Category Archives: U.S.

by | 9 September 2013 · 12:28 pm

Smyrna, 1919: Mustafa Kemal’s Last Chance

From The Sultans, by Noel Barber (Simon & Schuster, 1973), pp. 240-242:

The armistice was barely a month old when Mustafa Kemal reached Constantinople, after month of fighting the Arabs. He found the enemy everywhere – British warships in the Bosporus, French troops in the capital, Italians guarding the railways. The Ottoman Empire had been smashed, all the leaders of the Young Turks were abroad in hiding, the Government was led by an old pro-British diplomat from the reign of Abdul Hamid called Tewfik Pasha.

Mustafa Kemal should have been in a unique position, for with Enver gone he had no rival as the only successful general in Turkey. He was also kn own to have consistently opposed joining the Germans in the war. Yet political power eluded him, largely because of his own lack of tact. He passionately advocated ‘Turkey for the Turks’ in political speeches, demanding generous peace terms. He publicly attached Tewfik’s government and the occupation forces; he tried to stem the timid acceptance of total defeat; he tried to form a new political party as the months rolled by – until Turkey was shocked by a blow which to them was even graver than defeat.

In February 1919, Venizelos, the Greek Prime Minister, made a formal claim to the Peace Conference in Paris for the possession of the city of Smyrna on the Aegean coast of Anatolia. It was the price which Britain and France had already agreed on as a reward for Greek entry into the war. So many Greeks lived on the Aegean coast that Venizelos’ demands seemed reasonably fair, but there was also a more cogent argument in favour of them. Lloyd George regarded Venizelos as ‘the greatest statesman Greece had thrown up since the days of Pericles’ and it seemed to him highly expedient for the Greeks to replace the Turks as protectors of the British route to India. To President Wilson, a Greek occupation of Smyrna would be preferable to Italian threats to make the Mediterranean an Italian lake. According to the American author Edward Hale Bierstadt, ‘at the suggestion of President Wilson Greece was authorised to occupy Smyrna in order to forestall any Italian move in that direction’.

Three months later, on 15 May, 20,000 Greek troops landed at Smyrna, backed by British, American and French warships, and, as Churchill put it, ‘set up their standards of invasion and conquest in Asia Minor’. Delirious crowds of Greeks – for centuries a subject race of the Ottoman Empire – welcomed their ‘liberators’ who immediately sought revenge by massacring as many Turks as they could find in the city and province.

At first the Turks could not believe the Greeks were in Smyrna. It was one thing to suffer the occupation even of Constantinople by alien troops of the victorious Western powers, but for a former subject people to be presented with one of the greatest cities in Anatolia was an altogether different kind of humiliation. A crowd of 50,000 gathered in protest before the mosque of Sultan Ahmed in Constantinople. Under the machine guns of Allied troops, they carried black flags while black curtains shrouded the national flag of Turkey. Mustafa Kemal was there and (as he later wrote) was obsessed with only one thought – somehow to reach Anatolia and organise resistance to the Greeks, and the docile Turkish government which had given Smyrna away.

To Mustafa Kemal, distrusted by both Turks and British, it must have seemed an impossible dream. He was already known to the Allied occupation authorities as an intractable hotthead with dangerous left-wing sympathies. And, though respected for his military prowess, he was at this time hardly a figure to inspire confidence. Furious and impotent, he had let himself run to seed. Down-at-heel, short of money, he was living at the modest Pera Palace Hotel overlooking the Golden Horn. His face was lined and grey from a recurrence of his disease.

Yet, unknown to Mustafa Kemal, the British, even before the Greeks stepped ashore at Smyrna, had suggested that the Sultan should send a high-ranking officer to deal with increasing violence in the area. The request was not exactly a threat, but it masked an alternative distasteful to the Sultan. If the Turks could not keep their Anatolian house in order, the Allies would have to send in troops.

Mustafa Kemal was the last man anyone would have imagined would be nominated to handle the gathering storm in Anatolia. And yet that is exactly what happened, for he was the last man – the only man – available. At their wits’ end, the Sultan and Damad Ferid, the Grand Vizier, turned to him. The British were horrified; they already had evidence that he was concerned with plots to prepare centres of resistance, and his name was on a list for possible deportation to Malta. The Grand Vizier, however, finally persuaded the British that the troubles in Anatolia were due to rebel factions loyal to the memory of Enver and anxious to restore the Committee of Union and Progress….

Mustafa escaped from Constantinople by barely and hour, thanks to the blundering jealousies of the Allies. Urgent orders were certainly sent to intercept him, but the British, French and Italians all played varying parts in the control of passenger vessels, and each distrusted the others. While they were bickering, Mustafa Kemal slipped through the net.

He landed at Samsun on the Black Sea coast on 19 May 1919 – four days after the Greeks had occupied Smyrna. His orders were to disband the Turkish forces in the area. Instead he immediately started to organise a resistance movement and raise an army.

The Anatolian Greeks and Armenians would pay an especially dear price for these external interventions.

