My 2010 Goes Out

With 9 single-spaced pages.

Hopefully the article won't be that long when it is finished. But that will wait until 2011.
Happy New Year!

Home Again, For the New Year

We knew it would be like this. We were sorely tempted to stay in C'town. But our friends! Gigs! Shopping! Movies!

It was an ordeal by the end.

First there was the inevitable New Jersey Turnpike slow moving mess at some point.

Then it was the one-hour wait mess to enter the Holland Tunnel. We also took the wrong turrn and instead of joining the endless stop and start train for the Tunnel, we went to Jersey City instead.  What?  We hit it at the height of rush hour -- the Holland Tunnel for those who don't live in the region is where essentially 6 lanes turn into ... two lanes.  So we enlessly stopped and started though mid and residential Jersey City to the Holland Tunnel instead.  It was a one-hour delay between the toll plaza and entering the Tunnel, and it took the same amount of time between the toll plaza and entering the Tunnel via our detour.  But the detour caused the stress levels to rise as we had not an idea of where we were at first or how to get back to where we were supposed to be.  Then we saw we were on the route to the Holland Tunnel and relaxed.   But it still was a drag.

Followed by the snow mess that is NYC, with nowhere to park, and a car loaded down with stuff, including much beer, wine, champagne, etc. for tomorrow night's party. We managed to unload all our things into the apartment in relays, then drove the liquor to M's loft on the lower east side, where a good parking spot was found, and walked back over here. It's nice outside, temperature-wise!

Then the mess in the apartment. What has he been doing in here when I'm not around to oversee? And it's cold in here .... And the sink is leaking .... The Time-Warner cable service here as usual really sux. I also forgot my power supply cable for my laptop.  How did I do that?  I was wrapping the cables and I swear I recall putting them into the bag -- but obviously, I did not! Only the laptop itself got inserted because, ah-hem, himself was getting antsy about leaving and I was doing about 18 things at the same time, so I lost track of what I was doing, I guess.  I can use el V's power supply fortunately, as our netbooks are very close siblings. So we can switch off and re-charge our batteries. My HP Pro desktop here still works fine, but all the research and drafts I'm doing with The American Slave Coast is on the laptop -- and, um, a new version of Word on the laptop, so kablooey with footnoting format and so on, as we'd learned way back when I got this in July.

We brought a lot of C'town groceries with us. It sure beat running around in the snow mess tonight to go grocery shopping or find a restaurant.  The city's packed with tourists.  As well, it turns out the soups and porkchops I'd frozen from our last together trip here were perfectly fine.  And we brought some of da Fox's favorite wine with us as well, which she is now drinking in preparation for sleepy time, while el V has a stash of some of his favored cervezas on hand in the refrigerator too.

So all will be well -- and I get to take ye laptop up to the NYPL Humanities (I CANNOT get its new name in mind or right!  a billionaire's name) and do some work there after NY's too.

Sun Sets On 2010



Virginia History Textbooks Are Filled With Wrong, Vetting Finds

Didn't we already know this?


However, there had to be an official review, of "five professional scholars," which did find that, as we knew, Our Virginia: Past and Present, "should be withdrawn from the classroom immediately, or at least by the end of the year."  Along with the glaring error that "thousands of black soldiers fought for the South," are these and many, many more, pages-worth:

New Orleans began the 1800s as a bustling U.S. harbor (instead of as a Spanish colonial one). The Confederacy included 12 states (instead of 11). And the United States entered World War I in 1916 (instead of in 1917).

Then there are the further glaring errors in another textbook approved for Virginia schools, called Our America, from Harcourt.  Historian Mary Miley Theobald, a former Virginia Commonwealth University professor, reviewed Our America and concluded that it was "just too shocking for words."

"Any literate person could have opened that book and immediately found a mistake," she said.

Theobald's list of errors spanned 10 pages, including inaccurate claims that men in Colonial Virginia commonly wore full suits of armor and that no Americans survived the Battle of the Alamo. Most historians say that some survived.

Why Frederick Douglass Applauded South Carolina's Secession

Written by David Blight, the foremost scholar on the history of U.S. Slavery,  Director  of the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition at Yale, as today's Disunion column -- "Cup of Wrath and Fire."

Honk Country - DonchU Be Comin' Rounjeer Without U Have Foods 4 Us

It's a beautiful early winter mid-day -- above freezing, sunny skies, low wind, much melting.   The Chester is frozen along the shores, but the center is tide in-running fast.  The widgeon, teal, Canadian geese and another kind, plus various gulls and other water birds viciously beaked, strong winged and long-legged abound.  They are loud, vociferous and demanding.  And very funny.  Particularly when they approach tourists who haven’t seen this display before, with necks elongated and reaching, wings flapping, honking and quacking.  Great to be out and about since the weather had been nothing but miserable with cold, wind and /or snow since Christmas Day.

Difficult Writing Task

But I've finally got what seems a successful start, with a thousand words plus many footnotes in the Introduction to the section that shines retrieval illumination -- hopefully  -- into that historical black hole in the historical dynamic of our national slavery evolution between the Era of Confederation and the War of 1812.

We went from serious discussion of national abolition, we thought, as part of Independence, conceived in Liberty, to ... not. What happened? The Constitution happened, for one thing.  Why did the Constitution happen with those articles and clauses -- that keep the word slavery silenced, while binding and weaving inexorably into the warp and woof of our nation?  Because there was in truth no serious consideration of abolition at all.  But for Our Side, unlike the republican American history view, that slavery was a constitutional side issue at most, which later would become a part of exceptional American progressivism, for us it is a story of terrible loss. 
The college isn't shut down only for the holiday break, it is really closed.  For one thing there's no internet connection anywhere as WC IT decided to take this time to upgrade its rinkydink not-even-cable campus system.  Thus the library also decided to use this closing to close itself and do serious collection shelf moving.  So all the people we hang out with here are either gone to other parts of the world, or else, as they live in the country, are rather snowbound.  The town's been a ghost world populated only by wind today.  We have really been rolling on The American Slave Coast.  It's almost as though we planned it that way or something and now we're in shock we really have the words etc. to show for it.  We can go off for New Year's with a clear conscience and a sense of  having gotten somewhere.