Be the Ink

Five months ago, I discovered a townhouse subdivision of sorts called “the Magnolias,” when I moved to a spot nearby. In the months since I’ve lived in the area, I’ve wandered bemusedly around the neighborhood, growing more bewildered with each passing street sign.

Anyone living in the United States is familiar with the “Pine Groves” and the “Terrace Hills” and insert-generic-nature-term-here subdivisions that plague areas developed in the last several decades. I find them terribly boring, non-distinct from each other, almost comical. But having never really researched it thoroughly, I don’t know many of the details about street names inside those neighborhoods. Do they follow the same theme? Are they based entirely on nice-sounding and emotionally inspiring concepts? Do they simply draw names from hats? The answer is out there somewhere. I can only shed light on one example, the Magnolias in Cherokee County, Georgia, and the answer for this case may be all of the above.

Thirteen roads needed to be named in the Magnolias. A fourteenth “road” was given a name as well, though, so that anyone who pulls into the neighborhood drives gloriously down 200-foot Plantation Parkway. The grand parkway is all of the length of an extra-long dog leash. Which begs the question, who decided this span of concrete even merited a name different from the main road in the subdivision, and when that person won his case, who let him call it a parkway? Doesn’t that imply lots of traffic, busy sidewalks, or even a state highway? For whatever reason, Plantation Parkway is there, and if you use Google Maps to obtain directions, it shows up in the list of left- and right-turns.

The main road is Magnolia Leaf, which sounds normal to an unknowing stranger or newcomer to the ‘hood. Take a left on the next intersecting road however, and things start to digress. That’s Society Way, which begs an air of I’m not sure what, but definitely sparks pretension in my mind. What political message is trying to make its point on Society Way? I’m not sticking around to hear it.

After that you can walk down any of the surrounding streets and feel the confusion build: Market Place Dr., Breeze Lane, Blossom Way, Lantern Lane, until you arrive at the other end of the neighborhood and land on Antebellum Place. This is the first helpful clue to the theme the street-naming council was going for, with its clear reference to a historical time period. So, they’re thinking Southern atmosphere, let’s stir ideas of the weather, the plant life, lack of electricity, a pre-Civil War society…

The effect for someone who doesn’t really study history is mostly confusion. The effect for someone who does is… still confusion. Vague references to serene southern images rest on some streets, while parallel names proffer concepts like the plantation and the South during slavery. Whitefield Way provides another clue, but only to people who are really paying attention: Georgia Whitefield was a preacher from Charleston, South Carolina. That is probably Whitefield they meant, as Charlesstone Court lay a few streets over. Another tiny connecting road, Battery Way, makes reference to the Battery in Charleston, a main road and historical thoroughfare there. Cotton Gin Drive again provokes images of the Old South. My personal favorite is Rocking Chair Court which, while indeed related to the Antebellum South, must have been pulled from a hat when the committee realized they were one street name short. In keeping with the random selection, Bay Overlook Drive does not pass by any water, except the neighborhood pool; maybe any type of water represented a bay in this case?

After some thought, it can be roughly deduced what theme the developers were going trying to provide. Most people who use these roads will give it little thought at all, or will give it the least amount of thought. Perhaps the developers were going for a nostalgic Charleston theme. Introducing a confusing selection of South Carolinian and Old South terms to a neighborhood in a neighboring state can stir images of those things for drivers-by, whether or not their imaginations are accurate . So perhaps in this sense, they have created the mood they were going for. For others who put together the strange relations between the words and the historical references of each, the message becomes even more vague. Are we trying to recall this era in southern history in grand terms, by mixing traveling preachers with cotton gins and breezes, and adding a little nod to southern society by naming one road that very general “Society Way”? Are we pairing rocking chairs with “antebellum” because it will make the subject more approachable? I don’t think people want a history lesson in their neighborhood street signs; and if they do, let’s attempt to make it a bit more clear than the one presented here. There’s already enough trouble reconciling today’s South and the antebellum era of slavery. We don’t need to exacerbate the issue with vaguely related street names drawn from a hat.

One day in April or May of this year, I was sitting in the living room at my parents’ house perusing some quilt books (my mother owns plenty) when Ben and I came across what would become my summer (and 2009) project. The modern design of the quilt he chose (it was to be his Christmas gift) was created by a quilter named Dixie Haywood that was featured in the 2000 book Quilting Masterclass: Inspirations and Techniques from the Experts.

This design, “Soho Sunday,” would pose a particular problem to my mother and me upon beginning: the asymmetrical rows of uniquely-shaped quadrilaterals meant there was no simple pattern by which to guide me. The book didn’t give any sort of pattern, nor dimensions; as far as size, we measured another full-to-queen-sized quilt and then looked around to find something we could use as pattern pieces. We found some leftover pieces of 13×20 (or so, not sure exactly what size those are) poster board that my youngest brother had used for a class assignment. Tape three pieces together lengthwise, and boom, we had one row across. Do that nine times, you’ve got nine columns. For each row, I matched the angle I had cut in the one above it so that when combining rows later on, they would match up. We started the angles for the columns just on our eye, making sure the angles weren’t too large that the bottom would end up looking silly with distorted rhombuses.

