance that the University of Akron had on Buchtel Hall in 1970 was a carryover from its days as a municipal university.

Before, we didnt have the power and backing of the state, Auburn said. We had to have our own coverage because the city was in no position to come to our aid.

Auburn, who was preparing to step down from his post after 20 years, said he hoped to see Buchtel Hall restored.

We want to preserve the outside walls and the buildings architectural lines, he said. It is a landmark on the campus and we would like to see it back … only this time fireproofed.

President-elect Dominic J. Guzzetta, the leader of Marian College in Indiana, said he agreed 100% with Auburn.

I think Buchtel Hall is synonymous with the university, Guzzetta said. It would be quite unfortunate if Akron University did not have Buchtel Hall.

Not everyone was in agreement. According to an informal poll in the Beacon Journal, 55% of respondents said Buchtel Hall wasnt worth restoring while 45% wanted to see it repaired.

Among the comments of naysayers: A new, fireproof, more efficient building can be built for the same price. There is too much violence to try and preserve it. I believe in progress but this is not worth saving. It certainly doesnt harmonize with the other buildings.

Among the comments of preservationists: As a city university, it is important to preserve at least one link with the past. It is the only building that doesnt look like a factory. Ill never forget the beautiful stairway and balcony. Yes, but lets insure it. Akron U has too little tradition now.

University trustees authorized Auburn to ask the state for funds to restore or replace the administration building. On June 14, 1972, Gov. John Gilligan signed June 14, 1972, a $158 million capital improvements bill that included $850,000 for Buchtel Hall.

The University of Akron approved $722,742 in bids with Seese and Sveda Construction Co. serving as the general contractor for $472,520, Other winning bids were; Spohn Corp., heating, ventilating and air conditioning, $156,884; G.W. Geopfert, plumbing, $36,650; and Community Electric, wiring, $56,688.

By December 1972, all work on gutting the old building had been completed. Structural steel, window frames and door frames arrived for construction.

For the next year, workers restored Buchtel Hall to its original glory.

Philanthropist Helen Shaffer Robertson donated $100,000 in memory of her husband, James G. Robertson, an Akron financier. The money was used to build a blue-and-gold conference room forthe building.

The Womens Committee of the University of Akron took particular interest in the wrought-iron staircase, pledging $10,000 to restore the much-admired fixture. The 150-foot double stairway was carefully reshaped from the original iron, but its wood railings had to be replaced.

While most of the interior restoration was completed by September 1973, the University of Akron decided not to dedicate the building until the Founders Day celebration Jan. 9, 1974.

Classes were dismissed as officials held a ribbon-cutting ceremony at 11 a.m. Volunteers served refreshments and offered tours of the pristine offices.

In an address titled Out of the Ashes: Buchtel Rebuilt, Professor George W. Knepper praised the building as the heart of the university and said it held intangible value.

It serves as an emotional anchor, giving us a sense of continuity with past achievements and our goals, Knepper said.

Buchtel Hall was back.

Mark J. Price can be reached at mprice@thebeaconjournal.com.

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Local history: Fifty years ago, fire ravaged Buchtel Hall at the University of Akron - Akron Beacon Journal

Los Angeles, as the writer Octavia Butler once mused in a notebook, forms and shatters, forms and shatters.

This has never been a place with a conventional relationship to its history.

Where little blue plaques and carefully preserved structures have proliferated elsewhere, L.A.'s official stance on the past has typically been both grander and more opaque heavily romanticized, carefully edited, booster-ized, whitewashed and perpetually repackaged in service of whatever comes next.

We have always had our civic gaze fixed on the future, Christopher Hawthorne, the citys first chief design officer and a former Times architecture critic, told me. To the extent that we have had a coherent sense of identity, it has been very much shaped by that perspective.

But what about the past? And how to make sense of it?

