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Kay Bradley

L. Frank Baum - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia - 0 views

en.wikipedia.org/...L._Frank_Baum

Wizard of Oz Baum Gilded Age

shared by Kay Bradley on 13 Feb 13 - Cached
  • In December 1890, Baum urged the wholesale extermination of all America's native peoples in a column he wrote on December 20, 1890, nine days before the Wounded Knee Massacre.[13] Later, on January 3, 1891, Baum reverted to the subject in an editorial response to the event: The Pioneer has before declared that our only safety depends upon the total extirmination [sic] of the Indians. Having wronged them for centuries, we had better, in order to protect our civilization, follow it up by one more wrong and wipe these untamed and untamable creatures from the face of the earth.[14]
  • While Baum was in South Dakota, he sang in a quartet that included a man who would become one of the first Populist (People's Party) Senators in the U.S., James Kyle
  • In 1900, Baum and Denslow (with whom he shared the copyright) published The Wonderful Wizard of Oz to much critical acclaim and financial success.[18] The book was the best-selling children's book for two years after its initial publication.[citation needed] Baum went on to write thirteen more novels based on the places and people of the Land of Oz.
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  • Jokes in the script, mostly written by Glen MacDonough, called for explicit references to President Theodore Roosevelt, Senator Mark Hanna, and oil magnate John D. Rockefeller. Although use of the script was rather free-form, the line about Hanna was ordered dropped as soon as Hamlin got word of his death in 1904.[citation needed]
  • On May 5, 1919, Baum suffered from a stroke.
  • Baum wrote two editorials about Native Americans for the Aberdeen Saturday Pioneer which have provoked controversy in recent times because of his assertion that the safety of White settlers depended on the wholesale genocide of American Indians
  • The first piece was published on December 20, 1890, five days after the killing of the Lakota Sioux holy man, Sitting Bull (who was being held in custody at the time). Following is the complete text of the editorial: Sitting Bull, most renowned Sioux of modern history, is dead. He was not a Chief, but without Kingly lineage he arose from a lowly position to the greatest Medicine Man of his time, by virtue of his shrewdness and daring. He was an Indian with a white man's spirit of hatred and revenge for those who had wronged him and his. In his day he saw his son and his tribe gradually driven from their possessions: forced to give up their old hunting grounds and espouse the hard working and uncongenial avocations of the whites. And these, his conquerors, were marked in their dealings with his people by selfishness, falsehood and treachery. What wonder that his wild nature, untamed by years of subjection, should still revolt? What wonder that a fiery rage still burned within his breast and that he should seek every opportunity of obtaining vengeance upon his natural enemies.
  • The proud spirit of the original owners of these vast prairies inherited through centuries of fierce and bloody wars for their possession, lingered last in the bosom of Sitting Bull. With his fall the nobility of the Redskin is extinguished, and what few are left are a pack of whining curs who lick the hand that smites them. The Whites, by law of conquest, by justice of civilization, are masters of the American continent, and the best safety of the frontier settlements will be secured by the total annihilation of the few remaining Indians. Why not annihilation? Their glory has fled, their spirit broken, their manhood effaced; better that they die than live the miserable wretches that they are. History would forget these latter despicable beings, and speak, in latter ages of the glory of these grand Kings of forest and plain that Cooper loved to heroize. We cannot honestly regret their extermination, but we at least do justice to the manly characteristics possessed, according to their lights and education, by the early Redskins of America.[32][33] Following the December 29, 1890, massacre, Baum wrote a second editorial, published on January 3, 1891: The peculiar policy of the government in employing so weak and vacillating a person as General Miles to look after the uneasy Indians, has resulted in a terrible loss of blood to our soldiers, and a battle which, at best, is a disgrace to the war department. There has been plenty of time for prompt and decisive measures, the employment of which would have prevented this disaster.
  • An eastern contemporary, with a grain of wisdom in its wit, says that "when the whites win a fight, it is a victory, and when the Indians win it, it is a massacre."[32][34]
  • The Pioneer has before declared that our only safety depends upon the total extirmination [sic] of the Indians. Having wronged them for centuries we had better, in order to protect our civilization, follow it up by one more wrong and wipe these untamed and untamable creatures from the face of the earth. In this lies safety for our settlers and the soldiers who are under incompetent commands. Otherwise, we may expect future years to be as full of trouble with the redskins as those have been in the past.
  • These two short editorials continue to haunt his legacy. In 2006, two descendants of Baum apologized to the Sioux nation for any hurt their ancestor had
  • caused
  • Baum's mother-in-law, Woman's Suffrage leader Matilda Joslyn Gage, had great influence over Baum's views. Gage was initiated into the Wolf Clan and admitted into the Iroquois Council of Matrons for her outspoken respect and sympathy for Native American people; it would seem unlikely that Baum could have harbored animosity for them in his mature years.
  • Although numerous political references to the "Wizard" appeared early in the 20th century, it was in a scholarly article by Henry Littlefield,[36] an upstate New York high school history teacher, published in 1964 that there appeared the first full-fledged interpretation of the novel as an extended political allegory of the politics and characters of the 1890s. Special attention was paid to the Populist metaphors and debates over silver and gold.[37] As a Republican and avid supporter of Women's Suffrage, it is thought that Baum personally did not support the political ideals of either the Populist movement of 1890–92 or the Bryanite-silver crusade of 1896–1900. He published a poem in support of William McKinley.[38
  • Since 1964 many scholars, economists and historians have expanded on Littlefield's interpretation, pointing to multiple similarities between the characters (especially as depicted in Denslow's illustrations) and stock figures from editorial cartoons of the period. Littlefield himself wrote to The New York Times letters to the editor section spelling out that his theory had no basis in fact, but that his original point was, "not to label Baum, or to lessen any of his magic, but rather, as a history teacher at Mount Vernon High School, to invest turn-of-the-century America with the imagery and wonder I have always found in his stories."[39]
  • Baum's newspaper had addressed politics in the 1890s, and Denslow was an editorial cartoonist as well as an illustrator of children's books. A series of political references are included in the 1902 stage version, such as references by name to the President and a powerful senator, and to John D. Rockefeller for providing the oil needed by the Tin Woodman. Scholars have found few political references in Baum's Oz books after 1902.[citation needed] When Baum himself was asked whether his stories had hidden meanings, he always replied that they were written to please children and generate an income for his family
  • The Baums believed in God, but felt that religious decisions should be made by mature minds and not religious authorities. As a result, they sent their older sons to "Ethical Culture Sunday School" in Chicago, which taught morality, not religion.[41][42]
Kay Bradley