For color scheme, I wanted to keep the palette close to the pastel and pale dominating colors that bound the original quilt, because that base is what makes all the bold squares really pop. Right as the fall semester was starting, I finished the eighth and final row on the quilt front (nine would have made it disproportionately long, so I opted to stop at eight). A few weeks later, I bought the backing fabric, a funky Amy Butler design I found at my local Red Hen Fabrics. My mom taught me a mitered corner, and I successfully created a bold black frame around my quilt front. It was ready to be quilted.

Around mid-November, I brought the quilt and backing fabric in to Alta at Red Hen, their professional quilter, who took a particularly difficult and unique stitching design and bound these two layers around their batting, creating the black graphic motif that was essential to the entire mood and design of the quilt. Black had bound each square to its brother, each row to its neighbor, and all of them into a cohesive work of art; now it would wind its way throughout each little canvas of color.

She called me with the good news about three weeks ahead of my estimated completion date, which meant that after everything, I was going to finish the job in time for Christmas. All that was left was the binding, which I again learned from my mother. I used a nice stone-colored fabric for the binding, and hand-stitched the entire back side as I learned this final step.

The entire quilt was a learning process. Every little technique was taken into this larger project as an essential and important skill, one that must be accurate and provide the professional touch that learned quilters look for. Learning from my mother, there was no way I could do things in an amateur way, which is why piecing each square was just as important as reverse applique, and little things like seam allowances had to be accurate. Those skills translate into many other areas of sewing and design, and knowing how things are made when I see them only makes me want to start all over again with a new design. But I’m not quite so crazy; I’ll give it a few months at least. I have mastered the mitered corner (OK, I’ve only somewhat grasped it) and learned some tips and tricks on making a professional-looking doubled-over binding. Along the way, I also bought my own sewing machine (having grown up using my mom’s trusty Viking) and have definitely mastered threading and cleaning that thing.

This quilt has been a labor of love, and it has been guided under the loving tutelage of my mother, who has studied and created some amazing quilts herself. It has been rewarding in more ways than the resultant blanket on the edge of a bed, and has really brought me further into a realm I have always hung near only by association with my mom. More years of projects like this and much smaller ones as well provide us both the companionship and satisfaction of the craft and help further my own personal identity within textile arts. I don’t have the goal of matching my mother, but simply of absorbing everything I can from her breadth of knowledge so that I have the ability to create, to add to the things that surround and inspire me.

The fall semester has ended, and with it, the largest writing project of my life (so far). The function of a senior seminar in history is to prove that you’ve acquired the skills to read and analyze scholarly work, do research in primary and secondary sources, and develop your own historical argument– one that contributes to a larger body of work. The final written product needed to be around the 6000-word ballpark; we had four months to become semi-experts on the subjects we were researching, enough time to hopefully learn enough that our own thesis could grow out of the discoveries we made while reading.

We read.

For two months we read an array of articles from the Georgia Historical Quarterly, on various topics in Georgia history from the Civil War to the early 1970s. During this time, we were each seeking to become well-read in our respective areas of interest, often guided through the sources by our professor, Dr. David Parker. Then around the end of September, we stopped meeting to discuss articles and hypothetical topics and started using that class time to scour the archives, the library, and the research databases we’d used to much less extent in previous classes: we had to come up with a thesis and flesh it out into a contextual and well-argued history thesis by Dec. 7.

No pressure.

I had arrived in this class at the eleventh hour, signing up about two weeks before the start of fall semester– and without one last prerequisite class I needed. And in fact it was quite surprising to some of my history major friends that I would end up in a Georgia History senior seminar after spending college studying Asia. But several weeks earlier, in mid-July, Dr. Parker and I had found a way to combine these two seemingly unrelated regions: Young John Allen.

Young J. Allen (yes, Young is his first name, not a kindly prefix) graduated from Emory College when it was just a newly-founded school in Oxford, Georgia, and spent his life as a Methodist missionary in Shanghai, China. He left the United States in Dec. 1859 and remained in the Far East until his death there in 1907. His manuscript collection as well as a large library of his own books reside at Emory University in Atlanta, deeming Allen the subject of a day’s trek over to the archives at their Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book Library (MARBL). What started as a fun mini-project for my summer class (which I also took with Dr. Parker) would have to become my senior thesis topic; when else was I going to find a subject that would so perfectly blend documents in Georgia and three years’ worth of my knowledge about Chinese culture, language, politics, and religion? Plus, I was raised Methodist, so I would get to know a little more about that history to boot.

What I would discover was much more than the life, failures, and triumphs of Young J. Allen and the Methodist Episcopal Church, South in China, but simply how enthralling it is to pour over documents that he poured over more than a century earlier. Call me a dork, or a call me a historian, but it felt utterly like touching history. Thankfully, he had somewhat legible handwriting, so I read what I could of his hand-written letters, journals, sermons, and notes for the books he wrote. It felt romantic in the way it seems when you read The Historian and follow a generation of historians across Cold War Europe in search of Vlad Tepes (the prince who inspired tales of Dracula) but also monotonous in the way that you feel work must inevitably be. The result is a happy medium, a wholly rewarding experience and with any luck, worthwhile when you sit down to write.

