October 16th is Dictionary Day in honor of Webster’s birthday.
Wrong Webster.
That’s better.
“On the first of May will be opened…a school, in which children may be instructed, not only in the common arts of reading, writing, and arithmetic, but in any branch of academic literature.
“The little regard that is paid to the literary improvement of females…and the general inattention to the grammatical purity and elegance of our native language, are faults in the education of youth that more gentlemen have taken pains to censure than to correct…”
–Noah Webster, April 16, 1782
Across the Atlantic, the English Parliament was just voting to end the war in America when Noah Webster, a 24 year-old Yale grad and veteran of the Connecticut Militia, posted his notice. He had earned a law degree the year before, but the post-war economy was in such bad shape that no one could afford a lawyer. So he tried his hand at teaching.
His mission to ensure the literacy of Americans became a life-long passion, as did his belief that this new country required its own distinct standards of spelling. He printed his first Speller for children in 1783. The Speller became an irreplaceable teaching tool due to Webster’s keen understanding of how children learned language at different stages.
During his lifetime, he earned far more from the Speller than from his dictionaries. The Speller sold millions of copies, and was acknowledged as a considerable force for maintaining the unity of Americans through language.
His Compendious Dictionary of the English Language was published in 1806. In it, Webster created a uniquely American way of spelling. With words such as center, harbor and program, instead of centre, harbour and programme.
In 1828, at age 70, he published his masterpiece: American Dictionary of the English Language. It contained over 70,000 entries, but sold only 2,500 copies. Webster was forced to mortgage his house to complete the second edition, which was released in 1840.
After his death in 1843, George and Charles Merriam purchased the rights to the dictionary and expanded it. The expanded “Unabridged” dictionary became the undisputed American authority on the English language for over a hundred years.
October 12, 1492. Perhaps no date in Pan-American history is as important or controversial.
By October 11, 1492, Columbus’s crew had had enough. The trip was too long. They had spotted weeds and birds—signs of land—for weeks, but not a hint of soil. And at the rate they were going, many were afraid there would hardly be enough headwind to take them back to Spain.
Each day, Columbus lied to the men about how far they’d traveled, so as not to worry them more about the distance between themselves and civilization.
Finally a sailor aboard the Pinta by the name of Rodrigo de Triana spotted a speck of land on the horizon. On October 12, Columbus disembarked at an island in the Bahamas whose exact location is lost to history, and met with the island’s residents. His first impressions were that the people were young (all under 30), unclothed, painted black or various colors, and were a people who could be easily converted to Christianity, as “it seemed to me they had no religion of their own.”
Also, he noted how when he showed them his sword, they had never seen such a thing. They gripped it by blade and were surprised to find themselves cut. It was a foretelling symbol of the future of the two peoples and their relations.
Throughout much of the Americas, Columbus is derided as the bringer of devastation to two continents and the precursor to the genocide of millions of people.
“When Columbus sent back hundreds of Taino indians to be sold as slaves, Queen Isabella ordered them free and returned to their land. Eventually, the European colonists and sovereigns became so discontent with Columbus’ mismanagement that he was arrested and shipped back to Spain in chains. He spent the rest of his life trying to regain his governorship over Hispaniola.
“The government of Columbus was brutal and violated human dignity and the moral senses of his contemporaries. He was the first to establish institutions of slavery and brutal conquest that would lead to the demise of the nations and people who already called the Western Hemisphere their home.
Historians have still not settled upon a psychological portrait of the man around whom so much of world history hinges upon. Unlike the kings of the day whom history recorded so fastidiously, Columbus was a relative nobody until 1492.
And that may be the root of his popularity in 18th and 19th century United States. Here was a man not descended from royalty, but who attained fame and (supposedly) fortune merely by heading west into the great unknown—a fitting hero in the days of “manifest destiny.”
Had Columbus turned back on October 11, the New World would never have been discovered, and the indigenous tribes of the Americas would have lived in peace for hundreds of years. Unlikely. The idea had flourished in Europe that if the world was round a quicker way to the Orient must exist, and had Columbus turned back, it was only a matter of time before others would go the distance. Whether the actions of another discoverer could have stemmed the brutality, slavery and genocide, we will never know.
Today in the United States, over 500 years later, Columbus is one of four individuals honored with a federal holiday. The others are Martin Luther King Jr., George Washington, and Jesus Christ.
Leif Erikson arrived in the New World 500 years before Columbus. But you don’t hear any schoolchildren singing, ‘In 1002, Leif Erikson sailed the ocean blue.’
