History Category

While searching for info on the state of Christianity in America circa 1923, when J. Gresham Machen wrote Christianity and Liberalism, I found the US Census Bureau's 1916 two-volume survey:

Religious bodies : 1916 : United States. Bureau of the Census : Internet Archive

This is Volume 1 of a two-volume set, listing Christian denominations and other religious bodies. Includes both statistics and historical information. From the introductory essay:

This report was prepared under the provisions of the permanent census act, approved March 6, 1902, as amended by the act of June 7, 1906. Its purpose is to present statistics of the number of organizations, members, etc., of the different religious denominations of the country and to give, in addition, a review of their historical origin and development, their doctrine, polity, and their missionary, educational, and philanthropic activities....

Another body, known as the "Millenial Dawn," has a number of "meetings" in different parts of the country, as have also the "Russellites," or followers of Pastor Russell [Charles Taze Russell, founder of Jehovah's Witnesses], but in neither case was it feasible to obtain any definite statistics. Inquiries have been made of the bureau in regard to the "Holy Rollers," and an effort was made to identify them with specific organizations. It seems probable that the term applies to certain congregations whose members display physical manifestations in their services, similar to those exhibited by some religious bodies in the latter part of the eighteenth and early part of the nineteenth centuries, and which attract public notice for a time, but gradually subside into more normal ways of church life.

The page linked above has the summary table of adherents, attendance, congregations, and facilities. The list of changes since 1906 is interesting: New denominations include the Assemblies of God, Pentecostal Holiness Church, and Holiness Churches, reflecting the institutionalization of the Pentecostal movement, and the Albanian, Bulgarian, and Rumanian Orthodox Churches, the Jacobite Church (Assyrian), and the Lithuanian National Catholic Church, reflecting immigration from Eastern Europe and the Levant. Later in the book, there are church statistics by state (Oklahoma had 5,401 congregations with 424,492 members in 1916), adherents by denomination by state by county (Oklahoma is here) and large cities (Oklahoma City is here; Tulsa didn't make the cut of 25,000 inhabitants in the 1910 census). Oklahoma's largest denomination in 1916 was the Southern Baptist Convention (also the most congregations at 1,112), followed by the Methodist Episcopal Church, South, with the Roman Catholics in 3rd place.

Volume 2, which has a narrative and detailed statistics about each denomination. is here. The link leads specifically to the narrative for the Assemblies of God, founded in 1914, "following upon the great revival in 1907."

Some other resources of interest:

• Brown, William Adams, The church in America : A study of the present condition and future prospects of American Protestantism, Macmillan, 1922
• Weber, Max, The Protestant ethic and the spirit of capitalism, Scribner, 1930
• Interchurch World Movement of North America, Preliminary Grand General Summary, All Budget Statements by Denominations, 1920: A four-page pamphlet printed for the 1920 convention in Atlantic City.
• Krull, Vigilius H., Christian denominations, or, A brief exposition of the history and the teachings of Christian denominations found in English-speaking countries, St. Joseph's Printing Office, Collegeville, Indiana, 1917: A description of Orthodox and Protestant denominations, explaining why they're wrong from a Roman Catholic perspective. Mormons and Dowieites are included with "Other Christian Denominations," but Unitarians, Universalists, Shakers, Swedenborgians, and Christian Scientists are categorized as "Pretending to Be Christians."
• Benson, Robert Hugh, Non Catholic denominations, Longmans, Green & Co., 1921: Another Catholic perspective on Protestants and other Christians in England.

I had the idea of teaching a one-quarter (13-week) adult Sunday School course based on Machen's book, which was written at the dawn of the Fundamentalist-Modernist controversy, which led to the creation of the Orthodox Presbyterian Church in 1935 and planted the seeds for the cultural and religious divisions that began to emerge in the 1960s. Machen's 7-chapter book would be introduced by an account of early 20th century Christianity in America and the influences of Darwin, Marx, Dewey, Freud, and higher criticism, and would be followed by a history of controversy and denominational division since Machen's time.

Recently I've returned to the habit of reading a book before bedtime and when eating on my own, leaving aside the digital device and focusing my attention on the printed page. In the past few weeks I've finished Calvin Coolidge's autobiography, Arnold Dallimore's biography of Charles Haddon Spurgeon, a short book collecting Spurgeon's controversial writings calling attention to theological liberalism among British Baptists and Congregationalists (known as the "Down-Grade Controversy"), and started into The Federalist Papers, with an introductory essay by Garry Wills.

Charles Haddon Spurgeon in his study, 1882, age 48

Charles Haddon Spurgeon (1834-1892) might be considered the first of the megachurch pastors. A Baptist of Calvinist convictions, he was gifted with a prodigious memory, a quick verbal wit, and, most importantly, a godly heritage by way of his grandfather and father, both Independent (Congregational) ministers of the Puritan persuasion. He began at age 16 as preacher and pastor of a Baptist chapel in Waterbeach, Cambridgeshire, then was called to serve as pastor of the historic New Park Street Chapel in Southwark, in greater London, at age 20. His congregation quickly grew to thousands, overflowing the building, requiring a move first to Exeter Hall in the Strand while the church was being enlarged, then to the Surrey Gardens Music Hall, and ultimately to a new facility, the 6,000-seat Metropolitan Tabernacle near Elephant and Castle in Newington, now in the London Borough of Southwark. In addition to preaching twice on Sunday and on other occasions through the week, Spurgeon edited and wrote essays and book reviews for a monthly magazine, The Sword and Trowel, founded an orphanage, founded and taught at a pastor's college, and initiated many other missions and ministries under the auspices of the church.

A view of the Metropolitan Tabernacle from the pulpit, 1882

During my time in the south of England two years ago, I worshipped on a few occasions at the Metropolitan Tabernacle, which is still faithfully proclaiming the same gospel that Spurgeon preached in the same straightforward and unadorned way. Although the auditorium is much smaller than in Spurgeon's time -- it took a direct hit during the Blitz and was rebuilt after the war; the Greek Revival portico survived the attack -- every seat was filled, and the congregation was diverse in ethnic background and age. There seemed to be far more non-English faces than English faces in the congregation. No fog machines or colored lights. After a few hymns accompanied by organ, the congregation heard an expository sermon from Dr. Peter Masters or one of his associates. Masters marked his golden anniversary as senior pastor this November.

My curiosity about Spurgeon was rekindled by an item recently posted to social media summarizing his busy but productive weekly schedule, a summary of this passage in Volume 2 of the Autobiography. I pulled Arnold Dallimore's 1985 concise biography of Spurgeon off of the shelf and got through it in a few days, which only whetted my appetite to read more of his own work and to learn more of his life and times. As Spurgeon's opus is entirely in the public domain, there is a wealth of his work available online.

Spurgeon is very accessible to modern readers. Although there will be unfamiliar cultural references, and there have been shifts in meaning for some words, these are not barriers. Spurgeon writes with a warmth and wit that reaches the reader even when difficult subjects are in view.

Major repositories of Spurgeon's work:

Spurgeon's Morning and Evening: His daily devotional, presented in blog form.

The Spurgeon Archive: A selection of Spurgeon sermons and essays and essays about Spurgeon, curated by Phil Johnson, associate pastor of Grace Community Church in Los Angeles. There is a large collection of interesting items from Spurgeon's writing in The Sword and the Trowel, many of them reflecting Spurgeon's sense of humor.

• Spurgeon's account of an 1867 visit to Heligoland (then a British possession off the coast of Germany): Johnson calls "surely the best and funniest of Mr. Spurgeon's travelogues."
• A chapter of the Autobiography devoted to fun
• A caricature and sketch of Spurgeon from Vanity Fair
• Spurgeon's frustration with requests from aspiring blank-verse poets to read and find publishers for their work
• Free advice, including Spurgeon's opinion on the proper length of a sermon
• Spurgeon's love of fine cigars, which he "smoked to the glory of God"

Reformed Reader: Spurgeon collection, which includes his monumental multi-volume commentary on the Psalms, The Treasury of David, arranged for web navigation, and The Down-Grade Controversy: All of the essays, notes, and excerpts from The Sword and the Trowel, the Metropolitan Tabernacle Pulpit, and the Autobiography that are contained in Pilgrim Publications' little book of the same title.

The Spurgeon Center for Biblical Preaching at Midwestern Baptist Theological Seminary: The seminary is home to Spurgeon's personal 6,000 book library (formerly at William Jewell College, acquired for $3,000 in 1905), which is being digitized along with his annotations.

Spurgeon Gems: All 3,563 of Spurgeon's published sermons, with audio recreations of many sermons, books in PDF and plain text format, a collection of prayers by Spurgeon, notable quotes, and materials in Spanish.

Internet Archive collection of works by or about Spurgeon

Spurgeon in print:

Pilgrim Publications, Pasadena, Texas, which reprints facsimile versions of all of Spurgeon's works.

Banner of Truth Trust publishes modern editions and anthologies of Spurgeon's writing, including the Autobiography, a collection of letters, edited with commentary from Iain Murray, and Dallimore's biography.

Susie, The Life and Legacy of Susannah Spurgeon, is due out from Moody Press early next year (2021).

Contemporary biographies of Spurgeon in the public domain:

The Life of C. H. Spurgeon, by Charles Ray, 1903, published with the cooperation of the Spurgeon family.

Shortly after Spurgeon's death, his wife Susannah and his private secretary, J. W. Harrald, assembled a four-volume Autobiography from his diaries, sermons, letters, and notes:

Volume 1, 1834-1854
Volume 2, 1854-1860
Volume 3, 1860-1878
Volume 4, 1878-1892

Reformed Reader: Descriptions of life at Westwood from Susannah Spurgeon's book fund reports from Russell H. Conwell's Life of Charles Haddon Spurgeon, The World's Great Preacher.

Other items of interest:

A happy Thanksgiving 2020 to all and sundry. Ours was immediate family only, with one away at school; our nearest extended family were elsewhere today, and many more of our extended family are of advanced age. So four of us did all the cooking, eating, and cleaning. We intended to have lunch at 2, but everything was finally ready at 4.

My wife did an excellent job on the turkey, using a Nesco roaster and some herbs from her garden. My daughter made a treat that is a tradition from early-Thanksgiving gatherings at my aunt's house: peanut butter between Ritz crackers, dipped in chocolate or vanilla almond bark. Habit forming. For sides we made sweet potatoes, green bean casserole, cranberry fluff. The Mediterranean watermelon salad included a watermelon we grew (planted late and harvested in late October). I made the giblet gravy, which turned out nicely even though I got carried away adding flour; additional pan juice from the turkey saved the day.

Not everything was from scratch: We had jellied cranberry sauce (shaped like the can) and Stove Top stuffing. In memory of my mother, we had bread but forgot to put it in the oven. There was a Tippins pumpkin pie, but we were all too stuffed to eat it.

In this month of the 400th anniversary of the Mayflower's arrival in Cape Cod Bay, it's a good time to re-read (or read for the first time) the account of William Bradford, long-time governor of Plymouth Colony. At lunch today, I read the 9th chapter, which recounts the two-month voyage from Plymouth, Devonshire, to the New World. Here is the conclusion of that chapter. I have modernized the spelling and punctuation for readability:

Being thus arrived in a good harbor and brought safe to land, they fell upon their knees and blessed the God of heaven, who had brought them over the vast and furious ocean, and delivered them from all the perils and miseries thereof, again to set their feet on the firm and stable earth, their proper element. And no marvel if they were thus joyful, seeing wise Seneca was so affected with sailing a few miles on the coast of his own Italy; as he affirmed that he had rather remain twenty years on his way by land, then pass by sea to any place in a short time, so tedious and dreadful was the same unto him.

But here I cannot but stay and make a pause and stand half amazed at this poor people's present condition, and so I think will the reader too, when he well considers the same. Being thus passed the vast ocean, and a sea of troubles before in their preparation (as may be remembered by that which went before), they had now no friends to welcome them, nor inns to entertain or refresh their weatherbeaten bodies, no houses or much less towns to repair to, to seek for succour. It is recorded in scripture, as a mercy to the apostle and his shipwrecked company, that the barbarians showed them no small kindness in refreshing them, but these savage barbarians, when they met with them (as after will appear) were readier to fill their sides full of arrows then otherwise.