What did I find?

I found a man inspired by God, baffled by Confucius, and bound to pragmatism. The state of the young Methodist mission was sad when he arrived, and much as he tried to expand it, the American Civil War stole any hope of support or funding from abroad. Allen and his fellow missionary J. W. Lambuth spent nearly a decade working odd jobs to keep themselves afloat. Their families were present in Shanghai too; in fact, Allen had six children with his wife Mary Houston Allen, but only three survived past toddlerhood. By the time funding returned in any sense, Allen had made his own revelation about Chinese society. The non-receptive citizens he’d been preaching to had been anything but successful; but the young men he taught while working at a government school seemed just the type, the upper class families, who may have more influence in a hierarchical Confucian society. Maybe, he decided, reaching these people first and educating them in western subjects (including but not exclusively Christianity) could later influence more people through the top-down formation of their citizenship. These people would not only receive the accompanying western education that Allen considered paramount, but might have more success at reaching the laypeople with whom he’d become so disenchanted.

Allen spent the rest of his life working to varying degrees in education in Shanghai. The Anglo-Chinese College, Shanghai would eventually merge with two others to become Suzhou University in 1901, which had been one of his life’s goals. He would also play his hand in journalism and publishing, using his Wan-kuo kung-pao magazine to propel a combination of world and national news, essays on religion, and attacks on Confucian lifestyle. He contributed many translations of tomes on politics and religion, including The Relations Between East and West that was popular among his colleagues and governmental gentry. He wrote several books of his own as well, including one that you can find on Google Books today (by the way, it’s in Chinese!). While he did not abandon his evangelistic goals, he expanded those initial plans by adding his social missions to his ambitious strategy to win converts. He wound up somewhere in between fully accepting Confucian society and fully condemning it, and allowed students to learn about Christianity in a non-pressured way. At the end of the day, he saw both mental and spiritual parts of man to be significant.

My thesis touches on this and other aspects of what made Allen a combination of the two worlds of missionary work that grew out of that late nineteenth and early twentieth century, as Americans and other missionaries encountered reluctant natives in the field; a strong camp of traditional strictly evangelical missionaries would go forth alongside the newer social progress proponents. It wound up being around 8000 words (thirty pages double-spaced). I had an embarrassing number of library books checked out from mine and other university libraries across Georgia.

It was an incredible exercise in being a historian. Almost every person in my ten-student class ended up spending at least a few days in an archive somewhere in Georgia, from Emory to Koinonia Farm and in between. What any of these theses will become in the future remains to be seen, but I think we all felt like historians during those months. I am one of the only living experts on Young J. Allen, and I think that’s pretty darn cool.

This may sound more like a description of a totalitarian state, a lawless nation in remote Africa (or urban Africa), or maybe a Soviet-era Eastern European country. I’ve just been learning all about the atrocities suffered on the German-Russian front of WWII in Dan Carlin’s “Ghosts From the Ostfront” podcast series, and how many of the Russian soldiers were fighting for a country that had imprisoned, tortured, and perhaps killed their own family members. WWII was an epoch of worldwide chaos, really, more than History Channel specials can ever express. As Carlin says, it seems sometimes as if the people alive and doing these things during the war were creatures unlike people of today, because how could such brutality have been carried out?

Animosity towards Japanese during WWII

America has its own ghosts, which we often brush under the rug much as any other country, because who wants to remember how we forced Japanese-Americans out of their communities and  into internment camps while we blasted a cultural homeland some of them had never even visited? Well the patriotic Japanese-Americans who lived through it sure want you to…

It can be easier to point to other countries and cultures and say, “But look at what they’re doing to their own people! That’s much worse than our past.” But the problem here is the disconnect that exists between our history and what the average American knows about it; and the misinformation that runs rampant when you have sports coaches teaching your high school history classes. Our own people have also suffered under legislation that in hindsight seems unbelievable.

The United States had another demon from its WWII past that was finally given its proper recognition in 2007. The Tuskegee Airmen were the first African-American pilots in the U. S. military, and they fought in the war in the south European and North African front, earning a stellar flight record with very small losses. Then they returned to a homeland that subscribed to Jim Crow traditions of discrimination and racism. In fact, although many of these pilots were even more extensively trained than their white counterparts (due to disbelief in their abilities), many of these men returned home and could not find employment in the commercial aviation field. Lt. Col. Alexander Jefferson reported that he was treated better as a POW of Germany than he was treated in his own state of Mississippi. Read that again. Now remember that we’re talking about the most brutal war in human history, which he willing went to fight for a segregated United States. And the most ironic and tragic thing of all: he had to fight even to earn that opportunity.

