panchomanyeti-blog

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August 28th 1963: March on Washington

On this day in 1963, the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom took place. The march was a key moment of the Civil Rights Movement, and a triumph for the nonviolence philosophy which underpinned the movement. The march is best remembered for Martin Luther King Jr.’s famous ‘I Have a Dream’ speech, given in front of the Lincoln Memorial, which extolled King’s vision of an America free of racial discrimination. Other speakers included chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee John Lewis and veteran civil rights leader A. Philip Randolph. When politicians in Washington heard about the march many, including President John F. Kennedy, feared that there would be violence and rioting. The peaceful gathering of over 250,000 supporters of civil rights, with many whites in attendance as well as African-Americans, highlighted issues of racial discrimination and unequal housing and employment. The demonstration in the nation’s capital, and King’s speech in particular, spurred America into action and paved the way for the landmark 1964 Civil Rights Act and 1965 Voting Rights Act, vital tools in the fight for racial equality.

“I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed. ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal’… I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.”

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Last week, the Internet Archive announced that 2.6 million images extracted from the Archive’s public domain eBooks have been uploaded to Flickr Commons. But not just that - they’re tagged and they include about 500 words surrounding the image. So full-text searches of images, basically. Oh, and that 2.6 million images is just the first batch. There are a total of 14 million images extracted which will ultimately be uploaded to Flickr.

What’s cool, too, is that even though not all the images are on Flickr yet, browsing can lead you to more images at the Archive itself. For instance, there’s an amazing series of books at the Archive I discovered via the Flickr account called Reminiscences about Abraham Lincoln, which are newspaper clippings and recollections cataloged by the last name of the people included. The “Wi” section (surnames beginning with “Wi”) is on Flickr, but only a handful of the images are uploaded so far. But on the main page for any of the images on Flickr (like this, for example), you can find the link to the Archive page, with the full volume.

Anyway, long story short: that’s how I found the image above, and this week I’ll be posting finds from the Internet Archive’s Flickr account, or finds that began with browsing the Flickr account!

Drummer Boy, Now 80, Regrets Lincoln Didn’t Spank Him At 14 Philadelphia Ledger, February 12, 1931

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young trotsky looks like jean ralphio

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President Barack Obama holds hands with Selma march veteran Amelia Boynton Robinson and civil rights legend Congressman John Lewis on Saturday. 

(Photograph: Jacquelyn Martin/AP)

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French President François Hollande and his squad about to throw a sick verse

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Hello, sir! As you've probably noticed, I've gotten myself irrevocably interested in Richard Nixon and would like to know which books from your list would give me the best (and least biased) portrait of the man? Darn, but he is interesting!

ladyhistory!

Because of Nixon’s very long, very interesting life and career, he has more books written about him than average Presidents, and, in his case, more good books written about him than most. So, there are going to be a lot on the list to choose from. 

For the best all-around portrait of Nixon, I’d suggest the trilogy by the legendary Stephen E. Ambrose:

•Nixon, Volume I: The Education of a Politician, 1913-1962 (BOOK | KINDLE)•Nixon, Volume II: The Triumph of a Politician, 1963-1972 (BOOK | KINDLE)•Nixon, Volume III: Ruin and Recovery, 1973-1990 (BOOK | KINDLE)

Other books that are pretty down-the-middle, complete portraits of either Nixon’s life, or just his Presidency, include:

•President Nixon: Alone in the White House by Richard Reeves (BOOK | KINDLE)•Richard M. Nixon: A Life In Full by Conrad Black (BOOK | KINDLE)•Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America by Rick Perlstein (BOOK | KINDLE)•Nixon and Kissinger: Partners In Power by Robert Dallek (BOOK | KINDLE)

Want more?

Okay, how about books that are a little more biased — or, at least one-sided:

•RN: The Memoirs of Richard Nixon by Richard Nixon (BOOK | KINDLE): It’s Nixon’s own autobiography, so it’s obviously his side of the story, but that’s certainly important. Plus, Nixon was a good writer, and even candid at times.

•All the President’s Men (BOOK | KINDLE) and The Final Days (BOOK | KINDLE) by Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein: You have to read these two books at some point in your life; especially The Final Days. If you like this essay of mine ("What Have I Done?"), you’ll love The Final Days.

