Today is the 302nd anniversary of the birth of Ben Franklin (1706-1790).
At one time, this was the only day of the year on which a tornado had not been recorded in the U.S. Does anyone know: Is that still so?
Happy birthday, Ben. And, happy Ben’s birthday, America. We were lucky to have him.
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Ben Franklin, Heroes, History | Tagged: Ben Franklin, Heroes, History | 
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Posted by Ed Darrell
Education majors know he had something to do with creating modern public education. Ed.D.s probably know more about Horace Mann‘s actual life, actions and philosophy. Local school boards know enough to name a school after him from time to time.
But has anyone actually kept count? How many schools in the U.S. — or anywhere else — are named after Horace Mann? Is there a registry somewhere? We know of a few:
Antioch College continues to operate in accordance with the egalitarian and humanitarian values of Horace Mann. A monument including his statue stands in lands belonging to the college in Yellow Springs, Ohio with his quote and college motto “Be Ashamed to Die Until You Have Won Some Victory for Humanity.”
There are a number of schools in the U.S. named for Mann, including ones in Arkansas, Washington, D.C., Boston, Charleston, West Virginia, Marstons Mills, Massachusetts, Salem, Massachusetts, Redmond, Washington, Fargo, North Dakota, St. Louis, Missouri, Chicago, North Bergen, New Jersey and the Horace Mann School in Riverdale, New York. The University of Northern Colorado named the gates to their campus in his dedication, a gift of the Class of 1910.[9]
If you know of a Horace Mann school, would you comment? Tell us about it, where it is, and how long it’s been there.
And if you know of a list of the schools, let us know.
16 Comments | Education, Heroes, History | Tagged: Education, Heroes, History, U.S. history | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell
Ten feet in altitude, 120 feet traveled, 12 seconds long. That was the first flight in a heavier-than-air machine achieved by Orville and Wilbur Wright of Dayton, Ohio, at Kittyhawk, North Carolina, on December 17, 1903.
On the morning of December 17, 1903, Wilbur and Orville Wright took turns piloting and monitoring their flying machine in Kill Devil Hills, North Carolina. Orville piloted the first flight that lasted just twelve seconds. On the fourth and final flight of the day, Wilbur traveled 852 feet, remaining airborne for 57 seconds. That morning the brothers became the first people to demonstrate sustained flight of a heavier-than-air machine under the complete control of the pilot.
No lost luggage, no coffee, no tea, no meal in a basket, either.
Resources on the Wright Brothers’ first flight:
1 Comment | Heroes, History, History images, Technology | Tagged: Airplanes, flight, History, Technology | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell
Our friends and benefactors at the Bill of Rights Institute put up a great branch of their site, Founders Online. A grant from the Shelby Cullom Davis Foundation made the project possible.
Check it out:
John Adams | Samuel Adams | Alexander Hamilton | Patrick Henry
Thomas Jefferson | James Madison | GeorgeMason | Gouverneur Morris
James Otis | Thomas Paine | George Washington | John Witherspoon
This page should be a first stop for your students doing biographies on any of these people, and it should be a test review feature for your classes that they can do on the internet at home, or in class if you’re lucky enough to have access in your classroom.
Good on-line sources are still too rare. This is stuff you can trust to be accurate and appropriate for your students. Send a note of thanks to the Bill of Rights Institute, and send your students to the site.
Leave a Comment » | 1787, 1789, Accuracy, Ben Franklin, Civil Rights, Classroom technology, Declaration of Independence, Education, Famous quotes, Freedom - Economic, Freedom - Political, George Washington, Heroes, Historic documents, History, James Madison, John Adams, On-line education, On-line learning, Student projects, Technology in the classroom, Thomas Jefferson, U.S. Constitution | Tagged: Bill of Rights, Constitution, Education, founders, History, Lesson plans, Politics | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell
Students and faculty at Devry University in Irving, Texas, and a few hundred others who knew him, lost a great friend when Michael Field died the day after Thanksgiving.
