Category: History

• One Year

  On March 7th I attended Kamasi Washington’s show at the Tower Theatre in Oklahoma City, the same day Oklahoma reported their first COVID–19 case. That is still the last major public event I’ve been. At that point we knew almost nothing about the pandemic and the risk seemed low in terms of attending the concert but as news of the pandemic progressed over the next week I kept questioning whether I should have gone and whether the slightest weird feelings I got were the onset of COVID–19 or just a panic induced response. That Friday, March 14th, I gave an in-person exam in my American history survey and then the class broke for Spring Break and never returned. The quietness of an exam magnifies literally everything in the room but even moreso when you’re giving it with the spector of a global pandemic in the background. Every cough seemed like it was an omen for something far worse than a dry throat. Every sniffle a sure sign that I could be handing out more than grades in a week or so. Nothing came to be from either event as far as know and I was obscenely fortunate to spend March through August essentially secluded at home with reliable pay. Even when I returned to in-person teaching in the fall semester I had a university that was enforcing mask requirements and implemented modified classrooms, even if those classrooms were at times ridiculous.[1]I wasn’t particularly interested in writing one of these one year of the pandemic posts because given my situation a lot of my life didn’t change all that much. I stopped going to concerts and I became more deliberate about what I do outside of the house but otherwise, life continued as normal. Yet in the last few days as Oklahoma begins warming up for Spring I had some very real flashbacks to March of last year. It was probably spurred on by the events of a year ago but really what sent me back was the fact that I opened the window in my bedroom. One of my favorite things is that point where it gets sensibly warm enough outside to open the windows that have remained shut for the last however many months. Not only does the house get the distinct spring smell but it feels nicer to have a breeze blowing through. Even though I get the smell every year and cherished it when I grew up in Connecticut where the winters were decidedly harsher than Oklahoma, that smell sent me right back to March 2020. It reminded me of the weird point when I sat at my desk and typed out lessons for the online course and tried to wrap my head around everything that was going on in the world at the same time. It reminded me of the walks and at-home workouts I did at the start of the pandemic to try and keep my exercise routine up, only to have it fall away in the summer when I simply couldn’t do another TRX band workout without hating everything. I don’t particularly want any of that to ever come back, just as I can’t wait to get to teach a course without a mask and giant socially-distanced rooms. It’s disconcerting that I’ve gone a semester and a half without seeing student faces, without really engaging with them because conversations in large rooms isn’t practical. Plus, lecturing for 45 or 75 minutes with a mask on is beyond annoying. There’s hope ahead that all of this will go away. The university is planning for regular classes in the fall and they’ve just announced that everyone on campus is eligible for a vaccine. Students, faculty, staff, and their spouses. Everyone. Furthermore the University’s health services are both efficient with covid testing and adminstering vaccines, so there’s very real prospects for normalcy in the near future. Yet there’s still the looming issue of variants and the fact that every spring I’m going to crack the windows and instantly be transported back to that weird time when I watched Youtube videos about making masks with shop towels and why you should wash everything from the grocery store like it was some high-risk hazmat situation.[2] I can’t wait for a time when my biggest worry is weird flashbacks.

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  1. Last semester I taught on the basketball courts adjacent to the kettlebell section of the gym and this semester through some kind of weird scheduling decision I have a class capped at less than a hundred in-person students (and 51 actually enrolled) in a gym annex that can sit 300 spread across five basketball courts. ↩
  2. That video has over 26 million views and the doctor who did it hasn’t published a Youtube video since early April when he released one on package and delivery tips. Probably because it pretty quickly got criticized by everyone as ridiculous and potentially harmful. ↩

  03/09/2021

  Reflections

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• The Swiping Revolution

  A few nights ago at far too late an hour I ended up watching the entire unveiling of the first iPhone back in 2007. I’m not sure I ended up on the subject, but in the end I stuck around for the entire 80ish minutes because it was such an interesting relic of technology history.

  It really it shocking to listen to an entire audience gasp at the fact that you can just swipe on the screen to see more content, something pretty much every has a natural understanding of today. Hell, the reminder of non-visual voicemail made me remember my old voicemail PIN that I haven’t used in a dozen years. The first iPhone by today’s standards is both too small (screen size) and too large (form factor) and lacking in so many features (remember not being able to copy and paste?) but the audience and the phone comparisons of the day remind us, this thing changed everything. The best reminder of this comes when Jobs opens the New York Times homepage and its a desktop website. There was no mobile design because there were no mobile designs. Being able to open a clunky desktop site and double clicking to zoom in and out on any article was a massive advancement. In December Adobe is sunsetting flash player, Apple got criticized for not including in on the phone, a decision that more than anything else helped destroy one of the worst bits of internet technology this century.