Economic history of the United States - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia - 0 views

en.wikipedia.org/...c_history_of_the_United_States

economics

shared by Kay Bradley on 31 Mar 11 - Cached
  • The U.S. Constitution, adopted in 1787, established that the entire nation was a unified, or common market, with no internal tariffs or taxes on interstate commerce.
  • He succeeded in building a strong national credit based on taking over the state debts and bundling them with the old national debt into new securities sold to the wealthy. They in turn now had an interest in keeping the new government solvent. Hamilton funded the debt with tariffs on imported goods and a highly controversial tax on whiskey
  • Hamilton believed the United States should pursue economic growth through diversified shipping, manufacturing, and banking
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  • He sought and achieved Congressional authority to create the First Bank of the United States in 1791; the charter lasted until 1811.[17]
  • Thomas Jefferson and James Madison opposed a strong central government (and, consequently, most of Hamilton's economic policies), but they could not stop Hamilton,
  • As president in 1811 Madison let the bank charter expire, but the War of 1812 proved the need for a national bank and Madison reversed positions. The Second Bank of the United States was established in 1816, with a 20 year charter.[18]
  • Cotton, at first a small-scale crop in the South, boomed following Eli Whitney's invention in 1793 of the cotton gin,
  • Millions moved to the more fertile farmland of the Midwest. States built roads and waterways, such as the Cumberland Pike (1818) and the Erie Canal (1825), opening up markets for western farm products.
  • The Whig Party supported Clay's American System, which proposed to build internal improvements (e.g. roads, canals and harbors), protect industry, and create a strong national bank
  • President Andrew Jackson (1829–1837), leader of the new Democratic Party, opposed the Second Bank of the United States, which he believed favored the entrenched interests of rich. When he was elected for a second term, Jackson blocked the renewal of the bank's charter. Jackson opposed paper money and demanded the government be paid in gold and silver coins. The Panic of 1837 stopped business growth for three years
  • Railroads made a decisive impact on the U.S. economy especially in the 1850-1873 era, making possible the transition to an urban industrial nation with high finance and advanced managerial skills. Railroads opened up remote areas, drastically cut the cost of moving freight as well as passenger travel, and stimulated new industries such as steel and telegraphy, as well as the profession of civil engineering.
  • Atlanta, Billings, Chicago, and Dallas
  • the railroad became the first large-scale business enterprise and the model for most large corporations.[24]
  • Panics did not curtail rapid U.S. economic growth during the 19th century. Long term demographic growth, expansion into new farmlands, and creation of new factories continued. New inventions and capital investment led to the creation of new industries and economic growth. As transportation improved, new markets continuously opened.
  • By 1860, on the eve of Civil War, 16% of the people lived in cities with 2500 or more people; a third of the nation's income came from manufacturing. Urbanized industry was limited primarily to the Northeast; cotton cloth production was the leading industry, with the manufacture of shoes, woolen clothing, and machinery also expanding. Most of the workers in the new factories were immigrants or their children. Between 1845 and 1855, some 300,000 European immigrants arrived annually. Many remained in eastern cities, especially mill towns and mining camps, while those with farm experience and some savings bought farms in the West.[26]
  • The industrial advantages of the North over the South helped secure a Northern victory in the American Civil War
  • Industrialists came to dominate many aspects of the nation's life, including social and political affairs.[26]
  • the region maintained its dependence on cotton
  • An explosion of new discoveries and inventions took place, a process called the "Second Industrial Revolution."
  • By 1890, the USA leaped ahead of Britain for first place in manufacturing output.[2
  • The rapid economic development following the Civil War laid the groundwork for the modern U.S. industrial economy.
  • Parallel to these achievements was the development of the nation's industrial infrastructure
Kay Bradley

