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 half-century after the end of the Civil War saw an outpouring of memoirs by veterans on both sides. Some were written by war heroes, like Ulysses S. Grant and William Tecumseh Sherman (and were bestsellers as well). For time, it must have seemed like every general and officer in the war was writing an account. A joke made the rounds that so many people had witnessed Robert E. Lee’s signing of the surrender to Grant at Appomattox that both armies had crowded into the room. For a time, those who had been privates – enlisted and drafted – penned their remembrances as well. These accounts, and I’ve read a considerable number number for my soon-to-be-published historical novel Brookhaven, are not so much concerned with strategy and battle outcomes as they are with day-to-day survival, getting enough food, mud (lots of mud, especially when you have to walk through it), in short, what everyman experienced.
To continue reading, please see my post today at Dancing Priest.
We see the statistics on infant and child mortality before the advent of antibiotics and other medical advances, and we nod in understanding. But when the statistic is your own family, and it affects both those who experience it and those who come after it happened, you know that it is something more than a statistic.
In the 38 poems of her new collection The New Life, poet and writer Wendy Wisner speaks to that difference between statistic and family reality. She knows from her own family history that children can die; it happened to her grandmother’s sister on the boat when the family immigrated to America. It happened to her grandmother who lost a child during childbirth in the hospital. To a doctor or researcher, such events are statistics. To the people who experience it, it’s a tragedy that stays with them the rest of their lives.
We’ve traveled to Britain several times since 2012, and our interest in the country (and my five novels) have kept us connected to British news. Since the last election there this summer, change is accelerating, and my American perspective doesn’t see it as good. People are being arrested, sentenced, and jailed for tweets that wouldn’t draw a second glance in the United States. You can be arrested for praying near an abortion clinic. Farmers are in an uproar, seeing the government as set on destroying British agriculture. Nottingham University has issued a trigger warning for a course on Chaucer – the warning is for Canterbury Tales containing “Christian expressions.” Judges are often allowing serious criminals to walk if they have some kind of immigrant status.
But there is resistance. One of the most popular British commentators (on Instagram, anyway; you won’t find her on the BBC or even the conservative Daily Mail) is Katie Hopkins, whose reports are often shocking even by free speech standards. The actor Laurence Fox (Inspector Lewis series) was arrested last year for articulating what was normal, everyday speech as recently as 2012. Father Calvin Robinson is an Anglican priest (with Catholic sympathies) who has left Britain for the United States; he’s called the recently resigned Archbishop of Canterbury an apostate (he’s also friends with a certain recently elected U.S. President).
While much of American law and rights can be traced to British common law and the Magna Carta, we have rights and freedoms the British don’t have, like freedom of speech and freedom of the press. For which I am thankful, even with the misinformation that comes out of both social media and the legacy news media.
