Whig Hill

I swear, if it’s the last thing I do…

I am always fed up with the local provincial blowhards who like to say that brightleaf tobacco happened by accident, and that the Durham tobacco industry got its start from pillaging Yankee soldiers who wrote back for more. I am also ever frustrated with the know-nothings at WUNC who keep airing this stuff (and who repeatedly refer to Bennett Place as Bennett Point.) Morons, all.

I’ll have a book—it’ll be my third book, btw—that details the efforts of farmers like Abisha Slade and his colleagues in the Hyco Agricultural Society who experimented for years on curing methods to achieve brightleaf and spent even more years marketing the method to other farmers in central Virginia and North Carolina. (Yeah, there already is a book that does this… Nannie Mae Tilley’s The Bright-Tobacco Industry, but the only press people pay attention to these days, apparently, is the self-publishing history houses.) And then my book will tell how Durham tobacco became regionally, then nationally known because Washington Duke hauled his skinny ass and his smoking tobacco to every dry goods merchant  between Wilmington and Pittsburg and Julian Carr deployed an army of salesmen and  innovative advertisers.

That’s what I’m going to do.

Ppppt-tyng!

p.s. I can't believe I still have to say this, but Bull Durham smoking tobacco was not a W. Duke & Sons product. It was Julian Carr's.

Successes

In our teaching workshop today, we were asked to discuss our “successes” in class. I offered four.

1. I successfully got rid of about six failing students by the final day for withdrawal (yesterday.)

2. I successfully identified several cases of plagiarism on Monday’s exam.

3. I successfully caved to a couple of students who wanted better grades on their exams, based purely on their persistent pleading.

4. I successfully held a study group that no one showed up for.

And, in non-class-related news, I successfully contributed to Barack Obama’s victory in North Carolina!

NC did it!

Originally uploaded by natmaconjr.

Originally uploaded by natmaconjr.

Do it

Do it
Originally uploaded by natmaconjr.

Du Bois

Du Bois
Originally uploaded by natmaconjr.

	Drive-By Truckers - The Righteous Path
	Found at skreemr.com

Checking in

Originally uploaded by natmaconjr.

Nice day, so I took Lizzie down to Green Hill Cemetery and let her run around off leash for a while. She had a blast. It’s been all-leash lately. I can tell that the mobility of her hips is gradually decreasing, but that doesn’t slow her down. Anyhow, we saw many of Greensboro’s leading (white) historical lights like the mill owner Alfred M. Scales, that terrible racist David Schenck, and Julian Price, whose crypt is the only memorial I’ve ever seen where the man’s name is subtitled “husband of [wife’s name].”

This is just a quick update, so I’ll just bullet-point it.

• My students are beginning to get serious about their grades. We started a study group today and that went well. I should say half of my students are getting serious about the class; the other half is getting serious about naps during class. Since it turns out I’m a non-confrontational pushover, I just let them snooze away. Hey, they might pick up something by osmosis, which won’t happen if they’re in the hall talking on their cell phones, which is apparently all the average undergraduate does these days.

• My own classes are going well. They both overlap time periods, so I’m getting a concentration in late-Nineteenth Century America and fixing on a common theme…the ideological underpinnings for modern, pragmatic, Twentieth Century America, that came out of the Civil War years. Great fun. And they’re still not offering any classes in early and antebellum America. Grrrrrrrr. I don’t know what I’m going to do next semester.

• I left my iPod in a classroom and don’t think I’ll ever see it again.

• Much reading at home. Lizzie is terribly irritated by that since it takes away from play time. She’s become quick in bringing toys to squeak in my lap or trying to roust me out of the chair…and even getting up in it so I can’t sit down.

• Attention North Carolina voters: Re-elect Les Merritt state auditor. He’s always coming up with some new, thrilling, read. Go to this post for the .pdf of his latest work. What gets me is that overseas expenses are justified as fulfilling the Department’s mission of bringing culture and art to the people of North Carolina, but I can think of a dozen ways to use $500 spent on a fancy dinner in St. Petersburg to upgrade, renovate, purchase or fund existing or new projects that would enhance the mission of Historic Sites or the History Museum right here at home. When I left sites in July, my position got yanked by the Secretary’s office. My salary was just below the cost of airfare for the France trip. I wonder if it went to pay back some of this. The costs of these trips could have funded the salaries of three or four employees. Meanwhile, the Department is having yet another hiring freeze (and even ungraciously un-hired someone it recently hired), positions are going unfilled, and I’ll wager that not one single piece of art will exchange hands because of these trips.

• That is all.

Honk! Fest 2008

Honk! Fest 2008
Originally uploaded by natmaconjr.

Went to Honk! Fest. Had a blast. Pictures here.