Category Archives: History

By Bartee Haile

The surprising thing about the April 7, 1902 death of Barney Riggs was not the violent nature of his demise but that the West Texas gunfighter managed to live so long.

There is no telling how many notches Riggs had on his six-gun before moving to Arizona in the early 1880s. Not that he was a professional killer, just an amateur with a fast draw and a bad temper.

The fact that Riggs always seemed to have reasonable doubt on his side kept him out of jail until Sept. 29, 1886. That was the day he shot a friend in the head for fooling around with his unfaithful wife.

This time there was no doubt as to Riggs guilt, and the judge saw no grounds for leniency. He started serving a life sentence for murder on New Years Eve 1886 in the infamous Territorial Prison at Yuma.

Ten months later, Riggs was stretching his legs in the prison yard when five inmates, all Mexican, made a live-or-die bid for freedom. A convict named Puebla buried a blade in the shoulder of Superintendent Thomas Gate while two accomplices were busy being shot down, one by a guard and the other by the secretary of the prison board.

Attracted by the screams and the familiar sound of gunfire, Riggs jumped in the middle of the mad melee. He grabbed a pistol from a mortally wounded Mexican, rammed the barrel into the chest of the superintendents assailant and pulled the trigger. The convict staggered back, and the fearless rescuer finished him with a second shot.

Stepping over the dead bodies of the five would-be escapees, the convicted killer from Texas helped his chief keeper to the prison infirmary.

Riggs was the talk of the territory. A Tucson newspaper praised his heroism in a glowing report that took pains to point out that no one was more brave and took more desperate chances than Barney Riggs to prevent the escape and further loss of life.

In record time, Riggs was rewarded with a full pardon. For the rest of his days, his favorite wisecrack was, I had to kill a man to get into Yuma and killed another to get out.

Riggs returned to West Texas with his young son but not his adulterous wife. She left town the minute she heard her foul-tempered husband was a free man.

After four lean years in the private sector, Riggs landed a job on the public payroll. Andy Royal, the corrupt and hated sheriff of Pecos County, always had a badge for anybody who was handy with a gun.

The ex-convict had been a deputy for a year or so, when his boss was voted out of office in November 1894. While working at his desk late one night a couple of weeks after the election, the lame-duck sheriff was given a shotgun send-off by an unknown assassin.

The word on the dirt streets of Fort Stockton was that Deputy Riggs was next, but he succeeded in dodging that particular bullet. However, try as he may, he could not avoid getting caught up in a classic West Texas feud.

Reeves County Sheriff G.A. Bud Frazer and Deacon Jim Miller, the Old Wests original killer-for-hire, already had two shootouts under their gun belts by the time Riggs relocated to Pecos. Neutrality made the most sense, but their marriages to each others sisters compelled Riggs to side with the lawman in the private war.

Riggs brother-in-law was no match, of course, for a killing machine like Miller. Frazer was playing cards in a Toyah saloon in September 1896, when Deacon Jim ended the feud with a fatal one-two punch from a double-barreled shotgun.

Once again Riggs was on a hit list with a single name his. He knew it was only a matter of time until Miller or his surrogates came gunning for him.

Riggs did not have long to wait. Three weeks after Bud Frazers murder, John Denson and Bill Earhart showed up in Pecos. The pair spent the day hunting their prey and the courage to take him on but found neither.

The next morning, Denson and Earhart burst into the watering hole where Riggs was tending bar for a buddy. Earhart got off the first round but merely grazed Riggs, who returned fire in a heartbeat hitting him right between the eyes.

With the odds suddenly even, Denson turned and ran. Riggs missed him on this way out the door, followed him into the street, calmly drew a bead on the shrinking target and put a bullet in the back of his head.

Following his acquittal in the double homicide, Riggs stayed out of serious trouble for several years. Then in 1901 his wife divorced him and was awarded a cash settlement of $2,000 payable to her son-in-law Buck Chadborn.

On Apr. 7, 1902, Barney Riggs temper got the best of him one last time. He confronted Chadborn and, according to three different witnesses, either (a) threatened to strike him with a walking cane, (b) reached in his back pocket for a handkerchief or something or (c) cursed the youth less than half his age.

No one claimed the over-the-hill gunfighter was armed. But Chadborn shot him dead anyway, and a jury agreed it was an open-and-shut case of self-defense.

Unforgettable Texans brings to life the once famous people no one remembers today. Order your copy for $24.00 (tax and shipping included) by mailing a check to Bartee Haile, P.O. Box 130011, Spring, TX 77393.

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This Week in Texas History: Hot-tempered gunman pushed his luck - Hays Free Press

And just like that, the Miami Marlins are about to take the field for Opening Day No. 30.

It usually hasnt gone well for the Fish. They are 12-17 all time on the seasons first day, and have just one Opening Day win since 2014. Even without a victory this Friday, this is already a somewhat unique opener for the organization, as it will be only theninth time Miami has started a season on the road. I guess some teams just havent been in a rush to get back north.

However, this article is about one of times it did go well. In fact, with all due respect to the 1993 squad that won game No. 1, Im prepared to say that this is going to be about the greatest Opening Day in Miami Marlins franchise history.

For your consideration, I give you the gem provided by the 2004 contest between the Marlins and the Montreal Expos.

For starters, Miami won, besting their division rival 4-3. Miami hadnt started 1-0 since 2000, so it made for a nice change. More importantly though, the year was 2004, meaning these were the defending world champions we were talking about. Whats more, a defending world champion that was actually expected to have a chance to defend. This was Miamissecond title defense, after all, but that 1998 team had been gutted heading into the season, with even more gutting still to come. When the 1998 team won its opener, it was a cute, almost annoying novelty. By contrast, the 2004 team winning its opener was an exciting tone-setter.

