Finally we have the writers, Mary Evans, Samuel Clemens and Charles Dodgson - respectively George Eliot, Mark Twain and Lewis Carroll. Dodgson seriously considered Edgar Cuthwellis as an alternative nom de plume, a choice thankfully vetoed by his editor as patently ridiculous.
#OTD in 1630, the Reverend Isaac Johnson famously renamed the former Tramount, more lately Shawmut, (itself a celebration in the indigenous tongue to its clear waters), Boston, after the muddy waters of his hometown in England’s county of Lincolnshire.
... ‘God seems to have made woman particularly suited to guide and develop the infant mind and it seems very poor policy to pay a man 20 or 22 dollars a month for teaching children the ABCs when a female could do the work more successfully at one third of the price’.
#herstory
#BackToSchool. And like it or not, after a long lazy summer, the challenges of mastering one’s ABCs and manipulating one’s mathematics return. While today’s NYC kids may think themselves overworked, oppressed even, the feeling is not new.
And for the community at large, all this schooling meant finding that happy balance between cost and result, usually in the form of a woman. The Littleton, Mass school board was typical in concluding in 1849 ...
... forcing inmates, staff and visitors alike to enter and leave through the basement kitchens, a place compared unfavorably to the deepest recesses of hell. But we digress – Happy Birthday National Park Service!
#history#nychistory#foundingfathers
109 years ago, #OTD, the National Park (yes, that’s park, singular) Service was established via the quaintly named ‘Organic Act’ to provide stewardship over the nation’s then 35 parks and monuments. Since then, it has regaled us with all sorts of park-land wisdom ...
... designed by Alexander Davis, better known in NYC at least as the man behind the Blackwell’s Island Lunatic Asylum, which curiously from a design perspective (actually the result of budget cuts rather than architectural incompetence), lacked a front door, ...