And for the season it was winter, and they that know the winters of that country know them to be sharp and violent, and subject to cruel and fierce storms, dangerous to travel to known places, much more to search an unknown coast. Besides, what could they see but a hideous and desolate wilderness, full of wild beasts and wild men? And what multitudes there might be of them they knew not. Neither could they, as it were, go up to the top of Pisgah, to view from this wilderness a more goodly country to feed their hopes, for which way so ever they turned their eyes (save upward to the heavens) they could have little solace or content in respect of any outward objects. For summer being done, all things stand upon them with a weatherbeaten face, and the whole country, full of woods and thickets, represented a wild and savage hue.

If they looked behind them, there was the mighty ocean which they had passed, and was now as a main bar and gulf to separate them from all the civil parts of the world. If it be said they had a ship to succour them, it is true, but what heard they daily from the master and company, but that with speed they should look out a place with their shallop, where they would be at some near distance, for the season was such as he would not stir from thence till a safe harbor was discovered by them where they would be, and he might go without danger, and that victuals consumed apace, but he must and would keep sufficient for themselves and their return. Yea, it was muttered by some, that if they got not a place in time, they would turn them and their goods ashore and leave them.

Let it also be considered what weak hopes of supply and succour they left behind them, that might bear up their minds in this sad condition and trials they were under, and they could not but be very small. It is true, indeed, the affections and love of their brethren at Leyden was cordial and entire towards them, but they had little power to help them, or themselves, and how the case stood between them and the merchants at their coming away, hath already been declared.

What could now sustain them but the spirit of God and his grace? May not and ought not the children of these fathers rightly say: Our fathers were Englishmen which came over this great ocean and were ready to perish in this wilderness, but they cried unto the Lord, and he heard their voice, and looked on their adversity, etc. Let them therefore praise the Lord, because he is good, and his mercies endure for ever. Yea, let them which have been redeemed of the Lord, show how he hath delivered them from the hand of the oppressor. When they wandered in the desert wilderness out of the way, and found no city to dwell in, both hungry and thirsty, their soul was overwhelmed in them. Let them confess before the Lord his loving-kindness and his wonderful works before the sons of men.

Bradford's ninth chapter covers the sea voyage; the first eight chapters recount the reasons that the community we now know as the Pilgrims wanted to leave England, their decision to become exiles in the religiously tolerant Netherlands, the misadventures of their illegal attempts to escape England, the economic hardships and theological divisions they experienced in Holland, the alienation of their children by Dutch culture, the decision to settle in the New World, the manipulations of their Merchant Adventurer investors, and the two abortive attempts to start for America before abandoning the leaky Speedwell in Plymouth, England.

Chapter 10, the final chapter of Bradford's first book, tells of the expeditions from the Mayflower in search of a harbor and a place to build a settlement. It wasn't until December 8, nearly a month after reaching Cape Cod, that they found Plymouth Harbor. On December 16, the Mayflower entered Plymouth Harbor, and on December 25 they began to construct the common house, but the passengers continued to live on the Mayflower during that winter while homes were being built.

Bradford's second book goes year by year, filling in a few details from the journey (including the Mayflower Compact) and continuing the story with the first fatal winter that killed half of the passengers and crew and the appearance of a native, Samoset, speaking broken English, in March, followed by Squanto, who had lived in London and spoke fluent English. The account for 1621 includes the first marriage, which was conducted by the civil magistrate in accordance with the custom of the Low Countries, and the Pilgrims various encounters with neighboring native communities.

After dinner our family watched an interesting hour-long video from Ian Cooper of Worldwide Christian Travel which surveys the history of the Pilgrim community over the entire 17th century, from the Puritan disillusionment with newly crowned King James of England, through the sojourn in Holland, the Mayflower voyage, the establishment of Plymouth Colony, and the conflict between settlers and natives known as King Philip's War. The video is not lavishly produced, but we all learned new and surprising facts, and it contains enough specifics to serve as a foundation for further study.

The account of the first Thanksgiving feast comes from a December 1621 letter from Edward Winslow to a friend back in England, part of a larger account published as Mourt's Relation:

You shall understand, that in this little time, that a few of us have been here, we have built seven dwelling-houses, and four for the use of the plantation, and have made preparation for divers others. We set the last spring some twenty acres of Indian corn, and sowed some six acres of barley and peas, and according to the manner of the Indians, we manured our ground with herrings or rather shads, which we have in great abundance, and take with great ease at our doors. Our corn did prove well, and God be praised, we had a good increase of Indian corn, and our barley indifferent good, but our peas not worth the gathering, for we feared they were too late sown, they came up very well, and blossomed, but the sun parched them in the blossom.

Our harvest being gotten in, our governor sent four men on fowling, that so we might after have a special manner rejoice together after we had gathered the fruit of our labors; they four in one day killed as much fowl, as with a little help beside, served the company almost a week, at which time amongst other recreations, we exercised our arms, many of the Indians coming amongst us, and among the rest their greatest King Massasoit, with some ninety men, whom for three days we entertained and feasted, and they went out and killed five deer, which they brought to the plantation and bestowed on our governor, and upon the captain, and others. And although it be not always so plentiful as it was at this time with us, yet by the goodness of God, we are so far from want that we often wish you partakers of our plenty.

Caleb Johnson, who produced the above transcription into modern spelling, has a large collection of primary source texts on his Mayflower History website. His blog recounts a 2017 journey to Pilgrim-associated sites in England, and he has just published a complete transcription of William Bradford's manuscript, which includes a great deal of material beyond Bradford's narrative of Plymouth. Johnson has also begun producing documentaries tracing the histories of individual Mayflower passengers, beginning with George Soule.

The German war is therefore at an end. After years of intense preparation, Germany hurled herself on Poland at the beginning of September, 1939; and, in pursuance of our guarantee to Poland and in agreement with the French Republic, Great Britain, the British Empire and Commonwealth of Nations, declared war upon this foul aggression. After gallant France had been struck down we, from this Island and from our united Empire, maintained the struggle single-handed for a whole year until we were joined by the military might of Soviet Russia, and later by the overwhelming power and resources of the United States of America.

Finally almost the whole world was combined against the evil-doers, who are now prostrate before us. Our gratitude to our splendid Allies goes forth from all our hearts in this Island and throughout the British Empire.

We may allow ourselves a brief period of rejoicing; but let us not forget for a moment the toil and efforts that lie ahead. Japan, with all her treachery and greed, remains unsubdued. The injury she has inflicted on Great Britain, the United States, and other countries, and her detestable cruelties, call for justice and retribution. We must now devote all our strength and resources to the completion of our task, both at home and abroad. Advance, Britannia! Long live the cause of freedom! God save the King!

So concluded Winston Churchill's announcement to the British people of the utter defeat of Nazi Germany. The news launched two solid days of rejoicing throughout Britain.

America welcomed the news, but the war with Japan continued, and the country was still in mourning for the death of President Roosevelt less than a month earlier.

When he repeated his remarks to the House of Commons, he appended an appreciation for his parliamentary colleagues of all parties, for maintaining "the liveliness of Parliamentary institutions" as well as unity and perseverance in the face of war:

We have all of us made our mistakes, but the strength of the Parliamentary institution has been shown to enable it at the same moment to preserve all the title-deeds of democracy while waging war in the most stern and protracted form. I wish to give my hearty thanks to men of all Parties, to everyone in every part of the House where they sit, for the way in which the liveliness of Parliamentary institutions has been maintained under the fire of the enemy, and for the way in which we have been able to persevere-and we could have persevered much longer if need had been-till all the objectives which we set before us for the procuring of the unlimited and unconditional surrender of the enemy had been achieved.

He concluded by putting a motion before the House:

I recollect well at the end of the last war, more than a quarter of a century ago, that the House, when it heard the long list of the surrender terms, the armistice terms, which had been imposed upon the Germans, did not feel inclined for debate or business, but desired to offer thanks to Almighty God, to the Great Power which seems to shape and design the fortunes of nations and the destiny of man; and I therefore beg, Sir, with your permission to move:

That this House do now attend at the Church of St. Margaret, Westminster, to give humble and reverent thanks to Almighty God for our deliverance from the threat of German domination.

This is the identical Motion which was moved in former times.

A great many events were planned for this weekend, and nearly all of them have had to be cancelled because of the CCP Bat Virus. Britons were encouraged go to their doorsteps to join in a toast to the nation at 3 pm, and to sing along with "We'll Meet Again" after the Queen's broadcast at 9 pm.

This playlist begins with a British Movietone newsreel of V-E Day in London, including excerpts of Prime Minister Winston Churchill's broadcast announcing Germany's unconditional surrender, the procession of the House of Commons to a service of Thanksgiving across the street at St. Margaret's Church, V-E Day celebrations, appearances of the Royal Family on the balcony at Buckingham Palace, and King George VI's address to the nation. There follows the complete seven-minute Churchill radio address, then what looks like the raw footage of Churchill's speech that British Pathé included in the Movietone newsreel. There is a seven-minute silent color film of London on V-E Day from the US National Archives.

Next up, film from the 50th anniversary celebrations in 1995, featuring the "Sweetheart of the Forces," Dame Vera Lynn, then 78 years old, performing the songs that inspired the Allied nations through World War II. She was joined by Harry Secombe and Cliff Richard for a sing-song in front of Buckingham Palace. Three of the four royals who had appeared on the balcony in 1945 appeared again in 1995: Queen Elizabeth II, Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother, and Princess Margaret.

Finally, from today's commemorations in COVID-19 lockdown: The Queen's address to the nation; the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge speak to World War II veterans in a care home; and today's concert from the Royal Albert Hall, with Katherine Jenkins performing for an empty arena, closed because of the CCP Bat Virus.

One phrase in Queen Elizabeth's speech might have been merely a reference to those still living who remember that day, but it could also be taken as an allusion to her incognito excursion with her sister Princess Margaret to join the celebrating throng, a night that included joining a conga line at the Ritz Hotel. A Daily Mail timeline of V-E celebrations around Britain has more details of the princesses' adventure.

For some reason, the ability to add this to the playlist above, but here, from the Royal Family's YouTube channel, is King George VI's V-E Day broadcast to the Empire.

MORE:

Dame Vera Lynn, who lives with her daughter and son-in-law in Ditchling, Sussex, raised a glass to salute the 75th anniversary and joined in the national sing-a-long of "We'll Meet Again" following the Queen's address. (Prof. Kate McLoughlin recounts a memorable interview with Dame Vera in 2005.)

Westminster Abbey recalls its role in the celebration of V-E Day, and the steps it took to protect its treasures during the war. The order of service of Thanksgiving for Victory began with this bidding from the minister to the congregation:

Brethren, we are met together on this day to pour out our hears in fervent thanksgiving to the God and Father of us all, and to dedicate ourselves afresh to the service of his Kingdom. We desire to thank him for deliverance from the hand of our enemies; for the devotion, even to death, of those who for the five years past have stood between us and slavery; and for the hopes of a better world for all his people. I bid you, therefore, lift up your hears that you may tell the praises of our God, and pray that his wisdom may lead us, and his Spirit strengthen us, in the days that are to come.

Not unto us, O Lord, not unto us:
but unto thy Name give the praise.
The Lord hath done great things for us already:
whereof we rejoice.
Praise the Lord, O my soul:
and forget not all his benefits.

The service included the National Anthem and the hymns "Praise, My Soul, the King of Heaven," "Rejoice, O Land, in God Thy Might," and "Before the Almighty Father's Throne." The congregation, kneeling, recited a Solemn Dedication:

Let us, as our best and only worthy thanksgiving, lay our lives before God in penitence for the past and resolve for the future, and dedicate ourselves anew to his service that we, being delivered out of the hand of our enemies might serve him without fear, in holiness and righteousness before him all the days of our life.

The short service of Thanksgiving, offered hourly in Westminster Abbey on V-E Day, included the Doxology, "All People That on Earth Do Dwell," "Praise My Soul, the King of Heaven," "O God, Our Help in Ages Past," and "Now Thank We All Our God." One of the prayers offered was adapted from President Lincoln's Second Inaugural Address, including the words, "With malice toward none, with charity toward all."

Does G. T. Bynum IV know anyone who lives east of Yale, north of 21st, or west of the river?

I've been watching the creation of blue ribbon panels for years, and this list is disturbingly familiar.

The mayor's picks for his Economic Recovery Advisory Committee are yet another expression of the tunnel vision of this city's ruling class, which can't see beyond its own little network of friends and associates, and which thinks of north, east, and west Tulsa as empty places you speed through to get to the airport, the lake, or Dallas.