Especially since it wasnt like the 2004 team didnt have some notable player absences themselves. The bulk of the team was retained, but you can make a pretty good case two of their three best hitters were the ones who werent retained. The Marlins couldnt afford to keep a pair of Gold Glovers in Ivan Rodriguez and Derrek Lee, making do instead with Hee-Seop Choi at first and a tandem of Ramon Castro and Mike Redmond at catcher.

As mentioned, Miami won 4-3.All four runs were knocked in by either Choi or Redmond.

So for a day, and indeed much of April in the case of Choi, the irreplaceable actually looked kinda replaceable. There have been plenty of openers where Miami Marlins fans have come into a season questioning the front office and having even more questions at the end of Game 1 of 162. Youd be hard pressed to name a Marlins opener where more was done to silence some of the doubters than this one.

Lastly, and most importantly though, was the pitching matchup. Reigning World Series MVP Josh Beckett against 1997 World Series MVP Livan Hernandez.

Honestly, it was an occurrence rare and awesome enough that the box score could almost have been thrown out. Except that both pitchers were actually kind of awesome that game. Both turned in quality starts. Beckett struck out nine, while Hernandez struck out eight. They were dominant. The pair only allowed three runs between them, with the bulk of the scoring coming in dramatic fashion late against the bullpens.

The two newest members of Miamis revamped bullpen stepped in to secure the victory just one more example of the new-look roster making the front office look good and making fans feel excited about what would be possible in 2004.

For at least this Miami Marlins fan, I cant recall an Opening Day I was riding higher.

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The greatest Opening Day in Miami Marlins history - Call To The Pen

Wreck takes a newish literary subgenre, in which a memoir or personal essay is pegged to an intense and often rather febrile investigation into one or more works of artthe best known is probably still Edmund de Waals The Hare with Amber Eyes (2010)to a new level of brow-knitting conceptual complexity. The book is itself presented as a kind of artwork, one strand in a tangle of projects done in several different media, often collaboratively; a document of a process, and a pretty messy one at that, rather than a thing in itself.

At its heart is Tom de Frestons obsessive relationship with Thodore Gricaults The Raft of the Medusa, a pioneering masterpiece of French Romanticism, exhibited at the 1819 Paris Salon asShipwreck Scene to coyly disguise its origins in a contemporary scandal. De Freston is struggling to process the feelings of grief, rage and hurt that the recent death of his abusive father has stirred in him. The paintings allusions to Michelangelos Sistine Chapel frescoes set him thinking about judgement and damnation, the drowned and the saved. The precarious progress of the raft, lashed together from the timbers of the Medusa after it ran aground off the west African coast in 1816, then cast adrift for nearly a fortnightduring which time nine-tenths of the 150 or so people aboard drowned, starved, died of thirst or ate one anotherseems to mirror his own floundering attempts to keep his life in one piece as he steers a course away from his traumatic past. It also makes him reflect, naturally enough, on the hopes and fears of todays migrants, whether the rafts they make for themselves are real or metaphorical; one of these, the Syrian journalist and academic Ali Souleman, becomes de Frestons collaborator and friend.

Tom de Freston's Wreck: Gricaults Raft and the Art of Being Lost at Sea

Wreck is not advertised as a scholarly work, so its perhaps beside the point that some of its historical and biographical elements are less than entirely reliable. Fact and speculation combine without any warning in scenes from Gricaults life: the paintings darker elementsits tarry palette, its Michelangelesqueterribilit, its sheer morbidity (Gricault carted body parts from the nearby Hpital Beaujon back to his studio to study the effects of putrefaction on skin tones)are allowed to eclipse a more nuanced reality, whereby the possibility of rescue, two hours away as depicted in the painting, is as important as the hellish tormentsat hand.

In fact, the picture is generally rather subtler than de Freston makes it seem. Gricault also has an eye on the European idealist tradition: the antique, Raphael, the butch, moonlit dead Christs of the Emilian Baroque, the homoerotic nocturnes of Anne-Louis Girodet. The Raft is no ordinary history painting, but rather the exaltation of a recent news story into an epic of betrayal, heroism and martyrdom that converses with some of the most interesting art of the era, from Henry Fuselis Ugolino (1806) to Baron Gross Bonaparte Visiting the Plague-Stricken at Jaffa (1804).

De Freston is surely quite right to stress Gricaults engagement with the politics and representation of race in the aftermath of Frances slave trade. Being on the right side of history on one issue isnt quite the same as being ahead of your time; yet Gricault was both. Its somehow telling that in the unrelenting fusillade of cultural references that pepper the text, from King Lear to Maggie Nelson by way of Jackson Pollock, the names of Baudelaire and Manet seem not to figure.

Wreck is a powerful testament to one persons subjective truthsa good working definition of Romanticism, maybe. I hope this project brought de Freston a measure of peace. But a calmer book might have been more nourishing.

Tom de Freston, Wreck: Gricaults Raft and the Art of Being Lost at Sea, Granta Books, 352pp, 13 in-text b/w illustrations, 16.99 (hb), published 3 March

Keith Miller is an editor at the Telegraph and a regular contributor to the Literary Review and the Times Literary Supplement

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New memoir relays a traumatic family history through an intense obsession with a Gricault masterpiece - Art Newspaper

Douglas Neckers| Community Columnist

All weapons of war are awful guns, bombs, bayonets, even arrows from bows whenever one of these is fired, no good can come to the person on the other end.

But war is war. The mortal hate that marks it means opposing armies will use everything at their disposal in quests of victory over the enemy. So that Putin might use chemical weapons in the Ukraine was taken seriously by the Allies. The compounds sarin and tabun probably have never been used in battle, but are so toxic that micro quantities kill humans.

The Germans made tons of both at three different sites in the 1940s, and considered using them. But Hitler wouldnt give his approval.Society is terribly ignorant, it seems, and if the kinds of drugs that were peddled to everyone including the former president of the United States to treat COVID-19 are any indications, the general awareness of the people toward chemical things hasnt improved. Hitler wasnt chemically more aware, but he surmised that if he had supplies of nerve agents, his enemies would have larger stashes.

