George Armstrong Custer: Hero or Half Wit?

History while it purports to tell the truth is, in fact, just an interpretive story of chronological events, a made up story that we have agreed to accept. This is why history so often changes. When General George Armstrong Custer was killed by the Sioux in 1876 he was heralded by newspapers as a “Christian knight martyred in the cause of civilization”. Today, many believe that Custer would be facing a war crimes trial for genocide. As would his commanding officer, General Philip, ‘The only good Indian is a dead Indian’ Sheridan. History is a kaleidoscope, the view changes with the values of each succeeding generation.

Hero?

or Half Wit?

Custer’s Last Stand: Portraits in Time

Since his death along the bluffs overlooking the Little Bighorn River, in Montana, on June 25, 1876, over five hundred books have been written about the life and career of George Armstrong Custer. Views of Custer have changed over succeeding generations. Custer has been portrayed as a callous egotist, a bungling egomaniac, a genocidal war criminal, and the puppet of faceless forces. For almost one hundred and fifty years, Custer has been a Rorschach test of American social and personal values. Whatever else George Armstrong Custer may or may not have been, even in the twenty-first century, he remains the great lightning rod of American history. This book presents portraits of Custer and the Battle of the Little Bighorn as they have appeared in print over successive decades and in the process demonstrates the evolution of American values and priorities.

The Great Depression and the Great Recession

Unemployment During the Great Depression

Average rate of unemployment
in 1929: 3.2%
in 1930: 8.9%
in 1931: 16.3%
in 1932: 24.1%
in 1933: 24.9%
in 1934: 21.7%
in 1935: 20.1%
in 1936: 16.9%
in 1937: 14.3%
in 1938: 19.0%
in 1939: 17.2%

The highest national unemployment rate since the Great Depression was recorded in 1982 at 9.7%. The current national unemployment rate is 9.5 % and is projected to rise to 9.9% by the end of 2010.

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"Wall Street: Share the Wealth"

"It is impossible for the United States to preserve itself as a republic or as a democracy when 600 families own more of this nation's wealth--in fact, twice as much--as all the balance of the people put together....Here is the whole sum and substance of the share-our-wealth movement:

Every family to be furnished by the government a homestead allowance, free of debt, of not less than one-third the average family wealth of the country....No person to have a fortune of more than l00 to 300 times the average family fortune....

The yearly income of every family shall be not less than one-third of the average family income....No yearly income shall be allowed to any person larger than from l00 to 300 times the size of the average family income....

Education and training for all children to be equal in opportunity in all schools, colleges, universities, and other institutions for training in the professions and vocations of life; to be regulated on the capacity of children to learn, and not on the ability of parents to pay the costs.”

Huey P. Long



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The Chinese Exclusion Act and American Labor

By 1870, the Chinese were the largest ethnic component of the foreign-born workforce in California, constituted some nine percent of the state’s total population, and made up fourteen percent of the total work force. The Chinese were viewed as workers who would work for meager wages and would accept any conditions of work no matter how minimal or oppressive they might be.

Most Chinese immigrants were men who had borrowed money to come to the United States and who were barred from becoming naturalized U.S. citizens. They sent money back to China regularly to repay their debts and to support their families.

Chinese immigration did have a negative economic impact on American workers. By 1870, the Chinese were a highly visible segment of the San Francisco labor force (13.2 percent). The immediate consequence of this labor influx was a reduction of wages and the extension of the working day. Of all trades in San Francisco, cigar manufacturing was the most affected by Chinese labor. Ninety one percent of all cigar makers in San Francisco were Chinese. Cigar makers in California, because of cheap Chinese labor, averaged wages ten per cent lower than in twenty other states. Wages for Chinese workers averaged half those of white workers in the shoe and clothing industries. White workers blamed the Chinese for falling wages.

Chinese immigration became a national issue culminating in the passage of the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 which forbade any additional Chinese immigrants for ten years. The law was regularly extended each decade until it was repealed in 1943 when China was given a small annual quota of 105 immigrants which continued in effect until 1965.



