September 2011 – Page 3

Thank you for sharing, N.C. legislators

Earlier this week I recalled some favorite quotes from North Carolina legislators. A few more dug from the same drawer:

“A good day’s pay for a decent salary — I believe in that.”

— Rep. Dan Lilley, D-Lenoir, sharing his thoughts on the work ethic (1981)

“Walking tackle boxes.”

— Rep. Frank Mitchell, R-Iredell, viewing with alarm the consequences of unregulated body-piercing (2001)

“You ever had a chigger on you? After they’re gone, you kind of miss the scratching?”

— House Speaker Liston Ramsey, D-Madison, waxing sentimental about retired gadfly Ivan Mothershead, R-Mecklenburg (1988)

“Still first in hams, second in yams and last in the SATs.”

— Sen. Bob Shaw, R-Guilford, deriding N.C. Democrats’ efforts at education reform (1995)

“The K&W Cafeteria Relief Act.”

— Sen. Fletcher Hartsell, R-Cabarrus, rebranding ethics legislation that discourages lobbyists from providing more upscale dining (2007)

“A scrooge on our environment.”

— Marc Basnight, president pro tem of the N.C. Senate, struggling for the appropriate condemnation of video poker (2007)

John Lawson and His Fateful Encounter with the Tuscarora

“Next Day, about 10 a Clock, we struck out of the Way, by the Advice of our Old Indian. We had not gone past two Miles, e’er we met with about 500 Tuskeruros in one Hunting-Quarter. They had made themselves Streets of Houses, built with Pine-Bark, not with round Tops, as they commonly use, but Ridge-Fashion, after the manner of most other Indians. We got nothing amongst them but Corn, Flesh being not plentiful, by reason of the great Number of their People. For tho’ they are expert Hunters, yet they are too populous for one Range; which makes Venison very scarce to what it is amongst other Indians, that are fewer; no Savages living so well for Plenty, as those near the Sea.”

-John Lawson describing one of his first encounters with the Tuscarora Indians in A New Voyage to Carolina.

Lawson did not fare well in a later meeting with the Tuscarora. He and Baron Christoph von Graffenreid were captured and held prisoner by the Indians during a trip up the Neuse to discover its source. Von Graffenreid was eventually released by the Tuscarora, who believed he was the governor. Lawson was killed, reportedly on this date 300 years ago.

Artifact of the Month: 1931 scholarship certificate

No matter what the economic climate, work-study programs have historically helped students attend UNC. Clyde Morris Roberts of Marshall, North Carolina graduated with a degree in education in 1931 after having worked as a Student Salesman with the Delineator College Scholarship Plan. The Gallery recently received some items belonging to Roberts, including the September Artifact of the Month: a 9.5″ x 5″ leather billfold embossed with the word “Delineator” on the front that contains a certificate noting Roberts’ status as a Student Salesman.

The Delineator was a women’s magazine published by the Butterick Publishing Company between 1873 and 1937. The magazine contained sewing patterns of the latest fashions as well as short stories. Frank Baum, author of The Wizard of Oz, published a series of short stories known as the Animal Fairy Tales in the Delineator in 1905.

While at UNC, Roberts sold subscriptions of the Delineator to earn his tuition. The 1930-1931 University of North Carolina Catalogue lists the total cost of tuition and fees per quarter for North Carolina residents as $49.66. The above June 1931 issue of the Delineator sold for 10¢. A subscription likely cost less than $1.20. It’s unclear how much Roberts earned from selling a subscription or how the scholarship program worked.

Another item that the Gallery received from Roberts’ time at UNC is an embossed leather 25″ x 12.5″ Carolina pennant.

As seen on TV: ‘We shut down the university’

“Educators are in thrall to their athletic departments because of these television riches and because they respect the political furies that can burst from a locker room. ‘There’s fear,’ [Bill] Friday told me when I visited him on the University of North Carolina campus in Chapel Hill last fall. As we spoke, two giant construction cranes towered nearby over the university’s Kenan Stadium, working on the latest $77 million renovation….