•The Haldeman Diaries: Inside the Nixon White House by H.R. Haldeman: Nixon’s most loyal soldier, H.R. “Bob” Haldeman, kept a diary during Nixon’s Presidency. This is it. That’s enough to sell it, in my opinion.

I could keep going, but I’ll wait until you read a few of these first. But, I’ll recommend two more books before I post this. You like Nixon, and I understand because I like Nixon, too. I like people who fascinate me, people who frustrate me, and I have a soft spot for underdogs — and Nixon was an underdog who made it to the very top and brought himself down by doing something stupid. I can understand that. So, I like Nixon, too.

Not many of these books with give you a good sense of who Nixon actually was. They are too focused on history or on their own feelings about the man to get personal. But in the final years of his life, Monica Crowley spent a significant amount of time with Nixon as his personal assistant and researcher for some of his last books. She wrote two books about Nixon that cover a much more candid, much less guarded version the man. After you go with the neutral, overall package, you may want to swing back around to Monica Crowley’s books: Nixon Off-the-Record: His Candid Commentary on People and Politics and Nixon In Winter: His Final Revelations About Diplomacy, Watergate, and Life Out of the Arena. 

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You are the books you read, the films you watch, the music you listen to, the people you meet, the dreams you have, the conversations you engage in. You are what you take from these. You are the sound of the ocean, the breath of fresh air, the brightest light and the darkest corner. You are a collective of every experience you have had in your life. You are every single second of every single day. So drown yourself in a sea of knowledge and existence. Let the words run through your veins and let the colors fill your mind until there is nothing left to do but explode. There are no wrong answers. Inspiration is everything. Sit back, relax, and take it all in. Now, go out and create something.

Jac Vanek (via exoticwild)

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And I saw it didn’t matter who had loved me or who I loved. I was alone. The black oily asphalt, the slick beauty of the Iranian attendant, the thickening clouds—nothing was mine. And I understood finally, after a semester of philosophy, a thousand books of poetry, after death and childbirth and the startled cries of men who called out my name as they entered me, I finally believed I was alone, felt it in my actual, visceral heart, heard it echo like a thin bell. And the sounds came back, the slish of tires and footsteps, all the delicate cargo they carried saying thank you and yes. So I paid and climbed into my car as if nothing had happened— as if everything mattered—What else could I do?

Dorianne Laux, excerpt from After Twelve Days of Rain (via theoryoflostthings)

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Who among us would disagree, though?

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Here Is The Most Disproportionately Popular Cuisine In Each State

When most people think American cuisine, they think pizza, hot dogs and hamburgers.

While these are indeed staples across the country, every state has its own sense of flavor. Now, thanks to a collaboration between The Huffington Post and Yelp, we can see exactly what types of cuisine are most likely to appear in each state.

You may not be surprised to learn that Maine is crazy about seafood. But would you have guessed that Utah has a hankering for Hawaiian?

Yelp figured out which cuisines were most common in each state by examining restaurant listings on its site. The review service uses information pulled by third-party data providers from public records and other sources in order to create its online restaurant listings, according to its website.

To get the data for the map, Yelp first calculated the percentage of total restaurants each cuisine represented in a given state. Then, it compared each percentage with the cuisine’s representation in restaurants nationwide. The resulting map, made by HuffPost, shows the cuisines with a disproportionate level of representation in each state.

Restaurants on Yelp can be placed into as many as three categories, so some restaurants may have been counted more than once. For instance, a Kosher vegetarian Chinese restaurant would count as three cuisines.

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What better occupation, really, than to spend the evening at the fireside with a book, with the wind beating on the windows and the lamp burning bright… Haven’t you ever happened to come across in a book some vague notion that you’ve had, some obscure idea that returns from afar and that seems to express completely your most subtle feelings?

Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary (via bookmania)

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just read the notes wtffff IS THERE A 2ND VERSION OF THIS EPISODE

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Suffering has been stronger than all other teaching, and has taught me to understand what your heart used to be. I have been bent and broken, but - I hope - into a better shape.

Charles Dickens, Great Expectations (via bookmania)