Oh boy.

Park Service to charge museum admission fee.

In reality, it is a better deal for the visitors. Currently the film is $8 and the proposed cost for the film + Cyclorama is $12. $7.50 is obviously a lot cheaper. However, something just bothers me about the museum requiring a fee. This will also cause ticketing to be backed up, causing people to decide against standing in line. That's what happened when we had the tickets for the museum but still weren't charging. We lost a lot of visitors then, in my opinion. Hopefully all of this works out with minimal hassle for visitors and minimal hassle for the Foundation staff.

Witness tree damaged

Here is the article from the Philadelphia Inquirer.

Oddly enough, I don't remember it storming on Thursday. I must really not be paying attention anymore.

"Which is Which?"

The good thing about working on this newspapers project for the CWI Office/Lincoln Bicentennial Commission is that occasionally I come across interesting and/or amusing items. Here is an article from the Philadelphia Press, January 19, 1861.

Which is Which?
The blunders of the English journals, when American topics are discussed, are frequent and amusing. At one time English editors declare that the President of the United States is elected by the rowdies of New York; at another, they acknowledge Mr. Bennett's Herald to be reliable and respectable; anon, they discourse of Ohio as margined by the Atlantic, and so on. We have now to notice their latest and most amusing error.
A London periodical, entitled "Once a Week," commenced eighteen months ago, to rival Dickens' "All the Year Round," has an article, in its number for December 29, called "Abraham Lincoln, President Elect of the United States." It commences thus, biographically.
"'Honest Old Abe,' as the Americans call Lincoln, was originally a farm-laborer in Illinois. Frederick Douglas, 'the Little Giant,' his defeated antagonist, was a cabinet maker."
Here be two pieces of exclusive news - that Frederick Douglass, the negro, was the political antagonist of Mr. Lincoln, and that the said Frederick bears the sobriquet of "the Little Giant." In the innocence of our heart, we always thought that, not Frederick Douglass, but Stephen A. Douglas, stood in that position, and bore that familiar sobriquet. Moreover, we were certain - until corrected in our belief by "Once a Week," - that Stephen A. Douglas is a white man, instead of a black.
The English editor cannot plead, in extenuation, that Frederick was a slip of the pen, for a dozen lines lower down, he describes what Frederick Douglass said of Mr. Lincoln "in one of his stump speeches, when lately itinerating the northwest provinces." He adds that in 1858 this self-same "Frederick" was elected Senator for Illinois, and that the New York Tribune is a "religious" paper. Nothing can be said to excuse the ignorance of a writer who confounds black and white in this odd manner - who supposes a negro eligible for the Presidency - and who speaks of the States of the Union as provinces. To carry on the joke, this very facetious and accurate English writer brags of his personal knowledge of America, its institutions, its people, its politics. "I," he says, "who have stood for hours and days watching the boatmen of these rivers [the Wabash and the Mississippi] know how laborious is their life," he alludes to the boatmen and so on. All this comes from people writing boldly about matters with which they are almost unacquainted. Not otherwise could any person have blundered so palpably as to confound the Hon. S.A. Douglas, the patriotic and eloquent Senator for Illinois, with Frederick Douglass, the negro.

Ch-ch-ch-changes?

Gettysburg train station promised to park service.

I love how no one has told any of the people who actually run the station about any of this. It's very weird to find out about this from the newspaper.

I'm not quite sure what this means for Adam or myself (mostly him since it's his only job) and all of the volunteers, but I guess we don't have to worry about it all just yet considering it could take quite a long time for Congress to approve of the purchase. Chances are I'll be off at college by the time any take over actually occurs.

Hopefully it will all work out.

Is America history-challenged?

We talked about this article from USA Weekend in my History Seminar class yesterday.

A report released last year showed that when more than 14,000 seniors and freshmen at 50 American colleges and universities were tested on some basics of American history and civics, the average score was about 52% -- a failing grade by any measure -- with the seniors scoring slightly higher than the incoming class. The best results came from Harvard, where seniors scored a 69.6% -- passing, but still a high D.

I cannot say I'm surprised. I know that many of my peers regard history as boring. But I still think it's extremely unfortunate that many people do not have this basic knowledge. Like one of the signs in the History Seminar room, "Everything that happened before you were born is your own kind of." I think not knowing basic things about American history is just like not knowing much about some part of yourself.

By the way, you can take the aforementioned test here. I'd love to hear what you get. I got a 73.3% Because the economics questions kicked my butt.

Frustration

The Internet - or internets, as I lovingly call this series of tubes - makes me very mad sometimes. Fairly often I will not post to here for a while due to lack of anything interesting to post about and then I will decide to actively pursue something interesting so that I am forced to write and not abandon my blog. So I turn to sites with databases of letters, newspaper articles, magazine articles and read around a bit until something somewhat obscure catches my eye. And then I will read all that the source has to offer on the topic and then search for more information. Well, today, I came across something that piqued my interest while reading "A Trip To The South" by the famous Alan Pinkerton:

...Here [in Nashville, Tennessee] also I came in contact with an army surgeon whose head was full of wild quixotic schemes for destroying the northern armies by other processes than that of legitimate warfare.
One of his plans I remembered was to fill a commissary wagon with whiskey, in which had been previously mixed a generous quantity of strychnine. The wagon was then to be broken and abandoned and left upon the road so as to fall into the hands of the Union soldiers. Of course the liquor would be consumed by the finders, and the valiant doctor with evident satisfaction to himself, but to the equally evident disgust of his companions, loudly vaunted his death-dealing and barbarous scheme...

Pinkerton's article goes on to say that later this doctor "fled in terror at the first fire" and was dishonorably discharged from the service.

So I was very curious as to who this man was and other information about him. But a Google search turned up nothing except an excerpt from a book that I do not have access to on an online database. This happens to me quite often; I find something that I want to explore further but there is no more information online about the subject. So I am just forever wondering about details.

I did, however, learn much about strychnine. My newfound love for organic chemistry is keeping me entranced.