Sears Tower Glass Balcony by felixdaacat
Holy cow! I can already feel that tingly yet amazing feeling!
Me and my poster, “Mapping and Reading a Constructed Landscape: Millard’s Crossing Historic Village,” at the 2011 National Council on Public History conference.
I did a landscape reading, map analysis, and cartographic critique of the site’s current walking tour map. In doing this project, I created a user-friendly map that focuses on navigation and eduction purposes. By eliminating the user’s ability to conduct micro-readings, the new map will decrease the user’s frustration and confusion when touring the site.
Phone convo with Grandma
I had an amazing conversation with my grandma today. I called her to thank her for a newspaper article on Black History Month and a lovely necklace.
Now the article was from a small podunk town and actually made it on the front page, above the center-fold (which is actually a big deal in terms of the publisher’s view of the piece). Despite the fact that I haven’t read it, a thank you was in order. Don’t tell her it hasn’t been read, I will when I get to work tomorrow.
About the necklace: she probably gave it to me four or five years ago but I didn’t quite “like” it at the time. I knew I would eventually but at the time, I was too young to really appreciate it. Let’s just say, I grew up. I now wear it almost everyday.
Okay, for the point of this post.
In the conversation, she revealed a really neat thing her and her friends did during the Civil Rights Movement. Based on when she was born (1934) plus twenty or so years, that would put her at the Marymount convent at about 1954. (Clearly she did not become a nun or I would not be here, which is something I’m bound and determined to find out.) So this would have been at the early stages of the movement.
- 1954: Brown vs. Board of Education, outlawing segregation in schools
- 1955: Rosa Parks refuses to give bus seat to a white passenger, sparking Montgomery Bus Riot
She told me:
Now I was friends with some black girls and there were some restaurants that just wouldn’t serve them. So, we would bomb the place and just go.
My response was:
What do you mean…”bomb?”
Grandma:
Well, you know, we’d just go eat there with them.
Me:
Oh, and get it to go?
Grandma:
No, go eat there with them. They wouldn’t dare mess with us Marymount girls.
(Let’s just say I was completely blown away! You know, you always want to think, “Oh, I would have given my support” but you never actually know. Well, now I do know. If my grandma had the guts to do it, I’m darn positive I would have.)
Me:
Oh my goodness grandma! That is amazing! I, I just never knew you would do something like that.
Grandma:
Well, I’ve always been a rebel-rouser!
This is, of course, so true and makes me so proud to be her granddaughter.
The conversation really makes me want to do some in-depth interviews / oral histories with her. I think I would be doing a disservice to my family’s history if I didn’t.
It must get done.
This afternoon, House Republicans voted to adopt an amendment that effectively kills all funding for reproductive health, including Planned Parenthood.
Here’s a rundown of the other nasty amendments in that same budget bill:
- Eliminated cancer screening and basic health services for millions of poor women.
- Prohibited EPA from regulating greenhouse gases.
- Cut financing for the Reagan-era US Institute of Peace.
- Chopped funding to the National Endowment for the Arts.
- Banned financing of net neutrality regulations.
- Stripped salaries from White House advisers.
- Eliminated financing for firefighter grants.
But! Here’s some money they kept in the budget:
- $7 million for the US Army to sponsor a NASCAR vehicle.
- Restored $1.5 billion in planned cuts for Iraq War funding.
Budget cuts in Texas means a proposed 80% cut in funds to the Texas Historical Commission. People (conservatives) need to realize that there are other ways to make money besides big business. Heritage tourism creates jobs for small and large businesses AND provides financial motivation for preservation.
Come on people! Wake up!
![canisfamiliaris:
I Want My Own Room!
“[Well into the 15th Century] practically all living, awake or asleep, was done in this single large, mostly bare, always smoky chamber [called the hall]. Servants and family ate, dressed, and slept together — ‘a custom which conduced neither to comfort nor the observance of the proprieties,’ as J. Alfred Gotch noted with a certain clear absence of comfort himself in his classic book The Growth of the English House (1909). Through the whole of the medieval period, till well into the fifteenth century, the hall effectively was the house, so much so that it became the convention to give its name to the entire dwelling, as in Hardwick Hall or Toad Hall.
“Every member of the household, including servants, retainers, dowager widows, and anyone else with a continuing attachment, was considered family - they were literally familiar, to use the word in its original sense. In the most commanding (and usually least drafty) position in the hall was a raised platform called a dais, where the owner and his family ate — a practice recalled by the high tables still found in colleges and boarding schools that have (or sometimes simply wish to project) a sense of long tradition. The head of the household was the husband — a compound term meaning literally ‘house holder’ or ‘house owner.’ His role as manager and provider was so central that the practice of land management became known as husbandry. Only much later did husband come to signify a marriage partner….
“One thing that did not escape notice in medieval times was that nearly all the space above head height was unusable because it was so generally filled with smoke…. What was needed was something that would seem, on the face of it, straightforward: a practical chimney…. What made the difference eventually was the development of good bricks, which can deal with heat better over the long term than almost any rock can. … So the development of the fireplace became one of the great breakthroughs in domestic history: they allowed people to lay boards across the beams and create a whole new world upstairs.