In late 2019, a Civic Memory Working Group impaneled by Mayor Eric Garcetti a diverse array of thinkers that included 40 leading historians, architects, artists, Indigenous leaders, city officials, scholars and cultural leaders, according to the city began meeting to explore how Los Angeles could more accurately reflect the brightest and darkest moments of its history. Hawthorne coordinated the groups efforts, and last month, it released its recommendations.

The 166-page report, produced by the Huntington-USC Institute on California and the West with support from the Getty Foundation, begins with a simple provocation in the form of a question: What might it mean if the city of the future could simultaneously be lauded for its regard for the past?

The groups recommendations include building a memorial to the victims of the 1871 Chinese Massacre, appointing an official city historian, looking into the creation of a city museum, an audit of monuments on publicly accessible land, and developing strategies to recontextualize or remove those that are outdated or fraught.

I spoke to Hawthorne about the Civic Memory Working Group and the sometimes slippery nature of L.A. history.

Heres some of our conversation, condensed and lightly edited for clarity.

I know the working group first convened in November 2019, but I imagine the idea was probably simmering long before then. Can you walk us through how it came to fruition?

It was something I was interested in trying to pull together pretty soon after I joined the mayors office in April 2018. At that point, there was already beginning to be a national conversation about what to do with controversial monuments and memorials, particularly Confederate monuments. I was interested in what that conversation meant for Los Angeles. Of course, we dont have Confederate monuments to the same degree, but we have plenty of fraught monuments and memorials that reflect a complicated relationship with history.

So I wanted to see if we could frame some of these questions in a way that was specific to Los Angeles and its particular and I would say even peculiar relationship to history. And when I say peculiar, I mean that we have arguably been more aggressive in clearing or whitewashing difficult aspects of our history than most American cities, even.

Why is that?

There are a number of reasons. I think we have relied to an unusual degree on boosterism and mythmaking in establishing our civic identity, particularly in terms of establishing an Anglo elite here in the late 19th and the early 20th century. We have been very much in love with our reputation as the city of the future. We have been headquarters of the Hollywood dream factory.

I know the group was already deeply engaged in discussion about monuments and erasure last summer, when the broader cultural reckoning around these issues hit an inflection point. Did that shape or affect your work?

It added to the urgency. And the sense that the work was timely and it was a good thing that we had done some of the work already, so we werent solely being reactive to what was happening. But we could try to incorporate discussions about that reckoning, because that was a word that we had been talking about already.

Most specifically, we talked a lot about how the suffering we were seeing around the city last year public health suffering related to COVID-19, suffering related to racial and other kinds of injustice had deep roots.

Its difficult to really understand the unequal toll that the COVID-19 pandemic was taking on the city, for example, without understanding some of the historical forces that we had been talking about and trying to grapple with whether thats redlining housing policy, freeway construction, the ways in which the city actively sorted residential populations, often by race, across much of the 20th century.

So both the racial and social justice protests and the pandemic reflected a need for us to understand our history more clearly particularly the parts of our history that weve tried to put aside.

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L.A.s history is often whitewashed, romanticized and censored. A new push to tell the truth - Los Angeles Times

ROCKFORD (WREX) Bats were swung and balls were hit at Midway Village Museum on Sunday, all to celebrate the history of women in sports

The Rockford Peaches Baseball Living History League played against the Mary B's, a team from the Bickford Senior Living Facility.

The re-enactment game gave people the chance to learn about women in sports and the role the Rockford Peaches played.

One educator says we must continue to share this history, especially with the next generation.

"My generation had the movie, so we remember this. But our kids and the generation coming up today, it's something new for them. And a lot of them don't know that during world war two, women played baseball, not softball, baseball," said Caitlin Treece.

People were also able to check out the Rockford Peaches exhibit as part of the admission.

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Rockford Peaches play ball to celebrate the history of women in sports - WREX-TV

Diane Janowski, Special to Elmira Star-Gazette Published 6:01 a.m. ET May 3, 2021

I wrote about the demise of the Langdon home in the Nov. 3, 2017 edition of the Star-Gazette. I have some more to report.