When I posted this list to social media, all but one of my friends who replied spotted the deficiencies immediately. If you're in The Money Belt Bubble, if you're a Yacht Guest, you probably won't see any problem at all -- you'll think that this list is comprehensively representative of the city's economic life.

Small companies that make products and provide services for customers across the country and around the world -- they may as well not exist as far as Tulsa's trust-fund babies are concerned. Small, unfashionable businesses that serve the residents of Tulsa's forgotten neighborhoods -- barbers and beauty salons, cafes, neighborhood bars, local retailers, the businesses that are most vulnerable to a prolonged shutdown -- don't rate inclusion in a discussion of Tulsa's economic future.

TU is included, but not ORU, a university that draws students to Tulsa from around the world, many of whom stay after graduation and contribute to Tulsa's economy.

Churches aren't in the picture at all. Bynum IV apparently has no interest in the institutions that provide spiritual, social, and often financial support to vast numbers of Tulsans, institutions that have had to shut their doors and have taken a financial hit along with the rest of the economy.

Let's break down the list. First, you've got the power behind the throne, the woman who was rejected by the voters but found in Bynum IV a vehicle back to the Mayor's office: Kathy Taylor.

Then there are the Kaiser Konnections: Argonaut is George Kaiser's private equity fund, BOK is George Kaiser's bank, GKFF is George Kaiser's foundation, the University of Tulsa is George Kaiser's Kollege, and G. T. Bynum IV is George Kaiser's politician. I seem to recall reading that Gerry Clancy was too ill to continue as president of TU and had to stand aside, to be replaced by the wife of GKFF's executive director, but somehow he has the strength to nurse the city's economy back to health?

Three of the city's hospitals are represented and the city's largest private employer, American Airlines, which seems reasonable. But why do you need to hear from the general manager of the BOK Center, which already enjoys a $200 million public subsidy and is going to be propped up by the taxpayer however bad the economy may get?

There's a city councilor on the panel, and of course it's the councilor for the only district that matters, District 9, which contains the midtown portion of the Money Belt.

Arch-Chamberpot Mike Neal is on the list, head of a quango that pretends to be a branch of government when it's convenient (when it comes to taking tax dollars or hosting the State of the City address as a fundraiser) and a private club when it's not (when it comes to openness and accountability). Most of the rest of the names on the list are also members of the Tulsa Regional Chamber Board of Directors -- the same names that pop up time and again on public boards and commissions.

Tulsa is known around the world as the setting for the bestselling youth novel The Outsiders and the location for Francis Ford Coppola's beautiful film adaptation of the book. But Tulsa was then and still is run by a band of Socs who refuse to acknowledge that the rest of the city exists. This election year, Tulsa needs an Outsiders revolution. Tulsa's ignored neighborhoods need to drive off the mis-leadership of Bynum IV and his Soc cabal and elect a mayor and councilors who represent all of Tulsa.

MORE: Here's the official press release, for the record:

Mayor's Economic Recovery Advisory Committee Formed to Help Restore Tulsa Economy Amid COVID-19 Response

The City of Tulsa and the Tulsa Regional Chamber announced the creation of the Mayor's Economic Recovery Advisory Committee today to help guide near-term strategy around Tulsa's economic recovery while also identifying long-term opportunities for growth as the Tulsa community responds to the COVID-19 threat.

"As we manage a public health crisis using guidance from independent local public health experts, so too will we rely upon guidance from some of the best minds in Tulsa's private sector to recover from this economic crisis," said Tulsa Mayor G.T. Bynum. "I am very grateful for these Tulsans stepping up with their time and expertise across a broad array of industries. Working together, we will work to restore Tulsa's economy while protecting public health."

The Mayor's Economic Recovery Advisory Committee will focus on two main goals. First, to develop guidelines for safely reopening the Tulsa economy during the coming weeks and months, and second, to identify what the Tulsa-area business community needs to do to drive a stronger post-pandemic economy.

"We are confident that the City of Tulsa working in concert with the local business community can ensure we rebound as safely as possible," said Mike Neal, president and CEO of the Tulsa Regional Chamber. "This committee will also leverage the collective brainpower of many of Tulsa's brightest leaders in hopes of helping us all emerge from this challenge as quickly as possible."

Mayor's Economic Recovery Advisory Committee:

Steve Bradshaw, Bank of Oklahoma
Chet Cadieux, QuikTrip
Gerry Clancy, University of Tulsa
Carlin Conner, SemGroup (retired)
Kevin Gross, Hillcrest Medical Center
Marilyn Ihloff, Ihloff Salon & Day Spa
Ben Kimbro, Tulsa City Council
Dave Kollmann, Flintco
Paula Marshall, Bama Foods
Josh Miller, George Kaiser Family Foundation
Steve Mitchell, Argonaut Private Equity
Mike Neal, Tulsa Regional Chamber
Elliot Nelson, McNellie's Group
Jeff Nowlin, Ascension St. John
Erik Olund, American Airlines
Pete Patel, Promise Hotels
Anja Rogers, Senior Star Living
Larry Rooney, Manhattan Construction
Peggy Simmons, American Electric Power
Casey Sparks, ASM Global
Barry Steichen, Saint Francis Health System
Kathy Taylor, Lobeck Taylor Family Foundation
Rose Washington, Tulsa Economic Development Corp.

*Lead Staff: Kian Kamas, City of Tulsa Chief of Economic Development and Justin McLaughlin Tulsa Regional Chamber Executive Vice President and Chief Operating Officer.

For the most up-to-date news, information and business resources in Tulsa, visit www.cityoftulsa.org/COVID-19.

MORE: Longtime reader Bob comments:

Yes, again the Tulsa Regional Chamber of Commerce appears to be picking the Committee members.

For the actual business executives appointed to the Committee, I wouldn't see how they would actually have any real spare time to devote to a Recovery Committee.

BOKF CEO Steve Bradshaw, Q-T CEO Chet Cadieux, and the CEO's of Hillcrest, St. John's and St. Francis are all probably working double-overtime to save their businesses. And, the American Airlines executive appointed has EIGHTY AA jets parked at Tulsa International Airport, totally idle.

BOKF's stock has been plummeting, falling in the past year from $89 per share to a recent low of $35, and only very recently climbing back to $45 per share. Additions by the major banks to their Provision for Loan & Lease losses has been huge at the U.S. Multinational banks at quarter end 3/31. I'll look up BOKF's shortly.

Due to a cessation of elective surgeries, which provide all 3 Tulsa hospitals with the majority of their revenue, they've got to be hemorraging $$.

How much of his valuable time would the SFHS CEO who earned $1.7 million back in 2017, according to OCPA's "Perspective" newsletter, have to devote to a City of Tulsa committee?

What are Bynum's and the Chamber's REAL strategy?

Another "emergency" sales tax INCREASE to "save" City Government.

WHY? Because in the same Tulsa World edition as announcing the Economic Recovery Committee, Mayor Bynum announced a measly 3% cut in the city budget for the Fiscal Year 2021 beginning July 1.

That's Fantastical! The city is intentionally building in a revenue crisis that will hit later this year, but in time for a new Sales Tax initiative, probably a special election, because of the funding "Emergency".

There are now 26.5 MILLION people out of work nationally. The U.S. government accumulated Federal Debt will exceed our 2020 Gross Domestic Product!

There is NO revenue flowing to City facilities at the BOK Arena, Driller Stadium, or the PAC.

As measured earlier this week, less than 180 passengers were cleared that day by TSA at Tulsa International Airport. Normal volume is 5,000 daily.

All the malls are closed. That means no city sales tax generated.

Restaurants are drive-in, take-out, or home delivery only.

Oil prices have collapsed. closing at $17 per bbl today, after actually closing at negative $13 on Monday for the first time EVER. Meaning oil sellers of WTI were paying buyers to buy their May crude oil delivery contracts.

All the oil service companies are announcing layoffs, and capital spending reductions. Oil production companies are shutting in their wells all over the U.S, and offshore. Too much oil for the level of demand.

That's a fair point about the likely level of participation by the CEOs. If the people calling the shots already know the preferred outcome, the members of the Blue Ribbon panel are just there for window dressing. The last thing they want on such a committee is a member who will do research on his own time, who will ask probing questions, and who may come to a different conclusion than the prescribed result.

And in the spirit of Rahm Emmanuel's maxim -- "Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste" -- it wouldn't surprise me if the aim is to create a fiscal crisis that demands higher tax rates.

My trouble has always been that I find too many different things interesting. The vast collection of printed material in the public domain and available on the internet is like a time machine that beckons one to enter and explore.

A Pocket article (originally from Narratively), advertised on a new browser tab, about the man who popularized a low-carb diet in 1860s London led me to his 50-page pamphlet (Letter on Corpulence, Addressed to the Public, by William Banting, 3rd edition (1864)). Searching for a magazine article mentioned by Banting led me to the Internet Archive's collection of The Cornhill Magazine, published monthly in London starting in 1860, and bound into semi-annual volumes.

Cornhill Magazine, Volume 5, January-June 1862, contains nearly 800 pages of prose, poetry, fiction, and non-fiction. The diversity of topics on display in the table of contents reminds me of Reader's Digest, except that these are full-length articles.

• The Adventures of Philip on his Way through the World
• Chapter 27. I Charge you, Drop your Daggers.
• Chapter 28. In which Mrs. Mac Whirter has a New Bonnet.
• An Election Contest in Australia
• The Fairy Land of Science
• To Esther
• The Struggles of Brown, Jones, and Robinson. By One of the Firm
• Chapter 16. Showing how Robinson walked upon Roses.
• Chapter 17. A Tea-Party in Bishopsgate Street
• Chapter 18. An Evening at the Goose and Gridiron.
• Liberalism
• At the Play
• The Quadrilateral
• Dining down the River
• Agnes of Sorrento
• Chapter 18. The Penance.
• Chapter 19. Clouds Deepening.
• Roundabout Papers -- No. 18. On Letts's Diary
• The Adventures of Philip on his Way through the World
• Chapter 29. In the Departments of Seine, Loire, and Styx (Inferieur).
• Chapter 30. Returns to Old Friends.
• What are the Nerves?
• Frozen-out Actors
• The Struggles of Brown, Jones, and Robinson. By One of the Firm
• Chapter 19. George Robinson's Marriage.
• Chapter 20. Showing how Mr. Brisket didn't see his Way
• Chapter 21. Mr. Brown is taken ill.
• Fish Culture
• The Winter in Canada
• Belgravia out of Doors
• Commissions of Lunacy
• Agnes of Sorrento
• Chapter 20. Florence and her Prophet.
• Chapter 21. The Attack on San Marco.
• Chapter 22. The Cathedral.
• Roundabout Papers. -- No. 19. On Half a Loaf. -- A Letter to Messrs. Broadway, Battery and Co., of New York, Bankers
• The Adventures of Philip on his Way through the World
• Chapter 31. Narrates that Famous Joke about Miss Grigsby.
• Chapter 32. Ways and Means.
• The Winter Time. -- A Peep through the Fog
• The Struggles of Brown, Jones, and Robinson. By One of the Firm
• Chapter 22. Wasteful and Impetuous Sale.
• Chapter 23. Farewell.
• Chapter 24. George Robinson's Dream.
• A Vision of Animal Existences
• Covent Garden Market
• Gentlemen
• Life and Labour in the Coal-Fields
• Recent Discoveries in Australia
• After Dinner
• Agnes of Sorrento
• Chapter 23. The Pilgrimage.
• Chapter 24. The Mountain Fortress
• Chapter 25. The Crisis.
• Chapter 26. Rome.
• The Adventures of Philip on his Way through the World
• Chapter 33. Describes a Situation Interesting but not Unexpected.
• Chapter 34. In which I own that Philip tells an Untruth.
• The Brain and its Use
• Fire-damp and its Victims
• A Fit of Jealousy
• Inner Life of a Hospital
• Irené
• First Beginnings
• On Growing Old
• Roundabout Papers - No 20. The Notch on the Axe. A Story a la Mode. Part 1
• The Adventures of Philip on his Way through the World
• Chapter 35. Res Angusta Doma.
• Chapter 36. In which the Drawing-rooms are not Furnished after all.
• Superstition
• The Great Naval Revolution
• Six Weeks at Heppenheim
• Rotten Row
• Book I. of the Iliad translated in the Hexameter Meter. By Sir John Herschel
• Agnes of Sorrento
• Chapter 27. The Saint's Rest
• Chapter 28. Palm Sunday
• Chapter 29. The Night-Ride
• Chapter 30. "Let us also go, that we may die with him."
• Chapter 31. Martyrdom.
• Chapter 32. Conclusion.
• The Wakeful Sleeper. By George McDonald
• Roundabout Papers -- No. 21. The Notch on the Axe. -- A Story a la Mode, Part 2
• The Adventures of Pliilip on his Way through the World
• Chapter 37. Nec plena Cruoris Hirudo[???]
• Chapter 38. The Beaver of the Bowstring.
• At the Great Exhibition
• Courts-Martial
• May : In Memoriam
• Is it Food, Medicine, or Poison?
• The Shallowell Mystery
• The Home of a Naturalist
• A Conceit
• What are the Oil Wells?
• Roundabout Papers -- No. 22. The Notch on the Axe. -- A Story a la Mode, Part 3

Unfortunately, few of the articles carry an author's byline. The Roundabout Papers are essays by the editor, William Makepeace Thackeray.