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In war making with chemicals, most everyone knows the Germans introduced waves of chlorine gas over the battle fields at Ypres in Belgium in April 1915 and that most combatants used mustard gas and phosgene during World War I. Less known perhaps was a much more toxic mustard gas analog, Lewisite, so-called "dew of death" that was never used.

Lewisite had an impressive academic profile the reaction to make it was discovered by Father Julius Nieuwland later at Notre Dame, where he probably gained more fame as Knute Rocknes chemistry instructor than from the reaction of arsenic trichloride with acetylene. The toxic substance in that mix was identified by Northwestern University professor Winfred Lewis and manufactured by the U.S. chemical corps at the former Ben Hur automobile site near Willoughby, Ohio, under the direction of James Bryant Conant, later the president of Harvard. As 1918 was winding down, tons of Lewisite were shipped east by rail through Corry, Pennsylvania, where I was born and up over the mountains to Baltimore where it was loaded on vessels headed for France. The War ended so the Lewisite was dumped in the ocean.

The late Professor Paul Fried of Hopes history department knew I was a chemistry major when I took his European history course as a senior, and he urged me to study chemical weapons by the medium of a former day the ubiquitous semester ending "term paper." Fried assigned term paper topics in his classes and because he knew I was to become a chemist, he assigned me to write a paper on the chemical organization, I.G. Farben.

Farben was a cartel of 11 companies formed after WWI to do what cartels do control markets, prices, patent positions and distributions. Farben was a WWI reaction by German industry to rebuild after the Versailles treaty had taken the best efforts of its industries in reparations for their causing WWI. Farben aspired to take over the world of chemical manufacturing much as the Nazis saw the Third Reich as lasting 1,000 years. I found one book on Farben in all of Holland, at the Herrick Library (it no longer has it I checked), so I read what I could I understand of the history of I.G. Farben, and most particularly of its involvement in making weapons of mass destruction in German chemical companies. Farben was the topic of Nuremberg trial No. 6, the case of the U.S. v. Karl Krauch et al. and its overriding impact on the chemical industry world wide continued until it was broken up following WWII. From that simple assignment came a lifelong interest in the involvement of chemists in War.

Nerve agents were made in huge quantities by other combatants after they were discovered, and their structures revealed. The U.S. stash of sarin, soman and other agents took German scientists to help us make, and later, to destroy. They have been used occasionally. Once by a Japanese terrorist in the GUM attack on a Tokyo subway; also by Russian operatives on agents in Britain, and last year on Alexei Navalny when Putin agents put a novichok, Russian for "new agent," in his underwear in Siberia.

Chemical weapons treaties were signed by many nations including Russia after the fall of the Soviet Union. Russian scientists who developed the novichok agents claim they are the deadliest ever made, with some variants possibly five to 10 times more potent thansoman. Chemical stocks were to be destroyed and no new compounds found or made. From reports published by a Russian scientist in the 1990s, we found that the chemical structures were only slightly different than other known compounds. And though this has not been officially released, a specific novichok, (Russian for "new agent") of known chemical composition that was not new was used in the poisoning of Alexei Navalny the Putin critic since jailed in Russia for his anti-government politics. Fortunately Navalny was treated in Siberia saving his life; and at the Charite Hospital in Berlin, where he was brought back to normal and released only to be jailed again when he returned to Russia.

Do we expect the Russians will use chemical weapons? No army has been as horrific as the Russian army in Ukraine; and no leadership as brutal. Its impossible to know for sure, but when cornered, Id guess the Russians would. When Fritz Hater, the German scientist that advocated the use of chlorine in Belgium in 1915 was about to depart to the east with armies that would use gas there, his wife chemist Clara Immerwahr tried hard to talk him out of doing so. And when he wouldnt, she took his pistol and shot herself. The conscience of a single spouse, also a chemist, says volumes to the rest of us. Lets hope she really could effect a never, but never, again.

Douglas Neckers, in addition to being a proud Hope alum, is an organic chemist, the McMaster distinguished professor emeritus and the founder of the Center for Photochemical Sciences at Bowling Green State University. He is also a former board chair of the Robert H. Jackson Center in Jamestown, N.Y.

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Douglas Neckers: The disturbing history of chemical weapons - HollandSentinel.com

The Long Island Rail Road (LIRR) is one of the oldest railways in the United States. It began life as the Brooklyn and Jamaica Rail Road (B&J), which was incorporated in 1832 to serve a 10-mile stretch between the City of Brooklyn and the village of Jamaica. However, while the B&J was still just in the planning stages, the railroads developers had ambitious plans for a train that ran the entire length of Long Island and connected New York to Boston via a ferry from Greenport. It was thought that this route would out-compete the other obvious route through southern Connecticut because that path would have to cross too many wide streams. By contrast, the LIRR does not have to cross any major streams on its way to Greenport.

With the plans in place for an island-spanning railroad, the Long Island Rail Road was chartered in 1834, and the first section between the Brooklyn waterfront and Jamaica opened in 1836. From there, the train tracks expanded eastward, reaching Hicksville in 1837, Deer Park in 1842, and finally Greenport in 1844. Operation between Brooklyn and Greenport began on July 29th, 1844, and reduced the travel time between New York and Boston from nearly fifteen hours down to eleven.

Long Islands relatively easy terrain and close connection to New York City meant that construction was fast and easy. Upon completion, the LIRR was one of the first major railroads in the United States. It started service only a few years after the countrys first railroad, the Baltimore and Ohio, commenced, and the system was virtually complete decades before the great railroad tycoons would amass their fortunes in the West. In fact, the name Long Island Rail Road is the oldest continually-used railway company name in the United States.