Before COVID-19, I had coffee with a group of friends every Friday morning at Steve Seabergs State Farm insurance office in Langdon Plaza. Sometimes we wondered which part of the Langdon Mansion we were sitting in.

After a sleepless night last month with a lot of thinking, I got up to find a floor plan of the old mansion and overlay it on todays Langdon Plaza to see what was what.

The Langdon Mansion is well documented by stereographic views dating from 1878 to 1880. The surviving furniture and decorative accessories are preserved at the Chemung County Historical Society and Quarry Farm, east of Elmira.

The Langdon Mansion floorplan from the 1903 Sanborn map overlayed onto a current map.(Photo: Provided)

Jervis Langdon was born in 1809 in Vernon, New York. He moved to Elmira in 1845 from Millport with his wife, Olivia. Jervis was interested in the lumber industry and made much money in his endeavors. By 1860, the family had enormous wealth, from lumber and then anthracite coal.

The family had three children: Olivia who later married Samuel Clemens, our Mark Twain Charlesand Susan. The Langdon home had two servants in 1860, Mary Lewis and Catherine Mahon, both from Ireland.

The family lived in several Elmira locations before purchasing a lot in 1862 near Main and Church streets owned by Anson Ely. In 1865, Jervis bought the corner lot that had a modest but elegant Greek Revival residence. As the house was not big enough, Jervis built an addition and remodeled the whole place as Italianate.

The north side of the Langdon home showing the early house with the new house and the circular driveway.(Photo: Provided)

Remodeled is the word they used. In my opinion, they built a whole big new house attached to the older smaller house. The result was a three-story mansion exceptional for Elmira and filled with the latest fashionable furniture. An architect adorned the brownstone home with a pedimented pavilion in front, bays on both sides, and a telescoping arrangement of wings. Around the back were a carriage house and a greenhouse. The architect was likely Andrew J. Warner, of Rochester. Warner was known for his wide porches that featured a central arch opening.

The inside of the house was commissioned to Pottier and Stymus, a new furniture and design firm in New York City, who were to do the cabinets, decorating, painting, carpets, curtainsand handmade wood furniture. The firm had notable clients.

The Langdon drawing room was the largest and most elaborate of all the rooms. The furniture was ebonized cherry embellished with gilt-bronze mounts and medallions. Pottier and Stymus borrowed forms from aristocratic French furniture. The decorators demonstrated Langdons good taste. In later years after Jervis died, Olivia continued to use Pottier and Stymus to create new furniture suites for several bedrooms.

The drawing room of the Langdon Mansion.(Photo: Provided/Mark Twain House & Museum)

Olivia continued to live at 303 N. Main St.until she died in 1890. The house went to son Charles. Charles and his wife, Ida, made changes in 1890.

The house was demolished in 1939, and Langdon Plaza opened in 1940.

So, back to the 1903 floor plan and todays layout. If you visit Steve Seabergs office in Langdon Plaza, please note that you are standing in the Langdon kitchen.

For lots more information about this subject, please seeThe Jervis Langdon Residence in Elmira, New York by Walter G. Ritchie in Mark Twain Journal56, no. 1 (2018), atjstor.org/stable/45173256.

Diane Janowski is the Elmira city historian. Her column appears monthly.

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The history of the mansion owned by the Langdons Mark Twain's in-laws in Elmira - Elmira Star-Gazette

The year is 1966; the place is Rochester, Minn., a small Midwestern city served by 77 filling stations. As one pulls into the station, a car-crazy teenage attendant in a blue shirt with his name above one pocket and Apco, D-X or Deep Rock above the other, offers to filler er up and wash the windshield.

Soon, his equally car-crazy buddies start hanging out. Pop is 10 cents, candy bars a nickel. The station has become part of their social life. They talk cars to the on-duty mechanic who learned his trade in the U.S. Army, being careful to not get in his way. He races at the Olmsted County Fairgrounds on Sunday nights.

