{"id":35430,"date":"2024-11-27T12:45:14","date_gmt":"2024-11-27T17:45:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lincolndemocrat.com\/?p=35430"},"modified":"2024-11-27T12:45:14","modified_gmt":"2024-11-27T17:45:14","slug":"my-trip-to-tennessee","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lincolndemocrat.com\/?p=35430","title":{"rendered":"My trip to Tennessee"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/live.staticflickr.com\/65535\/54151127836_d5497ac0f7.jpg\" alt=\"\" \/><\/p>\n<p>I bought two books at the site of Martin Luther King Jr.&#8217;s assassination. On returning to Duluth I began reading them both. Because of the death of my new computer and its replacement I have thrown up my hands at writing for the Reader. It has occurred to me once again that I resume penning my thoughts here at Lincolndemocrat. <\/p>\n<p>That will require my rebuilding my bookmarks something lost with my old computer. After a great deal of cursing last night and my patient wife figuring out how to get past some of the behind the scenes tech challenges I have always been stricken with I can once again resume posting here and link photos from my Flickr site. There is still much to do. Here is a photo of some of the books I&#8217;ve been looking through the past couple days. I plan to say something about each of them:<\/p>\n<p><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/live.staticflickr.com\/65535\/54168515488_3a07842959_z.jpg\" alt=\"\" \/><\/p>\n<p>Uncle Tom&#8217;s Cabin. I was a little surprised to see this on sale in the Civil Right&#8217;s Museum where King&#8217;s last hotel room is preserved along with a excellent history of the long road of Civil Rights leading up to King&#8217;s murder. I&#8217;ve avoided the book like the plague all my life not the least because I read ten histories to every novel I read and Cabin is novel and famed for its preachiness at that.<\/p>\n<p>To make myself feel a little more sophisticated I also bought the series of essays by James Baldwin, Notes of a Native Son from which I read a dismissal of Stowe&#8217;s novel as being little more than a political leaflet with only two of her black characters being treated the way a sophisticated novelist should treat them&#8230;..and besides those two characters, according to Baldwin, were practically white leaving no room for dark skinned characters to be real people. That critique challenged me as a Lincoln lover. I&#8217;ve heard countless times the probably apocryphal story that is so good it should be true that when Lincoln met the Author he said to her: &#8220;So, this is the little lady who made this big war.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>All of the books arrayed above are part of my current reading. I just passed the halfway mark at 260 pages for Uncle Tom&#8217;s Cabin and I&#8217;ve been coloring it up with lots of yellow marker. At age 73 I can better appreciate Stowe&#8217;s appeal to a war she has just hinted could be around the corner in words attributed to a shame faced slave holder.<\/p>\n<p>At the same time I can cut Baldwin some slack. His book is the product of a many only 31 who has returned from six year&#8217;s living in France. The book was published when I was 4 years old and like my trip through Tennessee I pondered many era&#8217;s of the Civil Right&#8217;s era from the Slave cabins of President Jackson to the simultaneous publication and television serialization of Alex Haley&#8217;s Roots in 1976 when I was a newly married struggling teacher.<\/p>\n<p>I had planned to write columns about this trip until my computer died. Now they are in doubt. <\/p>\n<p>I took my third grade Bible along to read but never found the time in Tennessee. I started a column about that the other night then folded it up because of mental distractions. The Book Driven out I mentioned here some years ago when I began it but stopped on page 136 of 346.<\/p>\n<p>This morning I deferred French to follow up on some stories in the New York Times which led me to the last two books in the panoply above Driven Out and Acquaintances<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/www.npr.org\/sections\/planet-money\/2024\/10\/14\/g-s1-28210\/a-nobel-prize-for-an-explanation-of-why-nations-fail\">a-nobel-prize-for-an-explanation-of-why-nations-fail<\/a><\/p>\n<p>This story was part two from a Part one which was published the day before: Here is a worrisome passage from the story:<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;U.S. institutions are really coming apart at the seams \u2014 and we have an amazingly difficult task of rebuilding them ahead of us,&#8221; Acemoglu says. &#8220;This is a perilous time.&#8221; The author then added: &#8220;Yikes.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p><strong>Driven out<\/strong> was one of three books mentioned in the story about the Chinese Exclusion Act which seems reminiscent of Trump&#8217;s ardor in ridding America of the foreigners who do work Americans&#8230;&#8230;.like the slave owners of old&#8230;&#8230;refuse to do. <a href=\"https:\/\/lincolndemocrat.com\/?p=22340\">I mentioned it<\/a> in a post back in 2017 when a trip to China was accompanied by a lot of book reading. The NY Times stories are worth the time it would take to plow through them&#8230;..<\/p>\n<p>Then there is Arnold Toynbee&#8217;s Acquaintances. Toynbee is the first big shot Historian who&#8217;s name stuck in my head. I saw the funny name among the books in my Grandfather&#8217;s library in a fat book about world history. I bought this book fifteen years ago in a used book store. I found it yesterday looking for a book about Captain Cook. I saw a passage about Toynbee&#8217;s two hour meeting with Adolph Hitler and decided to read it. I colored it up with yellow marker as well.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I bought two books at the site of Martin Luther King Jr.&#8217;s assassination. On returning to Duluth I began reading them both. Because of&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[46],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lincolndemocrat.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35430"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lincolndemocrat.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lincolndemocrat.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lincolndemocrat.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lincolndemocrat.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=35430"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/lincolndemocrat.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35430\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":35434,"href":"https:\/\/lincolndemocrat.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35430\/revisions\/35434"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lincolndemocrat.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=35430"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lincolndemocrat.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=35430"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lincolndemocrat.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=35430"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}