#eight is the battle maid of secretary work

[eorzeashan]

I find it incredibly hilarious that Eight not only was forcibly retired from being Outlander because he got too murder-y with it, but was relegated to trying out assistant work for Theron because everyone deemed him to have at least a moral backbone with which to allow Eight to get a second opinion off of (and hopefully grow his own). Which results in situations like either Theron getting in trouble and his ever-capable assistant whom was assumed to be a pencil pusher suddenly being revealed to be the former Outlander who disappeared from the role, or Eight himself being targeted as a liability to Theron and then said attackers finding out, unfortunately, that Theron's assistant is a much better fighter than him and why does the Alliance have someone like this doing secretary work.

Zakuul learns to be wary of anyone they assume to only be administrative personnel, lest they be secret assassins and former Ciphers, of all people.

[sciencespies]

The Actress Who Left the Stage to Become a Civil War Spy

https://sciencespies.com/history/the-actress-who-left-the-stage-to-become-a-civil-war-spy/

The Actress Who Left the Stage to Become a Civil War Spy

SMITHSONIAN.COM | Aug. 12, 2019, 9:30 a.m.

In a photograph no bigger than a playing card, a woman dressed in military costume cradles a sword, staring confidently beyond the frame. Her name is Pauline Cushman, an actress turned Civil War spy whose story dances between the boundary dividing history and fiction.

Born Harriet Wood in 1833, Cushman changed her name when she moved to New York City to pursue acting at age 18. There, she met her first husband, who joined the Union army as a musician, but tragically died in 1862. (Like much of Cushman’s story, the specifics of her husband’s death are unclear, with reported causes varying from dysentery to a head injury). Leaving her two children behind with her in-laws, Cushman relocated to Louisville, a Union-controlled hotbed of contention, to try her hand at acting in Wood’s Theater.

Louisville is where Cushman’s story becomes history, but not as an actress. She was “not necessarily of the first rank,” says the Smithsonian’s Ann Shumard, senior curator of photographs at the National Portrait Gallery. Working as a spy for the Union Army, Louisville is also where the facts of Cushman’s story become entangled with myth as dramatic accounts of her exploits are later romanticized.

“The career of the subject of this work, the beautiful and accomplished Miss Pauline Cushman, or ‘Major’ Cushman, as she is entitled to be called…is one so varied by patriotic incident and stirring adventure, that the ear of young or old can never become satiated by its recital,” states the Life of Pauline Cushman: Celebrated Union Spy and Scout, a biography written by one of Cushman’s acquaintances in 1865. “Since the days of the Maid of Saragossa, no woman has ever lived who has so completely come up to the ideal of a heroine, as Miss Pauline Cushman.”

In a new exhibition, titled “Storied Women of the Civil War Era,” and on view at the National Portrait Gallery, the image of Cushman, dressed in military uniform, is joined by those of 13 other women, with occupations ranging from actresses like Mrs. J.H. Allen, Kate Bateman and Laura Keene, performers like singer Clara Louise Kellogg and pianist Teresa Carreño to First Lady Mary Todd Lincoln and Queen Emma of Hawaii. The show illustrates the variety of spheres that women occupied and influenced during this tense time in America’s past.

Jessie Benton Fremont (1824-1902) was a staunch defender of her husband, the explorer John C. Frémont, and took an active role in his campaign for president in 1856.

(NPG, Mathew Brady Studio, c. 1863)

Harriet Lane (1830-1903), the niece of President James Buchanan, assumed the role of First Lady and took a lively interest in the cultural arts of the Capital City.

(NPG, Mathew Brady Studio, c. 1860)

“There’s so much history that we’re not always aware of,” says Shumard. “One of the specialties of the Portrait Gallery is using the images in its collections to convey the stories of these fascinating people—some of them very well-known, and others less familiar, but whose stories are certainly worth knowing.”