Olaudah Equiano - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia - 0 views

en.wikipedia.org/...Olaudah_Equiano

shared by Kay Bradley on 21 Sep 15 - No Cached
  • During the American Revolutionary War, Britain had recruited blacks to fight with it by offering freedom to those who left rebel masters. In practice, it also freed women and children, and attracted thousands of slaves to its lines in New York City, which it occupied, and in the South, where its troops occupied Charleston. When British troops were evacuated at the end of the war, its officers also evacuated American slaves. They were resettled in the Caribbean, in Nova Scotia and in London. Britain refused to return the slaves, which the United States sought in peace negotiations
  • Equiano became involved in helping the Black Poor of London, who were mostly those African-American slaves freed during and after the American Revolution by the British.
  • The black community numbered about 20,000
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  • After the Revolution some 3,000 former slaves had been transported from New York to Nova Scotia, where they became known as Black Loyalists
  • Equiano was appointed to an expedition to resettle London's Black Poor in Freetown, a new British colony founded on the west coast of Africa, at present-day Sierra Leone. The blacks from London were joined by more than 1,200 Black Loyalists who chose to leave Nova Scotia.
  • He was one of the leading members of the Sons of Africa, a small abolitionist group composed of free Africans in London
  • Olaudah Equiano (c. 1745 – 31 March 1797),[3] known in his lifetime as Gustavus Vassa (/ˈvæsə/),[4] was a prominent African in London, a freed slave who supported the British movement to end the slave trade.
  • His last master was Robert King, an American Quaker merchant who allowed Equiano to trade on his own account and purchase his freedom in 1766.
  • Equiano settled in England in 1767 and worked and traveled for another 20 years as a seafarer, merchant, and explorer in the Caribbean, the Arctic, the American colonies, South and Central America, and the United Kingdom.
  • in 1792 Equiano married an English woman named Susannah Cullen and they had two daughters.
  • In Virginia, Equiano was bought in 1754 by Michael Pascal,
  • He was transported with 244 other enslaved Africans across the Atlantic Ocean to Barbados in the West Indies.
  • He and a few other slaves were sent on to the British colony of Virginia.
  • Pascal took Equiano with him when he returned to England, and had him accompany him as a valet during the Seven Years' War with France. Also trained in seamanship, Equiano was expected to assist the ship's crew in times of battle; his duty was to haul gunpowder to the gun decks. Pascal favoured Equiano and sent him to his sister-in-law in Great Britain, so that the youth could attend school and learn to read and write.
  • At this time, Equiano converted to Christianity
  • Pascal sold Equiano to Captain James Doran of the Charming Sally at Gravesend, from where he was transported back to the Caribbean, to Montserrat, in the Leeward Islands. There he was sold to Robert King, an American Quaker merchant from Philadelphia who traded in the Caribbean.[1
  • King set Equiano to work on his shipping routes and in his stores. In 1765, when Equiano was about 20 years old, King promised that for his purchase price of 40 pounds, the slave could buy his freedom.[14] King taught him to read and write more fluently, guided him along the path of religion, and allowed Equiano to engage in profitable trading for his own account, as well as on his master's behalf
  • The merchant urged Equiano to stay on as a business partner, but the African found it dangerous and limiting to remain in the British colonies as a freedman. While loading a ship in Georgia, he was almost kidnapped back into slavery.
  • By about 1767, Equiano had gained his freedom and went to England. He continued to work at sea, travelling sometimes as a deckhand based in England. In 1773 on the British Royal Navy ship Racehorse, he travelled to the Arctic in an expedition to find a northern route to India.[15] On that voyage he worked with Dr. Charles Irving, who had developed a process to distill seawater and later made a fortune from it. Two years later, Irving recruited Vassa for a project on the Mosquito Coast in South America, where he was to use his African background and Igbo language to help select slaves and manage them as labourers on sugar cane plantations. I
  • Equiano expanded his activities in London, learning the French horn and joining debating societies, including the London Corresponding Society. He continued his travels, visiting Philadelphia and New York in 1785 and 1786, respectively.
  • n the 1780s he became involved in the abolitionist movement.
  • Equiano was befriended and supported by abolitionists, many of whom encouraged him to write and publish his life story. He was supported financially in this effort by philanthropic abolitionists and religious benefactors.
  • As part of settling in Britain, Equiano/Vassa decided to marry and have a family. On 7 April 1792, he married Susannah Cullen, a local girl
  • The couple settled in the area and had two mixed-race daughters, Anna Maria (1793–1797) and Joanna (1795–1857).
  • Kay Bradley on 21 Sep 15
     
