"Letter of Expulsion" and why I have to keep reminding myself that I belong here

This last appeal by the Court at Tishomingo was handed down to these people [Glenns and Tuckers]  and was dated October 20, 1904, they had been there [in Indian Territory] since 1846. They lost their appeal, and do not appear on the Dawes Roll and did not get an allotment because of this. Many of the original Petitioners from 1870 were deceased and decendants now number in the thousands.
Mr. Atkins was the Commissioner of Indian Affairs; and stated in his Letter of Expulsion. "they are of Indian Blood, undoubtedy part Choctaw".......

And Cherokee.

Expelling the Sims Intruders is one thing . . . . 

Keith McNeil--Brilliant Reader and Reviewer

 

Just noticed. Needed cheering up.

5.0 out of 5 stars Five Stars, January 2, 2015

By 

Keith McNeil - See all my reviews

Verified Purchase(What's this?)

This review is from: Melville Biography: An Inside Narrative (Hardcover)

This is a great book and a tour de force on historiography and the writing of biography.

TIME MAGAZINE on Sendak this Week

Fading fast.

So TIME for 19 January 2015 says the top 1 of the top 10 children's books is WHERE THE WILD THINGS ARE.

And is says #5 is LITTLE BEAR, illustrations by Maurice Sendak.

What would Maurice say?

I can hear him now, outraged:

"Where is IN THE NIGHT KITCHEN?"

And a moment later, gloomily:

"They left out OUTSIDE OVER THERE."

And he would be right.

Fading fast.

200 Years Ago--The Battle at New Orleans. No Parades? No Ceremonies? No Memory?

Anyone who has worked in the 19th century knows that the most important battle of the first half of the century was the Battle of New Orleans.

Elvis is important, but I guarantee you that Vernon and Gladys knew that he and Jesse Garon were born on the same day as the Battle of New Orleans.

a bit from MELVILLE BIOGRAPHY: AN INSIDE NARRATIVE:

Auguste Davezac had led a remarkable life. Born in Santo Domingo in 1770, he was studying in France during the great uprising of 1791 in which two of his brothers were killed. The surviving members of the family fled to the new United States, settling in Louisiana, where Davezac rejoined them and studied law with Edward Livingston, of the prominent New York family, who became his brother-in-law. The great adventure of his life was being aide-de-camp to Andrew Jackson at the Battle of New Orleans, and every American in the 1840s knew that whatever credit some precisionists gave to the Treaty of Ghent the war was really won at New Orleans on January 8, 1815. Jackson had sent Davezac to the Hague for much of the 30s as chargé d'affairs. As Jackson became more feeble and made fewer appearances even in Tennessee, Davezac was, by the 1840s, after his removal to New York, the living Manhattan connection to that still-recent battle which Americans cherished as ending the Second War for American Independence. At the dinner table in the Manhattan of the 1840s, with yet another war with England seeming imminent, over Oregon, that pasture ground for the bipedal American Buffalo, Davezac could tell intimate tales of Jackson and even tell about the legendary Jean Lafite (or “Lafitte”). Davezac was also a prominent literary man, capable of writing learnedly on Froissart's Chronicles in the November 1843 United States Magazine and Democratic Review, one of his favorite places to publish. His contemporaries would have hooted at the idea that he was obscure. To be sure, Whigs could attribute his fame to his publicizing himself, as when Thurlow Weed in his Albany Evening Journal on November 12, 1844 referred to him as "glorification Davezac, who by his endless parrot songs of Jackson and the Battle of New Orleans" had "sickened and disgusted both friends and foes." (Everybody knew everybody: Melville gave Weed a copy of the Revised Typee in August 1846.)

Hard Winter for Part of Last Week--Over Now But Still Dry in the Middle Kingdom

We kept at least one window open during the worst of the cold but gave up on cross ventilation for three or four nights and closed windows and set the thermostat to 62 in the mornings for half an hour. That's how we got through the winter.

The tourists and the children and the grandchildren have all gone home and the beaches are empty although the Pacific is still spotted with surfers, even after the shark attack on a Morro Bay man who has become a celebrity. I am in charge of the dunes and at least once a week carry a garbage to the tops so I can look down for trash. Yesterday the dunes were shining. What a beautiful place to be old.