Shumard hand-picked the subjects from the Frederick Hill Meserve Collection, an archive of more than 5,400 negatives produced in Mathew Brady’s studio, which the museum acquired in 1981. The current exhibition displays modern prints that were made from the original negatives, each measuring about 2.5 x 4.5 inches.

English-born actress Laura Keene (1820/26-1873) was performing in the play at Ford’s Theatre on the night that John Wilkes Booth shot Abraham Lincoln.

(NPG, Mathew Brady Studio, c. 1865)

American soprano Clara Louise Kellogg (1842-1916) was triumphant with her performance as Marguerite in Charles Gounod’s opera, “Faust.”

(NPG, Mathew Brady Studio, c. 1863)

Known as cartes de visite, or “calling cards” in French, the small prints gained enormous popularity in the United States during the 1860 presidential election just prior to the start of the Civil War. For the first time, people could acquire multiple images of their own likeness, or those of their friends and family at minimal cost. For only 20 cents per card, one could also buy the portraits of celebrities including theatrical personalities, politicians, or military officers, setting off a card collecting craze that spurred Oliver Wendell Holmes to call these prints the “social currency, the sentimental ‘Green-backs’ of civilization.”

To create a carte de visite, a photographer would insert a glass plate negative into a camera that had four separate lenses, securing a total of eight images if both halves of the plate were exposed. The negatives were turned into prints using paper that was coated with ammonium and fermented egg white, or albumen, and sensitized with silver nitrate. The result was a set of vivid, almost eggplant-toned photographs.

“Of course, in this era there are still a number of women who are principally known to the public because of their careers on the stage,” Shumard explains. Among several actresses, the exhibition displays the photograph of Laura Keene, best known for performing at Ford’s Theatre the night that Abraham Lincoln was shot. Keene, however, also broke boundaries as the first woman to manage a major theater in New York City, and as a result was subject to verbal abuse, vandalism, and the loss of her lease. “But she roared back the next year and was able to open a newly built theater and continued very successfully,” Shumard says. “So, while we might think of her as an actress, there is a richer dimension to her story.”

Actress Pauline Cushman (1833-1893) was a Union spy and became a major celebrity.

(NPG, Mathew Brady Studio, 1864)

Kate Bateman (1842-1917) made her acting debut at age 4. In New York City in 1863, she met with wild acclaim in the lead role of “Leah, the Forsaken.”

(NPG, Mathew Brady Studio, 1863)

Cushman’s story is equally rich, although perhaps with muddier details.

As the legend goes, Cushman was set to perform a scene in the play The Seven Sisters in which she proposes a toast. Two rebel officers, Colonel Spear and Captain J. H. Blincoe, offered her money to drink to the Southern Confederacy. After confessing this dare to Union authorities, she was directed to take the bet in order to ingratiate herself with Southern sympathizers and feed information back to the Union.

On the night of her performance, Cushman raised her glass and shouted, “Here’s to Jefferson Davis and the Southern Confederacy. May the South always maintain her honor and her rights!” The audience fell silent, before chaos ensued and Cushman was swiftly fired from the production.

What Cushman lost in roles she gained in Southern approval. According to the 1865 biography, Cushman was embraced by Confederate circles and began spying for the Union, with storied escapades like wearing men’s clothing to intermingle with rebels. One account even reports that she discovered her landlady mixing poison in the coffee of wounded Union soldiers and had her arrested.

First Lady Mary Todd Lincoln (1818-1882) sat for this portrait wearing the elegant gown created for her by the talented African-American dressmaker Elizabeth Keckley.

(NPG, Mathew Brady Studio, 1862)

Political operative Kate Chase Sprague (1840-1899), the daughter of Salmon P. Chase, the Secretary of the Treasury, established her home as a glittering salon and became the belle of Washington, D.C. society.

(NPG, Mathew Brady Studio, 1863)

Soon after, Cushman moved to Nashville to seek work at a new theater, and was hired by the espionage chief for the commander of the Army of the Cumberland. He asked Cushman to gather information about the confederate General Braxton Bragg, with strict orders not to steal any physical documents. Her alibi was to be that she was searching for her brother, who was a rebel in the Mississippi regiment.

