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Poetry and Fine Art Friday: The Flag

Jun29

I love the way words in poetry play off one another like shadows across the floor.
I think poetry is one way to blow away all the fog and see life in full light. A certain kind of poetry can prettify and falsify life, no doubt about it, but the right kind can boil it down to its essence.”
From A Garden to Keep by Jamie Langston Turner.

American Parade

Some more of “literature’s greatest lines” courtesy of Dr. Huff:

The Flag Goes By by Henry Holcomb Bennett

HATS off!
Along the street there comes
A blare of bugles, a ruffle of drums,
A flash of color beneath the sky:
Hats off!
The flag is passing by!

Blue and crimson and white it shines,
Over the steel-tipped, ordered lines.
Hats off!
The colors before us fly;
But more than the flag is passing by.

Sea-fights and land-fights, grim and great,
Fought to make and to save the State:
Weary marches and sinking ships;
Cheers of victory on dying lips;

Days of plenty and years of peace;
March of a strong land’s swift increase;
Equal justice, right and law,
Stately honor and reverend awe;

Sign of a nation, great and strong
To ward her people from foreign wrong:
Pride and glory and honor,—all
Live in the colors to stand or fall.

Hats off!
Along the street there comes
A blare of bugles, a ruffle of drums;
And loyal hearts are beating high:
Hats off!
The flag is passing by!

Essential or prettifying? You decide. At any rate, that ought to get you ready for the Fourth of July! And if you don’t live in the USA, then salute your own country’s flag the next time you see it.

Red Moon at Sharpsburg by Rosemary Wells

Jun9

I know Rosemary Wells, and maybe you do too, as the author of the Max and Ruby picture books for young children. She can write for young adults, too. Red Moon at Sharpsburg is proof that Ms. Wells has the ability to write and research and create a wstory and a world for young adults as vivid as the one created with very few words and pictures in her Max books.

Red Moon at Sharpburg is, as can be deduced, a Civil War novel. It’s told from the point of view of a southern girl, India Moody, who lives in Northern Virginia with her family —her daddy, a harness maker, her mother, her little brother and her aged grandfather. The Moodys aren’t rich before the war begins, but they are comfortable with a home and a profitable business. The war, of course, changes everything. In spite of a couple of holes in the plot, I thought Red Moon at Sharpsburg was one of the best Civil War novels written for young adults that I have read. The “holes” involve minor characters, namely India’s baby brother and her elderly grandfather, who have a tendency to disappear when they might interfere with the action. I also found it difficult to believe that a young girl in the South during the war was able through a series of fortunate connections to obtain medicines (aspirin?) from Europe that would cure fever since aspirin wasn’t really invented until the late 1800’s. And the one of the characters has a suspiciously modern knowledge of medicine and chemistry and bacteriology that would have made him somewhat prescient in the mid 1800’s.

Still, the narrator and main character, India, is a delightful young lady and role model. And the descriptions of the war, of battlefields and prisons, and of atrocities are accurate and chilling. Ms. Wells says in the back of the book that part of her purpose in writing it was to reveal “the profound immorality of war.” She goes on to say, “Sometimes we must fight wars, but it is unforgivable to pump war full of glamour and glory.” I’m no pacifist, but I agree with Ms. Wells. She also has a mildly feminist agenda, but it doesn’t become overbearing or preachy.

The best thing about this novel was the gems of language and writing that popped up when I was least expecting them. Here are a few examples:

“I follow him down to Buckmarsh Street to catch a last glimpse of him. Then I cry, standing in the the street like a child with a skinned knee.”

Mauve is a pinkish purple of such delicacy I can only hold the silk square to the light and gaze at it. I have seen it only in petunias and stained-glass windows.”

“The moon is in its last quarter. It appears low on the horizon above the smoke. The crescent sits like a bloody smile in the sky.”