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Filed under Armenia, democracy, France, Germany, Greece, Italy, Mediterranean, nationalism, Turkey, U.S., war

by | 21 August 2013 · 9:22 pm

Punahou and Baseball in the Hawaiian Kingdom

From: Missionaries, Cartwright, and Spalding: The Development of Baseball in Nineteenth-Century Hawaii, by Frank Ardolino, in NINE: A Journal of Baseball History and Culture 10(2002):27-45 (Project MUSE subscription required).

The person usually credited with the introduction of the Massachusetts form of early baseball is Captain James H. Black, a Boston printer…. The game flourished at Punahou School…. Daniel Dole, the school’s first principal (1841-54), was a noted baseball enthusiast and player…. The school promoted baseball on campus and in the community, arranging match games with other schools and supporting town leagues. Punahou’s encouragement of the game as a major recreational pastime resulted in the flowering of baseball in Hawaii from 1866 to 1890, a period that will be discussed in greater detail after Cartwright’s influence in analyzed.

Alexander Joy Cartwright is considered an important baseball pioneer because he helped to create the New York Knickerbocker ball club in the 1840s and formulated rules for the version of the game that evolved into the national pastime. In March 1849, he left New York for the gold fields of California and on his cross-country journey became a kind of Johnny Appleseed for baseball by introducing the game to American Indians and settlers, as he recorded in his diary. When he quickly grew disenchanted with California, he decided to sail home via China, but he disembarked in Honolulu at the end of August 1849 and soon determined to settle there permanently, bringing his family from New York in 1852.

In the next two decades, Cartwright not only prospered in shipping, whaling, insurance, and real estate but also became a community builder who helped to construct a new Hawaii. He was the organizer and first chief of the Honolulu Fire Department, one of the founders of the Queen’s Hospital, organizer and president of the Honolulu Library and numismatics society, and founder of Masonic Lodge 21, among numerous other achievements. As a result of his business and legal acumen, he also served as financial advisor to five monarchs.

Despite Cartwright’s considerable presence in the political, economic, and legal sectors of Hawaii, there exists little evidence for his similar role in the development of baseball….

Cartwright’s last two children, his sons Bruce and Allie, were born in Hawaii and attended Punahou from 1864 to 1869. There are contemporary references to their participation in the game. The Punahou Reporter recounts the minutes for the meeting of the Whangdoodle Base Ball Club–composed of Punahou students and graduates–on May 14, 1872, in which the club announces that it expects the Cartwright brothers to resume their ball playing when they return from school in the United States. In the following year, Allie is listed in the Punahou tally book as the captain of the club. Further, the box score from the Hawaiian Gazette of August 18, 1875, records Allie as the Whangdoodle second baseman who scored 2 runs in a 11-10 loss to the Pacifics. Bruce is mentioned as a member of the Married Men’s Baseball Club in 1884, and, finally, at the annual meeting of the Hawaiian Base Ball League on March 10, 1886, Bruce was chosen as one of the official scorers for the upcoming season….

The influence of Punahou and Alexander Cartwright as promoters of baseball resulted in its flourishing between 1866 and 1890. The game’s growing popularity resulted in the creation of league play and match games, an increase in the number of ball fields, and innovations in the rules, equipment, tally book, and box scores, which appeared in the Pacific Commercial Advertiser, the Hawaiian Gazette, and the Punahou Mirror, Reporter.…

During this period, the foreign population of Hawaii increased from 4,000 to 49,000, and the native population decreased from 58,000 to 40,000. Although Punahou’s enrollment grew slowly, only tripling its initial enrollment of thirty-four pupils by 1880, its influence on the changing community went far beyond its numbers. Richard Henry Dana, the author of Two Years Before the Mast and a visitor to Hawaii in 1860, described how Punahou extended its system of excellence by sending its graduates to mainland colleges, where they not only were trained to be future teachers at Punahou but also attracted prestigious recruits to teach there. 24 One illustrious mainland recruit was William H. Chickering, who came to Hawaii in 1871 to teach the classics. He had played shortstop for Amherst College, and at Punahou he served as umpire and catcher for both teams, as well as joining the Whangdoodles, “a downtown club composed of Punahou boys, old and new …

In his Reminiscences, W.R. Castle attests to the central role Punahou played in the development of baseball. Castle was the son of pioneer lay missionary Samuel N. Castle, who also founded the firm of Castle and Cooke, which became one of the Big Five corporations that controlled the sugar industry in Hawaii. W.R. Castle attended Punahou from 1860 to 1864 and then went to Oberlin College for two years. When he returned to Hawaii in 1866, he introduced the New York version to the Punahou Baseball club … When he traveled to the other Hawaiian Islands in 1869, Castle attended games played with enthusiasm and skill by residents who called baseball “the gift of Punahou.”… They used a lively rubber ball but had no mitts, masks, or body protectors….

In 1866, an official league was created composed of the Pacifics and the Pioneers, who were joined in a few years by the Whangdoodles, Pensacolas, and Athletics. At the first organizational meeting on June 1, 1866, the original teams adopted the regulations of the California National Baseball Convention. Future meetings were held at various firehouses, perhaps reflecting Cartwright’s influence on the organization of the league. Rules were enforced, fines levied, and sometimes teams disbanded, with their members joining other teams or forming new ones….