His memorial service last Saturday at Arlington’s Unity Church was filled with warmth and laughter as a dozen people remembered Michael’s verve and the joy with which he pursued knowledge, beneficial change, and good social interaction.
In my experience, psychologists come in three varieties: Crazy, eccentric, and real solid people. Michael was a pillar for a lot of people, able to be so solid because he enjoyed the crazy and eccentric, but was not controlled by it. I think the man never met a book or problem he didn’t relish in some way. No fewer than five people testified that Michael was, as a member of some group they nominally led, the guy who sparked great action. That was my experience, too.
It’s been nearly a decade since he left the board of a charitable institution we both served. I was lamenting that we had no one else like him when I learned of his death. Literally dozens of students at Devry told me how Dr. Field pushed them to be better and happier, when I taught there as an adjunct.
Listening at his service Saturday I was inspired again to climb back into the fray. The band of brothers is reduced — several bands, actually — but there is so much to do.
What have you done today to make the entire world better? Michael’s gone. We all have to work harder.
Smile while you do it, and enjoy the work.
Brief obituary below the fold. Read the rest of this entry »
1 Comment | Education, Heroes, Leadership, Personal | Tagged: Education, Heroes, Leadership | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell
From the East Valley Tribune, November 9, 2007:
“HEROES SALUTE: World War II veteran Silvestre S. Herrera, left, is applauded Thursday by Dr. Connie Mariano, veteran and former White House physician. Mariano gave a speech honoring veterans at a ceremony in Scottsdale.”
Photo by Bettina Hansen, For the Tribune
For Veterans Day this year, they gathered in Scottsdale, Arizona — mostly local veterans. Among them was World War II vet Silvestre Herrera, who fought in France.
One by one, veterans took their turn shaking hands and exchanging nods of respect with war hero Silvestre S. Herrera, 91, as he stood proudly wearing his Medal of Honor around his neck.
About 40 people gathered in 90-degree heat in north Scottsdale admiring a presentation of colors and listening in reverence to a high school band play in honor of the upcoming Veterans Day.
“It was very touching,” said Jackie Wolf, executive sales director for Classic Residence at Silverstone, where the event took place Thursday on a breezy patio.
It was fitting, somber and joyful all at once. A lot of veterans, paying honor to all veterans. [More below the fold]
Leave a Comment » | Heroes, History, veterans, World War II | Tagged: Heroes, History, Medal of Honor, World War II | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell
Rosa Parks: “Why do you push us around?”
Officer: “I don’t know but the law is the law and you’re under arrest.”
From Rosa Parks with Gregory J. Reed, Quiet Strength
(Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan Pub. House, 1994), page 23.Photo: Mrs. Parks being fingerprinted in Montgomery, Alabama; photo from New York World-Telegram & Sun Collection, Library of Congress
Today in History at the Library of Congress states the simple facts:
On the evening of December 1, 1955, Rosa Parks, an African American, was arrested for disobeying an Alabama law requiring black passengers to relinquish seats to white passengers when the bus was full. Blacks were also required to sit at the back of the bus. Her arrest sparked a 381-day boycott of the Montgomery bus system and led to a 1956 Supreme Court decision banning segregation on public transportation.
Rosa Parks made a nearly perfect subject for a protest on racism. College-educated, trained in peaceful protest at the famous Highlander Folk School, Parks was known as a peaceful and respected person. The sight of such a proper woman being arrested and jailed would provide a schocking image to most Americans. Americans jolted awake.
