Category: History

Foxcatcher Movie Review

We just caught Foxcatcher at Regal Edgmont Square 10, which was just a mile or so from where all the action happened.

Steve Carell nails John du Pont. He deserves an Oscar.

Was the movie entertaining? Well, it was like spending 134 minutes with John du Pont.

That would be a no.

Thanks for 134 minutes of misery, Mr. Carell.

You should be investigated by the Senate Democrats.

Some observations, Mark Schultz (Channing Tatum) is told on his initial helicopter ride to Foxcatcher that du Pont would have been piloting himself had he not been providing tactical assistance to the “Newtown Square” Police Department. That should have been Newtown Police Department as Newtown Square is the postal address not municipal name.  When police are shown, however, the shoulder patches are correct as are the names on the cars which even have the color scheme we remember.

Yes, du Pont did at times provide aerial assistance to the Newtown Police.

The mansion used was in Leesburg, Va. as the actual site was torn down in 2013.  You would not see the background hills in Newtown Square.

We don’t remember as much snow on the ground when the Jan. 26, 1996 shooting of Dave Schultz (Mark Ruffalo) happened. Ruffalo was also very good, by the way.

There was no mention of the Villanova University controversy or the sexual harassment suits by the wrestlers, nor was there of his short, unhappy marriage to Gale Wenk

There is one scene where John’s mother, Jean Liseter Austin du Pont (Vanessa Redgrave) is pushing du Pont to give away his toy trains. He never did. Below is a shot of his train set from his Nov. 26, 2011 estate sale. For what it’s worth, yesterday, Dec. 9, was the fourth anniversary of his death.

DuPont Train Set Foxcatcher Movie Review

Foxcatcher Movie Review

Remember Pearl Harbor

Today, Dec. 7 marks the 73rd anniversary of the attack on the U.S. Navy fleet at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii.

It’s “a date which will live in infamy,” said President Franklin Delano Roosevelt at the time.

This act was the catalyst which drew the United States into World War II, ultimately leading to the victory of Allied powers around the globe.

For  information about the attack visit here.

Hat tip Jim Cox.

Remember Pearl Harbor

Remember Pearl Harbor

William Lawrence Sr. Omnibit 11-21-14

William Lawrence Sr. Omnibit 11-21-14

The English Parliament remained in session without a break from 1640 to 1653. That’s why it’s called “The Long Parliament.”

It was called into session by Charles I and wound up cutting off his head.

It’s kind of an appropriate Omnibit for today.

It should be noted that those responsible for Charles’ execution were themselves executed when the Royalists returned to power in 1660, some by being hanged (to near death), drawn (removal of bowels while still alive) and quartered (cut in pieces after death).

One of those subject to such was Major-General Thomas Harrison, who remained cheerfully unrepentant during his ordeal. He reached over and smacked his executioner during the disemboweling, which cause his head to be prematurely removed.

It seems much aggravation could have been avoided if Parliament merely impeached Charles.

Long Parliament Has Lessons For Today

Helicopter War Commemoration

Carris Kocher informs us that The Vietnam War: A 50th Year Commemoration of “The Helicopter War” will take place Nov. 12 at West Chester University and American Helicopter Museum and Education Center in West Chester.

The event is to honor “Vietnam War veterans and their families, underlying the unique contributions to the war effort made by helicopters, and highlighting the Delaware Valley’s ongoing contributions to rotary craft aviation” according to the event organizers. It will   feature “a series of prominent speakers, both scholars and practitioners, who will situate the use of rotary wing craft within the American Way of War.”

The agenda is:

An Exhibit of Vietnam era artifacts curated by West Chester University Special Collections Director
10 a.m. – Opening Ceremony
11 a.m. – Rotary Wing Pioneers, Design and Engineering
1 p.m. – Opening Keynote Address Professor John Bonin, US Army War College
2 p.m. – Helicopters in Vietnam
3 p.m. – Post-Vietnam:  Legacy of the “Helicopter War”
4 p.m. – Veterans’ Round Table discussion
6 p.m. – Evening Reception at AHM&EC

The museum is at 1220 American Blvd., West Chester, Pa., 19380.

For prices and other information, contact info@americanhelicopter.museum or rkodosky@wcupa.edu

Helicopter War Commemoration

Helicopter War Commemoration

Why Elections Are Held On Tuesdays William Lawrence Sr Omnibit 11-4-14

Why Elections Are Held On Tuesdays William Lawrence Sr Omnibit 11-4-14

Elections are held on Tuesdays because when the nation was founded most did not travel on Sundays for religious reasons so having it on Monday didn’t provide enough time to travel.