The popularity of baseball was also demonstrated by the scheduling of match games between the Whangdoodles and sailors, the infantry and cavalry on King Kamehameha Day, and interisland teams. The Whangdoodles won 2 games, one at the end of 1871 by the whopping score of 88-43 against the Mariners, a team composed of the officers and sailors from the whaling fleet that had been shipwrecked in the Arctic Ocean….

As the popularity of baseball spread throughout the community, both attendance and the number of fields available for play increased. Women would attend games on horseback, and some fans arrived in carriages. So many new spectators came to see the games at Makiki Reserve that in June 1884 a new and larger attendance stand was erected to accommodate them. At this time, nine fields, representing a geographical spectrum of playing areas within and without the boundaries of what then constituted the city of Honolulu, were used: Punahou Field, the Esplanade behind the Custom House, the field on the grounds where Central Union Church now stands in central Honolulu, Makiki Reserve, the area behind historic Kawaihao Church, and the fields on the prison and parade grounds.

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by | 11 July 2013 · 3:31 pm

“One thing it ain’t, is black and white”

From Mississippi in Africa: The Saga of the Slaves of Prospect Hill Plantation and Their Legacy in Liberia Today, by Alan Huffman (Penguin, 2004), pp. 104-106, 278-280:

At first glance, Delores’s lineage is difficult to discern. Before now we have spoken only on the phone, after I was given her number by her niece, Laura “Butch” Ross. During my research into the story of Prospect Hill, I have often conducted first interviews on the phone rather than in person, and sometimes have found myself deliberating whether the person I am speaking with is descended from slave or slave owner, because many have similar accents and frames of reference. I wait for their perspective to reveal itself through some telltale sign—a verbal marker such as the use of “aks” in place of “ask” by blacks, or a reference to “faithful slaves” by whites. Sometimes the clue lies in what is left out of their account. The prevailing white version of the story of Prospect Hill always includes the slave uprising, but the prevailing black version never does. In many cases my assumptions have turned out to be entirely wrong, and I might be deep into a conversation before I know for sure.

In Delores’s case, neither her speech nor her perspective gave her away on the phone. Finally she said, “I’ll just be frank with you, it was kind hard growing up in the South with a black mother and a white father.”

After greeting me at the door and inviting me in, Delores launches into one of the more curious genealogies that I have come across.

“I’ll tell you, Roots, the best movie ever made, don’t have nothin’ on the Ross family,” she says. “We’re all over the place. Go way back, all over the place. Here some of ’em started out in Africa, come to Mississippi, then end up back in Africa. And a whole lot of ’em—black, white, you name it, been right here all along—and I’m talkin’ a long, long time.

Delores’s hair is long, wavy, and black, carefully molded with pomade, her skin midway between black and white. Her house is a catchall sort of place, with furniture from the 1960s and 1970s, potted plants and vases of plastic flowers, and every available surface crowded with memorabilia and framed photos of people, both black and white. Many area residents have a tendency to reduce key figures in local history to archetypes and stereotypes—good guys and bad guys, everything black and white, but not Delores. She listens patiently to a summary of the history of Prospect Hill, then leans back on her sofa and takes a long drag off her cigarette. She is unpretentious and self-possessed, and has no qualms about entertaining my questions about her family history—in fact, she relishes the opportunity.

“One thing it ain’t, is black and white,” she says, and blows cigarette smoke toward the ceiling….

“Here, pass me that picture there, Butch,” Delores says, and Butch hands her a framed photograph from among the group clustered on the coffee table. “That’s Thad Ross, my daddy,” Delores says, and passes the photo to me. “He was a descendant of Isaac Ross.” The photo looks to have been taken in the 1930s. A white man is seated on a sofa beside a dark-skinned girl with a black woman seated in a chair nearby. There is no mistaking they are a family. “It was taken down in Jefferson County,” she says. “That’s my father there. The girl is Jimmie, my sister, Butch’s mother. The lady’s Queen Esther Polk, Jimmie’s mother.”

The photo would be right at home in many family albums across the South but for the mix of skin colors. There are many people of mixed race in this part of the country, but they are usually the result of clandestine encounters. Racial mixing is rarely documented for posterity, particularly by members of prominent white families like the Rosses….

Delores points to a group of framed photos on the mantel, and adds, “That’s all my family up there.” She goes down the line, naming names. Most of the faces are black, but some are white, and others are in between. She pulls out her albums and shows me snapshots of blacks and whites intermingling unself-consciously—fishing on a lake, visiting in someone’s living room, gathering for a graduation….”

…

“Isaac Ross was a unique fella during that time,” James [Belton] says, in typical understatement. “He went along with slavery but his slaves were not slaves in the traditional sense. I doubt seriously if you would find anything written about the slaves before 1870, when blacks were first included in the census. But from word-of-mouth, folklore, what was passed down from generation to generation, it is apparent they were not like other slaves. I was told, you know, that some of those Beltons actually attended Oakland College. They were not free, per se, but they were educated.”

Before the Civil War, Oakland College was a private school for planters’ sons, and Isaac Ross sat on its board. Today it is Alcorn State University, which was founded in 1871 as the first land-grant college for blacks in the United States.