The plot quickly fell apart. While trying to cross back over into Union territory, Cushman was caught with battle plans hidden in the soles of her boots that she had stolen from Bragg’s camp. She was tried in military court and sentenced to death by hanging.

But fate was in Cushman’s favor. After her execution was delayed as a result of her sudden illness, the Union army invaded Shelbyville, Tennessee, where she was being held, and the Confederate forces abandoned her.

Cushman was saved, and soon soared to fame on the nation’s stage.

“She was honored by President Lincoln and given an honorary rank of Major,” says Shumard. “And then P.T. Barnum, who of course was great at capitalizing on any opportunity to exploit fame, enlisted Pauline to appear at his American Museum.” Afterwards, “Miss Major Cushman” (her newly earned nickname) toured the country, giving lectures about her adventures while dressed in a major’s uniform.

Actress Mrs. J.H. Allen (1840-1911) performed only under her married name and was hailed by the The New York Times as “the most beautiful woman on the New York Stage.”

(NPG, Mathew Brady Studio, c. 1861)

Born in Caracas, Venezuela, pianist Teresa Carreño (1853-1917) played her first recital in New York City in 1862, when she was just 8-years-old. She later performed at Lincoln’s White House.

(NPG, Mathew Brady Studio, c. 1862)

When entertainer Lavinia Warren (1841-1919) married Charles Stratton, known as “Tom Thumb,” their lavish wedding, publicized by P.T. Barnum, was called the “Fairy Wedding.”

(NPG, Mathew Brady Studio, 1863)

Like the cartes de visite of celebrities, Cushman’s story was collected and passed around by the public, thrilling them with tales of risk and patriotic duty. A Nashville Dispatch article from August 1864 reports the arrest of one woman who was particularly inspired: “Fanny Wilson, aged 19 years, and an actress in the Memphis Theatre, was arrested a few days since while attempting to be a soldier…She had heard of major Pauline Cushman and panted for military glory and the romance of a Southern prison.”

Cushman’s notoriety would not last for long. Enthusiasm for wartime stories waned as the country struggled to heal and put itself back together. Cartes de visite, which had been especially popular as mementos for soldiers and their loved ones, also declined in demand as men and women were no longer headed to the battlefield, and a new larger-format print called a cabinet card became the dominant trend.

In 1872, Cushman moved to California in an unsuccessful attempt to rekindle her acting career. She married again and was widowed less than a year later. After working in logging camps in Santa Cruz, she met her third husband and relocated to Arizona to run a hotel. They separated in 1890 after the death of her adopted daughter, forcing her to move back to California, where while suffering from arthritis and rheumatism, she became addicted to pain medication.

Julia Dent Grant (1826-1902) was a constant companion to her husband Gen. Ulysses S. Grant and joined him at his encampments in Jackson, Memphis, Nashville, Vicksburg and City Point. She narrowly avoided capture by the Confederates in 1862.

(NPG, Mathew Brady Studio, c. 1864)

Abolitionist and women’s rights advocate Anna Elizabeth Dickinson (1842-1932) became the first woman to speak before the U.S. House of Representatives and spoke to the contributions of African-Americans during the war effort.

(NPG, Mathew Brady Studio, 1863)

On August 6, 1865, Hawai’i’s recently widowed Queen Emma (1836-1885) became the first queen of any nation to visit the United States and she was welcomed with a 13-gun salute.

(NPG, Mathew Brady Studio, 1866)

Cushman died impoverished and from an opium overdose in 1893 in San Francisco, where she had been working as a seamstress.

She was buried with military honors in the Golden Gate National Cemetery, but her grave is marked with only her name and the label “Union Spy.” At that time, carte de visite portraits were nearing obscurity with the introduction of the Kodak camera in 1888 and the cheaper Brownie camera in 1900, which enabled home photography on an unprecedented scale and reduced the need to visit a professional studio.

