A weekly round-up of my favorite preservation related stories from around the web and in the news. Click on the title of each story to jump through to the original article/blog post.
“President Abraham Lincoln stood on a battlefield in Gettysburg, Pa., 150 years ago [this week] and declared “a new birth of freedom” for the nation. That same year, an African-American man named Lewis Henry Bailey experienced his own rebirth. At age 21, Bailey was freed from slavery in Texas. His journey began in Virginia, where he was sold as a child in a slave jail. Today, the building where Bailey and thousands of slaves once lived before they were sold is the home of the Freedom House Museum and the Northern Virginia chapter of the Urban League, one of the nation’s oldest civil rights organizations.”
Dallas, 1963: City of Hate? – Atlantic Cities
“In the wake of President John F. Kennedy’s assassination, Dallas earned a new moniker — the “City of Hate.” It’s a damning nickname. Is it fair? Fifty years ago, Dallas was the nation’s right-wing “center for resistance.” After President Kennedy’s assassination, Dallasites faced years of trouble while traveling around the country. They were sometimes even denied service because of their hometown. What most non-Texans didn’t realize was that the city had a more glamorous and cultured side as well. It was home to new luxury apartment towers, a Frank Lloyd Wright-designed theater and the flagship location of Nieman Marcus. The Fort Worth hotel Kennedy stayed at on his final night transformed his suite into a room filled with sculptures and paintings by Monet, Picasso, and Van Gogh.”
WWI Created New Culture of Mourning – Deutsche Welle
Historian Jay M. Winter explains how the First World War permanently changed the culture of mourning. Whether Verdun, Shoa, or 9/11, what remains of the deceased is often only a name. Before WWI, mourning centered around the place where the physical remains of a person was entombed. Because of the massive number of casualties and the way in which soldiers perished during WWI, there was not a body to bury/burials were lost in the back and forth movement of the frontlines. It was at this point that spirtualism and seances became popular. It was also at this time that the list of names on memorials became an accepted practice in mourning: “The names were the things that mattered. The names are all that mattered. In war memorials you’ll see them, in churches, in Germany, all over the world. What matters is the list of the names in the parish or the town, the school or the university. It is the names. It is a way of bringing the bodies back home in a metaphorical sense of the term. Those names defined families that were empty, that had absences.”
Where Were You? 50 Memories to Mark 50 Years – Here and Now
“Here & Now has been receiving emails, web comments, Facebook messages and tweets (and even one fax) from listeners, with their memories of the day President John F. Kennedy was assassinated, 50 years ago today. Many of these stories share common threads: Class lessons interrupted, seeing parents and teachers cry, being glued to the television for days. Memories also came from foreign countries, on board planes, in hospitals and in the telephone room of an Air Force base. We’ve loved reading them and wanted to share 50 here to mark 50 years past.”