You will notice a number of serialized novels: Agnes of Sorrento by Harriet Beecher Stowe, author of Uncle Tom's Cabin; The Adventures of Philip on His Way Through the World, the final novel by William Makepeace Thackeray; and The Struggles of Brown, Jones, and Robinson, by Anthony Trollope, a satire of dishonest advertising.

"What are the Oil Wells?" describes the initial stage of petroleum exploration in Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Canada. The question "Is it Food, Medicine, or Poison?" is asked of alcohol. "Covent Garden Market" paints a portrait of London's vegetable and flower market, likely little different from its character as the Edwardian setting for My Fair Lady.

"The Inner Life of a Hospital" describes medical care and convalescence as it was at St. Bartholomew's Hospital. This depiction of patients facing lengthy stays in the hospital may provide some inspiration in this time of indeterminate confinement:

Now and then comes a patient of more sense than his fellows, who, feeling that he will be confined to the hospital for several months, sets boldly to work and tries heartily to improve his mind or learn some new art. Such patients are most grateful for a word or two of help, and it is very pleasant to find them asking the surgeon or the chaplain to lend them books of a higher class than those which are supplied to the wards. Latin and French grammars, books in those languages, and Euclid have repeatedly been lent, and have always been honourably delivered to the sister before the borrower has left the ward. A few years ago one patient amused himself with oil paint, and after decorating all the flower-pots and saucers in arabesque patterns, became ambitious and tried to copy landscapes. Being a persevering man, with some taste for colour and a good eye for form, he succeeded marvellously well, and actually sold his productions as fast as he could paint them.

The article mentioned by Banting is in Volume 7, in the April 1863 issue, and titled "Obesity." The same volume includes several chapters of George Eliot's novel Romola (a popular book that became a 1924 silent film, starring Lillian Gish, which served as the namesake for the rural Tulsa subdivision Romoland and a number of other places across the country). There is also a sketch of the final years, death, and funeral in Westminster Abbey of James Outram, an officer of British India, whose career and retirement had been detailed in the January 1861 issue.

In addition to watching commemorations on television and online, Tulsans have several options nearby and within a day's drive for remembering the 50th anniversary of mankind's first steps on the moon.

The 2019 Oklahoma Aviation and Space Trail links the Tulsa Air and Space Museum, the Oklahoma History Center in Oklahoma City, and the Stafford Air and Space Museum in Weatherford, west of OKC on I-40, all of which are exhibiting Apollo-related artifacts. Getting a "passport" stamp at all three museums prior to World Aviation Day on August 19, 2019, enters you in a drawing for a free one-year membership.

Tulsa Air and Space Museum has a temporary exhibit on local contributions to the Apollo 11 mission. The display includes an Apollo command module, two Master Command Control consoles, a large-scale model of the Saturn V rocket, and the story of record-setting Skylab astronaut William Pogue, from Okemah and Sand Springs, Oklahoma, who worked in a support role to help Buzz Aldrin prepare for Apollo 11 and played a key role in the command center during pre-launch.

The Oklahoma History Center will host a special showing of the Smithsonian Channel documentary The Day We Walked on the Moon at 1:00 pm on July 20.

The Stafford Air and Space Museum, named in honor of General Thomas P. Stafford, a four-time astronaut and native of Weatherford, has a permanent exhibit of space artifacts, including many related to Stafford's astronaut career, such as the Gemini 6A capsule and his Apollo 10 space suit. Stafford served on two Gemini missions, was commander of the Apollo 10 moon landing dress rehearsal, which flew to within 9 miles of the lunar surface, and commanded the Apollo-Soyuz Test Project, which involved rendezvous and docking of American and Soviet vehicles in earth orbit.

Four hours' drive from Tulsa, the Cosmosphere in Hutchinson, Kansas has a week of special Apollo 11 events leading up to a July 20, 2019, screening of CBS News moon landing coverage on the Cosmosphere lawn, followed by an opportunity to view the moon and planets through a 16" telescope. Our family has made several visits to the Cosmosphere, which tells the story of the space race between the USA and the USSR through a well-organized timeline of artifacts, including the Mercury Liberty Bell 7 capsule. The Cosmosphere has the largest collection of Soviet space artifacts outside of the old Soviet Union.

As you might expect, Space Center Houston at NASA's Johnson Manned Spaceflight Center in Houston, which served as Mission Control for Apollo 11, has a nine-day extravaganza of events planned running from the anniversary of launch on July 16 to the anniversary of splashdown on July 24. Highlights include mission briefings related to the day-to-day timeline of Apollo 11; Apollo 11-themed pop-up science labs; panel discussions with Apollo flight controllers on July 16 and with the children of Apollo astronauts on July 18; a July 19 briefing, for museum members only, on the next generation of lunar vehicles, from the chief engineer of Lockheed Martin Commercial Civil Space Division; and a July 23 panel discussion with current NASA flight controllers. The July 19th presentation with mission flight director Gene Kranz is sold out. The event that looks the most interesting to me is a special presentation on July 21: Apollo Engineering Design, Development, and Certification Challenges, featuring engineers who were involved with the design of Apollo spacecraft systems.

For folks of my age and older, watching men walk on the moon for the first time was an unforgettable thrill. Happily, through the wonders of the internet, there are many ways you can relive that experience and share it with the Gen Xers and later generations that missed out the first time.

My earliest clear memory of America in space is of Apollo 7, and I remember the names of the early command and lunar modules (Gumdrop and Spider on Apollo 9; Charlie Brown and Snoopy on Apollo 10). I have vague memories of watching launches on TV in a house we lived in in 1965-1966, which would have been during Project Gemini. Although the Gemini and Apollo launches typically happened at roughly two-month intervals, to my preschool brain it seemed like a regular TV series.

To see the Apollo 11 mission as we would have experienced it in 1969, you can watch online video of live coverage on the major TV networks. It's fascinating to see how the networks handled the absence of live video from space, playing the mission audio over animations of the lunar module in flight or video of actors in spacesuits manipulating controls in a replica of the lunar module interior.

During the long wait between the landing and the moon walk, ABC filled time with man-in-the-street interviews by Sam Donaldson, a silent movie about a trip to the moon, poetry from Poet Laureate (and author of Deliverance) James Dickey, and Duke Ellington singing a new composition, "Moon Maiden." That ABC clip includes a news report, anchored by Peter Jennings, which has a story about Ted Kennedy leaving the scene of a car accident, the event that made Chappaquiddick Island infamous.

These links have either embedded video or links to video of archived live news coverage:

• NBC coverage of launch (via It's the Minder
• CBS coverage of Apollo 11 launch
• UPDATE 2019/07/16:CBS Apollo 11 launch coverage from 3.5 hours before and 1 hour after launch, CBS News's own stream, complete with news breaks and commercials. (Via Gizmodo.)
• CBS coverage of landing and moon walk via kottke.org
• ABC coverage of launch and Trans Lunar Injection, landing and moonwalk via WAAY

(Tulsa readers will understand why I put the networks in that order.)

"Apollo 11: What We Saw," presented by Bill Whittle for the Daily Wire, provides an interesting angle on network TV coverage, contrasting the networks' animations and simulations, which he remembers seeing as a 10-year-old, with the tension in the lunar module as the guidance computer overloaded and as the pre-programmed landing site turned out to be a crater the size of a football field, surrounded by large boulders. Here is the trailer for the series of five hour-long episodes, and here's a link to Episode 1.

C-SPAN has aired contemporary NASA documentaries about the earlier Apollo missions:

• AIRBOYD playlist of NASA Apollo documentaries
• Apollo 8: Debrief: NASA documentary narrated by Burgess Meredith
• Apollo 9: Three to Make Ready: NASA documentary about the mission to test lunar module docking in Earth orbit.
• Apollo 10: To Sort Out the Unknowns : NASA documentary on the dress rehearsal for the moon landing.

In 1966, the MIT Science Reporter series visited the Grumman factory in Bethpage, Long Island, for a detailed look at new Lunar Excursion Module.

This article in the July 1969 issue Popular Science will give you an idea of what a more technically literate person would have been reading: First Men On The Moon: By Dr. Wernher von Braun, describes the landing process, moonwalk, experiments, ascent, return, and quarantine.

For a more behind-the-scenes look, NASA and the National Archives have made a great deal of mission audio and video, plus documentary films and documents, available online:

• Apollo 11 mission audio from NASA on the Internet Archive
• Restored downlink video of the complete moonwalk, including the higher-quality Australian feed from the first three minutes
• NASA high-def (720p) video of Apollo 11 moonwalk and mission highlights
• National Archives: Practice Makes Perfect: How the Apollo 11 Crew Prepared for Launch: Video of practicing low-gravity maneuvering, LEM control, splashdown, and egress
• National Archives: National Archives' Film Footage Fuels Apollo 11 Film: This story has links to digitized Apollo 11 documents online.

The recently released documentary Apollo 11 incorporates large-format, archival NASA footage, long overlooked. It appears that the film has already been and gone here, but you can stream it online and purchase it in various formats for home viewing. According to the movie's website, Kansas City and DFW are the nearest metro areas where you can still see the film on the big screen.

Now for some present-day documentaries and commemorations:

• "Chasing the Moon," a three-part series in The American Experience, is available on the PBS website for free streaming through September 10. Part 1 covers the beginnings of the space race from Sputnik to the death of Kennedy; Part 2 covers the missions leading up to Apollo 11, and Part 3 is focused on the moon landing mission. Each episode runs about 2 hours.
• NASA administrator Jim Bridenstine on the 50th anniversary of Apollo 11 and the plan to return to the moon
• Five recommended space documentaries available for streaming
• Apollo 8 50th anniversary service at the Washington Cathedral
• Apollo 8: Discussion of 50th anniversary of first lunar orbit
• Wright Brothers National Memorial at Kitty Hawk, NC, will rebroadcast the 1969 TV coverage of the landing, just as it did during Apollo 11
• History.com has a story on Apollo 10's near disaster
• The US Mint's commemorative Apollo 11 50th anniversary silver dollar features a spacesuit footprint in lunar soil.

In a later entry, I'll highlight commemorations and special events in our part of Planet Earth.

A half-century ago, three American astronauts became the first humans to orbit the moon. On Christmas eve, during a global broadcast estimated to have been heard by a quarter of the Earth's population, the crew of Apollo 8 -- Frank Borman, Jim Lovell, and Bill Anders -- read from the first chapter of Genesis, the Bible's account of the creation of the heavens and the earth.

In this short video that includes the famous broadcast from lunar orbit, NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine puts the achievement of Apollo 8 into the context of the space race with the USSR and the recent Apollo 1 disaster and the problems with the launch of Apollo 6, the final unmanned Saturn V test.

Today is the 100th anniversary of the armistice that ended the fighting of what they knew as the Great War, what we know as the First World War.

In memory of the millions who died in the conflict and the millions more who were maimed in body and mind, here is the poem "For the Fallen," written in 1914, by Laurence Binyon.

With proud thanksgiving, a mother for her children, England mourns for her dead across the sea. Flesh of her flesh they were, spirit of her spirit, Fallen in the cause of the free.

Solemn the drums thrill: Death august and royal
Sings sorrow up into immortal spheres.
There is music in the midst of desolation
And a glory that shines upon our tears.

They went with songs to the battle, they were young,
Straight of limb, true of eye, steady and aglow.
They were staunch to the end against odds uncounted,
They fell with their faces to the foe.