Often lost in the retelling of the story are the threads that tie together the events of the civil rights movement through the 1940s, 1950s and 1960s. As noted, Parks was a trained civil rights activist. Such training in peaceful and nonviolent protest provided a moral power to the movement probably unattainable any other way. Parks’ arrest was not planned, however. Parks wrote that as she sat on the bus, she was thinking of the tragedy of Emmet Till, the young African American man from Chicago, brutally murdered in Mississippi early in 1955. She was thinking that someone had to take a stand for civil rights, at about the time the bus driver told her to move to allow a white man to take her seat. To take a stand, she remained seated. [More below the fold] Read the rest of this entry »
10 Comments | Civil Rights, Dissent, Famous quotes, Heroes, History, Human Rights, Politics, Quotes | Tagged: Civil Rights, Famous quotes, History, Human Rights, Politics, Quotes, Rosa Parks | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell
November 30 is the birthday of Mark Twain (1835), and Winston Churchill (1874).
Twain had a comment on recent actions at the Texas Education Agency:
– Following the Equator; Pudd’nhead Wilson’s New Calendar
The Nobel literature committees were slow; Twain did not win a Nobel in Literature; he died in 1910. Churchill did win, in 1953.
Both men were aficianadoes of good whiskey and good cigars. Both men suffered from depression in old age.
Both men made a living writing, early in their careers as newspaper correspondents. One waged wars of a kind the other campaigned against. Both were sustained by their hope for the human race, against overwhelming evidence that such hope was sadly misplaced.
Both endured fantastic failures that would have killed other people, and both rebounded.
Both men are worth study.
Twain, on prisons versus education: “Every time you stop a school, you will have to build a jail. What you gain at one end you lose at the other. It’s like feeding a dog on his own tail. It won’t fatten the dog.” – Speech, November 23, 1900
Churchill on the evil men and nations do:
“No One Would Do Such Things”
“So now the Admiralty wireless whispers through the ether to the tall masts of ships, and captains pace their decks absorbed in thought. It is nothing. It is less than nothing. It is too foolish, too fantastic to be thought of in the twentieth century. Or is it fire and murder leaping out of the darkness at our throats, torpedoes ripping the bellies of half-awakened ships, a sunrise on a vanished naval supremacy, and an island well-guarded hitherto, at last defenceless? No, it is nothing. No one would do such things. Civilization has climbed above such perils. The interdependence of nations in trade and traffic, the sense of public law, the Hague Convention, Liberal principles, the Labour Party, high finance, Christian charity, common sense have rendered such nightmares impossible. Are you quite sure? It would be a pity to be wrong. Such a mistake could only be made once—once for all.”
—1923, recalling the possibility of war between France and Germany after the Agadir Crisis of 1911, in The World Crisis,vol. 1, 1911-1914, pp. 48-49.
Image of Twain aboard ship – origin unknown. Image of Winston S. Churchill, Time Magazine’s Man of the Year for 1941, copyright 1941 by Time Magazine.
More on Mark Twain
More on Winston Churchill
Orson Welles, with Dick Cavett, on Churchill, his wit, humor and grace (tip of the old scrub brush to the Churchill Centre):
3 Comments | Books, Famous quotes, Heroes, History, Human Rights, Humor, Quotes, Winston Churchill, World War I, World War II | Tagged: Books, Churchill, Humor, inspiration, Literature, Twain | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell
You can just see the kid trying to get the goat of the physics teacher:“Hey, Teach! What do you think 5Gs feel like when one of those fighter pilots pulls a real tight turn?”
And you can see the teacher at the chalkboard scribbling a formula the kid doesn’t want to know, and a smile creeping over his face.
“It’s nothing like hitting the shark-infested Pacific — salt water, and you’re wounded — and then being traded for a ten-pound sack of rice! That’ll get your gut more.”
And don’t you wonder, did the kids ever think to ask him his view of the campaign against the Japanese in the Solomon Islands, for help on their U.S. history exams? Did they ever think he might have some knowledge to share?
Jefferson DeBlanc would have shared wisdom certainly, though it’s uncertain he would have shared his war experiences as a fighter pilot. He died last Thursday in St. Martinville, Louisiana. He was 86. DeBlanc was the last surviving Medal of Honor winner from World War II in Louisiana. Col. Jefferson DeBlanc, Sr.