  The entire presentation is just chock full of things that are startlingly out of place by today’s standards. Even if iOS 7 was so controversial, the original design just looks…old and noisy. The fact that Jobs brings out Google’s Eric Schmidt and Yahoo’s Jerry Yang is jarring because Apple is decidedly in a position of needing these companies. Google provided the maps and Youtube apps while Yahoo! gave every iPhone user free push email. Now Apple has iCloud and Maps; Google has Android (and Gmail out of beta); and Yahoo! is well…still around. Probably the most shocking thing, however, is what Jobs focuses on first…the iPod. It shouldn’t be, music was a central pillar of Apple’s business model in 2007 between the iPod and the iTunes store. But in 2020 it feels so…unrevolutionary.

  07/07/2020

  Apple, Technology

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• Tulsa in 1918

  

  The hand-drawn map (not done to scale) comes from the Library of Congress’s panoramic maps collection. The full version can be downloaded or viewed here. Here’s some other historical maps from Oklahoma.

  If you zoom in you’ll notice there’s a baseball stadium between Brady and Archer from Cincinnati to Detroit, a block west of the current ONEOk Field. The drawing could be a reference to Association Park, which was located between Archer and First from Elgin to Cincinnati according to a timeline of Tulsa’s baseball stadiums. Association park, however, closed in 1917.

  Regardless of accuracy, the map provides a nice reminder of how much Tulsa has grown (or sprawled) in the last hundred years. Even by 1926, Tulsans considered the current fairgrounds, then a cow pasture, “so far out in the country.”

  04/20/2013

  Tulsa

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• The Ghosts of Louisiana’s Johnson and Gosset Plantation

  Sometime around 1859 or 1860 two cousins from Kentucky tore down “the handsomest and most commodious mansion on the Mississippi,” seemingly within months of having bought it. The two and a half story mansion, built in 1780 by a thirty-five year old former lieutenant in the French Navy, sat on over a thousand acres of land and featured three foot thick walls of water lime bricks. Three generations of the original owner’s family lived on the property until the economic crisis of 1857 and 1858 forced the family to sell the property to the two cousins from Louisville with the last names Gassett and Johnson.1 While relatively small, the plantation classified as a “large slaveholder” in 1860 lists and produced a considerable amount of sugar and molasses. So why did the two decide to tear down a stately mansion on prized land along the Mississippi? According to a New York Times article published roughly thirty-five years later, the house (and the owners) fell victim to “mysterious manifestations” that left them in “the grip of death.”

  According to the story and local legend, the issues arose out of a spell the original owner’s grandmother placed on the house during a the mansion’s house warming party. “Standing in the main hall, with a glass of wine in one trembling hand and a torch in the other, she laid a spell upon the mansion, calling ‘the curse of God down on the head of any who should dispossess the owner of his blood, for ten generations, of the house he had built.’” While the incident became the subject of gossip among the more religious of the area, most in the area quickly forgot about the supposed curse until Mr. Gassett, his wife, and servants moved into the mansion. Shortly after moving in rumors swirled that the house had been “cunjered” and Mrs. Gassett became so frightened (of what she wouldn’t say) that Mr. Gassett moved her back to Louisville and shuttered the house except for a single room he planned to live in while supervising the property.

  Hoping to calm the nerves of his slaves and area residents, Mr. Gassett brought a “voodoo queen” up from New Orleans to remove the curse. While the ceremony seemed to quiet fears, the unease returned when the plantation’s cook and butler fled the mansion around midnight a short time later. While neither explained what caused them to flee, Mr. Gassett became increasingly uneasy, telling Mr. Johnson the whole affair was too much for him arguing, “I can’t fight the devil.” In another bid to appease everyone involved, Mr. Johnson agreed to spend a night in the house, only to appear the next morning looking as if he had been sick for two weeks and refusing to discuss what happened.

  While the incidents left doctors puzzled, an assistant overseer at the plantation named Dogherty vowed to spend five nights in the mansion promising he would not be scared by wandering rats that he believed were the source of whatever frightened the others. Unfortunately, a slave sent to check on Dogherty after he didn’t appear after the third night found him strangled to death in an upstairs bedroom. While doctors agreed Dogherty was strangled to death, they couldn’t figure out what could’ve strangled a physically strong man who had a gun on the nightstand next to him.