And to remember that boy I saw on the Louisiana Hayride back in 1954, I think it was, the birthday boy, lucky enough to be born on the day of the Battle of New Orleans. He would have helped me pick up trash, I betcha.

So back to writing endnotes to a piece about what is verifiable in David Fanning's Narrative. Research is so changed that a boy historian can find new documents by staying at home that he could not possibly have found in the libraries fifteen years ago.

KC Johnson & Stuart Taylor, Jr., on Teresa Sullivan's UVA and Richard Brodhead's Duke

http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2015/01/02/u-va_reaction_to_rape_claim_worse_than_at_duke.html
U-Va. Reaction to Rape Claim: Worse Than at Duke?

By KC Johnson and Stuart Taylor Jr. - January 2, 2015

Depressing similarities link the two highest-profile allegations of campus sexual assault in recent years -- the fraudulent gang rape claims against Duke lacrosse players in 2006, and Rolling Stone writer Sabrina Erdely’s multiply discredited portrayal in November of a sadistically brutal gang rape at a University of Virginia fraternity.

Even more depressing is another comparison between the two cases. While campus journalists and many other students at Duke were refreshingly open to evidence and critical thinking as the case there unfolded, the vast majority of U-Va. students have been sheep-like. They have emulated -- or at least tolerated -- the anti-male prejudices of U-Va. academics and administrators. Some have even called for secret criminal trials in rape prosecutions.

As to lacrosse case similarities, the most obvious was the initial mob-like rush to judgment at U-Va. by left-leaning faculty, administrators, and news media in embracing the now-infamous claim by “Jackie” of being gang-raped on a bed of shattered glass. By presuming the guilt of college men accused of implausibly barbaric crimes against women and minorities, these academics were oblivious to the lessons from Duke.

Not unlike the 88 Duke professors who signed a public statement in 2006, which included a thank-you to protesters who had urged the team captains’ castration, those U-Va. professors who individually spoke up immediately after the Rolling Stone article were eager to see it as exemplifying a campus “rape culture” of which there is little hard evidence.

Then there is the lamentable performance of school President Teresa Sullivan, who has rivaled the shameful indifference to due process shown by Richard Brodhead, who is, alas, still Duke’s president. Sullivan’s sins include using the Rolling Stone article as an excuse to accuse seven unnamed fraternity members of “evil acts” and to suspend all U-Va. fraternities both before and after the accuser’s story unraveled.

And while The Washington Post’s excellent work exposing Rolling Stone’s errors of omission and commission was a welcome change from the newspaper's own shoddy journalism in the lacrosse case, the New York Times continued its pattern of presuming the guilt of accused males. Its Duke coverage was exposed long ago as so appallingly biased as to prompt apologies from multiple editors. True to form, the Times disgraced itself yet again in early December by running an article aggressively defending Erdely’s piece just as it was collapsing.

The one encouraging on-campus aspect of the Duke case was the reaction of many students, including the award-winning news and editorial team at the student newspaper, The Chronicle.

During the many months when Brodhead and his professors were treating lacrosse players as presumptively guilty pariahs, student journalists dispassionately analyzed events and repeatedly scooped the national and local news media. Chronicle commentators, most notably Kristin Butler, eviscerated the cowardice of campus elders. Students also recognized Durham District Attorney Mike Nifong’s lies far sooner than did their teachers, and worked to change the system by registering voters to oppose Nifong at the ballot box.

The responses of the vast majority of U-Va. students to the Rolling Stone fiasco were far less inspiring. It was, of course, predictable that self-styled victims’ rights activists would embrace Rolling Stone’s version of events. Less predictable, and more striking, was the uncritical acceptance of Jackie’s wild tale by the student newspaper, the Cavalier Daily. Until late December, its coverage mirrored Rolling Stone’s, even as various off-campus publications shredded Jackie’s varying accounts.

Instead, the newspaper’s executive editor, Katherine Ripley, was busy sending tweets with the hashtag #IStandWithJackie about how the Jackie story “resonated with me.” (Ms. Ripley hasn’t revealed which of Jackie’s mutually contradictory stories she believes; her most recent tweets have utilized the #IStandWithSurvivors hashtag.) Assistant Managing Editor Julia Horowitz proclaimed that “to let fact checking define the narrative would be a huge mistake.”

