Archive for the ‘uncle toms cabin’ Tag
I’ve spent a great deal of my life dealing with the more unsavory side of the human race. Unfortunately, it’s taken a toll on me and seriously bruised the faith I once held for human tolerances. Doing historical research has its ugly side and I’ll share some of that with you today. Hopefully at some point in the future things will improve but I’m certain anyone reading this post today will never live to see it.
- Adolf Hitler kept a framed photograph of Henry Ford on his desk and Ford had one of Hitler on his desk in Dearborn Michigan. Hitler had used in his book Mein Kampf some of Ford’s anti-Semitic views, and he always welcomed Ford’s substantial contributions to the Nazi movement.
- From the beginning Puritan colonists engaged in the slave trade, first selling captive Indians to the West Indies and then bringing in Negroes from Africa. Cotton Mather, pastor of Boston’s North Church, owned both Indian and Negro slaves. In 1641, Samuel Maverick proposed the breeding of Negro slaves on Noodles Island, which is now East Boston.
- It has been estimated that the Spaniards killed off 1.5 million Indians within a few years after Columbus discovered the New World.
- Human beings have been exterminating animals at the average rate of one species a year for the last two centuries. That rate appears to be on the increase, despite the rising of ecological awareness that began in the 1960s.
- 40 million Americans are murdered, maimed, raped, mugged, or robbed every year.
- Pope Innocence VIII (142-1492) received a gift of 100 Moorish slaves, who he distributed as a gratuity to Cardinals and friends.
- Not all the bad guys in Harriet Beecher Stowe’s mild abolitionist tract about U.S. slavery, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, are Southerners. The villains, in fact, are Northern renegades. Simon Legree, the wicked slave driver, was from Vermont.
- Here in the “civilized West” a human being has been killed by others every 20 seconds for the last half-century, either legally or illegally. This is three times the rate of the century preceding these 50 years.
- The English promised land in the colony of Nova Scotia to former slaves to join their side during the American Revolution. When the promise was broken, a former slave, Thomas Peters, who had been a sergeant in the British Army, sailed to England and won a concession of land in Sierra Leone in West Africa, for his fellow blacks landless in Nova Scotia.
NUFF SAID
I’m a lover of history, and I’m absolutely crazy about obscure historical trivia facts. I’ve collected quite a few over the years and I’m going to begin today with what I hope will be a number of postings with more of these little tidbits. Enjoy!
- “Take this script,” Rudyard Kipling said to the nurse who cared for his firstborn child, “and someday if you are in need of money, you may be able to sell it at a handsome price.” Years later, when the nurse was actually in want, she sold the manuscript of the first Jungle Book and lived in comfort for the rest of her life.
- After writing the runaway bestseller Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Harriet Beecher Stowe was bombarded with hate mail. Out of one package that she received fell the ear of a slave.
- The author of the best-known document in the United States, and perhaps in the world, published only one book. Thomas Jefferson’s answers to a set of 23 questions about the American continent, circulated in 1780 by the French emissary François Marbois, appeared as Notes on the State of Virginia.
- Walt Whitman was dismissed from his clerical post in the Indian Bureau of the Department of the Interior when the Secretary of the Interior, James Harlan, read a portion of Whitman’s Leaves of Grass and deemed it “pernicious poetry”.
- Heavyweight boxing champion Gene Tunney lectured on Shakespeare at Yale University.
- The electric automobile self-starter, which was perfected in 1911 by Charles F Kettering, made it possible for women to drive without the companion previously needed for cranking the engine.
- In the early 1860s, a New York firm offered a prize of $10,000 for a satisfactory substitute for ivory in the manufacture of billiard balls. The prize was won by an American inventor, John Wesley Hyatt, who devised for the purpose what came to be known as celluloid. It was the first synthetic plastic.
- Somewhere out there in space, amid all of the junk, is the Hasselblad camera dropped during a spacewalk by the United States astronaut Michael Collins. It will orbit the earth indefinitely.
- A manned rocket reaches the moon in less time than it took a stagecoach to travel the length of England.
- In 1930, Ellen Church recruited seven other young nurses to work 5000 feet above the Earth. They were the first airline stewardesses, flying on Boeing’s San Francisco to Chicago route, a trip that, in good weather, took 20 hours and made 13 stops.
WHO DOESN’T LOVE HISTORICAL TRIVIA?
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