Leif was the son of Norseman Erik the Red. According to the Norse sagas, Erik’s family had been exiled from Norway because of his father’s part in some killings there.
In Iceland, Erik continued the family tradition by getting exiled from Iceland, after committing two separate murders. (One of the victims was a neighbor who refused to give Erik back his shovel.)
Rather than head east, Erik followed the sun, landing in a frozen wasteland he deceptively named “Greenland” to attract settlers. The ploy worked.
Small Norse settlements on Greenland survived over 400 years, although at no time did the Norse population surpass 5000. The last written record of the Norse settlement’s existence was from a wedding dated 1408.
Leif’s father Erik was a pagan, his mother a Christian. Leif followed his mother’s religion, but carried on the male tradition—not of murder and banishment, but of heading west into the great unknown.
Leif had heard of a land to the west from a trader named Bjarni Herjolfsson, who had been blown off course on his way from Iceland to Greenland. Despite being the first European to site mainland North America, Herjolfsson was too anxious to get to Greenland to even make a pitstop. Had he been more patient, we might be celebrating Bjarni Herjolfsson Day today, but as it was, Bjarni passed word onto Leif, who gathered men to explore.
According to the sagas, Leif and his followers founded three North American settlements: Helluland (land of flat stones), Markland (forest land) and Vinland (meadow land.) But none of the settlements reached the size or longevity of Greenland, and knowledge of the existence of the land disappeared for centuries.
In the 1960s archaeologists excavated the remains of a Norse settlement at L’Anse aux Meadows in Newfoundland, the first conclusive proof of Viking settlement in mainland North America.
In 1963 Congress declared October 9 “Leif Erikson Day,” following the lead of states like Wisconsin and Minnesota. October 9th isn’t actually Leif’s birthday, or the day he discovered North America. Nope, October 9th marks the anniversary of the arrival of the “Sloopers,”–early Norwegian immigrants to the U.S.–in New York Harbor aboard the ship Restauration, in 1825, following in the ancient wake of their daring westbound ancestor.
To all my Norwegian friends, Uff da! This day’s for you.
Perhaps because of the plurality of the attacks—four planes, three locations, and two landmarks of national significance—no single name summed up the tragedy of 9/11 better than the date itself. Today “September 11” refers the attacks on the Twin Towers and the Pentagon, and the plane crash outside of Shanksville, Pennsylvania. It means the extinguishing of thousands of innocent lives in a single morning.
But long before 2001, in fact before the pilgrims set foot on American shores, September 11 was already a pivotal date in American history.
Over 400 years ago on September 11, a ship by the name of Half Moon anchored in what is now New York Harbor, just north of a quiet island inhabited by a tribe known as the Mannahattes. Henry Hudson was about to take the first documented European journey up the river that would be named for him.
Spanish explorers had already reported the existence of the “Grand River”, but Hudson was the first to travel inland. He was an English navigator hired by the Dutch to find a passage to India; he hoped he’d find it up the Hudson.
The Half Moon sailed up the Hudson River, trading with some tribes, shooting at others. (One crew member had been shot through the neck with an arrow a few days before, an incident which colored the crew’s impressions of early Hudson Valley residents.) They never did find the route to India, but they did find Albany. At which point the river became too shallow and the ship turned around.
On his way out of New York harbor in October, another, more serious fight occurred between Half Moon and the indigenous residents—most likely the Mannahattes–the tribe living on the island that would become–you guessed it: New Amsterdam. The small battle was serious enough that the locals had not forgotten it when the Dutch came around 15 years later to “buy” the island of Manhattan for 60 guilders worth of goods.
Before returning to Holland, Hudson stopped in his homeland of England. As a fitting symbol of Hudson’s life, he never got to where he was going. Upon arriving in England, he was greeted, not as a hero but as a traitor, for sailing a craft under a foreign flag, and was promptly arrested.
Hudson’s journey is the reason why New York grew up Dutch before it was English.
The English did let Hudson out to do more exploring, to find that well-hidden secret passage to India, this time for the British crown. He spent several months exploring what would become “Hudson Bay” in Canada, lured north by the indigenous rumor of a river that ran to an “ocean”—probably referring to the Great Lakes.
After close to a year of exploring the Hudson Bay, his crew were getting homesick (and if you’ve spent a winter in Hudson Bay, you know why).