The incident that earned Jefferson the nation’s highest military honor took place Jan. 31, 1943, during operations against Japanese forces off Kolombangara Island in the Solomon Islands.
A Japanese fleet was spotted headed toward Guadalcanal. U.S. dive bombers were sent to attack the fleet, with fighter aircraft deployed to protect the bombers. In a one-man Grumman Wildcat fighter, DeBlanc led a section of six planes in Marine Fighting Squadron 112, according to the citation that accompanied his Medal of Honor.
At the rendezvous point, DeBlanc discovered that his plane, which was dubbed “The Impatient Virgin,” was running out of fuel. If DeBlanc battled the Japanese Zero fighter planes, he would not have enough fuel to return to base. Two of his comrades, whose planes malfunctioned, turned back, according to a 1999 article in the New Orleans Times-Picayune.
“We needed all the guns we could get up there to escort those bombers,” DeBlanc said in the Times-Picayune article. “I figured if I run out of gas, I run out of gas. I figured I could survive a bailout. I had confidence in my will to survive. You’ve got to live with your conscience. And my conscience told me to go ahead.”
DeBlanc and the other pilots waged fierce combat until, “picking up a call for assistance from the dive bombers, under attack by enemy float planes at 1,000 feet, he broke off his engagement with the Zeros, plunged into the formation of float planes and disrupted the savage attack, enabling our dive bombers and torpedo planes to complete their runs on the Japanese surface disposition and withdraw without further incident,” the citation says.
Ultimately, DeBlanc shot down two float planes and three of the fighters. But a bullet ripped through DeBlanc’s plane and hit his instrument panel, causing it to erupt into flames. DeBlanc “was forced to bail out at a perilously low altitude,” according to the citation.
“The guy who shot me down, he saw me bail out,” DeBlanc said in a 2001 article in the State-Times/Morning Advocate of Baton Rouge, La.. “He knew I was alive. I knew they (the Japanese) were looking for me. But I’m not a pessimist. I knew I could survive. I was raised in the swamps.”
A Louisiana kid raised in the swamps, a Tuba City, Arizona, kid raised in a hogan on a reservation, a kid from Fredericksburg, Texas, a kid from Abilene, Kansas, another kid from Columbus, Ohio, a West Point graduate with a corn-cob pipe — the reality of the people who fought the war looks like a hammy line-up for one of the post-war movies about them. Maybe, in this case, there was good reason for the stereotypes.
After his plane was shot down in 1943, DeBlanc swam to an island and slept in a hut until he was discovered by islanders and placed in a bamboo cage. The man who gave a sack of rice for him was Ati, an islander whom DeBlanc later called a guardian angel, responsible for orchestrating his rescue by a U.S. Navy boat.
DeBlanc served a second tour of overseas service in Marine Fighting Squadron 22 in the Marshall Islands. By the end of his service, he had shot down nine enemy planes.
On Dec. 6, 1946, President Truman awarded DeBlanc the Medal of Honor. His other honors include the Distinguished Flying Cross, several awards of the Bronze Star and the Purple Heart. In 1972, after serving six years as commander at Belle Chasse Naval Air Station, DeBlanc retired from the Marine Corps Reserve.
Then, as if to make the model for Tom Brokaw’s later book, DeBlanc went back home to mostly-rural Louisiana, and made the world a much better place.
At home, DeBlanc earned two masters’ degrees in education from Louisiana State University in 1951 and 1963, and a doctorate in education from McNeese State University in 1973. For years, he taught in St. Martin parish and supervised teachers.
Just a normal guy to his kids, neighbors and students:
Despite the illustrious awards, [daughter] Romero [DeBlanc] remembers a loving father first and dedicated educator second.