“Friday insisted that for the networks, paying huge sums to universities was a bargain. ‘We do every little thing for them,’ he said. ‘We furnish the theater, the actors, the lights, the music, and the audience for a drama measured neatly in time slots. They bring the camera and turn it on.’ Friday, a weathered idealist at 91, laments the control universities have ceded in pursuit of this money. If television wants to broadcast football from here on a Thursday night, he said, ‘we shut down the university at 3 o’clock to accommodate the crowds.’ He longed for a campus identity more centered in an academic mission.”

— From “The Shame of College Athletics” by Taylor Branch (UNC ’68) in The Atlantic

Sorry for today’s multiple postings, but civil-rights historian Branch is making big waves in indicting the NCAA for the “unmistakable whiff of the plantation.”

The Growth of Newspapers in North Carolina and Beyond

Quick. Name the first newspaper in North Carolina. How about the second? And the third? If you’re stuck, the folks at Stanford University’s Bill Lane Center for the American West have provided a tool to help you. They created a data visualization of the growth of newspapers across the U.S. from 1690 to 2011. Drag a pointer across a timeline and watch as dots pop up on a U.S. map at the town or city where the paper began. Click on the dot and you’ll get information about the newspapers in that town during the period you’ve chosen. If you want to make the Tar Heel state the center of your universe, you can zoom in to look only at the space that lies between Murphy and Manteo.

If you want to read some of the state’s early newspapers, you can do so with the help of a project completed by the State Archives in 2009. More recent student and community newspapers are available online via Digital NC.

And while we’re on the subject of cool websites, here are two more. Geography fan Derek Watkins has created a visualization of U.S. territorial expansion through the growth of post offices. And Historypin allows users to pin photographs to a Google map of the world. With a moveable timeline, you can determine the time period for which you want to see photos. The project is London-based, so the site appears to be much more populated with European images. But there are N.C. photos, including some from the State Library.

‘Some people say he started it, some people say we started it’

“In my opinion, the way I see it, and I heard it all back then, there was bluegrass before Bill Monroe ever got into bluegrass. There are several tunes we recorded where the banjo sounds like bluegrass. The Morris Brothers also were playin’ like that.

“Bill Monroe wasn’t doin’ any good, let me tell you, until he added a banjo into his group. Then his name was ‘Blue Grass Boys,’ and the name stuck for his music. I give credit to Bill. He probably was the man who made the music faster. But some people say he started it, and some people say we started it.”

— Wade Mainer in a 2000 interview with Tom and Lucy Warlick, authors of “The WBT Briarhoppers: Eight Decades of a Bluegrass Band Made for Radio” (2008)

Mainer, a Weaverville native who recorded prolifically during Charlotte’s heyday as a hub of country music, died Monday at age 104.

How shapes of heads shaped shape of nation

“Throughout the 18th century, most Euro-American intellectuals had believed that humans were a unified species and that differences in environment accounted for both physical and cultural variance among people.

“As early as 1811, however, a North Carolina doctor named Charles Caldwell rejected that theory, proposing instead a natural hierarchy of the races. The developing pseudoscience of phrenology, which supposedly used cranial morphology to measure intelligence, bolstered Caldwell’s theory of scientific racism. Philadelphia physician Samuel Morton’s influential 1839 study ‘Crania Americana’ used phrenology to formulate an elaborate racial hierarchy — whites at the top, Indians in the middle and Africans at the bottom….

“Gone were the days when policymakers sought to integrate ‘civilized’ Indians into the republic. By the Jackson era, American expansion showed little regard for nonwhites who stood in the way.”

— From “Slavery in Indian Country: The Changing Face of Captivity in Early America” by Christina Snyder (2010)

‘Silly’ health-claim ads turn off tobacco growers

“As representatives of 71,000 North Carolina tobacco growers met last week in Raleigh’s Sir Walter Hotel, they filled the air with their troubles as well as tobacco smoke.