“Yes, the deeds of the ‘Scout of Cumberland’…will live as long as American hearts beat, and be related by future historians of our land as the most romantic and most remarkable episode of this fearful rebellion,” Cushman’s 1865 biography prophesized.

Now more than 150 years later, Cushman and the tradition of cartes de visite are preserved behind glass, cast in egg white for contemporary eyes to fall on and to wonder at the stories behind them.

“Storied Women of the Civil War Era,” curated by Ann Shumard, is on view through May 8, 2022 at the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery in Washington, D.C. This exhibition is part of the Smithsonian American Women’s History Initiative, “Because of Her Story.”

#History

[stephicness]

Haven't read a headcanon yet with this subject BUT: let's go with the fact that Luna lives and Noctis marries her and they have little cute babies. ALSO Ravus the adorable beanpole lives too because some awesome badass person saves him last second.*cough*Sheridan*cough* What type of uncle would Ravus be to the little royal tykes? Spoil them rotten or be stern? I think this would be so cute.

Oh hey. Remember the boys I talked about HERE and HERE? Yeah, let’s discuss them a bit more too. c: Perhaps his relationship with each of the boys as they grow up~

Little Minions – Uncle Ravus and the Caelum Boys Headcanons

He hardly thought the idea of ‘babysitting’ was important for him to do. He had to make sure Tenebrae wasn’t burning to the ground (again), and so the notion of having to babysit for the week was hardly pleasant.

He was unable to attend the birth of his nephews, and due to his disability and tensions still after Niflheim had fallen and Ravus’s name was slandered amongst some, his advisor suggested that Ravus shouldn’t travel just yet.

This meant that his nephews’ arrival would mark the very first time he would be meeting the boys.

So he stood there, awaiting the car to arrive with the boys, awkwardly fidgeting with his tie and undoing it several times until his advisor had to adjust the tie for him. Having one arm now definitely made it harder to do anything.

The car had arrived, and Ravus could only stare down at the three little boys in front of him. One clearly annoyed that he was there, another staring up at Ravus as if mesmerized by the king of Tenebrae, and another… Well, he was too busy staring at the maids with a fiendish smile.

The first thing Ravus remembered hearing one of them ask – and it wasn’t any sort of greeting either. “Can we go home yet?”

Ravus let out a sigh and rubbed his face. This was going to be a long week…

The Curious Case of the Eldest Prince

For a young boy that was only about eight years old, Ravus noticed that on the first day, when the two youngest brothers decided to venture around the mansion on their own, the eldest son hardly seemed interested in the endeavor.

While they ventured about, he decided to reside solely in the library, acquainting himself to the books upon books there, dedicating himself to the extra assignments Uncle Iggy had asked him to do.

Ravus liked to dedicate himself to his work, but goodness. Did this boy do anything besides just study?

Ravus found himself stopping in as he noticed for the third day in a row since the boys’ arrival to the Fleuret manor that the boy was studying. Once again. Apparently doing something as tedious as arithmetic and Eos World History. How dreadful… Just what was Scientia making this boy do?

He asked if the boy wished to take a break, but was immediately met with a straight-forward no. It was almost shocking to hear, almost offending Ravus because damn. Now he knew how others felt.

It wasn’t until Ravus had locked the library doors the next day that he had found the young boy sitting at another table, still doing his work. Ravus let out a sigh, but he would win in the battle.

So he approached the boy again, asking if he would like to learn what it was like being the King of Tenebrae. The glint in the boy’s glasses showed immediate interest.

So Ravus spent the next few days with the boy as his shadow, teaching him the court etiquette of Tenebraen politics, showing him the responsibilities a king would have. All while also making sure he wouldn’t turn into a delinquent like his younger brother – that was for certain.

Out of all of the boys, it seems that Ravus has the most respect for this boy, knowing that one day, he’d become a valiant and wonderful king.

But damn… That boy really needed to learn how to do something beyond just studying. He’d have to have a talk to Ignis to make sure he started doing some more extra-curricular things.

