Lenora Rogers's Blog, page 11
December 31, 2017
Art vs. History: a False Dichotomy
Over the last three weeks, as I have listened to the public discourse surrounding the Peabody Essex Museum’s reluctant announcement that it was planning to house the Salem-dominant collections of its research arm, the Phillips Library, in a vast collections center (encompassing both archives and objects) in Rowley, I have heard a constant refrain: the PEM doesn’t want to be a history museum. They are only interested in art (That’s why they are taking/hiding our history away). ...
December 25, 2017
Herbert Hoover, Food Administrator
Mr. and Mrs. Herbert Hoover
When World War I finally came to US shores, President Wilson summoned Herbert Hoover back home.
The Hoovers: Ex-Pats
For nearly twenty years, Mr. And Mrs. Herbert Hoover had lived abroad, in various and exotic locations. They didn’t even have a US residence. On their infrequent trips “home” they usually stayed with family.
Herbert Hoover (1874-1964) was one of the pre-eminent mining engineers in the world, and had become a bona fide mi...
Saxon Cross in St Peter’s Minster Church, Leeds, West Yorkshire
The Anglo- Saxon Cross in St Peter’s.
OS Grid Reference: SE 30657 33295. In St Peter’s parish church on Kirkgate in Leeds, west Yorkshire, there is a very tall and slender 10th century Anglo-Saxon wheel-headed cross, which stands on the Altar Flat. This very large city centre church is nowadays called Leeds Minster or ‘The Minster and Parish Church of Saint Peter-at-Leeds’. The cross-shaft fragments were discovered in the late 1830s when the tower was being demol...
The Story Of the First Christmas Ads
The following excerpt about the age-old material significance of Christmas comes from Pulitzer nominated Prof. Stephen Nissenbaum’s The Battle for Christmas, (Random House, 1997):
“If the domestic reform of Christmas began as an enterprise of patricians, fearful for their authority, it was soon being reinforced by merchants, who needed the streets to be cleared of drunks and rowdies in order to secure them for Christmas shoppers; by shoppers who in turn needed to feel secure in...
Remembrance Walk–Reflections in the National Cemetery (final words)
From Hennessy: On this, the day after the anniversary of the the burials on the Bloody Plain at Fredericksburg, we give you the last of six stops on the Remembrance Walk. If you wish to read the entire series, you can start here. I presented these words on one of the lower terraces, not far from the entrance to the cemetery.
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We have walked from the Bloody Plain to this place, this hill, unattainable to Union soldiers in December 1862, but later the res...
Children’s Christmas Letters 5
Christmas History 32. Recently on Windows into History we have been looking at some letters from children published in a January 1910 edition of the Iowa Homestead, writing about how they spent their Christmas. The following is one last selection:
My Christmas was spent very differently this year to what I had spent it other years. We had always had our relatives who were able to get their own Christmas dinner, but this year we were thinking about those we could make h...
December 24, 2017
The Kindness of Christmas
“Toy Makers,” photo taken between 1909 and 1919. Courtesy of: Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, LC-DIG-npcc-19400.
“The return of Christmas is a kind of beacon in the year. Whether it is the Christmas of childhood, full of excitement and a flow of good things, or the Christmas of older folk, woven with memories, or the Christmas of the captives of men far from home, for whom it is full of wistful longings, it is a season different from other seasons and a d...
Happy Christmas from Bob Dylan, Judy Garland, Charles Dickens & The Immortal Jukebox!
Traditions must be maintained!
An Etching by Rembrandt
A Literary extract from Charles Dickens
Music by Bob Dylan, Judy Garland & Shostakovich conducted by Rostropovich, played by Maxim Vengerov.
Our painting today is by Rembrandt who may be the most searching anatomist of the human heart who has ever lived.
There is such depth of humanity in Rembrandt’s etching of Mother and Christ Child.
The scene glows with immediate and eternal love and intimacy.
Our first music sel...