Most historical accounts note that many Prospect Hill slaves were taught to read and write, and that they all enjoyed relative freedom within the confines of the plantation. Ross never sold any slaves, and it appears he kept them sequestered from the slaves on neighboring plantations. When Isaac Ross Wade took over as master of the plantation, however, they were treated like any other group of slaves, James says. “By the time of the burning of the house, from what I gather, all of the slaves but a few were extremely bitter. Isaac Ross had treated them like relatives, and the truth is, a lot of them were relatives. The Belton ladies who worked around Prospect Hill were very light—you couldn’t hardly tell ’em from white ladies, my father said. But after Isaac Wade contested the will [that freed the slaves and offered them emigration to Liberia], they weren’t getting the treatment they had gotten during Ross’s lifetime, and resentment just built up. That was how they came to set fire to the house.”

Why did any of the slaves choose to remain behind when the majority emigrated to Liberia? James has a ready answer. A few were not given the option of being repatriated, he says, “most likely because they were just bad apples, like you have in any community.”

The others, he says, may have been wary of traveling to a distant, unknown land. But Mariah was different. Belton believes she chose to remain behind because her two sons, Wade and Edmond, had fled Prospect Hill to escape being lynched in the aftermath of the uprising, and perhaps she knew their whereabouts.

It may have been the grief she was keeping within over what had happened,” he says. “She knew her sons did not go to Liberia, and perhaps she thought, ‘For me to ever see my sons again, I have to stay in the area.’ So she was sold to Walter Wade and transferred to Rosswood with her son, William. He was my great-grandfather.” He digs through the stack of papers on his kitchen table and pulls out a photo of the young man, which looks to have been taken around the 1850s, with an inscription that identifies him as a carriage driver….

James still has a lot of questions, but most of them concern the genealogical riddle. He has organized the documents pertaining to his family and Prospect Hill on a CD-ROM, complete with images of the portraits of Isaac Ross and his wife, and of tombstones in the graveyard, and he plans to give a presentation on the subject at the next Belton family reunion. Since 1984 the Beltons have held reunions, often several times a year, at various locations. Last year the event drew more than 4,000 people, he says. “I had to get my facts in order,” he says of his Prospect Hill presentation. “I don’t like to lose history, and the first time I mentioned all this at the Belton reunion, the whole place went quiet. People’s mouths dropped. They said, ‘A white man did that before the Civil War—in Mississippi?’ They didn’t believe me. One fella who did believe the story said, ‘Man, you need to get in touch with Spike Lee. It’s make a great movie.’

“There’s a lot about our history people don’t realize,” he says, “Like that a lot of blacks in the South owned slaves.” In his view, the story is complicated, and it is shared. “Some of the white Rosses have helped me put a lot of information together, and the white Beltons, too,” he adds.

When I mention what so many have said about the story not being simply black and white, he smiles. He says there are a lot of gradations between any two extremes, and cites as an example the quasi-ward system that he remembers as a child, which was similar to that which exists in Liberia today.

“It was basically the same way here,” he says. “It wasn’t like slavery, but I grew up with a stepbrother and -sister, who Dad took in and raised ’em, and they worked for the family. They were like family, and they were less fortunate, and they worked for us. I see a lot of that—people who are less fortunate, maybe because they’re darker-skinned, and they weren’t given the same opportunity.”

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Filed under language, Liberia, migration, slavery, U.S.

by | 6 July 2013 · 2:13 pm

Early Liberian Colonists vs. Indigenous Peoples

From Mississippi in Africa: The Saga of the Slaves of Prospect Hill Plantation and Their Legacy in Liberia Today, by Alan Huffman (Penguin, 2004), pp. 45-48:

In creating its Liberian colony in 1820, the American Colonization Society used as a template the colony of Sierra Leone, immediately to the west on the coast of West Africa. Freetown, the capital of Sierra Leone, had been founded thirty years earlier by English philanthropists as a home for freed British slaves, many of whom had originated in America but had won their freedom by fighting for the crown during the American Revolution. West Africa was chosen for the colonies for several reasons, but primarily because it was known as the “slave coast” and was the general area of origin of large numbers of slaves, including the majority of those who ended up in the Americas. Historians estimate that approximately sixty million Africans were captured as slaves in West Africa from the first recorded slave sale in 1503 to the end of the trade in the mid-nineteenth century. Of those, an estimated forty million died before arriving at their destination.

Until the establishment of the two colonies, the territory that would become Liberia had been held by indigenous tribes, many of which were (and in some cases continued to be) active in the slave trade. In hindsight, it was a recipe for disaster….

In January 1820 the society’s first chartered ship, the Elizabeth, set sail from New York for West Africa with three society agents and eighty-eight emigrants aboard. The ship first landed in Freetown, then made its way along the coast to the future Liberia, where the colonization effort got off to an inauspicious start. Within three weeks all of the society’s agents and twenty-two of the immigrants had died of fever. The survivors were evacuated to Freetown. Undeterred, the society organized two more voyages and began buying additional land, sometimes under threat of force, from tribal chiefs along the coast. According to historian [Mary Louise] Clifford, U.S. officials struck a deal with indigenous tribes that allowed the tribes’ active slave trade, which would have meant that as freed slaves were arriving to settle in Liberia, new slaves would have been setting sail. The colonization society board rejected the deal, however. A compromise that gave the coastal region only to the immigrants, and apparently made no mention of the slave trade, was accepted, but when the immigrants actually landed they met armed resistance and so moved farther down the coast, where they were again attacked. Some escaped to Freetown while others remained trapped within crude, hastily built fortifications. Only a small group persevered….