During the 1850s and 60s, the LIRR competed with other Long Island railways, such as the New York and Flushing (NY&F) and the Central Railroad of Long Island (CRRLI). The NY&F was the LIRRs first competitor, beginning operation in 1854 with a route between Flushing and a ferry terminal in Long Island City. The two companies competed for 13 years until NY&F was bought by the LIRR in 1867, eventually becoming the modern-day Port Washington branch. The Central Railroad of Long Island served many of the local villages in Nassau County that the LIRR bypassed on its way to Greenport, but by 1876 the LIRR had bought this railroad as well.

As the 1870s came to a close, the Long Island Rail Road had eliminated all of its major competitors and formed monopoly control over rail service throughout the peninsula. However, the economic recession of 1893-1897 caused ridership to plummet, and by the end of the 19th century, the LIRR itself was bought by the giant Pennsylvania Railroad (PRR). The PRR owned thousands of miles of track from Chicago to New York and for a brief period even operated a special express service from Penn Station to Montauk, fully equipped with dining and lounge cars, for wealthy vacationers traveling to the Hamptons.

In 1905, the Pennsylvania Railroad used some of its mammoth fortune to modernize large portions of the Long Island Rail Road through electrification and grade-crossing elimination projects. The following three decades would be the LIRRs high point both in terms of service quality and the extent of track miles. Not only did the Pennsylvania Railroad electrify large sections of the LIRR, withthe New York City-area electrification project being completed in 1913, but PRR also completed major grade-crossing eliminations. For example, the Atlantic Branch of the LIRR, which runs between Downtown Brooklyn and Jamaica, had 50 grade crossings in 1897. By 1907 a combination of elevated viaducts and tunnels were built and the line became fully grade-separated.

A surprising relic from this era of railroad expansion was the LIRRs introduction of through-running service into Manhattan via the subway system. Between 1909 and 1917, Long Island Rail Road trains served the Financial District of Manhattan by traveling over the Williamsburg Bridge and into the J/Z subway tunnel to Broad Street. This highly modern level of railway integration exists today only in Tokyo, and it is one of the crowning achievements of their transit system, but an early version of it actually existed in New York almost 100 years earlier.

Unfortunately, beginning in the 1940s, the Long Island Rail Road began to face increasing competition from highways and the automobile, which created a downward spiral of declining ridership, decreasing revenue, and deteriorating service. During the postwar years, at least 22 different branches, spurs, and cutoffs of the LIRR were abandoned, sold off, or even burned down. Some of these branches, like parts of the Rockaway Beach Branch and the Manhattan Beach Branch, were incorporated into the New York City subway system as the A and B/Q trains respectively. However, other major rail corridors were abandoned altogether, like Whitestone Branch that served the Queens neighborhoods of College Point and Whitestone with passenger rail until 1938.

The rapid ascendency of the car after World War II caused cascading bankruptcies for rail companies across the United States. The New York region was not immune from this destruction, and in 1949, the Long Island Rail Road went bankrupt. Although it was still owned by the mighty Pennsylvania Railroad, after the LIRRs bankruptcy the PRR stopped subsidizing the LIRR. This led to a series of deadly crashes, branch closures, and service reductions throughout the 1950s and 60s. Even the LIRRs majestic terminal station in Manhattan, the original Pennsylvania Station, was demolished to build Madison Square Garden. By 1970,the Penn Central Transportation Company, formerly thePennsylvania Railroad, filed for bankruptcy. Prior to this, the LIRR wasacquired by the MTA from the Pennsylvania Railroad in 1965 and incorporated into New Yorks regional transportation network

In the decades following the LIRRs incorporation into the MTA, the railroad has seen a gradual but steady resurgence. By and large, service stopped being cut by the 1970s and in some places even expanded. New electrification projects began in 1968, and by 1987 the Main Line had been electrified from Mineola to Ronkonkoma and the Port Jefferson Branch had been electrified from Hicksville to Huntington. Service slowly increased on the non-electric sections of rail too. For example, in 1963 there was one train running between Riverhead and Greenport per day; in 2018, there were four per day. Today the LIRR is the busiest commuter railroad in the country, serving almost 350,000 daily riders over 11 branches. And throughout its 188-year long history of mergers, expansions, and bankruptcies it has kept its original 1835 name: the Long Island Rail Road.

Curious about the history of the LIRR? Join us for the virtual talk, When New York Was Long Island: The Past and Present of the Long Island Railroad led by Gotham Center Writing Fellow and journalist Elizabeth Moore. The talk is free for Untapped New York Insiders (get your first month free with code JOINUS).

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The History of the Long Island Rail Road - Untapped New York

The current state ofmilitaryhistory was the focus of theannual PritzkerMilitaryMuseum & Librarys On WarMilitaryHistory Symposium held March 31 and April 1 in Chicago.

Three panel discussions highlighted the second day of the summit, which was held in person and virtually.

During the final presentation, panelists addressed the challenges of documenting the history of the current Global War on Terrorism. The session, entitled Lessons to be Learned: Writing theMilitaryHistory of the Post-Cold War Period,covered how different audiences such as academics andmilitaryprofessionals use these histories.

Historians face multiple challenges include finding sources, achieving objectivity and conducting interviews.

Among the panelists was Daniel Marston,director of the Secretary of Defense Strategic Thinkers Program and professor of international studies at Johns Hopkins University. Marston did his PhD on the British 14th Armys Burma campaign. He conducted about 120 interviews with veterans in Pakistan and the United Kingdom, then matched those interviews with historical records.

We are truly at phase one with understanding the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, Marston said. But we are also going to be at a loss with the sources. We know the military relies now on PowerPoint. The war diaries that previous historians from Vietnam and going back used to match other records were missing a lot of that, which is a problem. How will we be really able to identify where the conflicts were? The decision-making is an issue as we know. Is it going to be peoples opinions versus the actual record that has to be unpacked?

Anthony Carlson, an associate professor of history at the U.S. Army School of AdvancedMilitaryStudies, pointed out a challenge he refers to as the invisibility of the adversary.

For example, Carlson cited the task in accurately documenting the history of what occurred during the war in Afghanistan without the perspective of the Afghans.

