Dispatches from Vilnius

I think few speeches stand out more than Martin Luther King Jr's "I Have a Dream" speech. I can only imagine the reaction at the time, but it sends shivers down my spine just thinking about it.

I've added a link to this site in "Other Sites." Some wonderful perusing available.

The Wilderness Warrior has been released to largely favorable reviews but I thought it best to offer a couple of differing opinions on Brinkley's massive tome of Roosevelt's Wilderness Legacy. Paul Abrams of the Huffington Post says that in, Reading Brinkley's well-documented tale, one slowly begins to realize that Theodore Roosevelt ("TR") is indeed an epic hero in the original sense of that term -- his world view was that our lands and forests and birds and animals must be defended from the rapacious talons of corporations and monied interests whose only concerns are profits. And, he did everything and anything he could to mount that defense, not worrying about the enemies he made in the process. While, Clay Reynolds of the Dallas Morning News sums up the book, Yet for all the well-researched detail Brinkley provides, reading this new biography is a slog. His prose varies from impenetrable encyclopedic listings to rambunctious, self-indulgent colloquialism, ...

We were fortunate to get such good weather. The beaches of Lithuania are a lot like that of the Atlantic Coast, albeit confined to a relatively narrow strip. Probably don't notice the kite in the upper right hand corner. I broke out my stunt kites after several years and my son and I managed to find all the pieces and get one of them up into the air. We watched with envy the kite surfers out on the rough sea. Look forward to getting back into the flow of the forum. I will put up a window for a discussion on The Wilderness Warrior soon.

BOSTON — John Quincy Adams , president, statesman — and Twitterer? They may be two centuries old, but, written with staccato-like brevity, entries from one of Adams’s diaries resemble tweets sufficiently that they began appearing Wednesday on Twitter . The Massachusetts Historical Society , under the Twitter tag JQAdams_MHS , is posting the entries, from a diary Adams started writing the day he left Boston for St. Petersburg to serve as minister, or ambassador, to Russia. That day was Aug. 5, 1809, and the society chose Wednesday, precisely 200 years later, to post the daily entry from it. Thursday’s posting will be from Aug. 6, 1809, Friday’s from Aug. 7, and so on, at least until year’s end.

Levon Helm Band, Jefferson Starship and Country Joe McDonald are among the acts that will descend on Bethel, New York, on August 15th to celebrate the 40th anniversary of the Woodstock Festival, Billboard.biz reports . Mountain, Ten Years After, Canned Heat and Big Brother and the Holding Co. will also play the Bethel Woods Center for the Arts, a venue built on the site of the original Woodstock, which ran from August 15th-17th, 1969. Helm appeared at the 1969 fest with the Band, while Jefferson Starship took the Woodstock stage as Jefferson Airplane. With the exception of Big Brother & the Holding Co. — Janis Joplin performed at the ‘69 concert with the Kozmic Blues Band — the rest of the acts performing on August 15th all had a set at the original Woodstock festival. As Rock Daily previously reported , Richie Havens will also play a Woodstock-related event on August 14th, returning to Bethel to perform “Freedom,” the song that opened up the ‘69 festival, at a media-only event.

He came dancing across the water With his galleons and guns Looking for the new world In that palace in the sun. On the shore lay montezuma With his coca leaves and pearls In his halls he often wondered With the secrets of the worlds. And his subjects gathered round him Like the leaves around a tree In their clothes of many colors For the angry gods to see. And the women all were beautiful And the men stood straight and strong They offered life in sacrifice So that others could go on. Hate was just a legend And war was never known The people worked together And they lifted many stones. They carried them to the flatlands And they died along the way But they built up with their bare hands What we still cant do today. And I know shes living there And she loves me to this day I still cant remember when Or how I lost my way. He came dancing across the water Cortez, cortez What a killer. _________________________________________ Couldn't resist, as naive as it sounds now.

Speaking of the Bob, here's a view of the meandering Bob Marshall wilderness. Meander where you may.....

I found this very good essay at American Heritage on the impact of the King legacy on Obama. One of the many interesting points that Clayborne Carson makes is, Obama’s understanding of American history parallels King’s, but the new president is less willing than King to see social conflict as an inevitable part of the struggle for justice. Lincoln rather than Jefferson serves as his dominant point of reference. Here is Obama reading Goodwin's Team of Rivals .

Can't seem to shake this notion of an "Uncle Tom." I came across this review of a collection of essays entitled Uncle Tom or New Negro: African Americans Reflect on Booker T. Washington and 100 Years Later at the American Heritage website. I remember enjoying Up From Slavery very much the first time I read it years ago, as I thought it was incredible the way Washington was able to build a school at Tuskegee literally from the ground up with the students making their own bricks because of the high price charged by local contractors. Quite a metaphor in that one.