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Kay Bradley

In Rural Alabama, a Longtime Mistrust of Medicine Fuels a Tuberculosis Outbreak - The N... - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...s-a-tuberculosis-outbreak.html

civil rights US History race economics

shared by Kay Bradley on 19 Jan 16 - No Cached
  • Marion is in the throes of a tuberculosis outbreak so severe that it has posted an incidence rate about 100 times greater than the state’s and worse than in many developing countries.
  • Residents, local officials and medical experts said the struggle against the outbreak could be traced to generations of limited health care access, endemic poverty and mistrust — problems that are common across the rural South.
  • There’s not support for local medical care, so when something like this happens, you have a health delivery system that’s unprepared.”
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  • In Marion, a city of fewer than 3,600 people, the toll of the slow-growing bacteria, commonly referred to as TB, has been staggering. Since January 2014, active tuberculosis has been diagnosed in 20 people, nearly all of them black; three have died. (Six people who live in other cities in Alabama have also received diagnoses of active tuberculosis and have been linked to the outbreak here.)
  • Others suggested that the history of medicine in Alabama, including the notorious medical experimentation in Tuskegee, was hampering efforts to contain tuberculosis.
  • n 1932, the United States Public Health Service began a study of untreated syphilis that involved 600 black men in Macon County, Ala., which includes Tuskegee.
Kay Bradley

Rooted in Reconstruction: The First Wave of Black Congressmen | The Nation - 0 views