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Greed and Slavery in Virginia

The development of slavery in Virginia set the pattern for the development of slavery throughout the South and laid the foundations for the development of race relations in America.

The population of England rose from three million in 1500 to four-and-one half million in 1650 without any corresponding growth in the capacity of the island’s economy to support the people. Colonization efforts were, among other things, an effort to alleviate demographic pressures in England.

At first, Virginia absorbed the new immigrants and appeared to be successfully creating a New World community on the English model. An emerging planter class, speculating in land, however, constrained access to good land in Virginia by the many.

The high price of free labor was incompatible with the profitable running of large plantations. The great landowners turned to slave labor, encouraging the first massive introduction of slaves from Africa. There was no precedence in England for enslaving a class of people for life and making that status inevitable, but non-Christian Africans were not thought to be naturally guaranteed the “rights of Englishmen”. A slave labor force without rights could be more easily controlled by brute force than a free labor force which was raised to believe it had “rights”

In pre-Civil War America two competing models for economic development emerged: (1) the plantation economy in which a few wealthy men and a mass of slaves produced raw materials for Europe, and (2) the independent producer mode with many small, independent farmers and artisans, all of whom were generally self-sufficient.


Link to: Why the South Fought the Civil War


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The Spoils of War: The Daiquiri - Cocktail History

In 1909 the USS Minnesota called at Guantanamo, Cuba. The skipper took the ship’s junior medical officer, Lt. Johnson, on a tour of Spanish American War battlefields. At the town of Daiquiri they met Jennings Cox, an American engineer, who treated them to a drink he had developed to temper the local rum. Cox called the drink a “daiquiri” in honor of the town.

On his return to the United States, Johnson immediately introduced the drink at the Army and Navy Club in Washington D.C. It was an immediate hit with officers who had served in the Spanish American War. When Johnson retired as a rear admiral he presented the Club with what is now one of its prized possessions, an account of how Jennings Cox made the drink: “He mixed in each glass a jigger of rum, the juice of half a lime, and a teaspoonful of sugar. He then filled the glass with a finely shaved ice and stirred it well. In that hot, humid weather the ice melted rapidly and the glass quickly became frosted.”
Link to: What Sherlock Holmes Drank


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The Martini is Born

The Martini is said to have originated in San Francisco just after the gold rush. It was invented by bartender Professor Jerry Thomas at the bar of the old Occidental Hotel in San Francisco. Thomas made the drink for a gold miner who was on his way to the town of Martinez, some forty miles to the east.

The citizens of Martinez deny this account. They say that around 1870 a miner from San Francisco stopped at a local saloon tended by one Julio Richelieu. The miner plunked a small sack of gold nuggets before the bartender, asked for a bottle of liquor, and as a bonus received an unusual drink in a small glass with an olive dropped into it. “What is it’, asked the miner. “That”, replied Richelieu, “is a Martinez cocktail”
Link to: What Sherlock Holmes Drank


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Historic Earthquakes: Washington D.C.

On March 9, 1828, an earthquake, centered in southwestern Virginia, attracted the attention of President John Quincy Adams as it rattled windows in Washington. President Adams reported the tremor felt like the heaving of a ship at sea. In March 1918, an earthquake emanating from the Shenandoah Valley broke windows in Washington and rippled over Northern Virginia. The tremor caused a terrifying noise and was commented upon by President Wilson at the White House. A White House staffer called a newspaper office to learn the cause of the terrifying noise.

Since 1977, Virginia has experienced some two hundred earthquakes, most of them small.Virginia is considered to be at moderate risk, with a ten to twenty percent chance of experiencing a 4.75 Richter scale quake. Quakes over 4.5 on the Richter scale topple buildings. Virginias’ most severe earthquake (5.8 on the Richter scale) occurred on May 31, 1897 in Pearisburg, the county seat of Giles County, in southwest Virginia. Closer to home, small earthquakes have startled local citizens. On September 29, 1997 a 2.5 Richter scale earthquake struck Manassas. One local resident reported he was "shaken, not stirred" after hearing what sounded like an unusually large sonic boom. On May 6, 2008 a so called “micro-earthquake” (magnitude 1.8) struck Annandale. Approximately one thousand micro-earthquakes occur everyday throughout the world and are only noticed if they hit high population density areas where they are most often noticed by people living in high rise buildings.