“The upward expansion of houses changed everything. Rooms began to proliferate as wealthy householders discovered the satisfactions of having space to themselves. The first step, generally, was to build a grand new room upstairs called the great chamber, where the lord and his family did all the things they had done in the hall before - eat, sleep, loll, and play - but without so many other people about, returning to the great hall below only for banquets and other special occasions. Servants stopped being part of the family and became, well, servants. The idea of personal space, which seems so natural to us now, was a revelation. People couldn’t get enough of it. Soon it wasn’t merely sufficient to live apart from one’s inferiors; one had to have time apart from one’s equals, too.
“As houses sprouted wings and spread, and domestic arrangements grew more complex, words were created or adapted to describe all the new room types: study, bedchamber, privy chamber, closet, oratory (for a place of prayer), parlor, withdrawing chamber, and library (in a domestic as opposed to institutional sense) all date from the fourteenth century or a little earlier. Others soon followed: gallery, long gallery, presence chamber, tiring (for attiring) chamber, salon or saloon, apartment, lodgings, suite, and estude. ‘How widely different is all this from the ancient custom of the whole household living by day and night in the great hall!’ wrote J. Alfred Gotch in a moment of rare exuberance. One new type not mentioned by Gotch was boudoir, literally ‘a room to sulk in,’ which from its earliest days was associated with sexual intrigue.
“Even with the growth of comparative privacy, life remained much more communal and exposed than today. Toilets often had multiple seats, for ease of conversation, and paintings regularly showed couples in bed or bath in an attitude of casual friskiness while attendants waited on them and their friends sat amiably nearby, playing cards or conversing but comfortably within sight and earshot.”
[Excerpted by delanceyplace from pages 49, 58-60 of Bill Bryson’s excellent book At Home (Doubleday, 2010).]](http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_lg9htivDLu1qzk44io1_1280.gif)
I Want My Own Room!
“[Well into the 15th Century] practically all living, awake or asleep, was done in this single large, mostly bare, always smoky chamber [called the hall]. Servants and family ate, dressed, and slept together — ‘a custom which conduced neither to comfort nor the observance of the proprieties,’ as J. Alfred Gotch noted with a certain clear absence of comfort himself in his classic book The Growth of the English House (1909). Through the whole of the medieval period, till well into the fifteenth century, the hall effectively was the house, so much so that it became the convention to give its name to the entire dwelling, as in Hardwick Hall or Toad Hall.
“Every member of the household, including servants, retainers, dowager widows, and anyone else with a continuing attachment, was considered family - they were literally familiar, to use the word in its original sense. In the most commanding (and usually least drafty) position in the hall was a raised platform called a dais, where the owner and his family ate — a practice recalled by the high tables still found in colleges and boarding schools that have (or sometimes simply wish to project) a sense of long tradition. The head of the household was the husband — a compound term meaning literally ‘house holder’ or ‘house owner.’ His role as manager and provider was so central that the practice of land management became known as husbandry. Only much later did husband come to signify a marriage partner….
“One thing that did not escape notice in medieval times was that nearly all the space above head height was unusable because it was so generally filled with smoke…. What was needed was something that would seem, on the face of it, straightforward: a practical chimney…. What made the difference eventually was the development of good bricks, which can deal with heat better over the long term than almost any rock can. … So the development of the fireplace became one of the great breakthroughs in domestic history: they allowed people to lay boards across the beams and create a whole new world upstairs.
“The upward expansion of houses changed everything. Rooms began to proliferate as wealthy householders discovered the satisfactions of having space to themselves. The first step, generally, was to build a grand new room upstairs called the great chamber, where the lord and his family did all the things they had done in the hall before - eat, sleep, loll, and play - but without so many other people about, returning to the great hall below only for banquets and other special occasions. Servants stopped being part of the family and became, well, servants. The idea of personal space, which seems so natural to us now, was a revelation. People couldn’t get enough of it. Soon it wasn’t merely sufficient to live apart from one’s inferiors; one had to have time apart from one’s equals, too.
“As houses sprouted wings and spread, and domestic arrangements grew more complex, words were created or adapted to describe all the new room types: study, bedchamber, privy chamber, closet, oratory (for a place of prayer), parlor, withdrawing chamber, and library (in a domestic as opposed to institutional sense) all date from the fourteenth century or a little earlier. Others soon followed: gallery, long gallery, presence chamber, tiring (for attiring) chamber, salon or saloon, apartment, lodgings, suite, and estude. ‘How widely different is all this from the ancient custom of the whole household living by day and night in the great hall!’ wrote J. Alfred Gotch in a moment of rare exuberance. One new type not mentioned by Gotch was boudoir, literally ‘a room to sulk in,’ which from its earliest days was associated with sexual intrigue.
“Even with the growth of comparative privacy, life remained much more communal and exposed than today. Toilets often had multiple seats, for ease of conversation, and paintings regularly showed couples in bed or bath in an attitude of casual friskiness while attendants waited on them and their friends sat amiably nearby, playing cards or conversing but comfortably within sight and earshot.”
[Excerpted by delanceyplace from pages 49, 58-60 of Bill Bryson’s excellent book At Home (Doubleday, 2010).]
[Flash 9 is required to listen to audio.]
Saving Our Daughters from an Army of Princesses
An interesting look at gender identity in little girls and why we have “princesses.”
