When we think of celebrating July 4th, it’s always with an eye on 1776. The glorious beginning to a nation unlike any other. But lately I am thinking of a different year, not that inaugural season of America. Instead I look to 1826. That date likely doesn’t trigger your memory. There was no war being fought. The country’s economy was stable. John Quincy Adams was in the middle of his sole term as President. So why this seemingly nondescript year? Simple, it’s about the other Adams, Thomas Jefferson and Dr. Benjamin Rush.
John Adams and Thomas Jefferson were Founding Fathers. They also comprised forty percent of the Committee of Five that wrote the Declaration of Independence. Both were Vice-Presidents, then Presidents. Friends, rivals, enemies then friend again. Their story of their relationship is the story of America.
Let’s take a deep dive in to the roots of this new Juneteenth holiday. The Emancipation Proclamation is a complicated topic that I spend a day covering with my students.
President Lincoln found himself in dire straights in 1863 as draft riots and public opinion were putting the war effort in jeopardy. The north was losing a lot of battles. Most of the young men who enlisted for the Union did so for a myriad of reasons, adventure, travel, getting out of the boredom of farm or factory work, and the maintenance of the Union. Some, but not many, signed up under the guise of freeing the slaves.
As an educator, here’s all I’m going to say about Critical Race Theory (CRT). I have not read the actual text of it, nor do I need to. Its elements have been included in the teaching of History for quite some time now. It just never been given a motto.
The too long; don’t read version? I teach the state standards and will continue to do so.
Even though Christopher Columbus never set foot on any turf that would be defined as soil of the United States, American History starts with him. And every October we have a day for him where you can’t bank or send mail through the Postal Service. But there are sales at department stores, so we got that going for us.
Columbus is a polarizing figure. His journey was epic and his exploits barbarous. To start the story of America with Columbus is altogether fitting. He’s a complicated figure. America is a complicated place with a complicated backstory. The legacy of the anniversary of his voyage is celebrated daily in many schools about the country. We’ve named cities for him. And one of us rewrote his story that begat a club to which one in six Americans belong. So, yeah, American History starts with Chris.
Hamilton Hot Take: With millions of Americans taking in Hamilton over the weekend on Disney+, there has been no shortage of “hot takes” on the history behind it. Let’s be real: Hamilton was not *the* story of America’s founding, but *a* story of it. There are many. I’ve read takes over the weekend that it didn’t do enough to denounce slavery or that it silently enabled slavery. No. It was a biography wrapped in Shakespearanesque verse set to amazing music.
You were told at the beginning: Who lives, who dies, who tells your story. In Hamilton you get drama from all the human emotions (desire and deceit, love and loathing, etc.), it just happens to take place around events of our nation’s founding. And through our characters we, brilliantly, get to see them as quite human. For they were human. Faults and all. Washington is charismatic, Jefferson an aristocrat, Burr contemptuous and Adams… ignored (nobody particularly liked him in his day).
History isn’t binary. It isn’t right or wrong, conservative or liberal. It’s all of them. Some of the characters grow, others do not. Their humanity exposed in good and bad ways.
Washington bought and sold slaves. He did not believe it was wrong; other’s at the time did. Jefferson, Madison… they too were slavers. Hamilton was not, but he used slavery as a political tool, not a moral one. Yet he willingly married into the Schuler family, who were slave owners. See, it’s complicated. As we contemplate statues (who stands, who falls, who learns their story), we need to think on this. Not one statutory figure is perfect, dig enough and you’ll find the flaw.
Juneteenth Day is a day that many Americans don’t know about, perhaps never even heard about. Juneteenth is the African-American celebration of the end of slavery that started as a regional celebration and spread outward. It doesn’t make many calendars of American Holidays. That should change.
So says this descendant of a Slave Owner.
I often say that history is complicated. Mine is no exception. A little back-story: my maternal grandfather’s family traces back to early Virginia, living at one time next to George Washington’s grandfather’s farmstead. Several generations of Virginians later, Gerard Hutt would operate a farm and his wife, Caty Spence Hutt, would be linked to owning 16 slaves. Of Gerard’s six children, at least three of them would re-locate to Ohio in its pre-statehood days. Ohio, as part of the Northwest Territory and governance under the Northwest Ordinance, was slave-free. My great-great-great grandfather would be one of these children, and he left slavery and Virginia behind.
After Nevada’s primary results last night it’s time to pump the brakes on everyone here… Whether you are super stoked that Bernie is scoring big early or worried that Bernie winning means anything…
Let’s be real and remember history and civics. First civics.
The results of 3 states don’t mean the game is over. That this is the first time in modern history a Democrat has won the first three states may mean something… or nothing (Bernie “won” Iowa by tenths and New Hampshire by less than 2%).