They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old:
Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn.
At the going down of the sun and in the morning
We will remember them.

They mingle not with their laughing comrades again;
They sit no more at familiar tables of home;
They have no lot in our labour of the day-time;
They sleep beyond England's foam.

But where our desires are and our hopes profound,
Felt as a well-spring that is hidden from sight,
To the innermost heart of their own land they are known
As the stars are known to the Night;

As the stars that shall be bright when we are dust,
Moving in marches upon the heavenly plain,
As the stars that are starry in the time of our darkness,
To the end, to the end, they remain.

MORE:

Every year leading up to Armistice Day, the Royal British Legion sells poppy badges as a remembrance, a tradition with roots in the poem, "In Flanders Fields."

The Great War website is a wealth of information about the history of the war.

The BBC has a wealth of radio programming remembering World War I available online around the world.

Today's commemorations:

Sunday: A Remembrance Special, presented by Edward Stourton

For the Fallen: A service from the Chapel of the Royal Hospital, Chelsea, to mark the centenary of the WWI Armistice.

Ceremony of Remembrance at the Cenotaph: The annual laying of wreaths at the memorial in Whitehall

A Service to Mark the Centenary of the End of the First World War, from Westminster Abbey, with the Royal Family in attendance.

Armistice Day Poems: Eight short poems broadcast today on BBC Radio 4.

Historical interviews and dramatisations:

Voices of the First World War presents interviews with those who lived through it, from the archives of the BBC and the Imperial War Museum. 56 episodes, presented chronologically through the course of the war. A condensed series of five one-hour episodes, one for each year of the war, is available for the next month.

Two dramas tell the story of life during the Great War: Tommies, about those on the front lines, and Home Front for those who stayed behind.

On the lighter side, BBC Radio 4 Extra presents "Salutes You, Sir!" a three-hour collection of radio comedy by and for the Armed Forces, including episodes of The Navy Lark, Much Binding in the Marsh, and Dad's Army, hosted by Ian Lavender -- Private Pike on Dad's Army.

A millennium before Elvis sightings were to appear regularly in supermarket tabloids, stories of another unlikely survival circulated around England and Scandinavia.

Eleanor Parker, author of the award-winning history blog A Clerk of Oxford, translated an Old Norse text called 'Hemings þáttr,' about a soldier named Heming who travels from Norway to England and serves in the army of Harold Godwinson, the Saxon King of England.

In this version of the story, Harold survives the Battle of Hastings under a pile of corpses, is discovered and nursed back to health by a cottager who had been looting the bodies, and chooses to become a hermit monk at Canterbury rather than lead a rebellion and ask his earls to break the oaths they swore to William of Normandy after his victory. Harold lives for three more years, and loyal Heming visits him often, bringing food to his cell. When Harold dies, William discovers what has happened and comes to see the body for himself. Admiring Heming's loyalty to Harold, William offers him a high position as a baron and leader of his bodyguard, but Heming asks to be allowed to live as a monk in Harold's cell, which request William grants.

The mainstream media, in the form of the Bayeux Tapestry, says that Harold was killed and dismembered at Hastings. HIC HAROLD REX INTERFECTUS EST. History was written by the victors, embroidered, literally. Cause of death: Arrow to the eye, although there is some doubt about whether the arrow in the tapestry is original or the result of an overzealous 18th century restoration.

In 2014, shortly after the discovery of the remains of Richard III in a Leicester car park, an amateur historian paid to have ground-penetrating radar scan Waltham Abbey in search of the remains of King Harold Godwinson. (Other coverage: Telegraph, Daily Mail.) The site is named in an English text, Vita Haroldi ("Life of Harold"), which says that Harold survived the battle, then lived many years as a hermit monk at Dover and later at Chester.

For all the coverage in anticipation of the scan at Waltham, I haven't found an article saying what was found -- nothing, I assume. But three years later, there's a claim that Harold was buried in Bishop's Stortford, Hertfordshire.

On the Map Scans Facebook group, someone posted a link to the Internet Archive's copy of the 1980 State Farm Road Atlas, which was a rebranded Rand McNally Road Atlas. That got me wondering about finding earlier editions, and I did a search for items published by Rand McNally. The results were much broader than I expected. I knew that the company had published children's books -- I had several growing up -- but I was amazed by the number of other topics included. Before the days of automobile travel, there were "Handy Guides" to major American cities and for now-legendary World's Fairs in St. Louis, Buffalo, and Chicago. There is even some long-obsolete Rand McNally software available on the archive.

Here's a short list of interesting items I found:

• 1893: Handbook of the World's Columbian Exposition: The great World's Fair in Chicago to commemorate the 400 anniversary of Columbus's voyage of discovery. Midway Plaisance, White City, and the lakefront are all legacies of this fair. This book includes maps of the grounds and of major exhibition buildings, with descriptions of what you'd find in each. Australia didn't yet exist, but New South Wales had a pavilion. Oklahoma shared a Joint Territorial building with New Mexico and Arizona.
• 1893: Diagrams of World's Fair Buildings showing Location of Exhibits: Maps and building plans (but no description) from the Chicago World's Columbian Exposition
• 1895: Chicago City Railway Directory and Street Number Guide: "Accurately locating any given number of any street or avenue, and showing the street car line most convenient for reaching it. Also giving the route of every car line, with distinguishing colors of cars and lights; night line time tables, etc."
• 1898: The Washington Post Standard War Atlas: The war being the Spanish-American War.
• 1899: Handy Guide to Boston and Environs: Descripitions of streetcar routes and the recently opened Tremont Street subway, photos of important buildings, including my church home-away-from home, Tremont Temple, which opened its doors for public lectures between Sundays. The current building was only six years old at the time, having been rebuilt after a fire.

• 1904: The Rand-McNally economizer; a guide to the World's fair, St. Louis, 1904: The guide tells the reader how best to spend six days at the fair, winding up in a reproduction of old Jerusalem. Oklahoma has its own building now: "A composite Corinthian effect has been admirably planned and carried out by the architect [A. J. Miller of Oklahoma City] of this building. Large porches with wide ornamental arcades surround the front of both floors, and a view of the immense reception hall may be obtained from the wide gallery on the second floor." The Philippine village rates four pages of description and a photo. There is an exhaustive catalog of artworks on display and of the items from Queen Victoria's Jubilee Presents -- items received from the far reaches of the Empire in honor of her 50th and 60th anniversaries on the throne.
• 1914: United States Colonies and Dependencies Illustrated by William Dickson Boyce: A 600 page book describing our colonies (Alaska, Hawaiian Islands, Philippine Islands, Porto Rico, the Panama Canal Zone and Republic of Panama) and our dependencies (Cuba, Haiti, Dominican Republic).
• 1914: Atlas of the European Conflict: "containing detailed maps of the nations, pertinent statistics of the contending powers, analysis of conditions leading up to the present struggle." Includes a very nice detailed map of the German Empire with its component kingdoms and duchies.
• 1915: Rand McNally official auto trails map of the United States: Before the numbered U. S. highway system of 1926 there were named highways marked on telephone poles: Jefferson Highway, Ozark Trail, Dixie Highway, Old Spanish Trail, and the famed Lincoln Highway.
• 1916: Washington guide to the city and environs: Streetcar routes, ads for grand hotels, descriptions and photos of monuments and prominent buildings (including the then-new Post Office, now a Trump hotel). There is a detailed map and guide to the Library of Congress, including photographs and descriptions of its murals and inscriptions. The Corcoran Gallery, Smithsonian Institution, White House, and Capitol also enjoy extensive description. There is even a section to help you navigate the etiquette if you happen to attend a dinner with the President. At the back you'll find patent medicine ads, and information on electric railway transportation to the Great Falls of the Potomac. You could have gotten a pretty decent civics education from this book, which not only shows you the major federal office buildings, but explains what functions are performed within.
• 1918: Ukraine: The Land and Its People: By Prof. Stephen Rudnitsky of the University of Lemberg, a city later known as Lwow, Poland, and now Lviv, Ukraine. Published by the Ukrainian Alliance of America. Written in Ukrainian and translated into German and then from German to English. "The reader is respectfully requested to note that the few unpleasant references to Russia are of course meant to apply to the Russia of the Czars, as the book was written during the Czarist regime."
• 1919: Summary of the Treaty of Peace: Map showing the new, post-World War I boundaries of Europe. Jugo-Slavia, Poland, and Czechoslovakia exist, and Germany has lost territory to France, Poland, and Denmark, but the Baltic States have yet to be created. Turkey's partitioning is curious.
• 1919: What Calvinism Has Done for America by John Clover Monsma: This is worth further exploration. The author attempts to show the roots of America's greatness in the doctrines and habits of Calvinism, which he boils down to the core idea of God's sovereignty and traces two centuries before Calvin to the English theologians William of Occam and Thomas Bradwardine.
• 1921: Australia and New Zealand Illustrated by William Dickinson Boyce: Hopefully there's another version out there; this scan lacks all the illustrations.
• 1960: The Elves and the Shoemaker: The Brothers Grimm tale, illustrated by Esther Friend.
• 1973: Rand McNally Road Atlas and Travel Guide: This is a smaller format atlas, with each state on a single page, and only major highways shown.
• 1980: State Farm Road Atlas. United States / Mexico / Canada: A standard Rand McNally Atlas of the period with State Farm insurance ads on the outer and inside covers.

The older books are public domain; newer books are available for 14-day loan, if you have a free Internet Archive account.

I'll get back to the charter amendment proposals in a couple of days, but we have some historical commemorations that deserve our attention. There's the big one -- the semimillenial celebration of Luther's 95 Theses and the commencement of the Protestant Reformation -- but 100 years ago today there were a couple of events of lasting significance involving the Holy Land. One of those events was the last great cavalry charge in the history of warfare, which broke the Ottoman line of defense and opened the door for the conquest of Palestine by British, Australian, and New Zealand troops.

Beersheba is the ancient city known as the southern end of proverbial description of the extent of the ancient land of Israel -- "from Dan even unto Beersheba." It was at Beersheba that Abraham and Abimelech, king of Gerar, made a covenant, by which the place was named -- Well of the Oath (Genesis 21:31). The name could also mean the Seven Wells dug by Isaac (Genesis 26). The modern city of Beersheba, to the west of the tel, was founded in 1900 as a southern outpost of Ottoman Palestine, strengthening the Turks' claim to the Negev against British control of the Suez Canal and the Sinai Peninsula. Today the metro area has a population of about a half-million people. To the east of the modern city is Tel Be'er Sheva National Park, a UNESCO World Heritage site, where you can walk down into an ancient cistern from King David's day.

In 1917, Beersheba was one end of a defensive line that ran to Gaza on the coast, protecting Ottoman and German control of Palestine. In March and April, Allied forces twice attacked Gaza and twice failed to take the city. A long stalemate ensued, which included trench warfare, mounted patrols, aerial reconnaisance and dogfights, and training and reorganization on both sides of the line.

That reorganization included a change of leadership on the British side and a change of strategy, aided by some detailed local knowledge. Historian Barry Shaw explains in a Jerusalem Post story:

Under Gen. Sir Archibald Murray, the British army was badly beaten twice at the battles for Gaza.

Murray tried to put a brave face on his humiliating defeat by misrepresenting the casualty figures and claiming that "it was a most successful operation, the fog and waterless nature of the country just saving the enemy from complete disaster."

The War Cabinet did not see it that way, and Murray was relieved of duty, to be replaced as commander of what was called "The Egyptian Expeditionary Force" by Gen. Edmund Allenby.

This no-nonsense military leader, known as "The Bull" for his build (he stood 194 cm. tall) and demeanor, received instructions from British prime minister David Lloyd George, a Welsh Baptist Zionist, to give the British public a gift by taking Jerusalem by Christmas.

Allenby adopted a new tactic, military deception, by lulling the enemy into thinking he would follow Murray's example and launch a third major assault on Gaza.

Instead, aided and advised by a Palestinian Jew and a Christian Zionist intelligence officer, Allenby was persuaded to swerve south of Gaza and attack Beersheba because, as Aaron Aaronsohn, an agronomist from Zichron Ya'akov, told him, "that is where the water is."

Aaronson's research convinced him that large reserves of water lay hidden under the hot desert surface of the Negev. As he pointed out to a receptive Allenby, without sufficient water for his hundreds of thousands of men, tens of thousands of horses and camels and his motorized vehicles, he had no chance of winning the Palestine campaign.