“Some tobaccomen thought the blame for the slowdown [in cigarette consumption] should be put on the cigarette companies, and especially the new filter cigarette publicity. Cried Grower-Warehouseman Fred S. Royster, president of the Bright Belt Warehouse Association: ‘The public is being frightened from tobacco by outlandish medical claims by some of the manufacturers. Much of this advertising is plain silly.’

“Added Market Specialist Phil Hedrick of the North Carolina agriculture department: ‘It’s defensive advertising that’s doing it. A medical authority says, for instance, that there is a high incidence of lung cancer among heavy smokers, and immediately the tobacco companies rush to the defense. Instead of saying that cigarettes relax you, comfort you and soothe the nerves, they deny that their brand will give you a disease . . . ‘

“Editorialized the Raleigh News & Observer: ‘It still seems a little odd that those who most emphasize the possible bad effects of cigarettes on people are the cigarette manufacturers themselves.’ ”

— From Time magazine, Nov. 9, 1953

North Carolina Civil War Resources–Online

The State Library of North Carolina has digitized and uploaded a number of Civil War related publications (both state documents and publications by the NC Confederate Centennial Commission) to the NC Digital Collections.

Bloody Sixth: the Sixth North Carolina Regiment http://digital.ncdcr.gov/u?/p249901coll22,284870

Bloody Sixth: the Sixth North Carolina Regiment: Footnotes http://digital.ncdcr.gov/u?/p249901coll22,285391

Five points in the record of NC in the great War of 1861-5 : report of the Committee http://digital.ncdcr.gov/u?/p249901coll22,264493

Histories of the several regiments and battalions from NC, in the great war 1861-’65 v.1 http://digital.ncdcr.gov/u?/p249901coll22,264606

Histories of the several regiments and battalions from NC, in the great war 1861-’65 v.2 http://digital.ncdcr.gov/u?/p249901coll22,265485

Histories of the several regiments and battalions from NC, in the great war 1861-’65 v.3 http://digital.ncdcr.gov/u?/p249901coll22,266420

Histories of the several regiments and battalions from NC, in the great war 1861-’65 v.4 http://digital.ncdcr.gov/u?/p249901coll22,267315

Histories of the several regiments and battalions from NC, in the great war 1861-’65 v.5 http://digital.ncdcr.gov/u?/p249901coll22,268192

Guide to military organizations and installations: North Carolina, 1861-1865 http://digital.ncdcr.gov/u?/p249901coll22,269412

North Carolina at Gettysburg http://digital.ncdcr.gov/u?/p249901coll22,269309

Roster of North Carolina troops in the War between the states, volume 1 http://digital.ncdcr.gov/utils/getfile/collection/p249901coll22/id/270017/filename/271656.pdf

Roster of North Carolina troops in the War between the states, volume 2 http://digital.ncdcr.gov/cdm/ref/collection/p249901coll22/id/325283

Roster of North Carolina troops in the War between the states, volume 3 http://digital.ncdcr.gov/cdm/ref/collection/p249901coll22/id/352800

Roster of North Carolina troops in the War between the states, volume 4 http://digital.ncdcr.gov/cdm/ref/collection/p249901coll22/id/352045

Honorables unbound! Let’s go to the tape

Once again the General Assembly takes the floor, and once again we can expect the ensuing somnolence to be relieved by intermittent bursts of rhetorical excess. Three favorites from past sessions:

— Opposing a 2006 ethics bill that would cut back legislators’ take from lobbyists, Rep. Drew Saunders, D-Mecklenburg, argued that “Even the baby Jesus accepted gifts, and I don’t think it corrupted Him.”

— Rep. John Kerr, D-Wayne, stood up for the tobacco industry in 1990: “If it’s so bad, why do you see all the Japanese and the French and the English, every time you watch them on television, they’re all smoking?”

— In 1989, speaking against obscene bumper stickers, Sen. Bob Shaw, R-Guilford, imagined the pioneers tossing aside freedom of speech “if somebody had written four-letter words all over their wagons. There would have been some hangings, ladies and gentlemen.”.