When war was looming, the United States military realized they had an entire segment of the population that it need to utilize, the African-American men and women who were ready and willing to serve. The “Tuskegee Experiment” that grew out of this was deemed a failure before it had even fully begun, as black men were literally seen to be incapable of handling the complicated process of flying a plane, as reported in the War College Report of 1925. Eugenics and other notions of a hierarchy of intelligence were rampant during the first few decades of the twentieth century, but it is somewhat shocking that they were still considered pertinent, influential–and, worst, of substance or truth–by the start of the second world war.

The Airmen had a lot to be proud of though, they fought their “Double V Campaign” (victory both on the war front and at home) with honor and tenacity; only one of the Vs came to fruition. And then for over half a century proper credit was not given. The pilots and their ground crew were at the forefront of the Civil Rights movement by a decade or more. The men founded Tuskegee Airmen, Inc. (TAI) in the early ’70s and it continues to have annual conferences and has welcomed “torch-bearers” into their ranks to carry on the legacy of the Airmen and their stories. Several of the Airmen have written books (unfortunately when you search Amazon, top results are the 1995 Laurence Fishburne film…).

Bill Clinton, during his presidency, commissioned a national historic site to be established on Moton Field in Tuskegee, Ala. where the men had done some of their training; that historic site opened in 2008. Several exhibits exist currently on various military bases around the South. And opening Nov. 17, 2009 is a traveling exhibit created by students in the Public History program at Kennesaw State University (I am one of those students) in partnership with the school’s Museum of History and Holocaust Education and Tuskegee University. The coordinators of the Public History program, Drs. Dickey and Lewis, were the overseers of the entire project, and it has turned into our own little legacy. In 2007, President Bush awarded the Tuskegee Airmen the Congressional Medal of Honor, finally recognizing in the federal record books the amazing obstacles incurred and bravery maintained by all graduates of the Tuskegee aviation program during WWII. The honor also shed greater light on the legacy of TAI and the scholarships and public services they have provided since the group’s inception.

I am proud to have been a part of curating this exhibit on the Airmen. “The Tuskegee Airmen: The Segregated Skies of WWII” is a traveling, collapsible exhibit consisting of ten panels that tell the story, with photos courtesy of Tuskegee University, the Library of Congress, and the National Archives. It opens Tuesday, Nov. 17 at the KSU Center, and will be on display there until Feb. 28, 2010. I am very excited about the opening, and some of the original Airmen from the Atlanta chapter of TAI will be attending. (As a side note, my mom made me an incredible black Donna Karen design dress. Perfection for a co-curator.) If you live in the area, stop by and see it. After that, it will be traveling to various schools and organizations; the Airmen even want to bring it to their annual conference next year. What an amazing thing to have as my own tiny legacy at KSU, one that will potentially reach 50,000 people over its lifespan, according to Dr. Catherine Lewis, the museum’s director.

The Tuskegee Airmen waited a long to time to be acknowledged for their military service and impressive record in WWII. The United States has its own ghosts, but I like to hope in time, they can all be laid in the open and understood for their good and bad. I’m surprised by how many people I find who don’t know who the Tuskegee Airmen were. I hope this exhibit inspires people through their story.

I may have alluded to this at least once before, but I’ll say it again: I am only now discovering the breadth of colorful and amazing Georgia history there is to explore. As a novice historian, the past several years of my college education has been a journey in finding my spot within the field, locating the elements that pique my interest and doing the work to become “an expert” in whatever I spend the most time researching. Since declaring my major, I always knew I was more interested in world history, particularly that of the Asian continent, than in the American past. Founding fathers, Civil War, industrial revolution, world wars, OK, got it. I love world cultures and the way I saw it, I had no time for American history when there was so much outside this country to learn.

But this summer, I stumbled upon a weakness of sorts within myself. I spent the first eleven years of my life in the Upper Peninsula (U.P.) of Michigan (1987-1998), where my fourth-grade teacher taught a paltry Michigan history; at least, it’s paltry in my mind due to my minimal memory of anything that happened in Michigan history. I know Lewis and Clark passed by and the U.P. was a stronghold of iron mining (and I believe it still is…). Enough “Northern” was in me, I’m afraid, to consider Georgia history inferior and mostly see it as a compilation of idiots’ doings and praise of the Confederacy. Right as my family arrived (1999), the state flag had sparked controversy and the notion of “southern pride” seemed, to me, the ramblings of the ignorant. I didn’t understand Georgia’s past, nor did I care much to learn it. I was from Michigan, I didn’t need to know. By the time eighth grade rolled around, I was enrolled–along with every other public school eighth-grader–in Georgia History. Three years in the state had not improved my outlook on the relevance of Georgia’s past. I knew the state had been burned by that nobleman General William T. Sherman, and he gave Lincoln the city of Savannah as a Christmas present (I lived in Savannah during these years, and Savannians love to tell that story); I knew John Wesley landed in this state and spread his new philosophy across it (what would become Methodism, the denomination of my upbringing). I knew that modern-day white people loved to talk about their beloved Confederate battle flag, a topic I found boring. These were the basics in my mind, and this was enough for me to declare it a waste of time. It did not help that my eighth-grade Georgia history teacher was, for some reason, thought to be a member of the Ku Klux Klan. I cannot remember one ounce of information or reasoning backing this statement up, and looking back he seemed to be just a quirky guy who wore transition shades, but you know how schoolchildren are– the rumor stuck, and I disregarded a lot of the things he said. (I feel bad about that now, and I feel worse the more I think about it. I can’t think of one piece of evidence against him.) The KKK was a scary, historical image in my young head, another testament to the horrible past the South had, and another reason why it should be disregarded.