I dont know what the strategic aim of the Afghanistan military was or how they organized themselves at an unclassified level, he said. I can tease out an understanding of what their tactics were based on oral history interviews with American soldiers. But its difficult to get into and understand their intentionality.

Carlson noted the time it takes to be able to properly document history.

But its also one of the strengths of the discipline, he said. History can inform our judgment. It wont enable us to predict the future. It wont enable us to avoid war in the future. But history is the study of continuity and contingencies over long periods of time. And when you are able to do that, you are able to have a mind that looks at situations from multiple perspectives and develop some sort of empathy about how others who dont see the world like you understand time and space as they unfold.

An earlier session, Violence, Atrocity, and the Restraint in War, addressed topics related to the extent of violence employed by armed forces, how incidents of atrocity are treated and the contexts in which they occurred.

Panelist John Morrow, a professor of history at the University of Georgia, explained how the current invasion of Ukraine can be traced back centuries. The Chechens originally lived in Ukraine until Josef Stalin moved them east into Central Asia, he said.

The next thing you know, in the 20th century, (Vladimir) Putin is fighting a war in Chechnya and levels the city of Grozny as an example to them. There are historical antecedents between the Russians and the Ukrainians that go all the way back to the early history of the Middle Ages, he said.

The first session, Museums and Memorialization, featured a panel discussion that explored the roles museums play in the commemoration ofmilitaryservice and how they are impacted by popular and academic understandings ofmilitaryhistory.

Panelist Tammy Call is the director of the National Museum of the U. S. Army at Fort Belvoir, Va. The museum opened for 34 days in November 2020 before being closed due to the pandemic. It re-opened on the Armys birthday in 2021.

The museum tells the story of the Army through the eyes of the American soldier through all eras, and explore the symbiotic relationship between the soldier and society, she said.

Call was quick to point out the role of the museum.

We are not a memorial, we are a museum, she said. However, we have aspects of memorialization that any museum does. The campaign streamers, the campaign wall, certain items or artifacts that tell a certain story.

There are plans for the public-private funded museum for a memorial area outside and will host such remembrances. But its main focus will be to document the stories of soldiers.

Diversity is reflected throughout the museum, such as women who served and minorities, she said. We hope to serve as a repository for those precious stories.

Matthew C. Naylor is president and chief executive officer of the 47-acre National World War I Museum and Memoria in Kansas City. The museum does incorporate remembrances into its offerings.

Many people have an emotional connection to the site, he said. Whether they are there at 2 oclock at night or running the stairs at 6 a.m., people use it for memorializing in many ways.

To that end, the museum has added seven events called Taps at the Tower. These are brief remembrance services held as the sun sets during the summer.

The objective here is to allow people and introduce their families to the idea of memorializing when they dont have to give a two-hour commitment on Memorial Day, Naylor said. We do it to allow people to access the idea of memory and allow them to talk about the values of service, sacrifice.

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Documenting the Global War on Terrorism for history - The American Legion

Photos courtesy of History Colorado, DenverCulture

From Blinky the Clown to bongs to statement headwear, these items reflect the ever-shifting diversity of Colorado.

Its been a decade since the Colorado History Museum, the states pre-eminent repository of the past, became the History Colorado Center, a rebranding officially capped off with the opening of the nonprofits giant, $111 million center on Broadway in Denver. Another significant part of the organizations transformation was a renewed focus on fleshing out its permanent collection to better reflect the states diversity. To that end, History Colorado has accepted some 1,201 donations since April 2012. Here are some of the most remarkable additions.

Blinky the Clownaka Russell Scottentertained and educated on the local Blinkys Fun Club show wearing his trademark tartan blazer for more than 40 years, making him TVs longest-running clown.

Along with used tear gas grenades, rubber bullets, and spray paint canisters, History Colorado staff collected posters after the first Denver demonstration against the murder of George Floyd.

Pink beanies became a symbol of 2017s Womens March on Denver after thousands of people wore handmade versions as part of a protest against the presidential election of Donald Trump, who infamously used the term pussy in an offensive manner during an Access Hollywood taping in 2005. The nationwide demonstrations were some of the largest in the countrys history.

Its likely most Coloradans have already seen this artifact: Governor Jared Polis wore it often during the early days of the pandemic, including at the April 2020 press conference where he first urged all Coloradans to wear masks when outside of home.

History Colorado owns blueprints drafted by Colorados first licensed Black architect, John Henderson, who designed Denvers Byron Rogers Federal Building and his own midcentury modern home in Skyland, which was designated a local historical landmark in 2018.

The papers of Linda Fowler, a champion of womens and LGBTQ rights and one of the plaintiffs in Romer v. Evans, reside in History Colorados collection. The lawsuit challenged Amendment 2, a 1992 voter initiative that banned anti-discrimination laws for gay people and earned Colorado the moniker the hate state. The U.S. Supreme Court struck the amendment down as unconstitutional.

This water bong was one of only 30 made by now-defunct Heady Glass Studios to commemorate the 2014 Denver County Fairs Pot Pavilion, erected less than a month after the state legalized the sale of recreational cannabis.

This article appeared in the April 2022 issue of 5280.

Nicholas writes and edits the Compass, Adventure, and Culture sections of 5280 and writes for 5280.com.

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The Coolest Artifacts History Colorado Has Collected Over the Past 10 Years - 5280 - 5280 | The Denver Magazine

For over a decade, Jeffery Robinson has been telling an unvarnished history of the United States in an ever-evolving lecture presentation. His talks, now presented as part of his organization, the Who We Are Project, delve into how racism against Black people was bound up with the countrys legacy since its founding. The new documentary, Who We Are: A Chronicle of Racism in America, captures Robinsons eye-opening account (filmed at Town Hall in New York City) and intersperses interviews with civil rights figures and others from his travels across the country.