“I was very close to my father,” she said. “I could always talk to him. He taught me to drive. He taught school. He was very friendly with his students. He would come into the classroom and say, ‘I lost the test.’ Then he would look around and find it in the trash can. Of course he placed it in the trash can. He had a great sense of humor.”
Surely DeBlanc’s passing should have been worthy of note on national television news programs, and in the larger national print media. There was a note on the obituary page of the Dallas Morning News, and the Los Angeles Times obituary cited above. But DeBlanc has not yet gotten the recognition he probably deserved. A young cornerback for the Washington Redskins also died over the weekend.
No room for heroes in the news?
Resources for Teachers:
5 Comments | Education, Heroes, History, World War II | Tagged: Education, Heroes, Medal of Honor, Solomon Islands, Teachers, World War II | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell
As her physician I would have told her to stay down. As her parent, I don’t know what I would have done. As a bystander, after the fact, I can only admire the courage of this high school cross-country runner (from Fox News in Cleveland):
Claire [Markwardt] made it within forty feet of the finish line when her leg broke. She tried to get up, but it broke again.
“I knew I really couldn’t stay there and I didn’t wanna let my team down and I had gone that far, so there wasn’t really a point in laying there.” she said.
Amazingly, with a leg broken in several places, Claire crawled the rest of the way across the finish line. “It was my last race of my senior year and I didn’t know how my team was doing in the race, but I wanted us to be as high as we could.” she said.
Good write up about it at Education and Technology alerted me to the story. Surprisingly to me, Ray Ebersole writes:
When I was in my 20’s I was reading the print copy of SI, it was the only copy back then, when I read about a female high school track runner who broke her leg 100 yards from the finish of her race. She was the anchor for the 4×400 relay in a state meet and was leading by a lot when she broke her leg. Not wanting to let her teammates down she crawled to the finish line.
That high school girl inspired me to do a lot of things. She showed me what loyalty, courage and guts were all about. I never thought I would see anything like it again in my lifetime, but I see it everyday in the news.
Go see the examples he offers.
And be openly grateful we have such people among us.
1 Comment | Education, Ethics, Heroes | Tagged: courage, finishing the race, Heroes, people | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell
Worldwide fans of Robin Hood should be concerned: Sherwood Forest is not even a ghost of what it once was.
The Associated Press carried a story detailing efforts to preserve and revive the forest made famous by the stories of Robin Hood. 900-year-old oaks, encroaching development, a sense of history, and a need to save green space — it’s a good story for warm-up on conservation, development, historical myths, or England’s geography.
Leave a Comment » | Economics, Environmental protection, Geography - Economic, Geography - Physical, Heroes, History, World history | Tagged: Environmental protection, geography, Robin Hood, Science, Sherwood Forest | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell
144 years ago today, Abraham Lincoln redefined the Declaration of Independence and the goals of the American Civil War, in a less-than-two-minute speech dedicating part of the battlefield at Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, as a cemetery and final resting place for soldiers who died in the fierce battle fought there the previous July 1 through 3.
Interesting news for 2007: More photos from the Library of Congress collection may contain images of Lincoln. The photo above, detail from a much larger photo, had been thought for years to be the only image of Lincoln from that day. The lore is that photographers, taking a break from former Massachusetts Sen. Edward Everett’ s more than two-hour oration, had expected Lincoln to go on for at least an hour. His short speech caught them totally off-guard, focusing their cameras or taking a break. Lincoln finished before any photographer got a lens open to capture images.
Images of people in these photos are very small, and difficult to identify. Lincoln was not identified at all until 1952:
The plate lay unidentified in the Archives for some fifty-five years until in 1952, Josephine Cobb, Chief of the Still Pictures Branch, recognized Lincoln in the center of the detail, head bared and probably seated. To the immediate left (Lincoln’s right) is Lincoln’s bodyguard, Ward Hill Lamon, and to the far right (beyond the limits of the detail) is Governor Andrew G. Curtin of Pennsylvania. Cobb estimated that the photograph was taken about noontime, just after Lincoln arrived at the site and before Edward Everett’s arrival, and some three hours before Lincoln gave his now famous address.