Aaronsohn also knew the trails and wadis that would allow Allenby's massed troops to negotiate their way from Egypt to Beersheba without getting bogged down in the soft desert sands and for his advanced troops to approach Beersheba relatively undetected.

Shaw describes the battle as Britain's first victory in the Great War after four humiliating defeats to the Turks.

An article on the History of War website explains the strategic importance of Beersheba:

The main Turkish defensive line ended at Kauwukah, ten miles to the north west of Beersheba. There was a simple reason for this. The countryside to the west and south of Beersheba was entirely waterless. Any attacking force would have to carry its own water, and be confident that it could capture Beersheba in a single day, for the only water in the area was within the town. The biggest danger was that the Turks might have time to destroy the wells within Beersheba, forcing the attacking force to retreat back towards its water supplies.

The Turkish defences of Beersheba were strongest towards the south and west. There they had a line of trenches, protected by barbed wire, supported by strong redoubts, all constructed along a ridge. To the north and east the defences were much weaker, and crucially lacked any wire. No serious attack was expected from the area of rocky hills east of the town. Beersheba had just been designated as the headquarters of a new Turkish Seventh Army, but on 31 October that army had not yet come into being. The town was defended by 3,500-4,000 infantry, 1,000 cavalry with four batteries of artillery and fifty machine guns.

Early on the morning of October 31, 1917, the British guns began the attack on Ottoman positions. By mid-morning the attack on the tel, a key defensive position, had begun, and by mid-afternoon New Zealand ground forces charged up the tel with bayonets and took it. Not long after, the Australian 12th and 4th Light Horse Regiments led the charge for the assault on the town:

The 4th and 12th Australian Light Horse Regiments drew up behind a ridge. From the crest, Beersheba was in full view. The course lay down a long, slight slope which was bare of cover. Between them and the town lay the enemy defences. The 4th was on the right; the 12th was on the left. They rode with bayonets in hand. Each drew up on a squadron frontage. Every man knew that only a wild, desperate charge could seize Beersheba before dark. They moved off at the trot, deploying at once into artillery formation, with 5 metres between horsemen. Almost at once the pace quickened to a gallop. Once direction was given, the lead squadrons pressed forward. The 11th Australian Light Horse Regiment and the Yeomanry followed at the trot in reserve. The Turks opened fire with shrapnel. Machine guns fired against the lead squadrons. The Royal Horse Artillery got their range and soon had them out of action. The Turkish riflemen fired, horses were hit, but the charge was not checked. The Lighthorsemen drove in their spurs; they rode for victory and they rode for Australia. The bewildered enemy failed to adjust their sights and soon their fire was passing harmlessly overhead. The 4th took the trenches; the enemy soon surrendered. The 12th rode through a gap and on into the town. Their was a bitter fight. Some enemy surrendered; others fled and were pursued into the Judean Hills. In less than an hour it was over; the enemy was finally beaten.

Crucially, the wells were intact when the Allies took the city.

By the end of the year the Allies had taken Jerusalem. The conquest of Beersheba was an turning point in the war against the Ottoman Empire, and a landmark of Australian military history.

Read more, and see photos of the charge:

• The Light Horse Charge at Beersheba
• The taking of Tel el Saba, or the role the New Zealanders played in the taking of Beersheba. By Steve Butler
• Col. Jack Davies personal account of the charge at Beersheba
• Photographs of Beersheba by Francis Gillard Rathkey
• A photograph of the charge
• Reenactment of the battle in western Queensland
• The Beersheba Living Museum 5th Light Horse Regiment in Maleny, Queensland, opened its doors for the first time earlier this year.
• ABC: Descendants of the Australian Light Horsemen retrace their ride in Beersheba
• ABC video: Remembering Indigenous [Aboriginal] soldiers at the Battle of Beersheba

MORE: Video from the Prime Minister of Israel's office of today's commemorations, including a dramatic haka (Maori war dance) in memory of the New Zealand soldiers who died capturing Tel Be'er Sheva.

A dictionary of the ancient Akkadian language, the language of Assyria and Babylon, has been completed after 90 years and published by the University of Chicago.

"This is a heroic and significant moment in history," beamed Dr Irving Finkel of the British Museum's Middle East department.

As a young man in the 1970s Dr Finkel dedicated three years of his life to The Chicago Assyrian Dictionary Project which is based at the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago.

That makes him something of a spring chicken in the life story of this project, which began in 1921.

Almost 90 experts from around the world took part, diligently recording and cross referencing their work on what ended up being almost two million index cards.

The Chicago Assyrian Dictionary is 21 volumes long and is encyclopaedic in its range. Whole volumes are dedicated to a single letter, and it comes complete with extensive references to original source material throughout.

Once again, we see that human nature has no history:

"It is a miraculous thing," enthuses Dr Finkel.

"We can read the ancient words of poets, philosophers, magicians and astronomers as if they were writing to us in English...."

But what is so striking according to the editor of the dictionary, Prof Martha Roth, is not the differences, but the similarities between then and now.

"Rather than encountering an alien world, we encounter a very, very familiar world," she says, with people concerned about personal relationships, love, emotions, power, and practical things like irrigation and land use.

If you want a copy for the bookshelf, it's only nineteen-ninety-five -- $1,995, that is. If you just want access to the info, the Chicago Assyrian Dictionary is available for free download.

Volume 6 (Het) was the first volume published, back in 1956. Its foreword explains how the entries are ordered and organized. Volume 1 (A, part 1) has an introduction that tells the history of the discovery and study of the Akkadian language, beginning in a small way in the 17th century and blossoming with the discoveries of Ninevah and Babylon in the early 19th century, and recounts the development of the dictionary from its inception in 1921 until the publication of Volume 1 in 1964.

Back in October, my youngest and I joined our homeschool community on a field trip to the Fred Jones Jr. Museum of Art on the University of Oklahoma campus to see a special exhibit from Rome's Capitoline Museum. "Immortales: The Hall of Emperors of the Capitoline Museums, Rome" features 20 ancient busts of Roman emperors and their consorts from the very beginning of the empire through its final century.

The exhibit was originally scheduled to run through December 6, 2015, but I was excited to learn this weekend that it has been extended through February 14, 2016

This is not part of a tour, but the sole showing of these ancient sculptures anywhere in the world beyond Rome, and it's part of a broader collaboration between OU and the Capitoline Museums, bringing ancient Roman artifacts to Oklahoma for study. According to the press release:

The exhibit in Oklahoma is the second phase of the Hidden Treasures of Rome program, which was launched in 2014 by Enel Green Power, in partnership with the world renowned Capitoline Museums of Rome and served as a first-of-its-kind initiative to exchange cultural, educational and technological resources and artifacts between the Capitoline Museums and U.S. universities.

The program's expansion allows EGP-NA to bring the ancient culture of Rome to the state of Oklahoma, creating a distinctive exhibit for the university and innovative way for the company to engage with local residents and communities, Venturini said....

This collaboration also includes the transfer of epigraphs and materials from the
Capitoline museum's Antiquarium to the Sam Noble Oklahoma Museum of Natural History at OU. These artifacts - dating to the period of the Roman Republic (fifth to first centuries B.C.) - are part of 100,000 pieces that were stored for more than 100 years in the Capitoline Museums' Antiquarium but have never shown to the public, creating the opportunity for undergraduate students from the university's department of Classics and Letters to catalog and analyze these artifacts for inclusion in the Digital Latin Library project.

We were fascinated by the realism and detail of these ancient marble sculptures, which showed hair texture, brow furrows, and smile lines, and even scars and double chins. Perhaps the most impressive were the portraits of Vespasian and Livia, both of which used several different types and colors of marble. Vespasian, founder of a new dynasty in the wake of the chaotic "Year of Four Emperors," looked like someone you might see around town, with his broad face and nose, large ears, and receding hairline. Our guide said one visitor thought he resembled Lyndon Johnson. One of our group thought he looked like an old football coach.

It was interesting to compare the marble portraits of Octavian and Augustus -- the same man, but depicted first as ordinary politician and then as deified emperor. In the transition, the sculptor gave Augustus a civic wreath, a svelter nose, and smaller ears than his civilian portrait.

We noticed the addition of carved pupils, beginning with Antoninus Pius, and increasing in sophistication through the years. The exhibit caption noted the emergence of beards after the Greek fashion beginning with Hadrian. The bust of Alexander Severus, showed him with a beard, but a rather insubstantial one, reflecting his youth -- he ascended to the principate as a 14-year-old.

Elsewhere in the museum, we enjoyed the permanent exhibit of French impressionists, were drawn in trying to decipher the Greek and Slavonic captions on the McGhee Collection of Orthodox icons, and were fascinated by a temporary exhibition of works on paper from 18th and 19th century Europe, which included satirical engravings by Goya and Hogarth, a landscape engraving by J. M. W. Turner, and a page from William Blake's Book of Job.

Later in the day, after a picnic lunch at Reaves Park (where the fort-like play structure was the perfect setting for a battle with foam-rubber swords and axes), we visited the Sam Noble Oklahoma Museum of Natural History. The dinosaur exhibit is the star of the museum, but we also enjoyed playing mancala in the hands-on Discovery Room and viewing a special exhibit on Galileo and the publishing society of which he was a member, which rescued a book on the birds of North America from oblivion.

OU is celebrating Galileo this year of its 125th anniversary with a series of exhibits around campus. Please note that "Through the Eyes of the Lynx: Galileo, Natural History and the Americas" will close on January 17 to make way for another exhibit on Galileo and Microscopy at the Sam Noble Museum. The exhibit "Galileo and the Scientific Revolution, currently on display on the OU-Tulsa campus in Schusterman Library, will close on December 18.

streiff, a contributing writer at RedState, has written a detailed and stirring account of the days leading up to and following Gen. Robert E. Lee's surrender of the Confederate Army of Northern Virginia at Appomattox Courthouse to Gen. Ulysses S. Grant on April 9, 1865.

April 7, 1865. Prelude to Appomattox

April 8, 1865. On the eve of surrender

April 9, 1865. The Surrender at Appomattox

In the final installment, he cites the surrender as one of three "critical points in American history: points after Independence was a done deal but where the very fate of the Republic teetered on razor's edge." Washington's handling of the Newburgh Conspiracy at the end of the Revolutionary War and his willingness to step aside after two terms as president were the other two he mentioned.

One of Lee's aides proposed that soldiers steal away in small groups, return to their states and report for further duty, effectively calling for a protracted guerrilla war. Lee immediately shut down the idea. Streiff quotes John Daniel Davidson, writing at The Federalist:

Lee gently rebuked Alexander, reminding him, "We must consider its effect on the country as a whole." The men, he said, "would be without rations and under no control of officers. They would be compelled to rob and steal in order to live. They would become mere bands of marauders, and the enemy's cavalry would pursue them and overrun many sections that may never have occasion to visit. We would bring on a state of affairs it would take the country years to recover from." Alexander would later write: "I had not a single word to say in reply. He had answered my suggestion from a plane so far above it that I was ashamed of having made it."

Grant handled the surrender with leniency and respect for the troops who had valiantly fought on the other side. He allowed the officers to retain their sidearms and all the troops to keep their horses and mules; Lee had told him that the animals were owned by their riders and would be needed for planting crops to feed their families. Grant stifled loud celebrations by his troops: "The war is over; the rebels are our countrymen again, and the best sight of rejoicing after the victory will be to abstain from all demonstrations." Three days later, General Joshua Chamberlain formally received the arms and flags of the Confederates, and he had his troops offer a salute of honor. "These enemies in many a bloody battle ended the war not with the shame on one side and exultation on the other but with a soldier's 'mutual salutation and farewell.'"

Had the defeated and victorious generals not acted magnanimously, the country might have suffered "a prolonged and bloody insurgency in the South that would have caused a permanent rift in the nation."

On October 27, 1964, Ronald Reagan gave this televised speech in support of Republican presidential nominee Barry Goldwater.

Not too long ago, two friends of mine were talking to a Cuban refugee, a businessman who had escaped from Castro, and in the midst of his story one of my friends turned to the other and said, "We don't know how lucky we are." And the Cuban stopped and said, "How lucky you are? I had someplace to escape to." And in that sentence he told us the entire story. If we lose freedom here, there's no place to escape to. This is the last stand on earth.

And this idea that government is beholden to the people, that it has no other source of power except the sovereign people, is still the newest and the most unique idea in all the long history of man's relation to man.