The film, directed by Emily and Sarah Kunstler, joins a lineage of documentaries that excavate race and the histories of marginalized people in America, like Raoul Pecks I Am Not Your Negro and Ava DuVernays 13th.

This is not Eyes on the Prize, Robinson said of the new movie, which is available on major digital platforms. But I think it is a call to us being something radically different going forward.

Reviewing Who We Are for The Times, Ben Kenigsberg made it a Critics Pick and wrote, Its a confrontational film, but never an alienating one.

Robinson, a criminal defense lawyer by profession, was the director of the A.C.L.U.s Trone Center for Justice and Equality in New York, and he remembers walking past the former Cotton Exchange on the way to work. I spoke with him and the Kunstlers (whose last feature, William Kunstler: Disturbing the Universe, was about their father, the civil rights attorney). These are excerpts from our interview.

Who We Are partly aims to chart the role of white supremacy in U.S. history. How did you approach that?

JEFFERY ROBINSON I say it as a rhetorical question in the film: What if I said America was founded on white supremacy? Somebody might say, Jeff, thats really extreme. But when you read the words of the people that founded our country and see what they did, I think its an inescapable conclusion. Some people have said the Constitution was a compromise between those who wanted slavery and those who didnt want slavery. This compromise protected the institution of slavery, gave the South extra congressional representatives and Electoral College votes to protect the institution of slavery, and made Black attempts to be free unconstitutional. It was unconstitutional for me to try and get away from my owner!

SARAH KUNSTLER And they accomplished all of that without using the word slavery. We have a history of hiding what we mean as a country. When we enact laws preserving and maintaining white supremacy, we dont actually say what it is that were doing.

ROBINSON There is no way you can associate white supremacy with a law that says you cannot change the name of iconic monuments in the state of Alabama until you understand that these are all monuments to slavery, essentially, and to people that enslaved people.

The film also uncovers the details of lived Black experience: for example, the fingerprints that enslaved builders left behind on walls they made.

EMILY KUNSTLER The facts in the abstract dont mean anything if you cant connect them to actual human experience. Those fingerprints are one example of a monument to a history of lived experience of enslaved Black people in Charleston, S.C., and in fact, all over this country, that despite the best efforts to erase them, persist. The same way the foundations for the houses in Tulsa, Okla., [site of the 1921 massacre], still exist where the homes were never rebuilt.

ROBINSON There was a moment when we were talking with Mother Randle [a survivor of the Tulsa massacre] and she was saying, There was a pile of bodies. There was just a chill that went up and down my spine this woman over 100 years old going back to that memory in her life.

Jeffery, how did it feel to share your, and your familys, experiences of racism, like the school basketball game where the hosts didnt want you to play?

ROBINSON We went to Dr. Tiffany Crutcher and asked her to talk about her feelings about her brother being killed on live television, practically, by the Tulsa police [in 2016]. And it felt like, All right, I should share something. Dick [a basketball coach who stuck up for Robinson] was 21 years old at the time this incident happened in Walls, Miss. This is just several years after civil rights workers got disappeared and murdered in Mississippi. Where he got the courage to handle that the way he did, I just dont know. But it was clear that if I didnt play, we were all leaving. And he wasnt going to put that on me at 12 years old. I think he saw me as essentially his younger brother.

Could you talk about including the conversation about slavery with a man you encountered at a Confederate statue who represented Flags Across the South, the pro-Confederate flag group?

EMILY KUNSTLER I felt like it encompassed the thesis of the film. I asked Jeff, Do you think that that gentleman could be reached? And Jeff said, I dont know if he can be reached, but I know that if nobody tries, he certainly wont be. Theres value in making the effort, theres value in laying out the facts and continuing to do so. We cant be frightened into silence by people who think differently, speak very loudly, and come out in force and wave Confederate flags.

ROBINSON The conversation didnt go the way he perhaps thought it was going to go in terms of me getting angry at him or something. Theres a little twitch in his face as we were leaving, and I think we at least made some wheels turn in his head.

How does the movie relate to the controversy around laws banning the teaching of certain American history?

ROBINSON The first time we met in person to talk about this [movie] was June 20, 2017. No one was even talking about CRT [Critical Race Theory] back then. It would have been like, What is that, a breakfast cereal or something? So this was not done in response to those laws. But those laws coming up can tell you how afraid people are of the information thats in this film.

This goes to the concept of the minds of the rising generation. All the way back in 1837, John C. Calhoun, one of the most virulent racists in American history, was saying that we cant teach children in school about the abolition of slavery, because if we teach that, slavery is done for. The day before the [Trump] administration left office, they put out something called The 1776 Report that talked about a return to patriotic education, and they use the exact same quote that John C. Calhoun did: the minds of the rising generation.

SARAH KUNSTLER Before there were anti-CRT laws, there were textbook wars. So theres an unending battle of what and how much our children are taught in school about our nations history. One of the most compelling things about Jeffs talk is that he goes back to primary sources. You dont need to just learn it in school. You can seek it out for yourself.

Read the rest here:

Using Film to Tell a Personal History of America and Race - The New York Times

John Gurda| Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

Where do you get all that stuff?, Im sometimes asked. Particularly after a talk, some interested (or skeptical) member of the audience will come up and inquire how I knew that Allis-Chalmers had 24,862 employees at the peak of war production in 1943, including 434 Black workers. Or where I learned that in 1886 the champion brewery hand at Schlitz could down 100 short glasses of beer every day nearly a case and a half at a time when free beer (on the job!) was a coveted fringe benefit. Or that Emil Seidel, Milwaukees first Socialist mayor, once summed up his partys platform as clean fun, music, dance, song and joy for all.

The answer, of course, is research the process of finding salient facts, corroborating them with other data, and coming to informed conclusionsor sometimes just stumbling on cool things to share.

Ive always enjoyed research more than writing. It feels to me like gathering pieces of a puzzle whose exact dimensions and precise subject are largely unknown. Once those pieces are spread out before me, or at least safely in my laptop, I find the process of assembling them into a coherent whole that will attract and hold someones attention writing, in other words much harder. But, as more than one author has said, I love having written.