Even U-Va. fraternity members, President Sullivan’s most immediate targets, meekly accepted their ill-considered suspension without critical scrutiny either of Jackie’s now-discredited claims or of their own alleged complicity in a supposed “rape culture.” While a national organization of fraternities demanded that Sullivan apologize, the fraternities at U-Va. made no such demand.

Indeed, the school’s fraternity council recently joined with the student council and various victims’ rights groups to recommend that the state of Virginia change its laws to hold secret trials, with the public excluded, in all criminal prosecutions for rape -- a stunning call for star-chamber-style railroading of accused males.

The student coalition also expressed hope that the university would provide accusers access to legal counsel (their recommendations contained no reference to accused students’ need for lawyers), while ordering all future U-Va. students to take a course in “Women and Gender Studies.” At Duke eight years ago, by contrast, a similar curricular proposal won support only from the most extreme anti-lacrosse faculty members, and even the Brodhead administration elected not to embrace it.

What explains this difference between students at Duke in 2006 and U-Va. now? We cannot be sure. But we do know that the past eight years have witnessed a profound effort to devalue due process for students accused of sexual assault, regardless of the merits of the accusation. This trend, which was ably analyzed by Peter Berkowitz, has been accelerated by Obama administration demands that campuses significantly weaken their already weak procedural protections for accused students or face crippling cutoffs of federal funds. The inevitable result will be more convictions -- whether the accused was guilty or not.

Today’s students have been bombarded with the president’s assertions that “one in five women on college campuses has been sexually assaulted during their time there” and similar claims by other officials, journalists, and academics. As Slate’s Emily Yoffe has observed, this absurd figure (which since has been discredited by the Bureau of Justice Statistics) implies that the typical college campus has the same rate of rape as war-torn areas of the Congo.

Yet powerful media voices, ranging from the New York Times to Huffington Post to BuzzFeed, have touted the claim while aggressively promoting the dubious “rape culture” narrative. They’ve done so through dozens of articles portraying sexual assault accusers who failed to prevail in campus disciplinary cases as victims of gender discrimination.

And the nation’s most prestigious universities, including U-Va. and Duke, have pushed such ideologies of resentment -- in their reeducation-camp-style “orientation” sessions for new students, in the extremist race/class/gender teachings that dominate many humanities courses, and in the kangaroo-court disciplinary systems that have censored expression of “offensive” political views as well as railroading dozens of students on rape charges that appear to be based on flimsy evidence.

In such an environment, it might be understandable that few students would risk being branded as “rape apologists” by defending due process. In this respect, the U-Va. student response may evidence a troubling trend over the last eight years. In any event, it surely illustrates a poisoned campus culture that has implications far beyond Charlottesville.
//

KC Johnson is a history professor at Brooklyn College and the CUNY Graduate Center. Stuart Taylor Jr. is a Washington writer and Brookings Institution nonresident senior fellow. They co-authored the 2007 book “Until Proven Innocent: Political Correctness and the Shameful Injustices of the Duke Lacrosse Rape Case.”

The Day the Annual Bruce Townsend Memorial Run Became a Memorial Walk

I stopped running and started walking instead, last spring.
Diary 1 January 1987. Ran 5 miles--Bruce Townsend (out of shape) with me, very slow, to Old Salem Church.
A note lower on page: 12 June 1987. Learned ystdy that on 4 Feb 87 Bruce shot himself to death, down by the Brandywine.

In the summer of 1986 brown, healthy young Bruce, a bicycle rider who rented next door, helped me carry into the house a toilet I then installed. In the fall of 1986 I saw Bruce at one meeting but did not speak to him. On the first day of 1987 we emerged for a run at the same time, and went together. Bruce said he was not at all certain he could go without alcohol. I was fresh back from Vanity Fair in Manhattan, where consciences are always for sale, the fresher but cheaper ones in 1986 at the Deconstruction and the smaller New Historicist booths, the smokier ones, at give-away prices, at the old New Criticism booth. I told him I was not sure either, for Michael had stopped me on Fifth Avenue to ask who I had murdered. So I understood, and we sympathized with each other a bit, and I went back to work and learned to ask questions at meeting like what you do when, and did not get around to asking where Bruce was till June.

I hate it when young men die.

I hate it when young men die because their addictions are killing them and they can't bear the pain.

So every January first since 1987 I have run, and now walk, in memory of one young man I hardly knew, one who went one way while I went another, because I started asking questions. "Dell, what can you do when . . . .?"