www.thenation.com/...n-first-wave-black-congressmen

shared by Kay Bradley on 02 Feb 11 - No Cached
  • Well over a century ago, during the turbulent era of Reconstruction, they were preceded by another three: Hiram Revels and Blanche Bruce, both senators from Mississippi, and P.B.S. Pinchback, briefly the governor of Louisiana.
  • It also underscores how remarkable, if temporary, a transformation in American life was wrought by Reconstruction. Revels, Bruce and Pinchback were only the tip of a large iceberg--an estimated 2,000 black men served in some kind of elective office during that era.
  • For many decades, historians viewed Reconstruction as the lowest point in the American experience, a time of corruption and misgovernment presided over by unscrupulous carpetbaggers from the North, ignorant former slaves and traitorous scalawags (white Southerners who supported the new governments in the South). Mythologies about black officeholders formed a central pillar of this outlook. Their alleged incompetence and venality illustrated the larger "crime" of Reconstruction--placing power in the hands of a race incapable of participating in American democracy. D.W. Griffith's 1915 film Birth of a Nation included a scene in which South Carolina's black legislators downed alcohol and propped their bare feet on their desks while enacting laws. Claude Bowers, in The Tragic Era, a bestseller of the 1920s that did much to form popular consciousness about Reconstruction, offered a similar portrait. To Griffith and Bowers, the incapacity of black officials justified the violence of the Ku Klux Klan and the eventual disenfranchisement of Southern black voters.
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  • Capitol Men
  • Dray's
  • It does not really offer an assessment of Reconstruction's successes and failings
  • Twelve years earlier, Smalls had piloted the Planter, on which he worked as a slave crewman, out of Charleston harbor and delivered it to the Union navy, a deed that made him a national hero. In 1864, while the ship was undergoing repairs in Philadelphia, a conductor evicted Smalls from a streetcar when he refused to give up his seat to a white passenger. Ninety years before a similar incident involving Rosa Parks sparked the Montgomery bus boycott, Smalls's ordeal inspired a movement of black and white reformers to persuade the Pennsylvania legislature to ban discrimination in public transportation.
  • Stephens offered a long argument based on states' rights as to why the bill was unconstitutional.
  • The subject of their exchange was a civil rights bill banning racial discrimination in places of public accommodation.
  • Elliott launched into a learned and impassioned address explaining why the recently enacted Fourteenth Amendment justified the measure (which was signed into law by President Grant the following year), then reminded Congress of an infamous speech Stephens had delivered on the eve of the Civil War: "It is scarcely twelve years since that gentleman shocked the civilized world by announcing the birth of a government which rested on human slavery as its cornerstone." Elliott already had proved that he refused to be intimidated by whites: in 1869 he whipped a white man in the streets of Columbia for writing inappropriate notes to his wife. A black man assaulting a white man in defense of his wife's good name was not a common occurrence in nineteenth-century South Carolina.
  • Robert Elliott
  • Many of the black Congressmen spoke of the abuse they suffered while traveling to the Capitol. Joseph Rainey
  • Robert Elliott was refused service at a restaurant in a railroad station
  • In the House, one Virginia Democrat announced that he was addressing only "the white men," the "gentlemen," not his black colleagues
  • Congressmen Dray profiles came from diverse origins and differed in their approach to public policies. Some had been free before the Civil War, others enslaved
  • Some favored government action to distribute land to former slaves; others insisted that in a market society the only way to acquire land was to purchase it. Some ran for office as representatives of their race, others as exemplars of the ideal that, with the end of slavery and the advent of legal equality, race no longer mattered. Reconstruction's black Congressmen did not see themselves simply as spokesmen for the black community
  • was one of the more conservative black leaders; yet in the Senate he spoke out for more humane treatment of Native Americans and opposed legislation banning immigration from China
  • Blanche Bruce
  • sixteen black members of Congress
  • had enjoyed opportunities and advantages unknown to most African-Americans
  • Revels
  • had been born free in North Carolina
  • Bruce
  • was the slave son of his owner and was educated by the same tutor who taught his white half-siblings.
  • Some Congressmen had enjoyed unique privileges as slaves.