I am far beyond that, obviously, high school and college have smartened me slightly, and I do not have such a myopic view of southern history. But I must admit that I have spent three years in college avoiding American history classes; until this summer when a course I took was focused on post-Civil War and Reconstruction. As it turns out, there are endless subjects in Georgia history to examine, and a trove of colorful characters who participated in the state’s amazing story.

Turns out I was dead wrong all those years. And now in a bit of a sticky spot.

I had now spent eleven years as a resident of Georgia (1998-2009). I can really no longer hold on to any idea of myself as a “northerner,” since really, my memories of Michigan are of childhood and subsequent return visits. Not only that, but I have no adult perception of life in my chilly childhood state, and know none of its history. So I don’t know Michigan history because I’ve lived in Georgia so long, but I’ve resisted learning about Georgia because I excused myself as “northern.” And I am a… historian?

Not to mention the fact that I am going to be graduating from an American university–a Southern American university–and taking my career into the wider world, a world that expects me, as a historian, to be educated on my own region’s past. If I venture into a global community of historians and start to chat about their histories but know none of my own, what good am I to the field? What kind of respect will I expect to earn with such an embarrassing lack of insight on my own state’s history?

My last year in school, however, has started to build my education in this critical element. The summer class really sparked a desire to learn more about the amazing history there is to study in Georgia. My senior seminar, in which I write my senior thesis, is on Georgia History. Some of the articles we read in that class blew my uninformed little brain: Stone Mountain’s history, anti-suffragist women, the Lost Cause, the state flag change of 1957–I never dreamed of the complexity and intrigue wrapped up in all the issues in the state’s history, and how these elements still linger in the present. My museum studies class has taken me to several museums in the area that I’d never before visited. And my own new-found interest is encouraged by personal endeavors: reading books I pick out and visiting places I’ve yet to see for myself. Learning about my city, my region, my state. Eleven years later, I’ve made a discovery: the thirteenth colony is pretty darn cool.

For the first half of my history senior seminar class, we had assigned readings–articles from the Georgia Historical Quarterly–that we discussed for their knowledge and arguments but also for their technical structure and research methods. Because the ultimate goal of the course is our own senior theses, we were using these as models for what our own research would become. The length, breadth, and coverage of journal articles like this is the aim for my own project, which I’m currently tackling with success so far (overwhelming at times, but I’m handling it well). I’ll explain a little more about my thesis in another post, sometime soon.

Two of the very first articles we read were about the Atlanta race riot of 1906. (Specifically, Harvey K. Newman and Glenda Crunk, “Religious Leaders in the Aftermath of Atlanta’s 1906 Race Riot,” GHQ 92, no. 4 [Winter 2008]: 460-85; Gregory Mixon, “‘Good Negro–Bad Negro’: The Dynamics of Race and Class in Atlanta During the Era of the 1906 Riot,” GHQ 81, no. 3 [Fall 1997]: 593-621.) This event in Atlanta history had been largely brushed under the rug since it occurred, so in 2006, for the centennial anniversary of the riot, efforts were made to bring this event into public light. The class readings were my first exposure to the event, in fact, and my interest was especially sparked by trying to visualize the Atlanta in which such a violent event took place. More than the social tensions, the gubernatorial smearing, and the yellow journalism, I was also interested in the physical Atlanta; where on Decatur Street were the saloons that were targeted, where did the mobs head, which buildings are still around, and where were these spots in relation to modern-day cityscape?

As it turns out, there is a walking tour that answers those questions. The tour is lead by Cliff Kuhn, associate professor of history at Georgia State, and began as part of the riot’s centennial events. Due to its popularity, the tour is still going, meeting at Woodruff Park at Five Points on the second Sunday of each month. I didn’t have to work this past Sunday, and so headed downtown with my boyfriend Ben to see and learn about Decatur Street and the surrounding spots.

When the riot broke out on a Saturday night in September, it did not come as a shock to most people. For several weeks, newspapers had been reporting alleged cases of assault by black men upon white women, and tensions were coming to a head. A heavily publicized gubernatorial race between Hoke Smith and Clark Howell had the men pitted against each other over who was better, ultimately, at disenfranchising African Americans. Behind these things were the growing pains of turn-of-the-century Atlanta, as it had become a multicultural city including immigrants and women working in the new industrial factories. Change was not easy for rural Georgians who came to Atlanta and found unfamiliar faces and behavior. Part of that behavior was the lifestyle available down on Decatur Street, where Eastern European Jewish immigrants (among some others) owned saloons where men could gallivant and drink and perhaps other unholy things– much to the dismay of Prohibitionists and rural Southerners who saw this as a dark spot on their city. Within these saloons, the intermingling of various classes and races was itself a huge threat to the way things had been. A particularly reported lynching had also fueled animosity throughout communities in Atlanta. In the days just before the riot began on September 22, newspapers were practically egging white men on, towards a response to the perceived danger posed by black men in the city.