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Environmental Disasters: The Dust Bowl

The recent BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico is not the first time that America has faced an environmental catastrophe of historic proportions. In the 1930s, Washington had to pay close attention to the disaster, however, because it arrived, literally, on Washington’s doorstep.

The most peculiar natural phenomena ever to hit Washington D.C. was a gigantic dust storm blowing in from the Great Plains. Years of environmental mismanagement on the Great Plains set the stage for a natural calamity. In 1931, a drought hit the Great Plains. Crops died and because the ground cover keeping the soil in place was gone, the naturally windy area began whipping up dust. Dust storms became problematic and continued to grow in intensity. In 1934 an enormous storm drove 350 tons of silt across the Great Plains as far as the East Coast. Ships three hundred miles off shore in the Atlantic reported collecting dust on their decks. In April 1935, a dust storm arrived in Washington from the Great Plains. A dusty gloom spread over the region and blotted out the sun. Meanwhile, in downtown Washington, conservationist Hugh Hammond Bennett was testifying before Congress about the need for soil conservation. Bennett explained, (pointing to the darkened skies over Washington) "This, gentlemen, is what I have been talking about." Congress passed the Soil Conservation Act the same year.



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A Nuclear Attack on Boston (Circa 1962)

Link to: Nuclear War 1962 (Alternate History)


In 1962 the New England Journal of Medicine published a paper describing the impact of a nuclear strike (20 megatons) on the Boston Metropolitan area.

Within 1/1000th of a second, a fireball envelops downtown Boston and reaches out for two miles in every direction from ground zero. Temperatures reach 20 million degrees Fahrenheit. People, buildings, cars, tress, everything within a two mile radius are vaporized. Winds in excess of 650 miles per hour roar outward to a distance of four miles, ripping apart and leveling everything. Ten miles from ground zero, the heat of the blast melts glass and sheet metal, and the 200 mile per hour winds flatten every house and business. The only things still standing are reinforced concrete buildings which are heavily damaged.

Sixteen miles from the center, the heat from the blast ignites houses, paper, clothes, leaves, gasoline, and heating fuel, starting hundreds of thousands of fires. The winds, still 100 miles per hour at this distance merge these fires into a giant firestorm thirty miles across that engulfs eight hundred square miles. The death rate is nearly one hundred percent. Thirty miles from ground zero the heat of the blast causes third degree burns on exposed skin. Even forty miles from the blast, anyone looking up at the sudden flash of light in the sky is instantly blinded. Ninety percent of the population would have been dead within one month of the attack.



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If the Nazis had Tactical Nuclear Weapons on D-Day

General Pliyev, the Soviet commander in Cuba during the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962 had twelve Luna Missiles in his arsenal. Each Luna had a range of 3l miles and a two-kiloton nuclear payload. Any tank or armored personnel carrier within 500 yards of the blast of one of these weapons would have been immediately destroyed. Un- protected soldiers 1,000 yards from the blast site would have died immediately. Those un-fortunate enough to survive the explosion and the winds would have suffered a painful death by radiation poisoning within two weeks. Had Luna Missiles been available to the Germans in World War II, the Nazis would have obliterated all five D-Day beachheads in 1944 with no more than ten of these weapons.




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American Nuclear Strategy (Circa 1960)

In the early 1960s both the size of nuclear stockpiles and available delivery systems, made decision makers think in terms of a “winnable” nuclear war. Nuclear war would have been horrible but survivable. It was not until the 1980s that “advances” in technology made the destruction of the entire human race one of the certainties of nuclear war between the United States and the Soviet Union.