By the end of 1822 a tenuous peace was negotiated between the settlers and the tribes. Soon after, colonization society officials rebuked the immigrants for what they considered to be a poor effort at self-sufficiency. Clifford wrote that the settlers considered farming too closely akin to the slavery they had known in the United States, yet they had few other economic options aside from trade, which was dominated by the tribes.

To engender a sense of purpose, and because the colonization society was having difficulty finding leaders who would remain in place, the group named the colony Liberia and sought to regiment its government on the local level. The colonists began bartering for more coastal land and eventually took control of most of the valuable slave trading ports. By 1830 more than 2,500 immigrants had arrived in Liberia from the United States, and the next year the state of Maryland incorporated its colonization society, distinct from the American Colonization Society, and appropriated money for its own colony.

Even as the colonization effort was getting on its feet, opposition in the United States grew. The concept of colonization was challenged by both white abolitionists and free blacks who argued that African-Americans had earned a stake in the United States, and that repatriation was tantamount to deportation. Those concerns would still be echoed in 1851, when Frederick Douglass, in a speech to the Convention of Colored Citizens, attacked colonization, saying, “But we claim no affinity with Africa. This is our home … The land of our forefathers.” African-Americans, he said, “do not trace our ancestry to Africa alone. We trace it to Englishmen, Irishmen, Scotchmen, to Frenchmen, to the German, to the Asiatic as well as to Africa. The best blood of Virginia courses through our veins.”

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Filed under Britain, Liberia, migration, Sierra Leone, slavery, U.S.

by | 11 May 2013 · 1:56 pm

Wordcatcher Tales: Chuckatuck, Nottoway

During my recent trip to see relatives in southeastern Virginia, I got curious about some of the Native American placenames and the languages they came from. Eventually I came across a very comprehensive article in Wikipedia on Native American tribes in Virginia (whose main contributors have the usernames Til Eulenspiegel, Parkwells, and—early on—Sarah1607). In it, I found that those tribes include not just descendents of Algonquian speakers (like the Powhatan Confederacy), but also a few far outliers who once spoke Iroquian and Siouan languages. The area I was visiting was where the three language types once met.

The village of Chuckatuck is now a borough of the city of Suffolk (the “World’s Largest Peanut Market” and home of WLPM-AM), formed out of what used to be called Nansemond County. As an English colony, Chuckatuck dates back to 1635. Chuckatuck Parish church (now St. John’s Episcopal Church) was established in 1642, and George Fox himself established Chuckatuck Friends Meeting in 1672. (Some of my ancestors show up in Chuckatuck Monthly Meeting records, but there is no longer a Friends Meeting there, as I discovered on this visit.) A Chuckatuck grist mill operated continuously from 1676 to 1972.

Despite being a tiny riverport and crossroads town, it has its own Greater Chuckatuck Historical Foundation, and Chuckatuck Historic District was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1995. According to the Foundation’s website, the village name comes from Chuckatuck Creek, “or Crooked Creek as the Indians called it” (a tributary of the James River). Those Indians must have been Algonquian-speaking members of the Nansemond tribe. The Virginia Algonquian language is also known as Powhatan, and was the source of such English words as hickory, hominy, opossum, persimmon, and (corn)pone.

Nottoway Parish was the original name of Southampton County, Virginia. It was named after the Nottoway River, which was in turn named for the Nottoway Indians who lived along it. The name Nottoway appears to come from an Algonquian word for peoples who were not Algonquian speakers. The same name shows up elsewhere in two counties named Nottoway in North Carolina and Louisiana, streets named Nodaway in Iowa and Missouri, and Nadoway Point in Michigan, where it faces Iroquois Island in Whitefish Bay, Lake Superior. The wide-ranging Algonquians had many foreigners in their midst.

We know the Nottoway used to speak an Iroquian language because someone collected a wordlist in 1820 from one of the last elderly speakers and sent it to Thomas Jefferson, who shared it with Peter DuPonceau, one of the earliest experts in the indigenous languages of North America. A few more words were added to the list, but they are the only trace we have left of the language. Nevertheless, they suffice to show that Nottoway was closely related to Tuscarora, which is much better documented but now highly endangered.

Two other groups of Northern Iroquian speakers lived in the area. The Meherrin Nation once lived along the Meherrin River in Virginia, but migrated south to North Carolina during the early 1700s. They signed several treaties with the colony and are now one of the eight indigenous nations officially recognized by the state of North Carolina.

The Tuscarora people once lived around the Roanoke, Neuse, and Tar Rivers in North Carolina, but began migrating north after the Tuscarora War of 1711-1713. Those who reached New York became the sixth nation of the Iroquois who are nationally recognized in Canada and the U.S. But other descendants of the Tuscarora have remained in North Carolina, and some have moved to Oklahoma.