Given the wealth of historical resources in our community, the real problem is knowing when to stop. Those resources are there for everyone to use. Most of what I know practically all of it, in fact has been gleaned from materials readily available online or in local archives. Although Ive never written a how-to column in the 28 years Ive occupied this space, Id like to share a handful of my favorites, a trio of resources that are easy to find, easy to use, and quite possibly addictive.

At the top of my list in recent years are historical newspaper databases, two in particular. The 19th-Century Newspapers Database is a national resource with an especially strong Milwaukee presence. The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel Historical and Current Database is entirely local but has a broader chronological span. Both resources are fully searchable by keyword, and searches can by narrowed by date, newspaper section, and article type.

The results can be astounding. When I was working on a history of the local Jewish community for the Jewish Museum Milwaukee in 2008, I entered the keyword Jewish on the 19th-Century Database and got over 5,000 hits. I dutifully scrolled through every one of them and unearthed gems that probably hadnt been seen since the day they were published. The highlights included an 1882 account of assimilated German Jews housing their strictly observant Russian brethren in temporary quarters just after they immigrated to Milwaukee and then calling in barbers to relieve the males of their barbarous superfluity of hair. One Orthodox immigrant resisted so strenuously that a policeman was summoned to make him cooperate.

If youve always been curious about that saloonkeeper ancestor of yours or wanted an eyewitness account of the 1892 fire that leveled much of the Third Ward, the newspaper databases are for you. And how do you access them? As always, your library card is your key to untold riches. My Milwaukee Public Library website is a portal to both databases; check with your local system if you live outside Milwaukee County.

Maps are another indispensable research resource. My terminal degree is in geography, not history, and maps are the quintessential geographers tool. Fire insurance atlases are particularly helpful for studying urban history. Rather than paying inspectors to compile risk reports on individual buildings, the insurance companies found it cheaper to create multi-volume atlases that included all of them: every structure on every lot on every block in a particular city, along with information about construction materials, types (and frequently names) of businesses, and the location of the nearest fire hydrants. These Sanborn maps, as they are usually called, are analog prototypes of Google Earth. With a little imagination, you can practically walk through your old neighborhood or the vanished neighborhoods of your ancestors.

I find it most efficient to use the original atlases at the Central Library, where they are on open shelves, or at the County Historical Society. (Handling the massive volumes could almost qualify as aerobic exercise.) If you prefer to do your research at home, online versions of the 1894 and 1910 Sanborn series are available through the Wisconsin Historical Society, the UW-Milwaukee Libraries, or the Milwaukee Public Library. You might find it helpful to start at mpl.org/local_history/maps_atlases.php.

City directories contain a different type of information. Beginning in 1847, just one year after Milwaukee incorporated, and continuing to the present, private companies have published annual directories that list every adult male (women appeared only as spouses or widows for many years), every business, and every institution in the city. The individual listings include home addresses and usually occupations, and a classified directory in the back of each book is organized by business and profession. (Want to know how many euphemistically named soft drink parlors Milwaukee had in 1922, near the midpoint of Prohibition? A total of 1,358.)

An extremely useful feature was added in 1921: a reverse directory of streets listing every occupant of every address in the city. You can compile the names of all the residents of a given area and then, if you like, cross-reference them by occupation. For a 2019 column, I used the 1925 city directory to identify every occupant inside the two-block footprint of Fiserv Forum. The tally included seven soft drink parlors, sixrestaurants, threereal estate offices, two leather stores, twomachine shops, two auto repair shops, a horseshoer, a tea shop, a plumber, a printer, a shirt manufacturer, a clothes presser, a carpet cleaner, a billiard hall, an undertaker, a junk dealer, 103 households, and, at what is now center court, the Ambrosia Chocolate plant.

Although you can find selected city directory listings on Ancestry.com, the full series is currently available only on microfilm or microfiche at the Central Library or in hard copy at the Central Library or the County Historical Society. The publishers didnt waste money on expensive paper in most years; the older copies are slowly dissolving into piles of yellowed crumbs.

Newspaper databases, Sanborn maps, and city directories are obviously only three bright stars in a vast constellation of local history resources. There are innumerable others. Want quick but incisive information on nearly 700 Milwaukee history topics? Try UWMs online Encyclopedia of Milwaukee. Interested in a visual record of Milwaukees marine history? Google Milwaukee Waterways, a Milwaukee Public Library collection. Want to learn more about the local civil rights movement? UWMs March on Milwaukee is a great database. How about brewing history or the Socialist movement? The Milwaukee County Historical Society has excellent materials on both.

Although the balance is shifting to the digital side, local history research will be a hybrid of online and in-person study for the foreseeable future. Digital materials have the enormous advantage of being pandemic-proof. I still find it hard to believe that I spent more than a year without seeing the inside of a library, probably the longest stretch since I was an infant. During the worst of the shutdowns, when I was feeling like an orphan, online resources were a godsend.

But I think Ill always have a preference for in-person research. Not only do I love the smell, the atmosphere, and the silent camaraderie of libraries, but Im also a firm believer in adjacencies; browsing is most productive when all the materials you need are in one place and close at hand. Milwaukee has two excellent and indispensable historical archives: the Frank P. Zeidler Humanities Room on the second floor of the Central Library, 814 W. Wisconsin Ave.; and the research library of the Milwaukee County Historical Society, 910 N. Martin Luther King Drive. Both are open again, thank goodness, but their hours are still limited; check online for details.

Whether youre a student, a genealogist, an armchair historian, or a budding professional, unearthing new facts and developing new insights about the history of our community is a delight like no other. There are countless trails to follow. As you blaze your own, happy hunting!