Teenagers grow up, making way for the next wave of the car-crazy culture, but lessons learned over a bottle of orange soda and the smell of high-octane gas will never be matched in todays self-serve, pay-at-the-pump world.

Lens on History is a weekly photo feature by Lee Hilgendorf, a volunteer at the History Center of Olmsted County.

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Lens on History: The gas station life - PostBulletin.com

A demonstrator raises a fist in front of Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial during a protest to mark Juneteenth, which commemorates the end of slavery in Texas, two years after the 1863 Emancipation Proclamation freed slaves elsewhere in the United States, amid nationwide protests against racial inequality, in Washington, D.C., U.S., June 19, 2020. REUTERS/Erin Scott/File Photo

Dozens of Senate Republicans called on the Biden administration on Friday to withdraw what they say is a divisive education proposal that would place greater emphasis on slavery and the contributions of Black Americans in history and civics lessons taught in U.S. schools.

In the latest salvo of a burgeoning culture war over race in America, 39 Republican lawmakers led by Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell said the proposed Education Department policy would divert established school curricula toward a "politicized and divisive agenda" fixated on the country's flaws.

"Young Americans deserve a rigorous understanding of civics and American history. They need to understand both our successes and our failures," the Republican senators wrote in a letter to Education Secretary Miguel Cardona dated April 29. The letter was released on Friday.

"Americans do not need or want their tax dollars diverted from promoting the principles that unite our nation toward promoting radical ideologies meant to divide us."

A spokesman for the U.S. Education Department said that institutions are acknowledging America's "legacy of systemic inequities" and noted that the department welcomes comments on the proposal until May 19.

The lawmakers zeroed in on the proposal's mention of the New York Times' Pulitzer Prize-winning 1619 Project. The initiative, which traces U.S. history from the arrival of the first enslaved Africans in colonial Virginia, was a frequent target for former President Donald Trump, who sought instead to promote "patriotic" education.

Tom Cotton, the Republican senator from Arkansas, introduced legislation last June to prohibit the use of federal funds to teach a curriculum linked to the 1619 Project in schools. Since then, Republican state lawmakers in Iowa, Mississippi and several other states have introduced similar bills proposing schools lose state funding for teaching the curriculum.

"No one is pushing laws mandating the teaching of the #1619Project, but Republicans across the U.S. are pushing laws to mandate 'patriotic' education & to prohibit the teaching of the #1619Project" and about the United State's "racist past," Niklole Hannah-Jones, the journalist who created the project, said on Twitter on Friday.

The letter released on Friday came two days after Senator Tim Scott, the Senates sole Black Republican, declared that America is not a racist country in the Republican response to President Joe Bidens address to Congress. Scott also defended a new Republican voting law in Georgia that Democrats have denounced as a return to Jim Crow segregation.

The proposed policy would support teaching that "reflects the breadth and depth of our nation's diverse history and the vital role of diversity in our nation's democracy," according to a notice posted on a government regulation website.

It would encourage schools to adopt projects that incorporate "the systemic marginalization, biases, inequities and discriminatory policy and practice in American history."

The Republican Party, which remains fractured after Trump's false claim that the 2020 presidential election was stolen from him, has sought to brand Biden as a divisive leader controlled by leftists.

Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.

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Republicans ask Biden to withdraw 'divisive' proposal to teach more Black history - Reuters

Wilkins also stressed the economic risk of holding debt like Mississippis. The racial subordination of nearly half the states population constituted an endless economic dead weight which is bound to reduce the fiscal attractiveness of the states securities quite apart from the moral issue, he wrote. Wilkins implied that, by excluding Black Mississippians from economic opportunities, the state would have to devote greater expenditures toward welfare, policing and other areas that might otherwise be used to promote economic growth that would safeguard bondholders investments.

Behind these statements was a strategy to shift large capital holders that played key roles in the municipal bond market, nudging investment and commercial banks, pension funds and insurers to assist a campaign that sought to cut off capital investment from the Jim Crow South.