Of the eleven tribes recognized by the State of Virginia, only three groups are not of Algonquian heritage. The Nottoway Indian Tribe of Virginia, Inc. and the Choreonhaka (Nottoway) Indian Tribe of Southampton County both descend from people who once spoke the same Iroquoian language.

The third group claims descent from speakers of Eastern Siouan languages (also known as Catawban). The Monacan Indian Nation gets its name from one of two historic tribes, the Monacan and Manahoac (or Mahock), who once lived in Piedmont Virginia and spoke languages (now extinct) closely related to Tutelo. The Tutelo fled north in 1740 and were adopted by the Iroquoian Cayuga in 1753. The ethnologist Horatio Hale, working among the Cayuga in Ontario, was the first to discover that the Tutelo language from Virginia belonged to the Siouan family. (He was also the first to identify the Cherokee language as Iroquoian.) So the Siouan language family once extended as far east as Virginia and the Carolinas and as far south as Biloxi, Mississippi.

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by | 6 May 2013 · 8:20 pm

Four Notable Slaves and Two Generals

While visiting ancestral haunts and a few more famous historic sites in Southampton County, Virginia, in April, we pulled the car over in front of the Rebecca Vaughan house in Courtland and I got out to take a photo of it. Soon I heard a lady’s voice behind me asking, “What do you think?”

She turned out to be the head of the Southampton County Historical Society, which runs a museum in another historic site I had photographed near what used to be called Jerusalem Courthouse, when the county seat had been called Jerusalem. Perhaps she had followed us from there, because she followed us into Heritage Lane, where the Vaughan house sits, and back out when we stopped to take a photo.

The house is still being restored and was placed on the National Register of Historic Places because it was the last house in which anyone had been killed during the Southampton Insurrection of 1831, more commonly known as Nat Turner’s Rebellion. (I read William Styron’s novel The Confessions of Nat Turner not long after it first appeared in 1967, the year I moved in with my uncle in Southampton County after finishing high school—in fact most of my childhood—in Japan.)

We two history buffs had a long and enthusiastic conversation that might have gone on even longer if it hadn’t been getting close to supper time. She named four famous slaves born in Southampton County.

1. Nat Turner (1800-1831), who led the slave rebellion in 1831.

2. Dred Scott (1795-1858), who left the County not long after his birth and died shortly after the landmark Dred Scott Decision in 1857.

3. Anthony Gardiner (1820-1885), whose family emigrated to Liberia in 1831, and who went on to become Liberia’s 1st attorney general (1848-1865), 7th vice president (1872-1876), and 9th president (1878-1883).

4. John Brown (c. 1810-1876), who escaped to England in 1850, where he dictated his life story to the president of the British and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society, which published it under the title, Slave Life in Georgia: A Narrative of the Life, Sufferings, and Escape of John Brown, a Fugitive Slave, Now in England (1855). (Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin had appeared in 1852.)

I hadn’t heard of the last two men, but I had heard of the two Civil War generals she next told me about.

General George H. Thomas (1816-1870) born in Newsom’s Depot, Southampton County, acquired several epithets from his leadership during the Civil War: “Rock of Chickamauga,” “Sledge of Nashville,” and “Slow Trot Thomas.” Until very late in the War, the Union troops never crossed the Blackwater River to invade Southampton County, and my interlocutor suggested that Gen. Thomas may have had something to do with that. (I doubt it, for two reasons: he commanded the Army of the Cumberland in the Western Theater; and Gen. Ulysses Grant held him in low esteem.)

General William Mahone (1826-1895) once lived in Mahone’s Tavern, just across from Jerusalem Courthouse. Trained as a civil engineer at Virginia Military Institute (class of 1847), he was hired to build the railroad between Norfolk and Petersburg. (His wife, Otelia Butler of Smithfield, is credited with naming several of the stations.) During the War, he distinguished himself at the Battle of the Crater during the Siege of Petersburg. He had worked as a teacher before becoming a railroad executive, and after the War joined the biracial Readjuster Party. He was a strong proponent of education for freedmen and free blacks and helped found Virginia Normal and Collegiate Institute in 1882 (now Virginia State University), the first fully state-supported four-year institution of higher learning for black Americans in the United States.

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Filed under education, slavery, travel, U.S., war

by | 16 April 2013 · 3:22 pm

The Postwar Quonset Era

From: Quonset Hut: Metal Living for a Modern Age, ed. by Julie Decker and Chris Chiei (Princeton Architectural Press, 2005), pp. 84-87, 93-94:

The Quonset form [called kamaboko-gata in Japanese] rippled throughout postwar visual culture. It no longer needed explaining; it had become an icon unto itself. On television shows like Gomer Pyle, USMC, the action played out on a stage set dominated by the horizontal lines and half-circle forms of the Quonset. The Marx Toy Company, creator of the Yo-Yo, released a yellow “Construction Office” Quonset toy. Sherwin Williams, playing to the evolving market, developed, in conjunction with Stran-Steel, a special paint called Quon-Kote, whose can was festooned with rows of Quonsets. “Quon-Kote dresses up your Quonset, gives it a trim, well-kept look that is an important business asset.” One can even find a lasting example of the Quonset influence, oddly enough, in an engineering textbook, where the Quonset was pictured with a halo of arrows and numbers. The typical exercise posited the situation thus: “You are to design Quonset huts for a military base in the Mideast. The design windspeed is 100 ft/s.” Problem-solving questions included, “What is the net drag force acting on the Quonset hut?”