  • enjamin Turner's
  • wner allowed him to learn to read and write and to run a hotel and livery stable in Selma
  • Others, however, had experienced slavery in all its brutality.
  • Jeremiah Haralson
  • John Hyman
  • None of these men fit the old stereotype of Reconstruction officials as ignorant, incompetent and corrupt.
  • All were literate, most were seasoned political organizers by the time of their election and nearly all were honest.
  • Governor Pinchback
  • ne who does fit the image of venality wa
  • of Louisiana, whose career combined staunch advocacy of civil rights with a sharp eye for opportunities to line his pockets
  • Pinchback grew up and attended school in Cincinnati. In the 1850s he worked as a cabin boy on an Ohio River steamboat. He fell in with a group of riverboat gamblers and learned their trade. He turned up in New Orleans in 1862 and expertly navigated the byzantine world of Louisiana's Reconstruction politics. Pinchback was undoubtedly corrupt (he accumulated a small fortune while in office) but also an accomplished politician.
  • Reconstruction ended in 1877, when President Rutherford B. Hayes abandoned the idea of federal intervention to protect the rights of black citizens in the South, essentially leaving their fate in the hands of local whites.
  • black political power, while substantially diminished, did not vanish until around 1900, when the Southern states disenfranchised black voters. Six more African-Americans served in Congress before the end of the nineteenth century. Some of their Reconstruction predecessors remained active in politics
  • Robert Smalls
  • of Planter fame, served as customs collector at Beaufort until 1913, when he was removed as part of a purge of blacks from the federal bureaucracy by Woodrow Wilson, the first Southern-born president since Reconstruction.
  • Pinchback and Bruce moved to Washington, where they became leaders of the city's black elite and arbiters of federal patronage appointments for African-Americans. Bruce worked tirelessly but unsuccessfully to persuade Congress to reimburse blacks who had deposited money in the Freedman's Savings Bank, which failed during the Panic of 1873. Like Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac in our own time, the bank was a private corporation chartered by Congress that enjoyed the implicit but not statutory backing of the federal government. Its counterparts today are being bailed out with billions of taxpayer dollars, as they have been deemed too big to fail. The Freedman's Savings Bank was too black to rescue.
  • George White
  • The last black Congressman of the post-Reconstruction era wa
  • of North Carolina, whose term ended in 1901. From then until 1929, when
  • Oscar DePriest
  • took his seat representing Chicago, Congress remained lily-white. Not until 1972, with
  • Andrew Young's
  • election in Georgia and
  • Barbara Jordan's
  • in Texas, did black representation resume from states that had experienced Reconstruction. Today the Congressional Black Caucus numbers forty-two members, seventeen of them from the states of the old Confederacy.
  • Robert Smalls
  • One such episode involves
  • who in 1874 was elected to Congress from Beaufort County, South Carolina.
  • Alexander Stephens
  • Equally riveting is the 1874 confrontation between
  • he former vice president of the Confederacy, then representing Georgia in the House of Representatives, and another black South Carolinian,
  • Robert Brown Elliott (1842-1884) was an African American member of the United States House of Representatives from South Carolina. Robert Brown Elliott's early life is a mystery. Although he claimed to have been born in Liverpool, England to West Indian immigrants, and to have graduated from Eton College, biographers have been unable to corroborate these facts. He moved to South Carolina in 1867 and established a law practice. Elliott helped organize the local Republican Party and served in the state constitutional convention. In 1868 he was elected to the South Carolina House of Representatives. The next year he was appointed assistant adjutant-general; he was the first African American commanding general of the South Carolina National Guard. As part of his job, he helped form a state militia to fight the Ku Klux Klan. Elliott was elected as a Republican to the Forty-second and Forty-third United States Congress. He "delivered a celebrated speech" in favor of the Civil Rights Act of 1875.[1] He resigned on November 1, 1874, to fight political corruption in South Carolina. He served again in the South Carolina House of Representatives, where he was elected as Speaker of the House. He ran unsuccessfully for South Carolina Attorney General in 1876. Reconstruction ended that year and he was forced out of office.[] He set up a private law practice in New Orleans.
  • Kay Bradley on 02 Feb 11
     