Seems Janet Maslin got the jump on everyone with her review in the New York Times. She seems to consider it a dry but ultimately rewarding read, focusing almost exclusively on TR's wilderness legacy. Some time ago, I read The River of Doubt , which chronicles one of his last journeys on a tributary of the Amazon, later to be known as Rio Teodoro . It showed to what lengths TR would go for adventure, even when he was well past the age for such adventures. But, TR was always known as an advocate of The Strenuous Life . I was eventually able to find a book on Candido Rondon, Stringing Together a Nation , who was the actual leader of the ill-fated expedition, as it seemed that TR spent most of the time lying prostrate in a canoe. Roosevelt was a big proponent of the Antiquities Act and used it to great effect from 1906 to the end of his term in 1908. Here is a brief history on the National Park Service filled with vintage photographs.

He could also be called a white man's worst fear. I enjoyed this snippet from a review of Grant's book in The New Yorker , In 1914, on a ship between Jamaica and England, an impoverished twenty-six-year-old named Marcus Garvey had what he later called a vision of "a new world of black men." Six years later, he rode through Harlem in regal robes and a plumed bicorne, and was proclaimed the Provisional President of Africa before a crowd of twenty-five thousand in Madison Square Garden. For a short, spectacular time, before his movement collapsed under the weight of its ambitions and schemes (a mail-fraud conviction resulted in exile in London), Garvey’s call for a transnational union of black people electrified crowds around the world—alarming J. Edgar Hoover and maddening W. E. B. Du Bois, who recoiled at Garvey’s separatism and his theatrics, wondering if he was "a lunatic or a traitor." (Garvey called Du Bois a "lazy dependant mulatto.") Grant’s ...

I was so smitten with this series of photos (linked above) and the fact that I could get started on TR online that I subscribed to Vanity Fair. Time will tell if all issues live up to these two samples, but it does seem like they have interesting stories from time to time. This photo booth snapshot may be from the Kennedys' honeymoon.

Joseph, the brother of Jefferson Davis, was of a very different stripe. He sold the family plantation at Davis Bend to Benjamin Montgomery , a freedman, allowing him and his family to have full reign of the former plantation, which they turned into a profitable farm. Sadly, the sale was later challenged in Mississippi courts by Joseph's children after his death, and ultimately nullified. I picked up this book while I was reading Eric Foner's book on Reconstruction. Well worth reading, especially from a Reconstruction point of view.

I don't know how this tome stacks up with Gibbon's classic text, but Jefferson Davis seemed intent on drawing a parallel. David Blight notes how Davis compared the Confederacy, albeit a very short-lived one, to the Greek and Roman Empires. At 1200 pages it would take an incredible amount of patience to go through a book like this, but I thought it was worth noting, as Blight states that this pretty much served as the base text for the Southern Redemption after Reconstruction. Blight notes that Davis was one of many unreconstructed Southern leaders, and how he and other former Southern Leaders (Breckinridge to name one) saw Reconstruction as the second civil war with the redemption of the Southern states seen as a victory over Northern "industrial imperialism." Rather than promoting a "Lost Cause," per se, they promoted "Redemption," which in effect they won, considering their cause noble and true. Ironically, his brother, Joseph, turned his...

I don't know how widely read this book was at the time, but some eminent persons weighed in on DuBois' study of Blacks in America, including William James, who was one of DuBois' teachers at Harvard. Interesting to read that William James sent his brother, Henry , a copy of the book.

If anyone wants a tonic to the highly favorable portraits of Lincoln that Miller and Goodwin provide, I can think of no better book, or I should say chapter from, Richard Hofstadter's An American Political Tradition . He spends about 60 pages on Lincoln, pretty much sizing him as a very shrewd politician who essentially caved on any moral position he had in regard to slavery. It is a rather cynical portrait of the beloved President, with heavy references to Herndon, although I suspect Hofstadter took only the most biting references, as it is quite apparent that he wanted to bring Lincoln down to size. Hofstadter focuses mostly on the many contradictions in Lincoln's speeches, noting how he would appeal to a more liberal crowd in Chicago but then tone down his rhetoric when in more southern Charleston, Illinois, during his debates with Douglas, leading Douglas to comment that he couldn't live with himself if he had so many contradictions. Hofstadter says that the great art ...

A little early for the weekend, but am sitting here on my deck enjoying an unexpected summer rain after days of near 100 heat. This is not from my deck, but looks like it could be from around here -- maybe the Flathead Reservation.

I found this letter from Frederick Douglass to Harriet Beecher Stowe, which he read to the Colored National Convention in 1853. There is only this passage specifically addressing the novel, Dear Madam, my deep sense of the value of the services which you have already rendered my afflicted and persecuted people, by the publication of your inimitable book on the subject of slavery. That contribution to our bleeding cause, alone, involves us in a debt of gratitude which cannot be measured; and your resolution to make other exertions on our behalf excites in me emotions and sentiments, which I scarcely need try to give forth in words. Suffice it to say, that I believe you have the blessings of your enslaved countrymen and countrywomen; and the still higher reward which comes to the soul in the smiles of our merciful Heavenly father, whose ear is ever open to the cries of the oppressed. I wonder if that made Frederick Douglass an "Uncle Tom?"