The Quonset seemed ubiquitous in any sector of public life; indeed, it even played a part as ideal fallout shelters in proving-grounds tests and elsewhere (e.g., in Palm Beach, Florida, a buried Quonset-type structure served as a temporary shelter for the vacation home of President Kennedy) as postwar peace and optimism were quickly overshadowed by the threat of atomic war. Indeed, Quonsetlike structures, designed by entrepreneurs like Nebraska’s Walt Behlen, were even submitted to test atomic explosions at the proving grounds in Nevada. Civil defense officials were intrigued by the domelike profile for the same reasons as engineers—the way the wind, or the force of an atomic blast, moved across its surface.

On college campuses, where enrollment had soared as returning veterans took advantage of the GI Bill, Quonsets mushroomed as temporary classrooms and student housing. “It was a lifesaver for all of us because housing prices in New Haven were out of sight,” one veteran told Yankee Magazine. “We had to wait three semesters to get a Quonset hut.” In Kalamazoo, Indiana, the Quonset community was referred to as a “genteel slum”—one veteran remembered the walls being so thin he could hear his neighbor asking for bread. Another Quonset resident recalled the instant neighborly bonhomie that seemed to arrive with the huts. “We enjoyed our neighbors, had people to dinner and sherry parties, and a lot of drop-in visitors from the campus and from the neighboring college where I was still teaching … We tackled the insufficiencies with enthusiasm.” Bernard Malamud was said to have written a number of his short stories in a Quonset at Oregon State University in 1948. The writer Lewis Lapham’s recollections of a job interview with the Central Intelligence Agency a year out of college involved a Quonset: “The interview took place in one of the Quonset huts near the Lincoln Memorial that had served as the Agency’s temporary headquarters during World War II. The military design of a building hastily assembled for an urgent purpose imparted an air of understated glory, an effect consciously reflected in the studied carelessness of the young men asking the questions.” …

In 1948, a young political neophyte named Gerald Ford set up his congressional campaign headquarters in a Quonset (emblazoned with his portrait) in Grand Rapids, Michigan. … Foreshadowing Bill Gates’ garage founding of Microsoft, engineer William Bradford Shockley, in 1955, set up his fledgling and pioneering semiconductor company—the creative spark that ignited what would become Silicon Valley—in a Quonset in California, near Palo Alto. In 1947, a food company salesman named Jeno Paulucci opened his novel business—what would become the Chinese food giant Chun-King—in a Quonset near Duluth, Minnesota. Great Lakes actively pitched such uses. “You’re in business Faster and for Less money with a Quonset.”

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Filed under democracy, economics, education, migration, U.S.

by | 7 April 2013 · 1:06 pm

Wordcatcher Tales: Kitchi Gammi, Nahgahchiwanong Adaawewigamig

While visiting family in Minneapolis over Spring Break, we made a long day trip up to Duluth and back. One of the architects (Oliver G. Traphagen) who designed many of Duluth’s finest buildings during its boom years in the 1880s and 1890s came to booming Honolulu in 1898, where he designed many more notable buildings, including both heavy stone (Richardsonian Romanesque) buildings and the graceful Moana Hotel, the first hotel on Waikiki Beach. The last Honolulu building Traphagen designed before he moved to Alameda, California, in 1907 (to help rebuild after the 1906 San Francisco earthquake) was the Punahou School president’s home.

Kitchi Gammi – Another far more famous architect who left his mark on Duluth and Honolulu, as well as San Diego, New York City, and many other cities, was Bertram Goodhue. In Duluth, he designed the Kitchi Gammi Club (1912) and the nearby Hartley Building (1914) on E. Superior Street along the lake shore.

The club name, Kitchi Gammi (15,700 ghits), of course, comes from the Chippewa/Ojibwe name for Lake Superior, gichigami (13,300 ghits) ‘large lake’, which Henry Wadsworth Longfellow spelled Gitche Gumee (98,300 ghits) and translated ‘Big-Sea-Water’ in “The Song of Hiawatha” (1855). Gordon Lightfoot used Longfellow’s spelling in the lyrics to “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald” (1976).

The name Hiawatha comes from a legendary Iroquois hero, and the name of his lover Minnehaha means ‘waterfall’ in Dakota, a Siouan language. Neither name is from Ojibwe, or even the Algonquian language family. The minne- that occurs in so many Minnesota place names comes from the Dakota root for ‘water’, mní-, which has the same shape in the closely related Lakota language farther west, according to the New Lakota Dictionary Online. The Rum River, which empties into the Mississippi just above Minneapolis, also gets its name from a mistranslation of the Dakota name for Spirit/Mystic River (Wakpa waḳaŋ lit. ‘River spirit’; cf. Waḳaŋ Taŋka ‘Great Spirit’).

