Posted by: thekickable on: 31 October 2009
Recently, I had to do an oral history project for one of my classes. Thereafter, I decided to interview my parents about basically everything I could imagine. This idea found me researching significant events of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries to formulate questions. In the midst of doing this, I found myself realizing why my [...]
Posted by: thekickable on: 1 October 2009
A couple years ago, Alan Jackson released a song called “Small Town Southern Man.” I’ve had a love-hate relationship with it ever since.
It’s a sweet song, really. There are many people who are just like the people in this song and, having grown up in a small town in the South, I can tell you [...]
Posted by: thekickable on: 25 September 2009
With all of this classwork on genealogy and researching ordinary people, last night, I started researching the family of my surname. My family has never been able to get past the year 1800 because this guy (aka, my four-greats-grandfather) didn’t claim his parents or something. Oddness. Anyway, I got to him and I typed his name into a [...]
Posted by: thekickable on: 24 September 2009
Today, I turned in my paper over our dear friend Reuben, a random dead guy in the cemetery over whom I had to write a biography, for the uninitiated. I used primary sources, such as the US Census, as well as secondary sources to piece together his life and his relationship to the local community [...]
Posted by: thekickable on: 18 September 2009
While I’m still quite determined to find out anything I can about our dear friend Karl, for the purposes of my paper, I’ve had to research someone on whom I can actually find information–and who, well, lived longer than four years. That said, I would like to introduce the world to my new bud, Reuben. [...]
Posted by: thekickable on: 16 September 2009
I find I’m having trouble truly caring about my studies this semester. I find myself weighted down by suddenly irreverent studies. “Why should I read about British furniture fanaticism in the 19th century? Don’t you know there are people dying in Iraq?!” I want to yell at my professors.
My classmates discuss things I suddenly find [...]
Posted by: thekickable on: 11 September 2009
I have two updates in regards to our dear friend Karl. First of all, I asked my German friends to try their hands at translating the tombstone, since I had problems reading it. I figured they could figure out things from context better than me. I was close in translating the first stanza, but I [...]
Posted by: thekickable on: 10 September 2009
Today, I found myself sitting on the cemetery ground with my legs straddling the tombstone. I had previously found a large, phallic monument for my history project of looking up dead people. Whomever must have been pretty rich to have had such a phallic monument, right? They should be pretty easy to find. I whipped [...]
Posted by: thekickable on: 18 August 2009
Hello again, all. I’m back from my Amazing Adventure to 5/6 of all the New England states (yes, I missed Vermont; it was sad). Above is a photo from a Portsmouth, New Hampshire park on the ocean. In Portsmouth, I stumbled upon an awesome historic village just across the street from the ocean called Strawbery Banke Museum. [...]
Posted by: thekickable on: 10 August 2009
On August 10, 1776, King George III learned of the American Declaration of Independence. Originally, King George III dismissed the colonists’ actions as a local rebellion centered in Massachusetts. When he failed to listen to the colonists’ complaints, however, the colonists decided the British empire no longer had any authority in the colonies.
It is ironic [...]
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