The crew mutinied. They placed Hudson, his son, and seven loyal crew members on a small boat, set them adrift, and sailed back to England. Hudson, his son and the men were never seen again.
The story of North America is in some ways the story of the Northwest Passage, the most famous passage that never was. The hope of a quick and easy waterway between Europe and India was the dream of kings and merchants alike for hundreds of years. The reward for a man who could find it would be wealth and fame beyond imagination.
But like the Fountain of Youth and the City of El Dorado, the Northwest Passage would elude every explorer from Columbus to John Franklin. Many devoted their lives to searching for a route that any child on Google Maps today can see never existed.
(There would be no direct water route between Europe and India until the Suez Canal was built in 1869, connecting the Mediterranean to the Persian Gulf. Ironically, this miracle of modern ingenuity had been preceded by a canal built by the Ancient Egyptians thousands of years earlier, which fell into disuse around the time of Cleopatra, filled with silt, and was forgotten.)
We are taught as children that the building of North America was based on freedom of religion, but it was based on trade. The first explorers came here seeking a trade route to the Orient. Then governments sought precious metals and untapped resources. Finally, immigrants came seeking a social and economic system that would allow those without resources or aristocratic blood an opportunity to attain wealth.You can tell what a society values most by the size of its buildings. Once cathedrals soared highest about medieval cities. Today those are dwarfed by centers of commerce and business. When terrorists attacked America, they didn’t strike our churches. They struck the World Trade Center, knowing full well this was the heart of America.
John Locke wrote that each member of society is entitled to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of property.” In the Declaration of independence, Thomas Jefferson changed that last bit to the “pursuit of happiness.” Was he exercising poetic license, or did he think property and happiness were interchangeable? Either way, the Declaration guarantees neither wealth nor happiness, only the pursuit thereof. Perhaps one day some child will be watching the whole course of human endeavors on ‘Google EverythingThatEverHappenedInHumanEventsDownToTheMolecule’ and mock our futile search for one or the other, silently bemoaning, “Had they only turned left at Albuquerque…”
Till then, appreciate what’s already at your fingertips:
Thanks to science, ingenuity, and commercial enterprise, the average citizen today has access to information and knowledge that was hopelessly out of reach of the most powerful kings in history. You can see almost any stretch of the globe at the push of a button, and many stretches in space, millions or billions of miles away. You have access to an unprecedented cornucopia of foods and flavors, savoring in one meal what a Caesar could not have enjoyed in a lifetime. You carry on a conversation with someone halfway across the world in two minutes, that would have taken an emperor decades.
Economist Thomas Friedman says “The World is Flat.” That trade has made the world a much smaller place. Average citizens interact with other cultures and countries on a daily basis, thanks to the internet and global communications. John Locke’s selfish pursuit of property may be in the end the greatest tool for global understanding the world has ever known.
When the Twin Towers fell, they took with them the citizens of 90 countries, morbid proof that the world is a small, small place.
EDWARD MORAN’S HENRY HUDSON ENTERING NY HARBOR SEPTEMBER 11, 1609
What is Juneteenth? Juneteenth is a statement of freedom. Juneteenth is the unshackling of a body of people. Juneteenth is the freeing of slaves in the State of Texas. Juneteenth is the renewing of one’s character, integrity, spirit, and ability to achieve one’s greatest opportunities.
Juneteenth is also an amalgamation of the words June and Nineteenth, and it’s celebrated on—you guessed it, June 19th.
Why are there multiple Emancipation Days in the U.S.?
Chronologically speaking…
Washington D.C. celebrates President Lincoln’s signing of the Compensated Emancipation Act on April 16, 1862.
For many years African-American communities in border states such as Ohio, Illinois, Indiana, and Pennsylvania celebrated the anniversary of Lincoln’s Preliminary Emancipation Proclamation on September 22, 1862.
The Emancipation Proclamation itself took effect 100 days later, on January 1, 1863…which is why New Year’s Day was celebrated as Emancipation Day in some regions. (And part of the reason why “Watch Night” services on December 31 have held additional meaning and importance for African-American communities ever since.)
As you can imagine, Confederate states didn’t heed the proclamation or amendments of a country they were rebelling against, so it wasn’t until Union troops forced their way into various states and established control that the proclamation had an effect on most slaves. May 20, for example, is the day that General Edward McCook announced the end of slavery in Tallahassee, Florida.
In O’ Freedom: Afro-American Emancipation Celebrations, William Wiggins, Jr. counts at least 15 separate emancipation celebrations spread throughout the calendar, eight of which stem from official proclamations.