It’s held the first Tuesday on or after Nov. 2 because the Founders didn’t want it to fall on All Saints Day and the first of the month was when shopkeepers did their books.

They picked November because that’s when harvest was over.

Elections are held on Tuesdays because when the nation was founded most did not travel on Sundays

William Bradford Evening In Concord

An Evening With William Bradford, An Eye-witness Account of The Pilgrim Story 1620-21 will be held Saturday, 6-9 p.m., Nov. 1 at the Concord Senior Center, 817 Concord Road, Glen Mills, Pa. 19342.

Tickets are $30 for adults with limited number of $15 discounts for children 12 and under.

The night features Thanksgiving themed refreshments.

Step back into the 17th Century and hear William Bradford share

his eye-witness account of key events in Pilgrim history. You are sure to be entertained and challenged while receiving an accurate rendering of events and new appreciation for this band of Separatists – who they were, what they did and why.

Learn the:
· Real reasons the Pilgrims left England and came to the New World
· Record of the Mayflower journey
· Realities of surviving their first Winter
· Amazing relationship with the Native American Indians
· Power of the Mayflower Compact
· Facts concerning the “First Thanksgiving”

To register for visit the Eventbrite link on Facebook https://www.facebook.com/events/714805915223252/

The children’s discounts are not available at Eventbrite. For information on how to get one call 484.557.7655 or email AmericanLibertyTours@gmail.com
Hat tip Carris Kocher

William Bradford Evening In Concord

William Bradford Evening In Concord

Ignore Howard Zinn, Celebrate Columbus

Ignore Howard Zinn, Celebrate Columbus — Let us today, this Columbus Day — granted the official observation is Monday — ignore Howard Zinn, who was  a very bad historian, and celebrate the guy who, for all intents and purposes, discovered America.

Vinland, after all, never really took.

Ignore Howard Zinn

Howard Zinn was a socialist who wrote a book call “A People’s History of the United States” which used to be able to be read for free  at a site, appropriately enough regarding Zinn, called HistoryIsAWeapon.com. It no longer seems to be available there, however.

Zinn claims that America has always been ruled by oppressors — the 1 percenters who own a third of the wealth and keep control by fermenting dissent among the 99 percent who are the rest of us  — and starts his claim with Columbus who he says committed genocide on the residents of the West Indies.

It seems to be the theme pushed by the hipster crowd this 2013.

Well, the truth is the Spanish were pretty rough on the native peoples of the Caribbean, something we know from Spanish sources, but the cruelty was obviously not done at the direction of Spanish authorities as steps were taken to stop it when complaints reached them. Further, the native peoples of the Caribbean were not without their flaws either. The name for the Caribbean comes from the Carib tribe, from whence we also get the word cannibal.

And while Columbus was  far from perfect he does not appear to be the gratuitously cruel tyrant Zinn and our hipster friends claim him to be. In Columbus’ own words this is what he says about the Lucayan peoples of the Bahamas who Zinn et al alleges he mutilated and slaughtered: “They are very gentle and without knowledge of what is evil; nor do they murder or steal… . Your Highness may believe that in all the world there can be no better people … they have the sweetest talk in the world, and are always laughing.”

It seems the revisionists are getting their signals crossed somewhere, which is understandable as Zinn is a bad historian.

America is a place that allowed tens of millions of Europeans and Asians to escape the feudalism that infected their homelands and her discovery only deserves to be celebrated. Even Africans should celebrate. Slavery existed in Africa — it wasn’t Europeans doing the slave catching — before the trans-Atlantic slave trade and it was only after the founding of the United States did the push begin to end it. Pennsylvania was one of the first recognized governments in in history, to ban slavery which happened in 1780 in the middle of the Revolutionary War.

Our hipster ironically wants a day named for Bishop Bartolomé de las Casas and there is a point to that as the Bishop is one of history’s good guys.  On the other hand, he was the one who suggested that the labor lost due to the death of Indians be replaced by Africans and some credit him with the start of the trans-Atlantic slave trade.

History is a bit more nuanced than Zinn and the hipster crowd make it out to be.

One more bit of irony:  Zinn’s work was popularized by Matt Damon and Ben Affleck who grew up near Zinn and were family friends. Damon and Affleck are now part of the one-percenter crowd. They have yet to give most of their money to the rest of us, and certainly have not led any crusades to end the tax breaks for performing artists who receive mega millions per film.