With the atmosphere as tense as it was, Atlantan Alonzo Herndon (Atlanta’s first black millionaire) decided to have the employees of his barber shop head home early. Herndon was not alone in that, and those African Americans who made it home before the violence began were lucky; violence was aimed that night–and in the days after–upon any man or woman who happened to be on the streets. Violence continued for three days after the first night. The riot intensified the social tension between blacks and whites, and actually created a split of middle- and upper-class African Americans from the lower-class, who they had to set apart as a saloon-going violent group who would have to be dealt with. This was seen as necessary in order to maintain the social and economic success that had so far been earned by Atlanta’s urban black community.

The violent riot, which drew anywhere from 5,000 to 10,000 men to the streets on that Saturday night, brought large tremors to the social situation of Atlanta, and its main response as a city was to blow on past it. Newspapers claimed the riot was mostly caused by low-class rabble-rousing white men, never mind the reports they had been printing just days earlier. On a larger scale, the city sort of entrenched itself even deeper into segregation, seeing it as the best way to deal with the friction that had brought this event in the first place. Reverberations of this outburst, although brushed away quickly for most of the public, affected many witnesses for the remainder of their lives; this includes W.E.B. du Bois, Elizabeth McDuffie (who later worked for President Franklin Roosevelt), and newspaper publisher Max Barber.

There is no way to easily explain the riot or its effects afterward, and that is not my intent here; you can read more on that on your own time. My own experience seeing the downtown spots was worth the parking fee and the overzealous homeless street preachers; Herndon’s barbershop is still intact, on Peachtree Street, and is now a clothing store. The Henry Grady memorial monument down Marietta Street was constructed after his death in the 1890s, and during the riots at least three men were dragged to the foot of it to their own deaths. The Atlanta newspaperman had coined the term “New South,” and had believed in the South’s potential while still being a white supremacist. Professor Kuhn, the tour guide, said he interprets the laying of these men at Grady’s feet as a sort of cry of these southern men: “Here’s your ‘New South,’” Henry.” The economic opportunities and other promised changes had not yet come.

It has taken me three years studying world history to arrive at the doorstep of my own region, and to appreciate its history. It has, more incredibly, taken me eleven years to learn that Georgia history is more colorful and unbelievable than I ever knew. I’ve got to spend some time getting to know my history.

Laura Ling and Euna Lee must have quite a story. What they have recently published, in the form of an Op/ed in the LA Times, is a brief explanation of their reason for being in that part of the world, and a narrative description of how and what happened when they were detained by North Korean forces.

East Asia

Assisted by a Korean Chinese guide, they were doing research and conducting interviews near the Chinese-Korean border, along the Tumen River. They state in their explanation that they are neither prepared to discuss in detail their experiences as prisoners nor looking to take any attention away from the dire situation they were there to cover in the first place.

As both of the articles I have linked to will suggest, the “underground” crossing North Korean citizens are making to escape the totalitarian state is dangerous and heart-breaking– and means either death or a life sentence in a labor camp if they are caught and deported. Ling and Lee were near the border where this journey begins when they were arrested, interviewing refugees and the people helping them escape in an effort to highlight their stories. It is a frightening reality to imagine that for just a 90-second stint on North Korean soil, these two American citizens were apprehended and subsequently sentenced to 12 years in a labor camp. This is a government that clearly has some issues, and seriously takes action against anyone trying to escape or trying to illuminate the situation.

It is important that these refugees’ stories be told. In early 2009, I read an article about the dangerous crossing in National Geographic; the article also added the story of the trouble North Korean citizens have even after a safe settlement in, most often, South Korea. After thousands of miles traveling under-the-radar through China (the Chinese-North Korean border is still a much safer bet than the most heavily-guarded border in the world: between North and South Korea) down to Laos, they trek across mountains and finally reach Thailand– where they can apply for asylum. Months and much paperwork later they can be granted a refugee’s visa and are able to move to South Korea. (I am of course giving the ideal course of a refugee’s story; many times, it is neither this smooth, quick, or simple.)

A refugee who has landed safely in South Korea, or maybe even one waiting on placement back in Thailand or China, still has cultural and linguistic barriers to overcome. These people have been living in a hermit society, speaking a somewhat archaic and nowhere near modern version of the Korean spoken by South Koreans. Down to the phrases and greetings used in everyday life, it can be a struggle for North Koreans to communicate with their Southern counterparts. Oftentimes looked down upon for their accents, it can be difficult for them to find good jobs in the South Korean job markets; sometimes they are not qualified educationally. Every day is a struggle.