“The geneologies of the remaining seven celebrations are not easily traced…Their celebrants simply say that on some past May 5, 8, 20, 22, 28, 29, or on August 4 or 8, their ancestors were freed.”
As for June 19, that was the day in 1865 that Major General Gordon Granger and his troops finally worked their way to Galveston, Texas, two and a half years after Lincoln’s proclamation. Granger announced::
“The people of Texas are informed that in accordance with a Proclamation from the Executive of the United States, all slaves are free. This involves an absolute equality of rights and rights of property between former masters and slaves, and the connection heretofore existing between them becomes that between employer and free laborer.”
Order 3, read by General Granger, June 19, 1865
Observed in over 35 states, Juneteenth is the most widely-celebrated Emancipation Day in the United States.
“The people of Texas are informed that in accordance with a Proclamation from the Executive of the United States, all slaves are free. This involves an absolute equality of rights and rights of property between former masters and slaves, and the connection heretofore existing between them becomes that between employer and free laborer.”
3rd Sunday in June
June 19, 2011
June 17, 2012
June 16, 2013
100 years ago the congregation of Williams Memorial Methodist Episcopal Church in Fairmont, West Virginia gathered to pay tribute to the 362 men, many of them fathers, killed at the Monongah Mine disaster of 1907. The victims were largely from poor immigrant families, Italian, Greek, Slav, Polish, and Russian. The accident left 250 women widows and over 1000 children without support.
The July 5 gathering was the suggestion of Fairmont resident Grace Golden Clayton. Clayton had been partly inspired by the first “Mother’s Day” celebration in nearby Grafton, West Virginia. But Clayton is not considered the mother of Father’s Day.
That title went to Sonora Smart Dodd, 3000 miles away in Spokane, Washington. As a teenager Sonora lost her mother who died in childbirth, leaving Sonora’s father to raise Sonora and her 5 brothers.
Sonora reflected on the role of fathers in the family during a Mother’s Day sermon in 1909. Thanks to Sonora’s efforts the governor of Washington declared July 19, 1910 the first Father’s Day.
However, unlike Mother’s Day, which went from a single West Virginia observance in 1907 to a national holiday in 1914, Father’s Day had a much harder uphill battle. The idea of Father’s Day was even mocked. In 1914 one New York Times reader wrote:
“Your correspondent of yesterday is quite right in his contention that the establishment of Mother’s Day argues for the appointment of Father’s day as well. It seems to me, however that he does not go far enough. I would suggest the following calendar:
Jan. 19,Brother’s Day
Feb. 3,Sister’s Day
Mar. 10Grandpa’s Day
Apr. 12Grandma’s Day
May 24Mother’s Day
June 13Uncle’s Day
July 21Maiden Aunty’s Day
Aug. 6Cousin’s Day
Sep. 20Father’s Day
Oct. 30Baby’s Day
Nov. 4Household Pet Day
Dec. 31 Slush Day
The Father’s Day movement met with support during the Depression, when businesses hoped to foster a minor Christmas during the summer with a gift-giving holiday devoted to Dad. The support and observance of Father’s Day was augmented during WWII in honor of the fathers in the Armed Forces.
Two early proponents for the establishment of an annual Father’s Day were the National Father’s Day Committee in New York City, founded in 1926, and Harry Meek, of the Chicago Lions Club. Meek spoke around the country in support of the holiday, and suggested the date of June 20, his birthday, to observe it.
There was also a movement to call Mother’s Day “Parents’ Day”. This lost steam in the 1940s when
“The business community essentially had killed it. Mother’s Day followed by Father’s Day was too perfect a setup financially to allow something as gender-nonspecific as Parents’ Day to muck things up.” —“The Modernization of Fatherhood: A Social and Political History”
In 1924 President Calvin Coolidge proclaimed the first national Father’s Day, to “establish more intimate relations between fathers and their children and to impress upon fathers the full measure of their obligations.”
In 1956 a joint resolution of Congress recognized Father’s Day. President Lyndon Johnson signed a President proclamation to the effect a decade later. But it wasn’t until 1972 that President Richard Nixon established a permanent Father’s Day holiday on the third Sunday in June.