“I am aware of a sudden force, as if I have been flung through space at the speed of a comet. I know what this speeding ahead is without being told. It is me being hurled forward in time to the empty spot at the head of my family. It is a place where I was not meant to be for years to come and now I’m there.
48hbc
Other good Civil War novels for young adults:

Beatty, Patricia. Turn Homeward, Hannalee.
Beatty, Patricia. Be Ever Hopeful, Hannalee.
Beatty, Patricia. Charley Skedaddle. (Bowery Boys and deserters)
Hunt, Irene. Across Five Aprils.
Fleischman, Paul. Bull Run.
Keith, Harold. Rifles for Watie. (Cherokee Indian leader Stand Watie and the repeating rifle)
Paulsen, Gary. Soldier’s Heart: a Novel of the Civil War.
Perez, N.A. The Slopes of War: A Novel of Gettysburg.
Rinaldi, Ann. An Acquaintance with Darkness. (Lincoln’s assassination)
Rinaldi, Ann. The Last Silk Dress.
Rinaldi, Ann. Numbering All the Bones. (Andersonville Prison)
Wisler, G. Clifton. THe Drummer Boy of Vicksburg.

Yellow Fever: America’s Plague

May10

An American Plague: The True and Terrifying Story of the Yellow Fever Epidemic of 1793 by Jim Murphy.

Fever 1793 by Laurie Halse Anderson.

The American Plague: The Untold Story of Yellow Fever the Epidemic That Shaped our History by Molly Caldwell Crosby.

I read the nonfiction 2003 Newbery Honor book for children and young adults by Mr. Murphy first. All I knew, or thought I knew, about yellow fever before I read it was that it’s carried by mosquitoes, it’s common in the tropics, and Walter Reed figured out about the mosquitoes. It turns out that yellow fever isn’t confined to tropical climates, it is spread by mosquitoes, and Walter Reed had a little help. Oh, yes, and by the way, yellow fever hasn’t been eradicated, and there’s no cure. Treatment consists of rest, fluids, and time. You may or may not survive if you contract the disease. Thousands of Philadelphians in 1793 didn’t. Of course, many of them may have been bled to death by Dr. Benjamin Rush and his colleagues—who also believed in dosing patients with strong, nearly lethal, purgatives to make them vomit and eliminate all the “bad blood” collected in the digetive system. Rest, fluids, and time are starting to sound good, aren’t they?

The American Plague by Molly Caldwell, a nonfiction book for adults, focuses on two events: the yellow fever epidemic in Memphis, Tennessee in 1878 and the work of the Yellow Fever Commission in Cuba in 1900. Over one hundred years after the 1793 epidemic, doctors were still arguing about what caused yellow fever and how to prevent or to treat it. For prevention, some public health officials argued for a quarantine during the summer months if any cases of yellow fever were reported; others favored better sanitation and waste removal. Treatment came back to purgatives, quinine (good for malaria but ineffective against yellow fever), rest and fluids. Over five thousand people died in Memphis during the yellow fever outbreak of 1878 —more lives lost than in the Chicago Fire, the San Francisco Earthquake, and the Johnstown Flood combined.

In the fictional account of the Philadelphia 1793 yellow fever epidemic, Fever 1793, Laurie Halse Anderson illustrates the deadly nature of yellow fever and its effects on the community with a story about Mattie Cook, a girl of fourteen who lives above a coffeehouse that provides her family’s livelihood. Since Mattie’s father is dead, Mattie’s mother, her grandmother, and the black cook, Eliza, run the coffeehouse, and Mattie and the serving girl, Polly, help. At the beginning of the book in August 1793, Mattie worries about her mother’s temper and about how to get a little extra sleep and avoid as much work as possible. By the end of the story, Mattie has been forced to take on adult responsibilities: nursing, providing food for her family, repelling thieves and intruders, and running the coffeehouse, to name a few. The tone and the narrative voice of a young lady growing into a woman are quite similar to that of Ann Rinaldi’s historical fiction novels, anchored by specific historical people and events.

Interesting factoids:

Alexander Hamilton fled Philadelphia to avoid the fever in August 1793. He got it anyway, but recovered so tat he could die in his infamous duel with Aaron Burr ten years later.

George Washington also left the city of Philadelphia, which was at the time serving as the U.S. capital, but he neglected to take many of his important state papers with him. Nobody wanted to go back inot fever-infested Philadelphia to fetch the papers, and Madison and Jefferson contended that it was unconstitutional for Comgress to convene outside of the capital city anyway. So, the country survived without much government at all for the weeks that it took for the yellow fever to run its course in Philadelphia.

Dolly Payne Madison lost her first husband, Mr. Payne, and her young son to the yellow fever epidemic of 1793. Aaron Burr then introduced her to his friend James Madison, and she married Mr. Madison in 1794.

