Two Thanksgiving Day Proclamations

Three United States presidents have issued Thanksgiving Day proclamations. George Washington issued the first proclamation, as the new Republic was getting started in 1798. James Madison issued one in 1815. Abraham Lincoln issued two, one in 1862 and one in 1863. But it wasn't until the 1863 proclamation that Thanksgiving became an annual observance. 

The first proclamation by Washington and the second by Lincoln are posted at Dancing Priest today. 

Top photograph by Virginia Simionato via Unsplash. Used with permission.

Some Thursday Readings

 

Thankfulness is a Year-long Habit – Terry Whalin at The Writing Life.

 

“The New-England Boy’s Song about Thanksgiving Day ,” poem by Lydia Maria Child – Joseph Bottum at Poems Ancient and Modern.

 

Thanksgiving Sonnet – Kelly Belmonte at Kelly’s Scribbles.

 

A Nation’s Gratitude: The First Presidential Thanksgiving – Jason Clark at This is the Day.

 

Thanksgiving: A Sonnet – Malcolm Guite.

 

The Year Washington (Almost) Canceled Thanksgiving – Michael Connolly at The Imaginative Conservative.

 

Some Thursday Readings - Sept. 12, 2024

Handbags & Handcuffs: The Mysterious Case of the Victorian Female Detective by Sara Lodge – Claire Harman at Literary Review. 

“Poor Eddy”: A New Life of Edgar Allan Poe – Mark Jarman at The Hudson Review.

 

On the Tarmac – poem by Tania Runyan at Every Day Poems.

 

Shakespeare and Classical Education – Joseph Pearce at The Imaginative Conservative. 

 

“The Traveler” and “Sunrise” – poems by Shindy Cai at Society of Classical Poets.

 

Author George Saunders on His Novel Lincoln in the Bardo, on Lincoln After the Death of His Son – New York Times Book Review podcast via The Reconstruction Era blog.

 

If your protagonist is bored, you can bet you reader will be to – Nathan Bransford. 

 

End – prose poem / reflection by David Whyte.

 

Photograph: Edgar Allan Poe about 1837.

"Belligerent Muse" by Stephen Cushman

“The past is never dead,” wrote William Faulkner in Requiem for a Nun. “It’s not even past.” One hundred and fifty-eight years after the last battle and the final surrender, it seems we’re still living with the effects of and trying to understand the American Civil War.  

Poet and English professor Stephen Cushman has been fascinated with the Civil War since childhood. He understands that any historical event, like a war, is understood generations later through the writings of those who lived it and then those who wrote about it. The subtitle of his 2014 book explains what he was about when he wrote it – Belligerent Muse: Five Northern Writers and How They Shaped Out Understanding of the Civil War.

 

The ”belligerent muse” in this case is war. Cushman points out that “war destroys, but it also inspires, stimulates, and creates.” The Civil War brought destruction, especially in the southern states, but it continues to be the source of an enormous outpouring of memoirs, reports, journals, historical texts, biographies, and fiction. In this book, Cushman says that we should not simply see these writings as “transparent windows opening into the past, but also as literary engagements with the momentous events of the war itself. In other words, they were writing to understand themselves the events they were living through.

To continue reading, please see my post today at Dancing Priest.

Some Wednesday Readings

 

The Axis of the Human Heart – Rod Dreher.

 

Civil War Art: Antietam by James Hope – Kevin Pawlak at Emerging Civil War.

 

A Conductor at Twilight: Michael Tilson Thomas’ Last Days – Teez Rose at The Imaginative Conservative. 

 

Meet Meredith Angwin, the grandmother changing the energy industry – Emmet Penney at The Spectator.

Somewhere in England, a short story by Glenn McGoldrick (and it's a dark one), is free to download on Amazon today and tomorrow.

"President Lincoln Assassinated!!" by Harold Holzer

Less than week after Robert E. Lee surrendered to Ulysses S Grant at Appomattox, President Abraham Lincoln was shot at Ford Theatre in Washington, D.C., and died at 7 a.m. the next morning. He and his wife Mary Todd Lincoln had been watching the play Our American Cousin, a lighthearted farce about an American rube visiting his aristocratic English relatives.  

The Civil War was not yet over, but the end was near. As the news of the assassination spread, jubilation in the North quickly gave way to shock and anger. In the South, the news was greeted by some with enthusiasm, but by other, more prescient people, with trepidation. Lincoln’s death would not bode well for the South.

 

Harold Holzer, one of the leading authorities in the United States on Lincoln and the era, considered the first-hand accounts – diaries, letters, newspaper editorials, official announcements, testimonies, affidavits, speeches, and more. (It surprises us today that the reports took weeks to reach the broad mass of people North and South). He then collected some of the best and assembled President Lincoln Assassinated!! The Firsthand Story of the Murder, Manhunt, Trial, and Mourning.

To continue reading, please see my post today at Dancing Priest.

Some Wednesday Readings

 

Old Weird America: The dark comedies of Charles Portis – Justin Taylor at The Point.

 

Hiding the Sword – Sarah Kay Bierle at Emerging Civil War.

 

National Portrait Gallery Presents “One Life: Frederick Douglass” – The Smithsonian.

Why We Celebrate Thanksgiving

We celebrate Thanksgiving Day because of Henry VIII, the Gunpowder Plot, the 1619 landing of 38 English colonists in Virginia (without slaves), the Pilgrims, the end of the American Revolution, the beginning of the American Republic, the Civil War, and the need to stimulate the economy in the late 1930s. And it might have been called Evacuation Day.  

Thanksgiving as we know it today in the United States evolved over a period of some 400 years. The idea of thanksgiving observances goes back to the Protestant Reformation in England under Henry VIII, consolidating a rather large number of thanksgiving holidays during the Roman Catholic period. Special days of Thanksgiving would be called for military victories and for deliverance from such events as the Gunpowder Plot of 1606.

To continue reading, please see my post today at Dancing Priest.

Top photograph: Union soldiers celebrate the first national Thanksgiving Day in 1863.

Poets and Poems: Maurice Manning and “Railsplitter”

Poet Maurice Manning has done something unusual for a poetry collection. He’s crawled inside the head of a famous historical figure and told stories about the man’s life from his own, posthumous perspective. 

In Railsplitter: Poems, the historical figure is Abraham Lincoln. Manning explains that his own affinities for Lincoln have been long-standing. “I grew up near his birthplace,” he writes in the preface, “and I live in the same county where his parents were married. My ancestors were early settlers of Kentucky. All my life I have had a sense of the world Lincoln came from, and meeting him through poetry has seemed, especially in recent years, inevitable.” He says his great-great-grandfather would boast that he voted for Lincoln twice. 

To continue reading, please see my post today at Tweetspeak Poetry.