Whig Hill

a beautiful day in the neighborhood

Let me tell you... the gravitational cool of Northgate Park is getting stronger by the day.

May I?

Does anyone have a tiller I can borrow for half a day to prepare some unbroken land for a garden?

things

Here is a new online photo exhibit from the Durham County Public Library about the last days at Liggett.

Also, if you are driving around listening to the radio this afternoon between 4 and 6 and think you hear some twang inflected pop, that's probably me.

UPDATE: That went well. Much indie-pop today. But I did crib a bunch of new music for the laptop. Oh, goody. While there, Kacey called to say she saw a protest by the Burger King on Club Blvd. Something about tomatoes. So I reported that ace girl reporter Kacey had phoned in a daring report from a protest at the Burger King! Now, I don't get any song requests, but this little thing got very earnest calls from paranoid do-gooders wondering what's up? I said, beats me. Something about tomatoes.

Oh, well. Back to reading. It's Cold War and nationalism this week.

Happy Birthday Charlie Poole

March 22, 1892

	Charlie Poole - Poole_DealGoDown
	Found at skreemr.com

Dr. Hawkes

I, too, had Dr. Robert Hawkes as an undergraduate advisor for my history B.A. at George Mason. He passed away earlier this month. His hard-core Southside Virginia gentleman farmer accent couldn't hide a great subversiveness and humor as he told us about growing up a privileged white boy in the Jim Crow south and his transformation to post-racial liberal at college. He also told me that getting your B.A. and M.A. from the same school was looked down upon as incestuious in academic circles. I'm not certain that's true, but it caused me to drop out of George Mason's graduate program in history after one semester in 1993. I still regret that. Maybe he was just trying to get rid of me. Ha!

Test, test

Just testing this Skreemr business. Despite what these drunks say at the end about someone writing the lyrics to this song, it is actually an old Country Gentlemen tune from back in the day.

	Drive-By Truckers - Fox On The Run
	Found at skreemr.com

Here's the original:

	Fox on the Run MP3
	Found at skreemr.com

A good thing by our state archives (UPDATED)

  ConDev7340C 
  Originally uploaded by North Carolina State Archives.

(UPDATE: Kim has made the changes I mentioned below. Now that's responsiveness! Great.)

By now we all know about the Library of Congress' initiative to get their photographs on Flickr. Well, now we learn through the North Carolina state archives' (tragically underutilized) blog that they are doing the same thing, almost.

This is a great effort. It is important that we get our stuff out there so it is easily accessible. I only wish the photos were larger,  and that they'd fix it so that we could add tags and notes to the pictures, like the LoC does.

And, they've got a set of Plott Hound photographs that are cool.

The now-legendary coosh debacle

I am in the audio for this slide show (see if you can guess), but do not appear in the images because I missed part of this because I am a shit bird, and I have shit for brains. But I was standing near Ernie when he absolutely ruined that flour and grease dish he tried to make.

The New Deal

Ok. Time for my one political post for the year. I don't give a good-goddam about this business with Obama's pastor. First of all, being in the South, you learn real fast that you can't have good without a little bad. Its just a fact you have to learn to accept and get over. Second, what this man said wasn't really all that bad. But I'll let Ralph Luker handle that one. Ed Blum, too (you should really read that one.) Third, this kind of politicking--condemn a man by association and all that gotcha stuff--is repulsive and if you engage in it I will vote against you because you obviously don't take this whole thing very seriously. Whether Obama is all that, I don't know, but for now, he's carrying the idea that we should be beyond this type of poison bullshit and I'm going with it. </end rant>

I've been reading about the New Deal these last two weeks. I don't know anything about the twentieth century, but I'm learning. Anyhow, one of the fundamental reforms to the American economy the New Deal instituted was for the U.S. government to insure financial institutions against failure. Before the 1920s, the major financial houses took the lead in managing economic downturns. So when I heard the news today about the Treasury Department backing J.P. Morgan to purchase Bear Stearns I thought, this is exactly how the New Dealers intended it to work. Or something like that. (Its kind of a time warp because J.P. Morgan and his firm often managed the economy in hard times before the New Deal.) Oh, well. At least it's not 1931...    its not, right? right?

This makes me happy

Good history is revealing itself all over the blogs today. Pressing forward our understanding of historical events and people is the process of history. The subjects of the dissertation I aspire to write--antebellum southern people--are proving a fertile bunch these days, and the direction of new analysis makes me very happy. Kevin found a fresh look at Thomas Jackson of Virginia, and Kelly Baker considers a new book about Georgia's Charles Jones. This is exciting.