Dr. Benjamin Rush, a devout Christian and generally a good doctor, stayed in Philadelphia to treat the il, and at the height of the epidemic, he saw as many as 120 patients a day. Unfortunately, he truly believed the “cure” for yellow fever was to bleed and poison the fever out of his patients, and so he probably caused many of them to die. Dr. Rush himself fell ill with the fever during the 1793 epidemic, used his preferred treatment on himself, and survived.

George Washington laid the cornerstone for the U.S. capitol in Washington, D.C. on September 18, 1793 at the height of the yellow fever epidemic.

Desperate Journey by Jim Murphy

Jan22

That’s what she felt like, Maggie realized. A boiler filled with steam, wanting to go and go fast, but held in place, steam pressure building and building.

Nice description. I’ve felt that way.

Author Jim Murphy is well-known for his nonfiction titles about historical events, including The Great Fire about the Chicago fire of 1871, Blizzard: The Storm That Changed America, and An American Plague: The True and Terrifying Story of the Yellow Fever Epidemic of 1793. He’s won the Newbery Honor twice and other awards.

Desperate Journey is different, however, since it’s a fictional account set in 1848 of the life of a twelve year girl, Maggie Haggerty, and her family, living on a canal boat on the Erie Canal. In historical fiction the author must tell a made-up story with all the drama and details of history, but that comes across as both plausible and interesting. Mr. Murphy does a fine job of creating characters and a story that draw the reader in and keep us invested in the outcome of the story. Maggie and her family have lots of obstacles to overcome, and they do what needs to be done in spite of the difficulties. I guess you could say they’re examples of inspiring characters in historical fiction.

I’m working on a post on “God talk” in children’s literature, a continuation of some thoughts I had after reading MotherReader’s post on Hattie Big Sky. Desperate Journey is certainly another example of a book in which God and talk about God play a role. Maggie and her mother and brother are caught in desperate race to get a load of cargo down the canal, and God sends help in the form of a strange character who sees visions and hears God speaking to him in dreams. It’s a sort of a “touched by an angel” situation, but there is little indication that the visionary character, Billy Black, is anyone other than a man with a troubled past, redeemed and sent to help Maggie and her family in their desperate journey. The God talk is an integral part of the story, and Maggie reacts to all this talk of visions and messages from God as one would expect a normal twelve year girl to react—with skepticism and a bit of curiosity. Billy Black remains a mysterious character all the way through the novel, and I enjoyed that bit of ambiguity.

Desperate Journey would make a fine addition to the American history curriculum. I would recommend it to homeschoolers who use Sonlight or Tapestry of Grace, curricula that make heavy use of historical fiction to teach history. I think I’ll add it to our read-aloud list for the next time we cycle through U.S. history.

Weedflower by Cynthia Kadohata and Blue by Joyce Moyer Hostetter

Dec15


Two books set during World War War II: One takes place in California and Arizona; the other book is set on the other side of the country in North Carolina. Sumiko is twelve years old and lives with her aunt and uncle and cousins on a flower farm; Anna Fay is thirteen and has become “the man of the house” since her daddy’s gone to fight in the war. Both girls are typical older children, responsible, obligated to grow up fast and take care of younger brothers and sisters. Both girls use gardening as a way to work through their problems and challenges. And each must face her own war, her own imprisonment, and her own fight against ignorance and prejudice.

Sumiko, heroine of Weedflower, is a Japanese-American girl; her parents are dead, and she faces prejudice against “orientals” from the beginning of the story when she is dis-invited to a birthday party for a girl in her class. The challenges only get worse after the Japanese bomb Pearl Harbor and all the residents of Japanese descent on the West Coast are gathered and sent to internment camps. Sumiko, her aunt, her two older cousins, and her little brother are sent to Poston in Arizona. There Sumiko must learn to survive and even overcome the heat, the dust, the hostility of neighbors, and even the threat of succumbing to “the ultimate boredom.” The latter is her grandfather’s term for the temptation to give up, to lose your dreams, to surrender hope, a temptation that Sumiko must face and defeat if she is to win her war.