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Baby Born During Battle of First Manassas

Link to: CIVIL WAR CIVILIAN LIFE: MANASSAS,VIRGINIA 


The Lewis family of “Portici” found themselves at the center of the First Battle Manassas. Confederate officers notified the Lewis family that a battle was imminent and that their house would be exposed to fire. They evacuated, taking everything they could with them, but left valuable and heavy furniture behind. The furniture was stored in a small room in an angle of the house, and the room securely nailed shut. The only shot that struck the house during the battle struck this room and destroyed all of the furniture. Furniture was a trifling matter however. Fannie Lewis was in her ninth month of pregnancy and went into labor as they began to evacuate the house. Servants found a nearby ravine and dug a small earthen hollow into the bank. They covered this with greens. It was here that Fannie Lewis delivered her first baby, John Beauregard Lewis.

CIVIL WAR CIVILIAN LIFE: MANASSAS,VIRGINIA 

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The British at Mount Vernon

Link to: Who Were the Slaves of the Founding Fathers?

In April, 1781 the British warship H.M.S. Savage anchored off George Washington’s plantation, Mount Vernon. The British raiders took seventeen of Washington’s slaves from the Mount Vernon plantation. Lund Washington, a cousin who was watching over the plantation during the General’s absence, went on board the Savage, took refreshments to the British officers, and tried to negotiate the return of the slaves. He failed. A week later Lafayette wrote General Washington criticizing Lund’s actions, “This being done by the gentleman who, in some measure, represents you at your house will certainly have a bad effect, and contrasts with spirited answers from some neighbors, that had their houses burnt accordingly.” The General sent the unfortunate Lund a stinging letter rebuking him for “ …communing with a parcel of plundering Scoundrels….”

How Martha Washington Lived:

18th Century Customs

Gifts for Dogs

Spanish Explorers in Virginia

Most people think that the English were the first Europeans to explore what is now Virginia, founding Jamestown in 1607. There is evidence, however, that the Spanish beat the English to Virginia by several decades.

An attempt at colonization was made in 1570, when Governor Pedro Menendez of Florida, authorized an expedition. At the time, it was believed that the Chesapeake Bay was the long sought short passage to China. Jesuit missionaries convinced the Governor to send their small unarmed expedition to the area as a forerunner to future colonization. On September 10, 1570, a small band of Jesuits headed by Father Segura, vice provincial of the Jesuits settled near a place the Native Americans called Axacan. The nearest surviving Indian word that suggests the name, is "Occoquan”. One historical school places the unfolding drama in a village located on the Occoquan River in Northern Virginia.

The Jesuits were convinced that they could gain the trust of the natives and willingly convert thousands to Christianity for one simple reason; they were accompanied by a prince of that country who had converted to Christianity in Spain itself.

Hidden History of Northern Virginia

Read about the Rebel blockade of the Potomac River, the imprisonment of German POWs at super-secret Fort Hunt during World War II and the building of the Pentagon on the same site and in the same configuration as Civil War, era Fort Runyon. Meet Annandale's "bunny man," who inspired one of the country's wildest and scariest urban legends; learn about the slaves in Alexandria's notorious slave pens; and witness suffragists being dragged from the White House lawn and imprisoned in the Occoquan workhouse. 

Gifts for Dogs

American Werewolves?

                                                                        

What are the explanations for werewolves? Hypertrichosis is a scientific explanation.

Hypertrichosis (also known as “wolfitis”) is a rare medical condition which results in the growth of abnormal amounts of hair all over the body. A number of people suffering from hypertrichosis became famous sideshow freaks working for American impresario P.T. Barnum. Fedor Jeftichew (picture #1), born in St. Petersburg, Russia, signed on with P.T. Barnum at the age of sixteen in 1884. Barnum made a point of pointing out how much Jeftichew resembled a dog and he was known as “Jo-Jo the Dog Faced Boy”. Jeftichew barked and growled for gawking crowds to enhance his image as a half man-half beast monster. “Lionel the Lion Faced Man”, was another victim of hypertrichosis who worked for Barnum. “Lionel”, actually named Stephan Bibrowski (picture #2), was born in Poland in 1891 and began appearing in the Barnum and Bailey’s Circus in 1901. Bibrowski’s body was entirely covered by hair except for the palms of his hands and the soles of his feet. Hair hung eight inches from his face and four inches from the rest of his body. In real life, Bibrowski was well educated and spoke five languages.