Today in Business

April 30, 2021, 7:16 p.m. ET

Thus, before Donald Barnes, an executive vice president of Childs Securities, wrote a letter in 1965 to Gov. George Wallace questioning Alabamas creditworthiness, civil rights activists sought to harness the power of finance in aid of the movement. Childs Securities decision to boycott Alabama came after the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.s call to boycott the state, and after dockworkers along the West Coast refused to handle Alabama-made products.

The lessons are twofold. First, it took social movements to push banks to divest from the South. Business was not the central agent of change in the fight for racial, economic and social justice, but in some cases it was an effective tool.

The second lesson is that businesses that joined the cause worked against industry peers, such as the analyst at Moodys who said in 1965 that it was not sympathetic with the civil rights movement. The financiers at Childs Securities decided to stand with the N.A.A.C.P. and against Alabama, but also against their syndicate partners, many of whom did not agree with what one Boston banker called the ill-conceived and immature decision to publicly declare and act on their opposition to Alabamas actions. Childs Securities battled on multiple fronts, including within a sector that put profits ahead of social issues.

These efforts have threads in common with contemporary social movements. In April, more than 140 racial justice leaders published an open letter that asked large asset managers to use their shareholder voting power to advance racial equity, including by opposing all-white boards and supporting more visibility into corporate political spending.

You share unique power to shape corporate behavior and to change the business-as-usual practices that uphold white supremacy at the foundation of our economy, they wrote.

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The History of Banks and Social Movements - The New York Times

Like the United States, Germany has a thriving anti-vaccination movement, and here it has encompassed conspiracy theorists, left-leaning spiritualists, and the far right. These last ties are the most troubling. In German-speaking lands, anti-science sentiment, right-wing politics, and racism have been entwined since even before Jews were accused of spreading the bubonic plague in the 14th century. These movements illustrate a grim truth: In both the past and the present, anti-science sentiments are inextricably tangled with racial prejudice.

Anti-vaccine movements are as old as vaccines, the scholar Jonathan M. Berman notes in his book, Anti-vaxxers, and what is striking, according to the author, is that early opponents at the turn of the 18th century believed that vaccination was a foreign assault on traditional order. But beliefs linking anti-science sentiment and anti-Semitism were already deeply set. During the plague outbreak of 1712 and 1713, for instance, the city of Hamburg initiated public-health measures including forbidding Jews from entering or leaving the city, Philipp Osten, the director of Hamburgs Institute for History and Ethics of Medicine, told me. By the time cholera emerged in the 19th century, sickening thousands of people in the city within a matter of months, these antiquated ideas had taken on a new form.

Because this new disease was poorly understood, doctors, scientists, and laypeople promulgated competing theories about its spread. Some physicians blamed cholera on alcohol consumption, others on sadness or fear. Self-published pamphlets circulated misinformation much as social-media posts do today, and the publics understanding of the disease was capacious, in many cases reflecting peoples anxieties. These ideas might have been innocuous enough on their own, but consummated through social movements and disinformation, they often posed a threat to peoples lives. As the historian Richard J. Evans has noted in Death in Hamburg, some Germans blamed the spread of cholera on Jews. These sentiments then extended to other epidemics, and to the vaccination movement. By the middle of the 19th century, anti-Semitic propaganda leaflets were being written against smallpox vaccination.

When cholera reemerged with full force in Hamburg in the late 19th century, local officialsfollowing the advice of the scientists Robert Koch and Max von Pettenkoferproposed a bill of public-health regulations such as school closures, disinfection of waterways, and quarantine. This led to a national uproar among constituents who saw state-enforced health measures as a threat to the German economyand this time an ad hoc coalition joined together to oppose such measures. The German National Economic Association argued that the bill interfered with economic trade and personal freedom. But the opposition was as much about ethnicity as economics.

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Germanys Anti-Vaccination History Is Riddled With Anti-Semitism - The Atlantic