    "Rooted in Reconstruction: The First Wave of Black Congressmen Eric Foner"
Kay Bradley

The Wonderful Wizard of Oz - 0 views

www.amphigory.com/oz.htm

Wizard of Oz Baum Gilded Age literature WizardOfOz

shared by Kay Bradley on 13 Feb 13 - Cached
  • publication in 1900
  • The Wizard of Oz is an entity unto itself, however, and was not originally written with a sequel in mind
  • Born near Syracuse in 1856, Baum was brought up in a wealthy home and early became interested in the theater. He wrote some plays which enjoyed brief success and then, with his wife and two sons, journeyed to Aberdeen, South Dakota, in 1887. Aberdeen was a little prairie town and there Baum edited the local weekly until it failed in 1891
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  • For many years Western farmers had been in a state of loud, though unsuccessful, revolt. While Baum was living in South Dakota not only was the frontier a thing of the past, but the Romantic view of benign nature had disappeared we well. The stark reality of the dry, open plains and the acceptance of man's Darwinian subservience to his environment served to crush Romantic idealism
  • prices
  • grasshoppers
  • drought
  • blizzards
  • juggling of freight rates
  • Baum's stay in South Dakota also covered the period of the formation of the Populist party, which Professor Nye likens to a fanatic "crusade".
  • Western farmers had for a long time sought governmental aid in the form of economic panaceas, but to no avail. The Populist movement symbolized a desperate attempt to use the power of the ballot[8].
  • Moreover, he took part in the pivotal election of 1896, marching in "torch-light parades for William Jennings Bryan"
  • could have been unaffected by Bryan's campaign. Putting all the farmers' hopes in a basket labeled "free coinage of silver," Bryan's platform rested mainly on the issue of adding silver to the nation's gold standard. Though he lost, he did at least bring the plight of the little man into national focus[11].
  • Nevertheless, Professor Nye quotes Baum as having a desire to write stories that would "bear the stamp of our times and depict the progressive fairies of today.
  • Yet the original Oz book conceals an unsuspected depth
  • children's story with a symbolic allegory implicit within its story line and characterizations
  • subtle parable, Baum delineated a Midwesterner's vibrant and ironic portrait of this country as it entered the twentieth century.
  • orothy, who was an orphan
  • Dorothy's house has come down on the Wicked Witch of the East, killing her
  • Notice that evil ruled in both the East and the West; after Dorothy's coming it rules only in the West.
  • The Wicked Witch of the East had kept the little Munchkin people "in bondage for many years, making them slave for her night and day.
  • In this way Eastern witchcraft dehumanized a simple laborer so that the faster and better he worked the more quickly he became a kind of machine. Here is a Populist view of evil Eastern influences on honest labor which could hardly be more pointed.
  • There is one thing seriously wrong with being made of tin; when it rains rust sets in.
  • Tin Woodman had been standing in the same position for a year without moving before Dorothy came along and oiled his joints
  • he Tin Woodman's situation has an obvious parallel in the condition of many Eastern workers after the depression of 1893
  • While Tin Woodman is standing still, rusted solid, he deludes himself into thinking he is no longer capable of that most human of sentiments, love
  • the country is divided in a very orderly fashion. In the North and South the people are ruled by good witches, who are not quite as powerful as the wicked ones of the East and West
  • Emerald City ruled by the Wizard of Oz
  • Dorothy is Baum's Miss Everyman
  • Dorothy sets out on the Yellow Brick Road wearing the Witch of the East's magic Silver Shoes
  • Silver shoes walking on a golden road
  • orothy becomes the innocent agent of Baum's ironic view of the Silver issue.
  • neither Dorothy, nor the good Witch of the North, nor the Munchkins understand the power of these shoes. The allegory is abundantly clear
  • William Allen White wrote an article in 1896 entitled "What's the Matter With Kansas?". In it he accused Kansas farmers of ignorance, irrationality and general muddle-headedness.
  • the Scarecrow displays a terrible sense of inferiority and self doubt, for he has determined that he needs real brains to replace the common straw in his head
  • the Cowardly Lion
  • As King of Beasts he explains, "I learned that if I roared very loudly every living thing was frightened and got out of my way."
  • Born a coward, he sobs, "Whenever there is danger my heart begins to beat fast
  • The Lion represents Bryan himself
  • In the election of 1896 Bryan lost the vote of Eastern Labor, though he tried hard to gain their support.
  • "struck at the Tin Woodman with his sharp claws." But, to his surprise, "he could make no impression on the tin, although the Woodman fell over in the road and lay still.
  • Baum here refers to the fact that in 1896 workers were often pressured into voting for McKinley and gold by their employers.
  • The magic Silver Shoes belong to Dorothy
  • ilver's potent charm, which had come to mean so much to so many in the Midwest, could not be entrusted to a political symbol
  • All together now the small party moves toward the Emerald City. Coxey's Army of tramps and indigents, marching to ask President Cleveland for work in 1894, appears no more naively innocent than this group of four characters going to see a humbug Wizard, to request favors that only the little girl among them deserves.
  • Those who enter the Emerald City must wear green glasses
  • The Wizard, a little bumbling old man, hiding behind a facade of paper mache and noise, might be any president from Grant to McKinley
  • he symbolizes the American criterion for leadership -- he is able to be everything to everybody.
  • the Wizard assumes different shapes, representing different views toward national leadership. To Dorothy he appears as an enormous head, "bigger than the head of the biggest giant
  • The Wizard has asked them all to kill the Witch of the West
  • he golden road does not go in that direction and so they must follow the sun, as have many pioneers in the past
  • The Witch of the West uses natural forces to achieve her ends; she is Baum's version of sentient and malign nature.
  • Baum makes these Winged Monkeys into an Oz substitute for the plains Indians.
  • Baum's monkeys are not inherently bad; their actions depend wholly upon the bidding of others. Under the control of an evil influence, they do evil. Under the control of goodness and innocence, as personified by Dorothy, the monkeys are helpful and kind, although unable to take her to Kansas. Says the Monkey King, "We belong to this country alone, and cannot leave it" (p. 213). The same could be said with equal truth of the first Americans.
  • The Witch assumes that proportions of a kind of western Mark Hanna or Banker Boss, who, through natural malevolence, manipulates the people and holds them prisoner by cynically taking advantage of their innate innocence.
  • Dorothy destroys the evil Witch by angrily dousing her with a bucket of water. Water, that precious commodity which the drought-ridden farmers on the great plains needed so badly, and which if correctly used could create an agricultural paradise, or at least dissolve a wicked witch.
  • What a wonderful lesson for youngsters of the decade when Benjamin Harrison, Grover Cleveland and William McKinley were hiding in the White House.
  • Formerly the Wizard was a mimic, a ventriloquist and a circus balloonist
  • our little Wizard comes from Omaha, Nebraska, a center of Populist agitation
  • Current historiography tends to criticize the Populist movement for its "delusions, myths and foibles
  • Their desires, as well as the Wizard's cleverness in answering them, are all self-delusion. Each of these characters carries within him the solution to his own problem, were he only to view himself objectively.
  • Like any good politician he gives the people what they want
  • hroughout the story Baum poses a central thought; the American desire for symbols of fulfillment is illusory. Real needs lie elsewhere.
  • In this way Baum tells us that the Silver crusade at least brought back Dorothy's lovely spirit to the disconsolate plains farmer. Her laughter, love and good will are no small addition to that gray land, although the magic of Silver has been lost forever as a result.
  • Thereby farm interests achieve national importance, industrialism moves West and Bryan commands only a forest full of lesser politicians.
Kay Bradley