When the Founding Fathers sat down and wrote themselves American Government 2.0 (the Constitution), they built a new form of government where none had existed. They borrowed upon the Greek ideals of democracy and Rome’s idea of a Republic. What did not exist at the time were Corporatism and Socialism, the two sides of a coin our current political parties argue against.
On President’s Day a little reflection of the place of the Chief Executive through the lens of Ohio.
We like to conflate the Presidency to more than it is and nothing says that more than Ohio, who claims to have sent the most Americans to the White House, tied with Virginia. But as we oft like to argue about #fakenews, Ohio didn’t even make the Reader’s Digest list of presidents at all. It spoke of who was born in what state, and totally left Ohio out in the cold. Thus the rivalry of whose number one, I guess.
Chicago lyrics aside, do you really understand time as a function of American History? You proably don’t… and you may not even really care. But time has not been a constant throughout our history and often quite confusing.
Begin with the notion of “being late” to something. In colonial America, being late wasn’t a thing. Time was local, not universal. If three communities in the same region all had clock towers, none of them might have the same time. There was no official time from the Naval Observatory. That doesn’t start until 1845 for greater Washington, DC and the official time keeping for nation starts in 1865. So time was a local matter, and if it was 9 am in your community, that it was 9:15 in the neighboring village mattered not. Who could travel fast enough (by horse) to get between the two communities to have those time differences matter?
So the concept of “you’re late” wasn’t a thing, because you weren’t expected to arrive at a precise time. You might come over in the afternoon, or visit in the evening. Generalized time.
It wasn’t until the introduction of the railroad that time mattered across places. That you could now travel a distance of 10 miles by train to do some shopping in the bigger city close to you meant that you would need to know when to catch that return train home. Standard time, rather than local time, was introduced by the railroads. And with it the growing concept of tardiness.
And as railroads became faster and more universal, time across place mattered more and the introduction of time zones for the nation was born. In 1883 the railroads began using the concept of time zones in the U.S. and in 1918 the government adopted them officially.
Time was the source of frustration and anger in other ways beyond tardiness. In 1918 the government initiated Daylight Saving Time as a war productivity measure. Some say the idea originated with Ben Franklin in a letter on the concept to French authorities. Full of wit, perhaps America’s Founding Father of Snark may have been spoofing in his letter. Either way, by 1919 farmers were irked by the concept and led to its repeal that year. Farmers use the sun, not the clock, for their field work but hired hands were using the clock and not the sun. So a loss of productivity on the farm axed the measure meant to increase manufacturing productivity. During World War II another national daylight measure was passed, then repealed after the war’s end.
But in its aftermath was a cacophony of state and local time codes that left many confused. One fantastic tale was of an office building in St. Paul, Minnesota where some of the floors observed Daylight Savings time and others did not. The Uniform Time Act of 1966 resolved local time issues, but still allowed for exemption by states — but only upon the days that the Federal law kicked in. Today Hawaii and Arizona are the only state that exempt from Daylight Saving. For where Hawaii is, perhaps the concept irrelevant. For Arizona it is only the Navajo reservations that do not jump the clock ahead each Spring.
Thankfully Indiana capitulated to Daylight Saving Time in 2006, as that state was confusing enough with the Central Time zone weaving through part of the state let alone determining your timezone and then what time of year it was.
But time exists across the calendar, and if you think the time on your wrist (or cell phone) has been a source of frustration, let’s reflect on time across the months. Every December 31st we flip on the TV at 11:59 to watch the ball drop in New York City to usher in the New Year. Except… January 1st has not always been the first day of the year.
In pre-United States time in Colonial America, the “new year” was traditionally… March 25th. America, governed by the British, continued under the Julian calendar despite the move across Europe to the Gregorian calendar. That date, March 25th, is claimed to be “Lady Day” where Mary had learned she was pregnant with Baby Jesus. England, the last to convert to the Gregorian calendar New Year of January 1st, did so in 1752 and created a bizarre set of circumstances. 1751 ended up being only nine months long and to further adjust to align with the Gregorian calendar, erased 11 days in September 1752.
Americans, oft for not following British law at the time, were already using the Gregorian calendar for international business beyong England’s reach. Imagine the outcry today if we were to erase 11 days from any month. Think of all the birthdays missed, anniversaries lost and National Day of (whatever) skipped!
Perhaps in all of this kerfuffle over time none is more amusing than the story of a Chicago convict was to be executed for his offense in 1921 (before the codication of time zones and Daylight Saving). He asked at what time he was to be hanged? When he was told it was to be at 8 a.m., he said “Chicago time or Central time? The said Chicago time, to which he said “But I was sentenced before the time was changed and this rearrangement deprives me of an hour of life. That won’t mean anything after I’m dead, but it will mean a lot Friday morning.” The officials relented and bumped his execution to 9 a.m., granting him one extra hour that morning.
Evidently they did know what time it was and somebody, indeed, really did care.
Historic Thinking 