John Gurda writes a column on local history for the Ideas Lab on the first Sunday of every month. Email:mail@johngurda.com

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Tools of the trade: Researching Wisconsin, local history is easy once you know where to look - Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

Margaret M. McGowan, a British cultural historian who created a new international area of academic study, now known as early dance, and received national honors in both Britain and France, died on March 16 in Brighton, England. She was 90.

Her death, in a hospital, was confirmed by her husband, Sydney Anglo, a fellow Renaissance historian. He said the cause was bladder cancer.

Professor McGowan, who was bilingual, exposed the collision of politics, ballet, design and music at the French court of the late Renaissance and early Baroque era in her first book, published in French in 1963, LArt du Ballet de Cour en France, 1581-1643. In that book, she analyzed the spectacular mixed-media genre in which kings and members of royal and aristocratic families performed in public. Her interdisciplinary approach, hailed by her fellow dance historian Richard Ralph as precociously modern, enlarged the field of dance history. Her devotion to research was lifelong and diverse.

Her scholarly work reached beyond Europe. Linda Tomko, a dance historian at the University of California, Riverside, wrote in an email, Margaret McGowans research on dance and spectacle in France, of the early to mid-17th century, vividly explored dancings connection to operations of power, modeling a research question that has since gained wide adoption in U.S. scholarly dance studies, and abroad.

In 1998, Professor McGowan was honored in Britain with the title Commander of the Order of the British Empire; in 2020, she was made a Chevalier de lOrdre des Arts et des Lettres in France.

Margaret Mary McGowan was born on Dec. 21, 1931, in Deeping St. James, Lincolnshire, England. Although she could have studied French at the prestigious University of Oxford, she chose instead to do so at the University of Reading because Reading, unlike Oxford, would give her a year in France.

She remained in France to teach at the University of Strasbourg from 1955 to 1957, after which she took a position at the University of Glasgow, where she taught until 1964. She undertook postgraduate studies at the prestigious Warburg Institute, which is globally renowned as a center for the study of the interaction of ideas, images and society across international history.

Her topic was the ballet de cour at the courts of the French kings Henri III, Henri IV and Louis XIII; her adviser was the eminent Renaissance historian Frances Yates. The inspiration she derived from both the Warburg and Ms. Yates became a source of lifelong loyalty.

Speaking in 2020, Professor McGowan recalled Ms. Yatess guidance in her work on the ballet de cour. Ms. Yates realized that the material on which I was working had not before been considered in an interdisciplinary way, she said. Musicologists had explored the vocal music, art historians had begun to find drawings belonging to festivals, and literary scholars had recognized the importance of the court context for understanding lyric poems. Ms. Yates, the pioneering French scholar Jean Jacquot and Mr. Jacquots colleagues at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique all guided Professor McGowan in her endeavor to join those artistic elements in a larger European context.

The importance of Professor McGowans 1963 book on the ballet de cour was recognized by scholars in France, Britain, the United States and elsewhere. She joined the staff of the University of Sussex in 1964 and rose to deputy vice chancellor in 1992. She held that position until 1998, a year after retiring as a professor.

In 1964 she married Professor Anglo, who specialized in the parallel area of Tudor tournaments, and whom she had met while they were both students of Ms. Yatess at Warburg.

In an interview, Professor Anglo spoke of his wife with intense, affectionate and wry admiration: She was 75 percent of our marriage. I was 25 percent. (Writing two days later, he gave himself a lower percentage than that.)

Professor McGowan edited several books that brought together the latest work of a range of colleagues. One of those colleagues, Margaret Shewring of the University of Warwick, observed in an email that Professor McGowans retirement from university duties had brought new riches by allowing her to pursue many new lines of investigation.

Some of her books were primarily concerned with the literature of the French Renaissance: the poet Pierre de Ronsard, the essayist Michel de Montaigne. But she remained true to the interdisciplinary nature of the Renaissance itself.

Introducing her Ideal Forms in the Age of Ronsard (1985), she observed the pervasive importance of praise to Renaissance thought, as the dominant mode in public life, in literature and in art. She went on to put Ronsards verse into the complex context of the mid-16th-century reigns of the Valois monarchs. With The Vision of Rome in the French Renaissance (2000), she examined the vital significance of classical ruins to Renaissance Rome and, in turn, the importance of Rome to French culture.

Her Dance in the Renaissance: European Fashion, French Obsession (2008) won the Wolfson History Prize, given annually to a British subject for excellence in the writing of history; four years later, she published a companion volume in French, concentrating on source materials.

Catherine Turocy, artistic director of the New York Baroque Dance Company, wrote in an email that Dance in the Renaissance was a detailed analysis of 16th-century society and how dance was at the center of philosophical and aesthetic thought feeding current politics, and that she had been inspired and guided by Professor McGowans insights, passionate views and new research.

Her three final books showed the breadth of her understanding of the Renaissance. Festival and Violence: Princely Entries in the Content of War, 1480-1635 (2019) connected public performance to military politics. Charles V, Prince Philip, and the Politics of Succession (2020) addressed the dynastic politics of the Habsburg emperor Charles Vs use of spectacular festivities as propaganda in imposing the future king Philip II on the Low Countries. Her final book, completed just three weeks before her death, is yet to be published: Its title, Harmony in the Universe: Spectacle and the Quest for Peace in the Early Modern Period, indicates the characteristic scope of her historical vision.

Loyal to the Warburg Institute, Professor McGowan was chairwoman of its Review in 2006 and 2007. From 2011 to 2014, when she was in her 80s, she spearheaded the institutes case for independence from the University of London, taking it to the British high court with eventual success.

In addition to her husband, she is survived by a sister, Sheila.

Professor McGowan in 1993 was made a fellow of the British Academy, the national academy for the humanities and social sciences. In 2007 the British journal Dance Research, where she had been assistant editor for 25 years, honored her with a special Festschrift issue, hailing her as Pioneer of Academic Dance Research.

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Margaret M. McGowan, Who Expanded the Field of Dance History, Dies at 90 - The New York Times