Beatriz de Bobadilla y Ossorio - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia - 0 views

en.wikipedia.org/...Beatriz_de_Bobadilla_y_Ossorio

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  • Christopher Columbus made La Gomera his last port of call before crossing the Atlantic in 1492 with his three ships. He stopped here to replenish his crew's food and water supplies, intending to stay only four days. Beatriz de Bobadilla y Ossorio, the Countess of La Gomera and widow of Hernán Peraza the Younger, offered him vital support in preparations of the fleet and he ended up staying one month.When he finally sailed, she gave him cuttings of sugarcane, which became the first to reach the New World.[1]
  • Kay Bradley on 11 Sep 16
     
    Where Columbus got sugarcane from.
Kay Bradley

Pre civil war south 4/5 - 0 views

www.digitalhistory.uh.edu/disp_textbook_print.cfm

shared by Kay Bradley on 07 Jan 14 - No Cached
  • At the same time, southern intellectuals began to defend slavery as a positive factor. After 1830, white Southerners stopped referring to slavery as a necessary evil. Instead, they argued that it was a beneficial institution that created a hierarchical society superior to the leveling democracy of the North. By the late 1840s, a new and more explicitly racist rationale for slavery had emerged.
  • With the emergence of militant abolitionism in the North, sharpened by slave uprisings in Jamaica and Southampton County, Virginia, the South began to see itself as surrounded by enemies.
  • Before the 1830s, southern statements on slavery had been defensive; afterward, they were defiant.
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • began to denounce the North’s form of capitalism as “wage slavery.”
  • Beginning in 1837, southern leaders held the first of a series of commercial conventions in an attempt to diversify the southern economy and to rescue the South from northern “pecuniary and commercial supremacy.”
  • Efforts to develop the southern economy were surprisingly successful. Southern railroad mileage quadrupled between 1850 and 1860--although southern track mileage still trailed that of the free states by 14,000. By 1860 Richmond manufactured more tobacco than any other America city and exported more goods to South America than any other American port, including New York.
  • Regional independence was also called for in religion. Due in large part to fear of antislavery agitation, southern Baptists, Methodists, and Presbyterians sought to sever their denominational affiliations with northern churches
  • Southerners also called for a distinctive and peculiarly southern literature. More than 30 periodicals were founded with the word “Southern” in their title, all intended to “breathe a Southern spirit, and sustain a strictly Southern character.”
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