I was doing a little reading for the course I’m teaching this quarter and I came across this in a description of a trip across Oregon ( Read more... )

I heard the president last night and he's right: we all need to scale back our rhetoric and seek a more civil discourse. I'm not sure that means we should let lies and distortions go unchallenged, but I'm willing to try to find a better way to do that. I refuse, however, to allow those who adorn themselves in the flag assert that they-and only they ( Read more... )

I am looking through a diary found in the Waddie Hudson Collection and found this entry. It is dated October 31, 1900, and I'm not sure who the author is, although her first name appears to be Maude, and I know she was born in Camargo on November 16, 1868. She briefly attended school at St. Mary's Academy near Terre Haute, Indiana, and then was ( Read more... )

From a 1923 instruction to teachers on the correct procedure for reciting the pledge of allegiance

At the given hour in the morning the pupils are assembled and in their places in the school. A signal is given by the principal of the school. Every student or pupil rises in his place. The Flag is brought forward from the door to the stand of the ( Read more... )

And still I push on in this very long and protracted narrative of my trip east into the West. Not much farther now, just this stretch from the nuclear heartland of South Dakota through one of the corniest spots in the nation to Minnesota and then another day across the unmapped cornfields, over the Mississippi, and to, finally, Evanston, Illinois ( Read more... )

One of the hazards of taking a detour is that you end up far, far away from where you are supposed to be ( Read more... )

OK back to my much-delayed narrative of the trip east into the West ( Read more... )

Given that it is the 90th anniversary of the day that women across the nation got the vote, I guess it seemed only appropriate that many of the records and stuff I was looking at today dealt with woman's suffrage.

Like this resolution by the Tulsa County (Oklahoma) Woman's Christian Temperance Union, from 1913:

"That we urge our women to study ( Read more... )

Here is an excerpt from a speech Lilah Lindsey made around 1906 warning her fellow members of the Woman's Christian Temperance Union to be on the look out for something quite evil in their communities. See if you can fill in the blanks and figure out what she was warning her white-ribbon sisters to avoid.

There is a danger that is lurking in our ( Read more... )

I was amused to run across this item in the files of Lilah D. Lindsey, a woman who will likely play a huge part in my dissertation. (Is suspect my fellow historians will also be amused, as well as any teachers out there.) It is from the Tulsa Historical Society about a textbook it was assembling on Tulsa history:

A good deal of emphasis is now ( Read more... )