The Curious Case of the Middle Prince

This? This boy was going to be the future oracle? Ravus was rather baffled to hear the news that the eldest son would be the king and the middle child would be the oracle. The eldest son had potential, but this middle child…? Ravus wasn’t having it.

Especially when he heard news of the five year old boy getting smacked for trying to look up his advisor’s skirt, claiming that they had weird legs they wanted to see. He unfortunately walked out of there with a giant red mark on his face after being slapped.

But nevertheless, the little boy had a smile on his face as he was satisfied with completing his mission, but Ravus was hardly pleased to hear the complaints against the boy – ranging from pranks on the kitchen staff to maids having to clean up the destruction left in the boy’s wake.

Honestly? Lunafreya allowed that little shithead Noctis to raise a boy as mischievous like this?

Ravus sat there in his office, staring at the five year old boy that rocked on his feet with his arms innocently tucked behind his back. He knew that this boy was up to no good, just by the smug ass smile on his face. Reminded him too much of Caelum…

No matter how much he scolded the boy, however, he always seemed to get into more and more trouble. The boy was a walking migraine. And he probably couldn’t even pronounce the word or know its meaning.

But as Ravus had to conduct business with the new Altissian secretary in regards to luxury trades in exchange for other imports, the boy was quite a charmer, after he was found stowing away under the table in hopes someone would sit on his squeaky cushion for fun.

The secretary was charmed enough to accept Ravus’s deal and offer more as well, a good trade for certain. He eyed the boy, who smiled and thanked her – in the name of the new oracle. A good play for certain.

Perhaps the boy was a troublemaker, but Ravus could see that he would grow up into a fine oracle. Once he stopped trying to stick gum onto the secretary’s backside in the form of a smiley face.

The Curious Case of the Youngest Prince

Not even three years old. Not even three. Why was Noctis and Lunafreya trying to pawn off such a small child onto him? Ravus could easily crush this child’s developing little brain with too tight of a hug, for Astrals’ sake.

So the fact that the little boy was having such a fit about being separated from his mother and wouldn’t stop crying the first three days was awful. How could a little boy cry so much? How is it that none of the servants could calm this boy?

Ravus grit his teeth in frustration, going to the room where the little boy was tucked into, and stared at him. That stare alone silenced the child. Good. Strike fear into the boy. Make sure he doesn’t cry again in the halls of his mansion.

But it wasn’t exactly fear, Ravus realized, that got the boy to quiet down. It was the fact that Ravus had the same eye color as his mother that got him to relax. Well, one of his eyes, at least. Ravus hardly seemed to notice.

So as Ravus was about to depart again, the small whimper and grabby hands at him got him to stop and look back at the boy that reached to him. The sad and dejected look was so sad that even Ravus couldn’t walk away from them.

So with a heavy sigh, he walked back to the boy’s bed, laying down next to him with his arm folded over his chest and his gaze on the ceiling. He was only going to be there until the little one fell asleep.

Well, that’s what he thought, at least. The small boy ended up snuggling up to him and securing a hold onto Ravus’s shirt to keep the king from leaving.

So in defeat, Ravus took off his glasses and his coat before he let the child curl up under his arm as he fell asleep as well.

This unfortunately caused a bond to form between the two of them, with the youngest son unable to be away from Ravus’s company without wanting to cry from anxiety. So Ravus found himself having to come up with a solution.

So as Prompto and Gladiolus visited the providence on behalf of some Lucian business, they were surprised to see Ravus being followed after by a tiny three year old, who clutched onto Ravus’s empty sleeve with his stuffed behemoth under his arm and still in his night onesie.

Prompto had to resist taking a shot of the King, while Gladio had to hold back making jokes and unleashing Ravus’s wrath. No kid should have to witness that sight, that was for sure. Still, it was a damn cute sight.

