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Today in History

vitanola

I'll Lock Up
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4,254
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Gopher Prairie, MI
It's too bad things weren't so "gracious" during Reconstruction.


Well, the corrupt bargain which put my fraternity brother (DKE, Lambda) in the White House ended THAT.

How about an old veteran's ditty:

A century and a half on it still seems a bit harsh.

You would most probably find Polk Miller and the Old South Quartet's 1909 recording to be more congenial:

Polk Miller & His Old South Quartette:

Here we have a seventy-five-year-old Virgina veteran of the Rebellion singing the first great Southern anthem, accompanied by a quartet of elderly former slaves, with whom he successfully toured in Vaudeville for a decade, and whom it is reported that he pubilcally and privately treated with both honest affection and great respect. He was also an effective apologist for the Peculiar Institution, for his act included narratives of slave life and mutual affaction. Polk Miller in the 1890s did a great deal to make the nation uncritically accepting of such later media narratives as "Birth of a Nation", more's the pity.
 
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vitanola

I'll Lock Up
Messages
4,254
Location
Gopher Prairie, MI
Was he DKE, Lambda too?
I doubt that he was a fraternity man.

Even so, it is difficult to overstate the influence of Greek societies on college life in the latter half of the nineteenth century. Many national and local chapters were founded in the 1830s, 1840s, and 1850s, and during the half century between 1860 and 1910 the great majority of graduates were fraternity men, with only the new western land grant colleges excepted.

The GI Bill largely eliminated the campus dominance of Greek societies, for grown men who had seen combat had little patience for sophomoric hazing rituals, and little time to waste in extra-curricular activities. The great changes of the 1960s further pushed fraternities into irrelevancy. In the 1980s, the 1979 moving picture "Animal House" proposed, for comic effect, a mode of fraternity life which has since been very widely emulated.
 
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15,259
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Arlington, Virginia
On this day in 1865, John Wilkes Booth, an actor and Confederate sympathizer, fatally shoots President Abraham Lincoln at a play at Ford’s Theater in Washington, D.C.
 
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17,223
Location
New York City
On this day in 1865, John Wilkes Booth, an actor and Confederate sympathizer, fatally shoots President Abraham Lincoln at a play at Ford’s Theater in Washington, D.C.

I have seen it reenacted in so many TV, movie and documentary versions that I have this weird Hollywood-amalgam image of the shooting blocking up my mind around the actual event.
 

LizzieMaine

Bartender
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33,771
Location
Where The Tourists Meet The Sea
pvum7bL.jpg


Brooklyn 5 Boston 3

Boston 0 0 0 0 1 2 0 0 0 – 3 8 1
Brooklyn 0 0 0 1 0 1 3 0 x – 5 6 1

WP -- Gregg (1-0) LP -- Sain (0-1)

Boston: Sain, Cooper, Lanfranconi, and Masi
Brooklyn: Hatten, Gregg, Casey and Edwards, Bragan.
Umpires - Pinelli, Barlick, and Gore. T–2:20. A–26,623.

E–Torgeson (1), Edwards (1). DP–Boston 1. Culler-Ryan-Torgeson, Brooklyn 1. Stanky-Reese-Robinson. 2B–Brooklyn Reiser (1); Reese (1). SH–Culler (1); Masi (1); Sain 2 (2); Robinson (1). HBP–Litwhiler (1); Neill (1); Edwards (1).
 

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