Since April, I have been donating $9 per month to the 9 Lives Campaign, through the organization LiNK (Liberty in North Korea). LiNK uses donations to assist refugees in language training, cultural adaptation, education, and job placement while they are settling into new lives in other countries around the world. The 9 Lives campaign in particular aims to end the 9 different violent and tragic lives that befall some of these North Koreans–including sex trafficking and child labor– when they cannot find  any other work or are tricked by people who claim they can help them. There is additional tragedy in the fact that many of these people leave their families behind, with very little chance of seeing them again.

Journalists Ling and Lee have been making headlines since March 17 when they were arrested. But the more important story has been going on much, much longer.

I urge you to listen to PRI’s The World in Words podcast from February 19, 2009: “Two Koreas divided by language,” which takes the listener on a journey into North Korea, from the point of view of a Korean-American young woman who is granted permission to visit with her uncle and mother. Some of their family members were suddenly enemies when the line was drawn through the peninsula in the 1950s. She is quite aware, during her stay, that their lives could just as easily have been hers; her story is stunning, and highlights the Korean split in a starkly personal way.

Journal entry, which is explained in the previous post, for week three of Museum Studies. Discusses two articles we read to prepare for class discussion– one about the Newseum in Washington, D.C., and the other about the history of history museums and historic preservation in the U.S. Both great topics. Also a blip about my work on our class exhibit project.

The “Revisiting the Past: History Museums in the U.S.” has been lingering in my mind since I read it several days ago. I did not know very much about Ford’s propulsion of his own version of historic preservation, or the formation of Greenfield Village. Neither did I know anything about Rockefeller, Jr.’s role restoring Colonial Williamsburg, VA. The details about their roles in preserving U.S. history (and both the positives and negatives of their projects) were quite fascinating.

I have spent some time studying revisionist historians’ role in changing the face of and perspectives regarding American history; I have also studied the movement towards pluralistic, social history that bloomed in the 1960s-70s. But I had never considered those movements to revise historic traditions and perceptions in the context of the MUSEUM– that proved the most enlightening element of the article. It seems simple to me now, and obvious that the museum world would have to be adjusted as women, African Americans, Native Americans and others were writing a more dynamic American history. But prior to this I had not made that connection. The museum’s role is an important element of the story of American history (and its recent revisions), so I found this article very worthwhile.

I found it surprising that prior to the founding, mid-nineteenth century, of the Sons and Daughters of the American Revolution, there was not a large  or well-orchestrated effort to obtain or maintain historic sites and houses. The women who had organized before that were somewhat successful, but I suppose it is taken for granted, in today’s world of UNESCO sites and national parks, that spots of intrinsic value have not always been valued as they are now.

The article was well-worth the read, as I have made several connections to other historical trends I’ve studied; it has also remained in my brain, where I continue to ponder the main points. To me, that is the mark of a strong piece of writing.

On a different note, I have been looking into the photos for my exhibit panels, and have found several that may work for the introduction. I am very interested to visit Tuskegee during our upcoming field trip, particularly now that I am part of the team that is working on the “Why Tuskegee” panel. The history of that area, Booker T. Washington, and the field and institution will all come to life, I feel, when I can see them myself and have the place in my mind. Looking forward to it.

Newseum was a curiosity, to say the least. I am not sure what to make of it, and can certainly see the reason behind the controversy (both the topic being covered and the investors who funded it). Nevertheless, it seems a bit inevitable, albeit sad, that visitors today are lured to flashy, technology-driven exhibits and museums. The average citizen might prefer it to quiet, reading-based, reflective museums. It is a real issue facing the museum world today, and technology will probably never be able to be entirely left out of museums as an element in telling the stories of history. The trick will be making it just as thought-provoking. Well-made videos can do this– I know I have seen several excellent ones while visiting exhibits and museums in the past.

This fall I am part of a team that is curating an exhibit on the Tuskegee Airmen for KSU’s Museum of History and Holocaust Education. The exhibit will be on display Nov. 17 – February, and then will begin to travel to schools for possibly the next ten years. That’s a project that turns into our own small legacy within Kennesaw State. I am quite excited about this huge assignment.

Below will be, at the end, the journal entries I write each week regarding my thoughts on class discussion, readings, and project development. The brief entries will chronicle each week of the class and the exhibit progress, until its opening on Nov. 17. By that date, I will be more knowledgeable about public history and capable of working on historical projects to benefit the community. And you’re invited to the opening.

Week 2:

The more I read about putting together exhibits, the more excited I am to be part of a team that is putting one together. Having never really dug into the field of public history before, I am excited to see the impact public historians can impress on the community in which they work. It it such a subtle art. It is trying to teach people something without them realizing it, really; and it is making the information user-friendly and painstakingly clear. What an exciting challenge.