[newstfionline]

An unsparing look at the Vietnam War’s mountain of lies

By George F. Will, Washington Post, October 17, 2018

Early in his Marine Corps career, which he concluded as a four-star general, Walter Boomer was decorated for valor in Vietnam. He distilled into three words the lesson of that debacle: “Tell the truth.” Max Hastings, an eminent British journalist and historian, has done that in a book that is a painful but perhaps inoculating re-immersion in what Americans would prefer to forget.

“Vietnam: An Epic Tragedy, 1945-1975” is a product of Hastings’s prodigious research and his aptitude for pungent judgments. It is an unsparing look, by a warm friend of America, at the mountain of mendacities, political and military, that accumulated as the nation learned the truth of the philosopher Michael Oakeshott’s axiom: “To try to do something which is inherently impossible is always a corrupting enterprise.”

Vietnam remains an American sorrow of squandered valor, but it was vastly more a tragedy for the Vietnamese, 2 million to 3 million of whom died during the 30 years’ war--about 40 for every American who died during the 10 years of intense U.S. futility. U.S. statesmen and commanders, Hastings writes, lied too much to the nation and the world but most calamitously to themselves.

In 1955, Hastings writes, Secretary of State John Foster Dulles sent a cable to Saigon authorizing the removal of South Vietnamese Prime Minister Ngo Dinh Diem, “much as he might have ordered the sacking of an unsatisfactory parlor maid.” Six hours later, Dulles changed his mind, so Diem lived until he was murdered in the 1963 coup authorized by President John F. Kennedy. Hastings’s tangy writing tells us that as the coup approached, a U.S. operative arrived at the South Vietnamese army’s headquarters “carrying a .357 revolver and $40,000 in cash, which he deemed the appropriate fashion accessories for an afternoon’s work overthrowing a government.”

“Old Ho [Chi Minh] can’t turn that down,” said President Lyndon B. Johnson of his offer to buy North Vietnam out of the war with $1 billion for a Mekong River dam. America’s president fit part of Graham Greene’s description of the title character in his novel set in Saigon, “The Quiet American”: “I never knew a man who had better motives for all the trouble he caused” and who was “impregnably armored by his good intentions and his ignorance.” Except Johnson’s intentions were often self-serving.

In 1964, he unnecessarily sacrificed truth and, as an eventual result, young men to achieve a 44-state landslide, which was won three months after confusions compounded by lies produced the Tonkin Gulf Resolution’s limitless authorization for warmaking. Eight years later, President Richard M. Nixon twisted military strategy, diplomacy and the truth for domestic political advantage--while cruising to a 49-state romp.

Soldiers and Marines died because their M16 rifles were given to malfunctioning in combat. The manufacturer’s response was what Hastings calls “a barrage of lies,” with which the Army was complicit.

Almost every Hastings page contains riveting facts, such as these about the French, whose Indochina miseries preceded America’s: “While they abolished the old custom of condemning adulteresses to be trampled to death by elephants ... opium consumption soared after the colonial power opened a Saigon refinery.”

Eddie Adams’s Pulitzer Prize-winning photograph of Saigon’s police chief shooting a Viet Cong in the head during the 1968 Tet Offensive seemed to validate some Americans’ sympathies for the enemy. Hastings casts a cold eye, noting that the Viet Cong was in civilian clothes and had just cut the throats of a South Vietnamese officer, his wife, their six children and the officer’s 80-year-old mother.

Hastings’s detailed reports of battles--a few famous ones; others unremembered except by participants on both sides, some of whom Hastings tracked down--are as successful as printed words can be in achieving his aim of answering the question “What was the war like?” “This,” says Hastings, “was a ‘Groundhog Day’ conflict, in which contests for a portion of elephant grass, jungle, or rice paddy were repeated not merely month after month, but year upon year.”

A history book can be a historic act if, by modifying a nation’s understanding of its past, it alters future behavior. Obviously Vietnam itself was insufficiently instructive. On Page 752, the book’s concluding words are Boomer’s: “It bothers me that we didn’t learn a lot. If we had, we would not have invaded Iraq.” Sometimes, contrary to Marx, history repeats itself, first as tragedy, then not as farce but as tragedy again.