+ + +
Incidentally, most of the N.Y. Times’ reader’s holiday suggestions did come to pass, and more, though not all dates are agreed upon:
Grandparents’ Day: 1st Sunday after Labor Day (US); February 8 (International); 1st Sunday in October (UK); January 21 & 22 (Poland)
Sister’s Day: 1st Sunday in August
Brothers and Sisters’ Day: May 2
Siblings Day: April 10
Aunt’s Day: March 8; 1st Sunday in June
Aunts and Uncles’ Day: July 26;
Cousins’ Day: July 24
National Pet Day: April 10
Love Your Pet Day: February 20
Kids and Pets Day: April 26 (Why do kids and pets have to share a day?)
No “Slush Day” yet, but July 11 is “Free Slushie Day” at 7-11!
June 15 is Fly a Kite Day (or Go Fly a Kite Day), ostensibly honoring the anniversary of Benjamin Franklin’s famous electricity experiment in 1752.
However, Franklin never specified the date of the experiment. Written records reveal that he only narrowed down the timeframe to a month (June 1752) a full fourteen years after the fact. Strange circumstances like these have led some historians to cast doubts as to the veracity of the entire experiment.
In Bolt of Fate: Benjamin Franklin and His Electric Kite Hoax, Tom Tucker points out that the main evidence we have of the experiment, besides Franklin’s recollection 14 years later, is a single article he wrote about it for the Pennsylvania Gazette in October 1752 (and later published in Philosophical Transactions). The article leaves out several pertinent details, such as dates, witnesses, and oh yes, whether or not Franklin performed the experiment at all.
The article is written as sort of a “how-to” description. It contains details of how to construct a kite out of silk instead of paper, attach the key, and so on. But it never actually goes so far as to say the author actually carried out this task to its full extent. But the article does encourage the reader to go out and try an experiment that is more than likely to kill him. Whether Franklin realized this and this was just part of his conniving sense of humor is unknown.
Tucker argues that Franklin later chose June as the month of the experiment had occurred because French scientists had been conducting similar experiments on electricity across the Atlantic in May of 1752. It would have taken 6 weeks for such news to reach Franklin. Thus, in June his experiment would have still been an inspiration from God, as Franklin’s biographers insisted. Whereas in July it would have just been a copy.
Not all historians agree with Tucker’s hypothesis. Franklin is generally credited with proving that lightning is a form of electricity through a kite experiment so simple that it swept the rug out from more advanced scientists on the other side of the Atlantic.
“We meet to celebrate Flag Day because this flag which we honor and under which we serve is the emblem of our unity, our power, our thought and purpose as a nation…
We celebrate the day of its birth; and from its birth until now it has witnessed a great history, has floated on high the symbol of great events, of a great plan of life worked out by a great people.
“We are about to carry it into battle, to lift it where it will draw the fire of our enemies. We are about to bid thousands, hundreds of thousands, it may be millions, of our men, the young, the strong, the capable men of the nation, to go forth and die beneath it on the fields of blood far away,—
Flag Day was less than a year old when the U.S. entered World War I.
President Woodrow Wilson had proclaimed June 14th as Flag Day in 1916. The choice of June 14th is largely attributed to a school teacher from Waubeka, Wisconsin back in the 1880’s. Bernard Cigrand proposed the anniversary of the Second Continental Congress’s adoption of the first U.S. flag on June 14, 1777. He wrote articles about the should-be holiday and promoted it locally and nationally through articles and events.
The first National Flag Day was June 14, 1916. The backdrop of the celebrations was the war in Europe in which millions of young men were being cut down by machine gun fire and other wonders of modern warfare technology or (far more) by disease. Americans fiercely debated whether the U.S. should become involved in the European conflict. In April 1917, President Wilson—who had run on a policy of isolationism–asked Congress for a declaration of war against Germany and its allies.
It would be a while before troops were ready to be sent to Europe, but America wanted to send a symbol of its presence immediately.
Arthur Clifford Kimber, a 21 year-old Stanford University student and Ambulance Corps volunteer, was selected to carry the flag of the Stanford Unit of the American Ambulance Field Service across the country and then across the Atlantic to France. It was a largely symbolic gesture—the first officially sanctioned U.S. flag sent to the front after U.S. entry in the war.
Before Kimber even left the States, he showed his tenacity by defending the chosen flag from a mob of U.C. (University of California) students in New York. As Stanford’s rivals, the Cal students wrestled the flag from him before a parade down Fifth Avenue. The Cal students took off in a taxi, which Kimber chased by jumping onto the running-board of passing car. He caught up with the taxi at 73rd St, retrieved the flag with the aid of a cop, and made it back in time for the start of the parade…