Ignore Howard Zinn, Celebrate Columbus Ignore Howard Zinn, Celebrate Columbus Ignore Howard Zinn, Celebrate Columbus Ignore Howard Zinn, Celebrate Columbus Ignore Howard Zinn, Celebrate Columbus

Free Philly Walking Tour

The Association of Philadelphia Tour Guides will be hosting a  free, walking tour of the city from river to river, Vine to Pine, Saturday, Sept. 25.

Featured will be historic sites like the Liberty Bell, Independence Hall, Elfreth’s Alley, City Hall and more during an epic day of city adventuring.

The Great Tour is split into four, two and a half hour segments with each phase passing through 20 to 25 cultural and historic sites.

The exploration begins at the National Constitution Center at 8 a.m. with a walk through the historic sites of Old City. The tour continues on to Society Hill (11 a.m.), through Market East (2 p.m.) and concludes with a stroll past the cultural institutions along the Benjamin Franklin Parkway (5 p.m.).

Attendees are asked to arrive 15 minutes prior to departure for each phase of the tour. Advance registration is recommended and free of charge.

 For details visit here

Free Philly Walking Tour

 

 Philly Walking Tour

Hat tip Carris Kocher

Publicker Distillery At The Beginning

Many still remember the view of the  Publicker Distillery while crossing the Walt Whitman Bridge and its billboards for Old Hickory Bourbon and other products.

Others remember how the 40-acre site on Delaware Avenue in Philadelphia became a polluted Superfund scandal after it closed in 1982.

In its heyday in the 1950s, it was one of the giants of the liquor industry with a plant in Scotland producing Inver House Scotch, named for owner Simon Neuman’s Radnor home, and was the world’s biggest buyer of Cuban molasses.

The company got into the booze business in 1933 with the end of Prohibition.

Fortune magazine ran a optimistic story at the time about how Harry Publicker — founder and Neuman’s father-in-law — was going to shake up the booze business by making drinkable whiskey without aging it. One supposes they were right. Here is the link.

Publicker Distillery At The Beginning Old Hickory

Publicker Distillery At The Beginning

Taney Dragons Name Traced To Infamous Judge

Taney Dragons Name Traced To Infamous Judge

Taney Dragons Name Traced To Infamous Judge

The Taney Dragons, the melting pot of a baseball team from Philadelphia with a black girl pitcher, won the hearts of all with their just-ended Little League World Series run in which they finished third in the nation.

So where does the name Taney come from? It’s from Taney Street, a four-block stretch of pavement that runs from Pine to Bainbridge just across the Schuylkill River from Penn.

And for whom is Taney Street named? That’s the irony.  It is for the man who wrote the Dred Scott decision, the most racist and viciously destructive Supreme Court decision in our history.

Dred Scott was more hateful and irrational than Roe v Wade. It was more racist than Plessy v Ferguson. It was crueler than Buck vs Bell.

It declared blacks to be less than human. It started the Civil War.

Roger Taney was a Democrat — no surprise, really –from Maryland who was picked by Andrew Jackson to be Chief Justice of the Supreme Court in 1835 after the great John Marshall died in a stage coach accident.

It is said he favored States’ Rights but that certainly wasn’t the case concerning slavery. In 1842, he ruled that Pennsylvania could not stop a Maryland man from seizing former slaves that had taken up residence in the Keystone State.

It was in 1857, he really let the mask drop.  In Dred Scott he wrote regarding blacks:

It is difficult at this day to realize the state of public opinion in regard to that unfortunate race which prevailed in the civilized and enlightened portions of the world at the time of the Declaration of Independence, and when the Constitution of the United States was framed and adopted; but the public history of every European nation displays it in a manner too plain to be mistaken. They had for more than a century before been regarded as beings of an inferior order, and altogether unfit to associate with the white race, either in social or political relations, and so far unfit that they had no rights which the white man was bound to respect

So much for “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal”

Those governing Philadelphia at the time apparently thought the decision was peachy.  They named the street for him the next year.

Three years after that our country’s bloodiest war began. Taney died before it ended on Oct. 12, 1864, still the chief justice and giving as much grief to the Lincoln administration as he could but with his fangs largely pulled.

So thank you Mo’ne Davis and the rest of the Dragons, for the deserved mocking you gave to one of America’s great bigots.