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Did George Washington have an illegitimate son?

Link to:Who Were the Slaves of the FoundingFathers?

Did George Washington have an illegitimate son? Linda Allen Bryant, a direct descendent of a slave named West Ford (1784?-1863) points to correspondence between George and his brother, John Augustine, to argue that George Washington visited his brother’s plantation in 1784, and that a gap in Washington’s personal diary that year could account for a sexual liaison during this visit. According to an oral tradition passed down in the Ford family, a story first publicized in the 1940s, when confronted by her mistress, Hannah Washington, a pregnant slave named Venus confessed the paternity of her child, "The old General be the father, Mistress."

In all likelihood, the Mount Vernon Ladies Association argues, West Ford was indeed the son of a Washington, but not of George Washington. At the present development stage of DNA science, no direct link to George Washington can be established. The Mount Vernon Ladies Association has pledged its cooperation with testing as DNA science progresses.

PBS video: "George and Venus"

HowMartha Washington Lived: 18th Century Customs 

Neither Martha Washington nor the women of the South’s leading families were marble statues, they had the same strengths and weaknesses, passions and problems, joys and sorrows, as the women of any age.  So just how did they live?

Love, Sex, and Marriage in ColonialAmerica 1607-1800

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What did George Washington Eat?

Link to:

How Martha Washington Lived: 18th CenturyCustoms 

If you went back in time, you would soon discover that things sounded, smelled and tasted differently in the past. Consider food. In colonial Northern Virginia the cycle for meals was totally different from the modern cycle, as were the foods served. At Mount Vernon, at least three meals were served daily. Breakfast was served promptly at 7:00 am; dinner at 3:00 pm; and a light supper was served at 9:00 pm. George Washington once wrote to a friend, “A glass of wine and a bit of mutton are always ready, and such as will be content to partake of them are always welcome.”

Certain foods likely to be found on George Washington’s table included carrot puffs, chicken fricassee, Virginia ham, pickled red cabbage, and onion soup. Even though these foods appear familiar, the seasonings were very different from those used in modern cooking. Colonial cooks liked nutmeg and especially enjoyed a sweet taste. Salt and pepper were not heavily used. Some foods would make the modern diner blanche, rabbits and poultry, for example, were not only prepared with their heads and feet still attached, they were served at dinner that way as well.

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What did they eat in the American Civil War?

Link to:

Civil War Humor 1861-1865

Napoleon was the first to realize the military advantage of being able to scientifically control an army’s food supply. In 1795 he offered a huge cash prize to anyone who could find a way to improve the method of supplying food to the campaigning French army. Nicholas Appert patented a method of hermetically sealing food for future use. This was an important step forward in military logistics. In 1823, Thomas Kensett, an American invented the tin can. Appert’s sealing method and Kensett’s tin can gave the Union army a tremendous logistics advantage by the time of the American Civil War. Northern factories and food processing facilities canned milk, meats, oysters and vegetables by use by the troops. The Confederate army was at a disadvantage, with most of its canned goods coming either through the capture of Union supplies or via blockade runners.

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Hidden History of Northern Virginia

Northern Virginia is Washington, D.C.’s front porch, and while the history of the entire nation has been made in Washington, Northern Virginia has a rich regional history flowing from its connection to the capital. For example, there would be no Washington, D.C., if General George Washington had not lived in nearby Mount Vernon, Virginia.

Included here are the often-overlooked stories of Northern Virginia from colonial to modern times—stories such as the Rebel blockade of the Potomac River, the imprisonment of German POWs at super-secret Fort Hunt during World War II and the building of the Pentagon on the same site and in the same configuration as Civil War–era Fort Runyon. And then there are the people—Alexandria-hometown boy Robert E. Lee, Annandale’s “bunny man” who inspired one of the wildest and scariest urban legend, slaves in Alexandria’s notorious slave pens, suffragists dragged from in front of the White House and imprisoned in the Occoquan Workhouse and many other folks who have left their imprints on the region and the nation.



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