This is the issue of this election: Whether we believe in our capacity for self-government or whether we abandon the American revolution and confess that a little intellectual elite in a far-distant capitol can plan our lives for us better than we can plan them ourselves.

You and I are told increasingly we have to choose between a left or right. Well I'd like to suggest there is no such thing as a left or right. There's only an up or down--[up] man's old--old-aged dream, the ultimate in individual freedom consistent with law and order, or down to the ant heap of totalitarianism. And regardless of their sincerity, their humanitarian motives, those who would trade our freedom for security have embarked on this downward course....

Meanwhile, back in the city, under urban renewal the assault on freedom carries on. Private property rights [are] so diluted that public interest is almost anything a few government planners decide it should be. In a program that takes from the needy and gives to the greedy, we see such spectacles as in Cleveland, Ohio, a million-and-a-half-dollar building completed only three years ago must be destroyed to make way for what government officials call a "more compatible use of the land." The President tells us he's now going to start building public housing units in the thousands, where heretofore we've only built them in the hundreds. But FHA [Federal Housing Authority] and the Veterans Administration tell us they have 120,000 housing units they've taken back through mortgage foreclosure. For three decades, we've sought to solve the problems of unemployment through government planning, and the more the plans fail, the more the planners plan.

Read the whole thing. It's as relevant as it ever was.

An excerpt from President Calvin Coolidge's speech on the 150th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence:

A spring will cease to flow if its source be dried up; a tree will wither if its roots be destroyed. In its main features the Declaration of Independence is a great spiritual document. It is a declaration not of material but of spiritual conceptions. Equality, liberty, popular sovereignty, the rights of man these are not elements which we can see and touch. They are ideals. They have their source and their roots in the religious convictions. They belong to the unseen world. Unless the faith of the American people in these religious convictions is to endure, the principles of our Declaration will perish. We can not continue to enjoy the result if we neglect and abandon the cause.

We are too prone to overlook another conclusion. Governments do not make ideals, but ideals make governments. This is both historically and logically true. Of course the government can help to sustain ideals and can create institutions through which they can be the better observed, but their source by their very nature is in the people. The people have to bear their own responsibilities. There is no method by which that burden can be shifted to the government. It is not the enactment, but the observance of laws, that creates the character of a nation.

About the Declaration there is a finality that is exceedingly restful. It is often asserted that the world has made a great deal of progress since 1776, that we have had new thoughts and new experiences which have given us a great advance over the people of that day, and that we may therefore very well discard their conclusions for something more modern. But that reasoning cannot be applied to this great chapter. If all men are created equal, that is final. If governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed, that is final. No advance, no progress can be made beyond these propositions. If anyone wishes to deny their truth or their soundness, the only direction in which he can proceed historically is not forward, but backward toward the time when there was no equality, no rights of the individual, no rule of the people. Those who wish to proceed in that direction can not lay claim to progress. They are reactionary. Their ideas are not more modern, but more ancient, than those of the Revolutionary fathers.

MORE:

121 years ago today, Katharine Lee Bates was on a train through Kansas, watching the amber waves of grain, en route to the purple mountain majesty of Pikes Peak. Eleven years earlier on a boat from Coney Island to Manhattan, Samuel Ward wrote down a melody on a friend's starched cuff. Mark Steyn tells the story of the words and tune of "America the Beautiful" and how they came together.

English philosopher Jeremy Bentham didn't think much of the Declaration. He wrote a critique of the document, published as the final chapter of John Lind's Answer to the Declaration of the American Congress.

Some links of interest to me and possibly no one else within a 500 mile radius:

(Remember, "blog" is short for "weblog," a log of things found on the World Wide Web.)

Some games for testing your knowledge of historic counties of Britain and Ireland:

• Historic Counties of Scotland: See the name, click on Clackmannanshire.
• Historic Counties of Ireland
• Historic Counties of England
• County-Wise quiz: Click on the name matching the highlighted county. Allows you to choose a number of counties to identify, a degree of difficulty, and to limit the game to one or more of the four countries of the UK. User interface is annoying.

1859 Encyclopaedia Britannica article on Ross and Cromarty: "two shires of Scotland, so curiously mixed up in geographical position, and so closely united politically, as to render their description under one head a matter not merely of convenience, but even of necessity." So the article begins. The county of Cromarty "is divided into eleven portions, which are whimsically inserted into various parts of the larger county of Ross, like fragments of a more ancient rock in some newer geological formation." When George Mackenzie, Viscount Tarbat, acquired the original county of Cromarty (mainly the port of that name and environs), he convinced the government of Scotland to annex to the county all of the other bits of land he owned, between 1685 and 1698. The article goes on to say that Mackenzie's Royston House (later called Caroline Park), near Edinburgh, was annexed to Cromartyshire, and that "many of the houses in the Canongate of Edinburgh belong to different counties in Scotland, from their having been the town residences of Scottish noblemen whose estates lay in those different shires. The total land area of Cromartyshire was estimated at 345 sq. mi.

To deal with the impracticalities of this sort of situation, the Parliamentary Boundaries Act 1832 reassigned detached parts of English and Welsh counties to the constituencies of the counties in which they were geographically located. A companion bill, the Reform Act of 1832 also eliminated representation (for "rotten boroughs") or halved it for some boroughs while creating new constituencies where there had been no representation. (Prior to the act, Old Sarum, an uninhabited hill in Wiltshire, elected two members of parliament.) In 1839, law enforcement and courts were reassigned to the county in which the detached part was locally situate. The Counties (Detached Parts) Act 1844 formally made these odd bits part of the counties which surrounded them, leaving only seven counties in England and Wales with exclaves.

County-Wise is the new website for the Association of British Counties, which "exists to promote the use of the historic counties as a standard geography for the UK." The historic counties movement is a reaction to the frequent reorganization of local government in Britain over the last half-century. Historic counties provide a permanent geographical framework and "fixed popular geography," even as local government boundaries continue to shift at the whim of the national government of the day.The site has a page for each historic county in Great Britain and Northern Ireland.

The National Library of Scotland's Georeferenced Maps allows you to overlay historic maps going back to the 18th century onto a choice of modern satellite imagery and maps. It covers Britain, Ireland, and Belgium. A slider control allows you to make the historic layer more or less transparent for comparing present-day features to historic maps.

The map at Wikishire overlays historic county boundaries on OpenStreetMap data. It shows the 20-odd exclaves of Cromarty. The map is based on the work of the Historic County Borders Project, which is creating a digital database for use in mapping and GIS. The current boundaries available are based on including small detached parts in the county in which they are situate, but a future dataset will provide boundaries including small detached parts as they existed prior to the 1844 act.

Here are some direct links:

• Historic Counties of Britain and Ireland, interactive map, showing pre-1844 detached parts (Definition B)
• Historic Counties of Britain and Ireland, interactive map, shown post-1844 detached parts simplification (Definition A)
• Historic County Borders Project shapefiles in SHP and KMZ formats, for WGS84 and OSGB36 coordinate systems, both Definition A and Definition B, with high- and low-resolution versions.
• Gazetteer of British Place Names: Search by postcode or town name for historic county.

RELATED:

In 1986, the BBC attempted to create a new digital version of the Domesday Book on the 900th anniversary of William the Conqueror's comprehensive survey of his new realm. Participants submitted photographs and descriptive text to document everyday life. The collected materials, which were organized by 4 km x 3 km grid cells, called D-Blocks, were archived on a special type of Laser Disc which required special computer equipment. The data was rescued from digital oblivion, and in 2011, the BBC solicited updated information from around the country. The National Archives now curates the collected BBC Domesday material. In the story of the project, there is a cautionary tale -- make provision for your digital legacy!

In a private venture in 2001, Adrian Pearce set out to 'reverse engineer' the original Domesday data and make it available to any Windows PC - instead of emulating it. In 2004 he succeeded and published the data online, the first instance of a Domesday website. However, on January 27th 2008, Adrian Pearce sadly died and the website was taken off line.

("Sadly died" is an odd formulation. "Sadly" doesn't really modify "died," as it isn't meant to tell us of Mr. Pearce's countenance upon his own demise. It's sloppy shorthand for "we are sad to say" or "we sadly report." Americans use "happily" or "fortunately" in this way, but this misuse of "sadly" seems peculiarly British.)

And then there's this, in the "Frequently Asked Questions" for the 2011 project. It's no longer enough to cringe at the nouns and adjectives used by Mark Twain or Rudyard Kipling; behold the speed of Newspeak's evolution:

The language in 1986 is inappropriate these days

The articles were submitted in 1986 and the language used may differ from what we feel is acceptable today. However, this is now a historic record and therefore we have republished it intact.

ALSO SORT OF RELATED:

Voices from the Dawn has an interactive map of Ireland's ancient monuments. Click a hotspot and read an article about the folklore surrounding standing stones, dolmens, and the like, and view a virtual reality photo of the monument and its surroundings. It turns out a place we stayed 20 years ago this June, Holestone House, near Doagh, Antrim, Northern Ireland, was named for a famed 4 1/2 foot-high slab of rock with a hole through it. Engaged couples clasp hands through the waist-high hole as a symbol of betrothal, a custom that goes back for centuries.

We saw another of the monuments on the next year's trip, the Kilclooney Dolmen near Portnoo, County Donegal. I remember my wife's consternation when I told her we were going to see a dolmen, but couldn't (wouldn't, she thought) tell her what it was. No one really knows, although they're also called "portal tombs."

UPDATED 2020/03/02 to add some better links to maps and quizzes.

Thursday I took the students in my Ancient Greek class at Augustine Christian Academy. We went to Philbrook to see a special exhibit of ancient artifacts -- statues, inscriptions, coins, jewelry, household items, and vessels having something to do with Aphrodite, the Greek goddess of love (known to the Romans as Venus), and her most famous child, Eros (aka Cupid).

I had the students spend a good deal of time looking at a Greek inscription from the Roman period, from a public bath in the Greek town of Assos in Asia Minor. We're accustomed to seeing ancient texts set mainly in minuscule letters, with spaces between words and accent marks. It was interesting to try to decipher words in all caps with no spaces or accents, with part of the inscription missing and words sometimes wrapping around the end of a line.

Here is an image of the inscription, from Papers of the American School of Classical Studies at Athens: 1882-1883, published shortly after the inscription's discovery as part of the "first collection of Greek inscriptions ever made by an American expedition in classic lands."

Many artifacts depicted Aphrodite's role in the abduction of Helen and the disastrous war it sparked. Paris, prince of Troy, was asked to judge which of the goddesses Hera, Athena, and Aphrodite which one was the fairest. Aphrodite bribed Paris with Helen, the most beautiful woman in the world, who happened to be the wife of Menelaus, king of Sparta. Menelaus rallied the Greeks to get her back, the Trojans refused, and the Trojan War ensued, ending in the destruction of Troy. Aphrodite's mortal Trojan lover, Anchises, escaped the flames on the back of their son Aeneas, whose treacherous travels to the future site of Rome are told in Vergil's epic poem Aeneid. At least one coin in the collection depicts Aeneas giving Anchises a piggy-back ride.

I was fascinated by a vessel depicting the elopement of Helen and her return to Menelaus. There were names in tiny letters scratched into the pot above most of the characters. Some of them were written left-to-right and some right-to-left. There were phis and thetas, but there were Ls instead of lambdas, and they seemed to use X for the xi sound.

The exhibit has a roped-off "mature audiences only" section; we steered clear of it. There were a few items near the end of the exhibit (relating to drinking parties and a Greek practice that I'll euphemistically call "mentorship with depraved benefits") that should have been in the roped-off area.

After seeing the exhibit the students all decided to color a picture of an amphora (one student turned hers into an ιχθυς τανκ). We toured the gardens and marveled at a magnificent display of tulips on the south allee. On the rotunda's mezzannine, there's an exhibit of glamorous black-and-white photos of Hollywood stars of the 1930s, and next to it an intriguing display of art made from books.

We topped off the field trip with lunch, appropriately at Helen of Troy restaurant, 6670 S. Lewis Ave. We had gyros, tawook, stuffed grape leaves, hummus, falafel, and spanakopita. It was all delicious, and the students enjoyed trying new foods. The portions for the lunch sandwiches were larger than we expected.