  Perturbed by the death, a New Orleans doctor named Holliday decided he’d sleep in the house, along with a shotgun, a colt pistol, and his “finely-bred bull terrier.” Dr. Holliday, believing the incidents were the result of someone playing deadly tricks, requested his stay he kept quiet. “ According to the doctor’s subsequent story, it quickly became apparent the events were not the result of rats, cats, or humans. ”

  On the second night, Dr. Holliday locked up the house and was reading in bed when he noticed the bedroom door he thought he had closed was open. Upon closing it and returning to bed, the doctor looked up to see the doorknob turn and the door open followed by the sound of rustling silk and a low laugh. While the doctor says he laid motionless, but not scared (“for nothing had occurred to scare me.”), his watch on the nightstand began to move. When he reached for it he felt a notable resistance. Shortly thereafter a crashing bang erupted from the dining room, as “though all the dishes of the establishment had been let fall at once.” Upon stepping out into the hallway to investigate, a shriek of a panicked woman occurred right in front of the doctor, frightening both him and his dog. The two found the dining room as it was earlier in the night and headed back upstairs followed by what sounded like a light step and click of a high heel that continued until the bedroom door.

  The doctor locked the bedroom door and laid back down in the bed. Ten minutes later the key turned in the lock and the door again opened. As the doctor began to get up something grasped him around the throat. “I never felt such a grip. I dropped my pistol, and tried to free myself. But I could see nothing, nor see anything. For the first time in my life, I knew what terror was.” Dr. Holliday managed to free himself and spent the rest of the night awake in a candlelit room vainly trying to keep the door closed. While the doctor spent the next two weeks recovering from shock, he made it out of the mansion alive. His dog, on the other hand, was not so lucky as it was later found strangled under the bed when someone went to look for it.

  No explanation was found for the incidents. Seven years later the Mississippi River changed course near the former mansion, and outside of a handful of mentions, the Gossett & Johnson Plantation seems to have passed into the morass of history along with whatever inhabited the stately mansion.2

  Source: “With the Grip of Death,” New York Times, December 9, 1894.

  02/02/2013

  Archives

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• The Genus Vagrant

  There are three types of the genus vagrant: the hobo, the tramp, and the bum. The hobo works and wanders, the tramp dreams and wanders and the bum drinks and wanders.

  In Hoboes: Bindlestiffs, Fruit Tramps, and the Harvesting of the West by Mark Wyman.

  01/22/2012

  Quotes

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• Woody Guthries’s New Year’s Resolutions

  Amazing:

  Wake up and fight

  12/21/2011

  Quotes

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• Thanksgiving 1970

  1970 marked the 350th anniversary of the pilgrims landing at Plymouth Rock and like usual the residents of Plymouth, Massachusetts were planning the annual Pilgrim’s Progress festival. The festival included a parade and feast, complete with residents in period clothes. The whole affair was a celebration of American progress. Empire, if you will.

  Frank James, a Wampanoag Indian, decided to change the agenda for that year’s Thanksgiving. James and other Indians, including the Narragansets and Passamaquoddies, planned to demonstrate in a “dignified and responsible manner” about the repression and poverty endured by American Indians.[1]

  Yet the protest wasn’t going to attract much attention without some theatrics. To help bring more attention to the protest, James invited the American Indian Movement (AIM)–a Minneapolis-based Native rights group that had protested on Mt. Rushmore the same year–to join the protest. By the time the protest started at the foot of Massasoit’s statue, over 200 Indians had assembled. James decried the pilgrims that “stole our corn,” and added, “all that love and brotherhood stuff between Indians and white settlers is a lie!”[2] Russell Means, a charismatic leader of AIM, implored the white men to listen

  Listen. Listen to us, white men. Plymouth Rock is red. Red with our blood. The white man came here for religious freedom and he has denied it to us. Today you will see the Indian reclaim the Mayflower in a symbolic gesture  to reclaim our rights in this country.[3]

  Sure enough the group retook the replica Mayflower II moored in the harbor. Once on the ship the group lowered the flag of St. George and symbolically raised an upside down American flag. In a “new kind of Boston Tea Party,” only with real Indians, the group dumped pilgrim mannequins into the harbor.[4] After being cleared off the ship by local police officers, the group crashed the feast, overturning tables full of food, and dumped sand on Plymouth Rock. The protests concluded that night with another group sneaking back into the area and painting the Rock red.

  One little boy, while watching the Pilgrim procession during the festivities that day, turned to his mother and asked, “Where did all the Indians go?” “They’re not part of this,” the mother replied.[5]

  Celebrate Thanksgiving and count your blessings, but remember the cost at which your blessing came.

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  1. Dennis Banks and Richard Erdoes, Ojibwa Warrior: Dennis Banks and the Rise of the American Indian Movement* (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2004), 111.  ↩
  2. Ibid., 112.  ↩
  3. “Mourning Indians Dump Sand on Plymouth Rock,” New York Times, November, 27, 1970.  ↩
  4. The New York Times, November 27, 1970.  ↩
  5. 5  ↩
  11/23/2011

  Native Activism

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