I have also been met with two separate and equally exciting reactions when I mention this class assignment. The first is, “Who are the Tuskegee Airmen?” This offers the obvious satisfaction of being able to explain, and then invite the friend/coworker/classmate/parent to visit the exhibit when it opens. The other reaction has been, “What a great topic! I know a guy who knows one of them…” While this second one has obviously been less often, I was still able to learn about those several people who were very knowledgeable about the Airmen and learn a little about their perception of and thoughts about them. One of my coworkers in particular knew an Airmen that had lived next door to him in Alabama several years ago, and offered his phone number for a chat. Potential conversation, respectfully declined but with a open invitation should I want to speak with him later. Overall, my discussion with people has given me the inspiration to really make this an exhibit people can take with them when they leave, in the form of a powerful, lasting memory.

I have also been giving the titles some thought, and am looking forward to seeing where everyone else has wound up after mulling over last week’s brainstorming session. We made some great progress, and my notes were full of thought-provoking panel topics. Looking forward to developing our plan further on Tuesday.

“Harry Potter” in Chinese is one of those transliterations that is necessary when translating names across languages; and the sounds are nearly perfect– jokes aside regarding Chinese natives’ English pronunciation.

哈利 波特 literally sounds like “ha li po te,” with the “r” sound coming out like an “l.” In fact, when I say those syllables out loud, I am tickled by my own Chinese accent. English-speaking Asians who have been in the U.S. for years can still laugh at themselves and refer to their form of communication as “Engrish.”

There is a difference between translation and transliteration, and Chinese and other Asian languages in particular do much of the latter. Translation is taking the word “cat” and saying it in Mandarin as mao. Transliteration is taking my name, Jessie, and creating its Chinese form, Jie Xi. Hence the term, it is a literal translation of the sounds made to form the word. This second practice allows words that have foreign origin to become part of Chinese vocabulary, oftentimes necessary when there is no Chinese equivalent. Coca-Cola is a good example, as there was nothing similar to it in the Chinese language. In the 1920s, Coke was transliterated by store owners as ke kou ke la, sounding similar, but meaning literally “bite the wax tadpole” (as I learned from self-described language addict and writer Elizabeth Little). Anytime a foreign name or term is transliterated into Chinese characters, a new sort of nonsense phrase is created, like the Coca-Cola phrase. Chinese doesn’t have an alphabet, like English, so “you don’t have a script that is independent of meaning,” says Little. Any translation encounters this problem, and so speakers simply ignore the literal meanings of foreign and western names, and things that clearly come from foreign terminology. Little illustrates with Bill Clinton’s name: Co lin den, meaning, literally, in Mandarin, “repress forest pause.” A Chinese person would know right away that this is a western name.

It should be noted that Coca-Cola had been searching for a better transliteration of their product’s name in the years after its introduction in China, and eventually came to a satisfying decision. The current ke kou ke le translates in Chinese to mean “happiness in the mouth.” Quite fitting.

When a word like “cell phone” must be added to the language, Chinese speakers do not transliterate such terms. This is an element of delight the foreign student of Mandarin runs in to; the Chinese term is shou ji, shou meaning “hand” and ji meaning “machine.” So, the foreigner thinks, this is a “hand machine,” and a laugh follows. But terms like this are not to be taken to mean quite such a literal thing when translated. A student must simply absorb the term to mean “cell phone,” even while the parts of the translation do not individually mean “cell” and “phone.” That would be nearly impossible to achieve, and makes the nuances of languages and the mysteries of learning a new one that more challenging and exciting.

Elizabeth Little, who I discovered within my favorite podcast, The World in Words, has been featured in two separate episodes in regards to her obsession with learning languages, fiddling with modern and even ancient languages (she reads ancient Chinese and Greek both), and in particular for her experience with the Chinese language. She has written a book about her life as a language addict, which I have not read yet– but it is on my list. She sounds like a person I would love to invite to a dinner party. And why does she come up here? For two reasons: first, she taught me about the brilliant “bite the wax tadpole” transliteration.

Secondly, and to bring this back around to the start of the post, she encourages taking language learning beyond textbook- or CD-style repetition. She says she enjoys watching movies or reading books that she loves (and therefore knows well) in your subject language. I took this to heart, and bought myself a copy of Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets in Mandarin Chinese. Side by side, the reading is slow and tedious, but in the sort of exhilarating way of figuring out a difficult puzzle. I am surprised how many characters I recognize, considering my level of comprehension, and by looking at the context, I am able to build new meanings onto words I have already learned. New words are still hard to learn based only on character, because looking a word up in a Chinese dictionary is a lot harder than it may seem at first (remember… there is no alphabetizing going on…). But the internet is there to help me, for some words. Reading in Chinese is also rewarding for its grammar lessons, as Chinese grammar still makes very little sense to me.

It was great advice, which I must pass on. It is not the most original suggestion, people have been reading books in foreign languages forever, but it has been a useful nudge. I remember being in China and searching for something to read besides our textbooks for class, and feeling utterly overwhelmed by the idea of picking up a book in Chinese. My roommate Stacey, who had taken some Chinese previous to the trip, bought a book of poetry. I bought an audio book online, desperate for some English. (Granted, most books I would have even attempted that were available were older, and rather boring ones– things I don’t prefer, even in English.) I think the connection I was missing was tackling the language barrier through a book that I love. 哈利 波特 is the answer to that.