It was a delightful day. If you have an interest in ancient Greece and archaeology, I'd encourage you to catch the Aphrodite exhibit; it's at Philbrook through May 26, 2013. And if you love the food of the eastern Mediterranean, I encourage you to dine at Helen of Troy.

A world-changer has left this world for a better one. Former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher died today at age 87.

I don't remember when I started paying attention to British politics; sometime in the mid-'70s, I imagine. I had a shortwave radio, and I loved tuning in to hear the BBC World Service.

I remember news stories about strikes paralyzing the country and the inevitable decline of Britain from superpower to third-rate backwater. Britain's decline was part of a broader sense of decline and malaise throughout the western world. Communism was on the march abroad, and the socialist ratchet was at work at home, moving us toward a "new normal" -- less prosperous, less free, less secure.

The Conservative Party's victory in 1979, under Margaret Thatcher's leadership, was a harbinger of hope. Here was a leader unafraid to challenge the status quo of decline and despair in her own country and around the world. If Thatcher could win and govern successfully in Britain, there was hope of a conservative resurgence in America, too.

Pondering Thatcher's resolve to dispel the gloom of the 1970s with the light of liberty ought to encourage us that it can happen again, if we will persevere as she did.

Thatcher and President Reagan were willing to identify the Soviet Union as the Evil Empire and oppose it as such. Just a bit more than 10 years after Thatcher's first election, the Berlin Wall fell and European Communism collapsed. They were not ashamed of Anglo-American exceptionalism. The world needed the principles of liberty under law that were rooted at Runnymede.

There are many tributes to Thatcher on the web, beginning with the obituary from the Margaret Thatcher Foundation. Last January, when the Hollywood movie about her life came out, I put together a collection of videos and quotations of the real Margaret Thatcher. Conservative Home's Tory Diary has a running collection of tributes to Thatcher as does the Telegraph.

Conservative MEP Daniel Hannan does a fine job of summing up Thatcher's transformational achievements, contrasting them with his own childhood memories of pre-Thatcher Britain:

I'm not sure you can appreciate the magnitude of Margaret Thatcher's achievement without some knowledge of the calamity that immediately preceded it.... What I do recall, though, was the sense of despair. Again and again, I would hear adults casually say "Britain is finished"....

These were the years of the three-day week, of prices and incomes policies, of double-digit inflation, of constant strikes, of power cuts. Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, the United Kingdom had been outperformed by every European economy. "Britain is a tragedy - it has sunk to borrowing, begging, stealing until North Sea oil comes in," said Henry Kissinger. The Wall Street Journal was blunter: "Goodbye, Great Britain: it was nice knowing you".

Margaret Thatcher, almost alone, refused to accept the inevitability of decline. She was determined to turn the country around, and she succeeded. Inflation fell, strikes stopped, the latent enterprise of a free people was awakened. Having lagged behind for a generation, we outgrew every European country in the 1980s except Spain (which was bouncing back from an even lower place). As revenues flowed in, taxes were cut and debt was repaid, while public spending - contrary to almost universal belief - rose.

In the Falklands, Margaret Thatcher showed the world that a great country doesn't retreat forever. And, by ending the wretched policy of one-sided détente that had allowed the Soviets to march into Europe, Korea and Afghanistan, she set in train the events that would free hundreds of millions of people from what, in crude mathematical terms, must be reckoned the most murderous ideology humanity has known.

Hannan notes, too, the prescience of the principled stand that led to her ouster:

Still, it can't be repeated too often: the immediate cause of Margaret Thatcher's toppling was that she opposed Britain's membership of the euro. Who called that one right?

Historian Paul Johnson, writing in the Wall Street Journal, focuses on Thatcher's effect on British business:

The 1970s marked the climax of Britain's postwar decline, in which "the English disease"--overweening trade-union power--was undermining the economy by strikes and inflationary wage settlements. The Boilermakers Union had already smashed the shipbuilding industry. The Amalgamated Engineers Union was crushing what was left of the car industry. The print unions were imposing growing censorship on the press. Not least, the miners union, under the Stalinist Arthur Scargill, had invented new picketing strategies that enabled them to paralyze the country wherever they chose.

Attempts at reform had led to the overthrow of the Harold Wilson Labour government in 1970, and an anti-union bill put through by Heath led to the destruction of his majority in 1974 and its replacement by another weak Wilson government that tipped the balance of power still further in the direction of the unions. The general view was that Britain was "ungovernable."...

Johnson describes the legislation Thatcher passed to rein in the unions' destructive behavior, simplify the tax code and reduce tax rates, and returning inefficient state-owned industries to the private sector, reforms that echoed around the world.

More important than all these specific changes, however, was the feeling Thatcher engendered that Britain was again a country where enterprise was welcomed and rewarded, where businesses small and large had the benign blessing of government, and where investors would make money.

MORE:

Andrew Roberts draws lessons from Thatcher's legacy for today

The Telegraph has a video reel of Thatcher's most memorable House of Commons appearances.

Thatcher's Soviet counterpart, Mikhail Gorbachev, remembers his old adversary and her role in ending the Cold War.

The Tablet notes Thatcher's support for the Jewish people and the nation of Israel, a relationship that began when she was 12, working with her older sister raise money to help a Jewish girl escape Austria in 1938 and continued through her 33 years representing the Jewish entrepreneurs of Finchley.

Via Jim Geraghty, video of Thatcher in 1984 with actors Paul Eddington and Nigel Hawthorne, stars of the political series, "Yes, Minister," performing a sketch she wrote.

At a Conservative party conference in 1989, Thatcher compares the Liberal Democrats' new bird-like symbol to... a dead parrot:

Columnist Mark Steyn writes Thatcher thought Britain was worth fighting for, but worries that her time in office was only "a magnificent but temporary interlude in a great nation's bizarre, remorseless self-dissolution."

In Britain in the Seventies, everything that could be nationalized had been nationalized, into a phalanx of lumpen government monopolies all flying the moth-eaten flag: British Steel, British Coal, British Airways, British Rail ... . The government owned every industry - or, if you prefer, "the British people" owned every industry. And, as a consequence, the unions owned the British people. The top income tax rate was 83 percent, and on investment income, 98 percent. No electorally viable politician now thinks the government should run airlines and car plants and that workers should live their entire lives in government housing. But what seems obvious[ly wrong] to all in 2013 was the bipartisan consensus four decades ago, and it required an extraordinary political will for one woman to drag her own party, then the nation, and, subsequently, much of the rest of the world, back from the cliff edge.

Michelle Malkin remembers Margaret Thatcher with some lengthy excerpts from her 1975 speech to the Conservative Party conference, following her selection as leader of the party.

The Hope for America blog has eight great moments from Margaret Thatcher's career from which modern American conservatives should learn. Here she is in 1987, after her third general election victory, recalling those who said in 1975 that such a feat was impossible for a conservative.

Mr. President, 12 years ago, I first stood on this platform as leader of the Conservative Party. Now one or two things have changed since 1975. In that year, we were still groaning under Labour's so-called social contract. People said we should never be able to govern again. Remember how we'd all been lectured about political impossibility. You couldn't be a conservative and sound like a conservative and win an election, they said. And you certainly couldn't win an election and act like a conservative and win another election. And this was absolutely beyond dispute: You couldn't win two elections and go on acting like a conservative and yet win a third election.

THE TRIBUTES CONTINUE:

Oleg Atbashian, proprietor of the People's Cube, tells his personal story of encountering Thatcher's words as a young man in Ukraine, listening to the BBC and Voice of America on his shortwave set -- when the Soviets weren't jamming the broadcasts. He explains how news of Thatcher's reforms shattered his state-sponsored illusions about the west.

Gradually, the news sank in: if Britain was indeed a socialist state, then everything we were told about the outside world was a lie. And not just any lie -- it was an inconceivably monstrous, colossal lie, which our Communist Party and the media thoroughly maintained, apparently, to prevent us from asking these logical questions: if the Brits also had free, cradle-to-grave entitlements like we did, then why were we still fighting the Cold War? And what was the purpose of the Iron Curtain? Was it to stop us from collectively surrendering to the Brits, so that their socialist government could establish the same welfare state on our territory -- only with more freedom and prosperity minus the Communist Party?

The next logical question would be this: if Great Britain wasn't yet as socialist as the Soviet Union, then didn't it mean that whatever freedom, prosperity, and working economy it had left were directly related to having less socialism? And if less socialism meant a freer, more productive, and more prosperous nation, then wouldn't it be beneficial to have as little socialism as possible? Or perhaps -- here's a scary thought -- to just get rid of socialism altogether?

And wasn't it exactly what Margaret Thatcher was doing as a prime minister?

Atbashian designed an "IRON" poster with Thatcher's photo (a parody of the Obama Hope poster); the museum in her hometown of Grantham, Lincolnshire, is using it now to raise funds to build a statue of Thatcher. He notes that Thatcher succeeded in politics without the benefit of the kind of cult of personality that President Obama enjoys:

And yet she exerted great influence over people. She did it merely by being who she was: informed, unwavering in the face of adversity, brave in defending the truth, and confident in her belief that the free markets are a force for good, while socialism is a force for evil. A few Western leaders may have agreed with her in private, but they didn't have the courage to say it openly in the twisted moral climate brought on their countries by the false promise of socialism.

What Thatcher showed to these men is that when one has no fear of speaking the truth and possesses enough moral conviction to push back, miracles happen. Britain's resurrection as an economic powerhouse was one of them.

Her message came through despite all the hostile efforts to jam it around the world, shattering not just the Western establishment's media filters, but the Iron Curtain itself.

It still resonates; if only today's leaders could listen.

UPDATE 2013/04/17:

The Telegraph reports that Thatcher planned her funeral service to be an expression of her Christian faith, choosing the readings and hymns and excluding a political eulogy:

Cynical detractors who expect Lady Thatcher's funeral to be used for the Conservatives' political gain may be surprised (and perhaps disappointed privately) to learn that there will be no political eulogy. Although the occasion has been code-named Operation True Blue, the sole object of worship will be God, not free market ideology. Lady Thatcher is said to have been concerned that her funeral would become the subject of political debate. The woman who relished an opportunity for confrontation was, for once, resolved to avoid it. Her funeral would not be Conservative; it would be Christian.

The service included the hymns "To Be a Pilgrim" and "Love Divine, All Loves Excelling," the anthem, "Thou Knowest, Lord, the Secrets of Our Hearts," by Henry Purcell, and the patriotic hymn, "I Vow to Thee, My Country." Prime Minister David Cameron read from John 14 ("In my Father's house there are many mansions") and granddaughter Amanda Thatcher read from Ephesians 6 ("Put on the whole armor of God").

This is the final week to see a piece of George Washington's Mount Vernon right here in Tulsa. The traveling exhibition "Discover the Real George Washington: New Views from Mount Vernon" at Tulsa's Gilcrease Museum. The exhibition's final day is September 23, 2012.

The exhibit goes beyond the familiar basic facts of Washington as our 1st President and the Father of Our Country to help you get to know Washington the surveyor, young officer, churchman, and agricultural innovator, among many other roles.

Earlier this summer my family visited Mount Vernon and saw the new Donald W. Reynolds Educational Center there. The exhibit you will see here in Tulsa is a near-duplicate of the permanent exhibit in Mount Vernon, including three life-size figures depicting Washington at different ages -- as a young surveyor, as Commander-in-Chief of the Continental Army, and as President of the United States. The figures were developed using forensic analysis of a life mask, paintings, clothing, and other artifacts. Short videos from the History Channel accompany interactive exhibits.

My youngest son said he liked the exhibit at Gilcrease better, because you could look in through the side of the Fort Necessity diorama to see the battle from the perspective of those hiding in the forest.

One thing we saw at Gilcrease that we did not see at Mount Vernon: George Washington's dentures and the story of how they were made.

Unless you travel to Mount Vernon, you won't be able to see George Washington's repository for dung, see the "rustication" used to make the wooden mansion appear to be made of stone, or admire the vistas from the back of the mansion to the Potomac River, but you'll be able to learn about these things right here in Tulsa at Gilcrease Museum through Sunday or at the exhibit's companion website, Discover the Real George Washington, where you can explore an interactive timeline and see the same History Channel videos on display in the exhibit.

Gilcrease Museum is open 10 a.m. to 5 p.m., Tuesday through Sunday. Admission is $8 for adults, children 18 and under are free, and there are discounts for seniors, groups, and active duty military. Gilcrease Museum is owned by the City of Tulsa and curated by the University of Tulsa.