Anna Fay, the main character in Blue has a battle to fight, too. A polio epidemic has invaded western North Carolina in 1944, and Anna Fay’s little brother Bobby falls victim to the dread disease. Later in the story, Anna Fay herself must battle polio, even as she worries about her daddy fighting Hitler in Europe and about whether her family will ever be together again. Anna Fay is trapped in the polio hospital just as Sumiko is trapped in the internment camp, and Anna Fay faces boredom and prejudice, too. The discrimination comes when Anna Fay becomes friends with a “colored girl” who also has polio, but the two girls can’t convince anyone that they should be allowed to share a hospital ward as well as a friendship.

I thought both of these books were excellently well-written. Blue goes for the tear-jerker, drama reaction; the writing in Weedflower is a little more restrained. Sumiko is the stereotypical Japanese, determined to keep her emotions under control and her tears hidden; Anna Fay is comforted by her friend’s word picture of a God who saves each person’s tears in a bottle on a heavenly window-sill. (Anna Fay’s bottle is blue.) Each girl compares herself to a flower: Sumiko is a weedflower, a flower of the field that is both beautiful and resilient; Anna Fay is sometimes as fragile as a mimosa blossom and other times as tough as wisteria.

These books would work well, paired, in a unit study on World War II to give students a good picture of different aspects of the time period. Other World War II books for girls:

Denenberg, Barry. Early Sunday Morning: The Pearl Harbor Diary of Amber Billows, Hawaii, 1941.
Denenberg, Barry. One Eye Laughing, The Other Weeping: The Diary of Julie Weiss, Vienna, Austria to New York, 1938.
Greene, Betty. Summer of my German Soldier.
Osborne, Mary Pope. My Secret War: The World War II Diary of Madeline Beck, Long Island, New York, 1941.
Rinaldi, Ann. Keep Smiling Through.

Weedflower and Blue also have another thing in common; both books are nominated for the Cybil Award for Middle Grade Fiction.

Advent: December 7

Dec7

Every year on this date, my mom would ask me, “Do you know what today is?”

“Christmas? Almost Christmas? The beginning of Christmas?”



I eventually learned that December 7th has nothing to do with Christmas. Go here for an article by Maggie Hogan on commemorating this “date which will live in infamy” in your homeschool.

The book Early Sunday Morning: The Pearl Harbor Diary of Amber Billows, Hawaii, 1941 by Barry Denenberg is one of the Dear America series from Scholastic. Go here for more information on the book and some activities to accompany it.

Other books for children and young adults:
Air Raid–Pearl Harbor!: The Story of December 7, 1941 by Theodore Taylor

A Boy at War: A Novel of Pearl Harbor by Harry Mazer

World War II for Kids: A History with 21 Activities by Richard Panchyk

Links:
Phil at Brandywine Books: The Last Survivors of Pearl Harbor.

Michelle Malkin: Remembering Pearl Harbor.

George Grant posts Franklin Roosevelt’s December 8th “Date Which Will Live in Infamy” speech, broadcast on radio worldwide.

From Hawaii, Palm Tree Pundit comments and links to a few others who remember this date.

Antoine, The Nearly-Anonymous Pecan Gardener

Nov28

You may be used to varieties of pecans that are large with a lot of meat inside and at the same time easy to crack because of their thin shells. When I a little girl, we had a “native” pecan tree in our yard, and I can testify that the pecans were small and hard to crack with tiny bits of nutmeat inside.

We have the many varieties of pecans that we have today partly because of a man from Louisiana named Antione, that’s all, just Antoine. He was a slave gardener, and he grafted the first official variety of improved pecan, Centennial, at Oak Alley Plantation on the west bank of the Mississippi River just north of New Orleans in 1846. It won the Best Pecan Exhibited award at the Philadelphia Centennial Exposition in 1876.

Antoine is listed in an 1848 inventory of his owner, J.T. Roman’s, slaves as a “Creole slave, age 38.” That and the fact that he was a pioneer and expert gardener, skilled in the grafting of pecan trees, make up about the sum total of what we know about Antoine. But he did do something that I will appreciate tomorrow when I’m shelling my pecans, my paper-shell pecans.

George Washington, Thomas Jefferson and the Pecan Tree

Nov15

“The French botanist Du Mont de Courset recorded hearing from his brother, who served in George Washington’s army, that the general was forever munching on pecans and always had some in his pocket.” from The Pecan Tree by Jane Manaster

In 1775, George Washington may have planted pecan trees at Mount Vernon. Certainly, in May of 1786, his journal records the planting of a row of “Illinois nuts,” as pecans were sometimes called at the time.