Nahgahchiwanong Adaawewigamig – On the way back from Duluth, we detoured through Cloquet, Minnesota, to see the R. W. Lindholm Service Station designed by Frank Lloyd Wright in 1958 and now on the National Register of Historic Places. Then we stopped for a snack at Carmen’s Restaurant just across the street from a convenience store and gas station emblazoned with the words Nahgahchiwanong Adaawewigamig and the logo of the Fond du Lac Reservation.

I asked a young man who worked there whether he spoke Chippewa/Ojibwe. He said he spoke some, and translated the name for me as “where the water ends”—the same meaning the Voyageurs rendered into Fond du Lac in French. The Chippewa/Ojibwe name for Fond du Lac is now spelled Nagaajiwanaang, and adaawewigamig just means ‘store, shop’. Ojibwe speakers tend to create neologisms rather than borrow directly from French or English. By the way, the Chippewa/Ojibwe name for the St. Louis River, which empties into Lake Superior at Fond du Lac, is called gichigami-ziibi ‘Great-lake River’, the same ziibi that shows up in the various names for stretches of the Mississippi River, including gichi-ziibi and misi-ziibi in Ojibwe, both of which can translate into ‘Great/Big River’.

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Filed under Canada, language, North America, travel, U.S.

by | 21 February 2013 · 4:57 pm

Lankov on the Soviet-run Popular Revolution in NK

The Sino-NK blog (“Northeast Asia with a China-North Korea Focus”) has an interesting column with the provocative title, A False Dichotomy: Professor Andrei Lankov on a Popular Revolution Imposed from Without. Here’s Prof. Lankov’s conclusion.

The Soviet involvement with the new regime in Pyongyang was considerable. Soviet control far exceeded America’s rather moderate influence in the South. However, the vast majority of Koreans did not know this. One cannot help but wonder, then: had the extent of Soviet control been fully known in the late 1940s, would such a revelation have had a decisive impact on popular attitudes towards Pyongyang’s regime? It is, after all, difficult to imagine that in 1946 North Korean farmers would have rejected free land had they known that this land had been bestowed upon them by the secretive Soviet viceroy and not by this young, plump guerrilla field commander named Kim Il-sung.

It seems that Korean historians are caught in a false dichotomy when they argue about whether the 1945-50 period was a time of foreign occupation or popular revolution. In fact, it was both. Irrespective of the Soviet advisors, who discreetly but firmly controlled developments, the major ideas resonated well with the majority of North Korean people and provided the language of the revolution. The Kim Il-sung regime of the late 1940s might have been a dependent or even a puppet one, but this does not necessarily mean that it was unpopular. Of course, its popularity was to a large extent based on naive expectations and illusions, but it was quite real nonetheless.

via The Marmot’s Hole

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Filed under democracy, Japan, Korea, military, nationalism, scholarship, U.S., USSR

by | 10 February 2013 · 2:02 pm

Tohoku Japanese in Gone With the Wind

From: Mie Hiramoto. 2009. Slaves speak pseudo-Toohoku-ben: the representation of minorities in the Japanese translation of Gone with the Wind. Journal of Sociolinguistics 13(2): 249–263.

This study provides linguistic evidence that the use – and non-use – of Standard Japanese (SJ) in literary translation indexes social marginality in two societies (Japan and Southern American), and is based on socio-economic distribution rather than actual linguistic distribution. The main focus of this study is the investigation of the intertextuality and the transduction of the speech of the minority characters (namely, male and female slaves and poor whites) in the Japanese translation of Gone with the Wind (GWTW). While it is certain that the minority characters’ use of non-Standard Japanese – which strongly resembles the stigmatized Toohoku dialect, or Toohoku-ben (TB) – is a translation of the original non-Standard English (SE), the assignment to them of something resembling a particular regional Japanese dialect reinforces linguistic inferiorization of the slaves and poor whites, as well as TB speakers. The use of this pseudo-dialect is an important element in the linguistic representation of marginal characters and likewise underscores the salient marginality of TB in Japanese language ideology.

Two examples follow.

Sukaaretto-joosama, arigatoogozeemasu-da.
Sore wa, washi nimo wakatte-iru-da.
Yes’m [Miss Scarlett], thankee kinely, Ma’m.
Ah knows it …
NOTES: Polite verb ending gozaimasu pronounced as gozeemasu and followed by plain copula da. Washi ‘I, me’ is not commonly used by females in SJ (although it is in some regional dialects). Miss Scarlett uses the feminine form atashi.

Sungari (shingari) no hoosha desuda, Sukaaretto-joosama.
Zutto ushiro no hoodesudayo.
Back wid de las’ cannon, Miss Scarlett.
Back dar!
NOTES: TB “zuuzuu-ben” fails to distinguish su and shi so susu ‘ash’ and shishi ‘lion’ are homophones, and shingari ‘rear guard’ sounds like sungari. Polite copula desu followed by plain copula dayo.

The author wrote her dissertation on Japanese regional dialects spoken by immigrants to Hawai‘i, where Tohoku dialect features were stigmatized and Chugoku dialect features became the local standard among immigrants. Immigrants from Tohoku, esp. Fukushima, were far outnumbered by those from Chugoku, esp. Hiroshima.

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Filed under Japan, language, migration, slavery, U.S.