On-line, the Abraham Lincoln Blog covered the discovery that two more photographic plates from the 1863 speech at Gettysburg may contain images of Lincoln in his trademark stove-pipe hat. Wander over to the story at the USA Today site, and you can see just how tiny are these detail images in relation to the photographs themselves. These images are tiny parts of photos of the crowd at Gettysburg. (The story ran in USA Today last Thursday or Friday — you may be able to find a copy of that paper buried in the returns pile at your local Kwikee Mart.) Digital technologies, and these suspected finds of Lincoln, should prompt a review of every image from Gettysburg that day.
To the complaints of students, I have required my junior U.S. history students to memorize the Gettysburg Address. In Irving I found a couple of students who had memorized it for a an elementary teacher years earlier, and who still could recite it. Others protested, until they learned the speech. This little act of memorization appears to me to instill confidence in the students that they can master history, once they get it done.
To that end, I discovered a good, ten-minute piece on the address in Ken Burns’ “Civil War” (in Episode 5). On DVD, it’s a good piece for classroom use, short enough for a bell ringer or warm-up, detailed enough for a deeper study, and well done, including the full text of the address itself performed by Sam Waterson.
Edward Everett, the former Massachusetts senator and secretary of state, was regarded as the greatest orator of the time. A man of infinite grace, and a historian with some sense of events and what the nation was going through, Everett wrote to Lincoln the next day after their speeches:
“I should be glad, if I could flatter myself that I came as near the central idea of the occasion in two hours, as you did in two minutes.”
Interesting note: P. Z. Myers at Pharyngula notes that the Gettysburg Address was delivered “seven score and four years ago.” Of course, that will never happen again. I’ll wager he was the first to notice that odd juxtaposition on the opening line.
Resources for students and teachers:
3 Comments | 1861-1865, Abraham Lincoln, Civil War, Famous Battles, Heroes, History, History blogs, History images, War | Tagged: Abraham Lincoln, Gettysburg Address, historic photographs, History, Library of Congress | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell
Fly your U.S. flag today, to honor veterans of military service. November 11 was originally celebrated as Armistice Day after World War I’s armistice.
5 Comments | Flag etiquette, Fly your flag today, Heroes, History, War, World War I | Tagged: Flag etiquette, Fly your flag, Veterans Day | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell
Mario Capecchi’s story of his mother’s arrest by the Gestapo, and his life on the streets of Italy as a young boy, only piqued interest in the story of his winning a Nobel Prize in Medicine or Physiology, earlier this year.
It is such a great story, people set out to write it down in detail. Some of the details discovered, however, don’t quite square with historical records.
A group of reporters with the Associated Press uncovered the discrepancies. Realizing that the story comes from the memory of a very young child, so far the headlines and the stories have been corrective, but gently and adoringly so.
The story Capecchi has told repeatedly over the years in speeches and interviews begins when he is 3 and the Gestapo, Adolf Hitler’s secret police, snatch his mother before his very eyes and dispatch her to Dachau concentration camp. The peasant family that takes him in abandons him and he spends four years wandering about northern Italy – a street urchin, alone and begging for food.
At war’s end – on the boy’s ninth birthday – mother and son are reunited in the hospital ward where he is being treated for malnutrition and typhoid. They set sail for America where he flourishes, embarks on a brilliant research career – and goes on to win the Nobel Prize for medicine.
But The Associated Press, which set out to chronicle his extraordinary story in greater detail, has uncovered several inconsistencies and unanswered questions, chief among them whether his mother was in Dachau, and whether he really was for a long time a homeless street child.
You can read the full story at The Salt Lake Tribune.
This is a classic case. Memory differs from the facts. Human minds fill in details that would otherwise leave a mystery, and the details filled in differ from the details that can be corroborated.