In 1780, Jefferson planted pecan trees at Monticello. However, by 1801 they were still not bearing fruit. While in France, Jefferson begged his pecans from friends in back in the U.S., writing, “. . . procure me two or three hundred Paccan nuts from the Western country . . . they should come as fresh as possible, and come best, I believe, in a box of sand.”

If both Jefferson and Washington could agree on the “delectability” of the pecan, who are we to gainsay their verdict? If our Founding Fathers loved the pecan, so should we. If you like pecans and have written something pecan-related on your blog, please leave a link in the Mr. Linky. I’ll be sending some fresh pecans to one lucky contributor at the end of November.

Pecans: Good Enough for Washngton and Jefferson!
Pecans: Good Enough for Me!

For Your Listening Pleasure

Sep22

Kiddie Records.

“Kiddie Records Weekly is a three year project celebrating the golden age of children’s records. This brief but prolific period spanned from the mid forties through the early fifties, producing a wealth of all-time classics. Many of these recordings were extravagant Hollywood productions on major record labels and featured big time celebrities and composers.
Over the years, these forgotten treasures have slipped off the radar and now stand on the brink of extinction. Our mission is to give them a new lease on life by sharing them with today’s generation of online listeners. Each recording has been carefully transferred from the original 78s and encoded to MP3 format for you to download and enjoy. You’ll find a new addition every week, all year long.”

Singing Science Records.
From the creator of the webpage:

“When I was a kid my parents got this six-LP set of science-themed folk songs for my sister and me. They were produced in the late 1950s / early 1960s by Hy Zaret (William Stirrat) and Lou Singer. . . .The Singing Science lyrics were very Atomic Age, while the tunes were generally riffs on popular or genre music of the time. We played them incessantly.
In February 1998 I found the LPs in my parents’ basement. I cleaned them up, played them one last time on an old turntable, and burned them onto a set of three CD-R discs. In December 1999 I read the songs back off the CDs and encoded them into MP3, so now you can hear them on the web.

I already told you about LibriVox, a site which “provides free audiobooks from the public domain.” You can download these mp3 files of books (and poems) into your computer or iPod, or you can listen at the website. I’m enjoying it immensely.

American Rhetoric is a website with a “database of 5000+ full text, audio and video (streaming) versions of public speeches, sermons, legal proceedings, lectures, debates, interviews, other recorded media events, and a declaration or two.” I’ll be visiting this website frequently this year as I teach US History and American Literature at our homeschool co-op.

The Genevan Psalter. This webpage includes versified psalms in English and midi files to listen to the original (used in Calvin’sGeneva) melodies.

Isn’t the internet wonderful?

Ana Iris Medina, d. 9/11/2001

Sep11

AnaMedinaAna Iris Medina had 10 (or maybe 14?) brothers and sisters and consequently, a huge family, in New York and Puerto Rico. She was 39 years old when she died on this date five years ago as she began her day’s work at Aon Consulting, an insurance company, on the 101st floor of the World Trade Center. She left behind an eleven year old son, Leonardo Acosta, and her 87 year old mother, Monserrate Acosta. Ana was the caretaker for both of them.

On September 25, 200l, The Village Voice listed Ana Medina as “missing.” Her relatives were still looking for her, hoping that she might be still alive. They told newspaper reporters that she had a “pedicure with a mint-green color and white designs” and that she loved to watch her son play baseball. She also liked salsa music and dancing. By October 6th, Ana’s 40th birthday, her family knew that she would not be found in a hospital somewhere; she died in the World Trade Center. The family gathered to remember her at the small Pentecostal church she attended.

I found this note at legacy.com:

February 28, 2002
Dear Mom
hi its your son leony.I have benn very loney with out you.It has been a little strange that youre not with us anymore.You will always and truly in my heart.
Leonardo Acosta (Brooklyn, NY )

Leonardo Acosta would be sixteen years old by now. I imagine he’s still missing his mom.

Today is fifth anniversary of the attack on the World Trade Center towers in New York City and on the Pentagon in Washington, D.C. I thought it was important to remember those who lost their lives to some men’s misguided and evil sense of religious or cultural duty. You can click on the image to read more tributes to the victims of the 9/11 terrorist attack.