This is part of what keeps history lively.
We see here also a demonstration that there is much we can never really know for sure. Historians work from imperfect records in the best of circumstances.
The director of the Dachau Memorial, Barbara Distel, said women weren’t imprisoned at Dachau until September 1943 – more than two years after Capecchi says his mother was arrested. She also said only Jewish women from eastern Europe were held in Dachau’s satellite camps.
”I do remember – I remember the Gestapo coming to the Wolfsgruben chalet,” Capecchi told AP in the interview, conducted days after his Nobel Prize was announced. ”It’s sort of like a photograph. I can tell you how many people were in the room, which ones were in uniform and which ones weren’t. Just boom. It’s there.”
Pressed to explain how he could be certain he was just 3 1/2 at the time and remember it so clearly, he stood by his account.
The big question we want answered here is this: How can we get more great people like Mario Capecchi? Can we get a few Nobelists out of the current generation of children?
No one proposes revisiting war to make kids great, so the fascination with Capecchi’s childhood is more academic, if still for inspiration.
In the end, we have a mystery. How did Capecchi get to be such a great man? There remains that great chapter near the end of the book; early chapters are missing.
Perhaps AP could put a team of reporters on a story to explain exactly how Capecchi’ s research explains what it does, and what it means down the road. That’s a story that needs to be told, too.
2 Comments | Accuracy, Capturing history, Heroes, Historic documents, History, Research, Science, World War II | Tagged: Biography, History, Mario Capecchi, Nobel Prize in Medicine, Science | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell
Chris Rodda has a bee in her bonnet about wacky claims about early U.S. government and Christianity — same bee I get on occasion (hence the famous phrase, “busy bee”).
At Talk to Action, Chris dissects one of the more odd and arcane claims of people like the late D. James Kennedy, that Thomas Jefferson tried to import a group of Calvinist seminarians to make the University of Virginia a religious institution. Kennedy’s claim is voodoo history at its most voodoo.
There are two things wrong with Kennedy’s claim. The first is the time frame. Jefferson did consider a proposal to move the Geneva Academy to the United States, but this was in 1794 and 1795, thirty years before the University of Virginia opened. The second is that, although the Geneva Academy was originally founded by John Calvin in 1559 as theological seminary, by the late 1700s it had been transformed into an academy of science. The plan considered by Jefferson was not to import a religious school. It was to import a group of Europe’s top science professors.
This one is so obscure I have heard it only a couple of times. I’m not sure if that’s because it is so far outside the world of reality that even most victims of these hoaxes recognize it, or if it just hasn’t gotten traction yet.
Jefferson’s relationship with religious instruction in higher education really never varied. When he was a member of the governing board of the College of William and Mary, the board of visitors, he successfully campaigned to rid the college of preachers in teaching positions, and with the money saved, he got lawyers hired to instruct in other topics instead. In his design for the University of Virginia, he most carefully left out religious instruction from the curriculum, and from the space of the university. Since he shared this view of religion in education with James Madison, Madison followed through on keeping the University of Virginia as an institution of learning and not religious indoctrination.
So, how could someone with the research chops claimed by the late Rev. Kennedy get this stuff so exactly wrong? He relied on an old hoaxer, Mark A. Beliles. Why could a scholar like Kennedy could be sucked in by such a clear and blatant hoax? Bogus history seemed to attract him like seagulls to and overturned hot dog cart.
Read it, and gain enlightenment on the facts, if not on the motivations of Rev. Kennedy.
Tip of the old scrub brush to Ed Brayton at Dispatches from the Culture Wars.
Leave a Comment » | Accuracy, America's founding, Bogus history, First Amendment, Heroes, Historic documents, History, Religious Freedom, Voodoo history | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell
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Ed Darrell on Texas's Colorado River
Come on in, the water's fine. Come often: Cleanliness is next to godliness.
Millard Fillmore's Bathtub 