Context: 1. President and Mrs. Lincoln invited their son, then Capt. Robert T. Lincoln of Gen. Ulysses S. Grant’s staff, to Ford’s Theater to see a performance of Our American Cousin on the night of April 14, 1865. The younger Lincoln declined, telling his father that he planned to retire early that night. Several different people claimed to have been the one to inform him of John Wilkes Booth’s attack on his father at the theater, and Lincoln himself remembered only that numerous people came to him that night with the awful news. He immediately left for the Petersen house, where his father, unconscious but alive, had been taken after Booth shot him. Future Secretary of State John Hay, one of Abraham Lincoln’s private secretaries and a lifelong friend of Robert’s, wrote that, “After a natural outburst of grief, young Lincoln devoted himself the rest of the night to soothing and comforting his mother.” Robert was there at 7:22 a.m. on April 15 when President Lincoln died.

2. On July 2, 1881, President Garfield was scheduled to leave for a trip to New England. While some cabinet members and their wives were scheduled to go on the trip, Lincoln was unable to depart until the following day. He went to Washington, D.C.’s Baltimore and Potomac train station that morning to meet the President and let him know that the Lincolns would be along on July 3. He was about forty feet away and walking toward President Garfield and Secretary of State James G. Blaine when Charles Guiteau approached from behind and shot Garfield twice. By Lincoln’s own recollection, “I think I reached him in fifteen seconds.” Secretary Lincoln immediately sent for Dr. D.W. Bliss, then ordered four companies of soldiers to immediately come to the train depot for security. When Garfield was moved back to the White House, Lincoln made sure that “all intruders were out of the grounds and a strong military guard on duty there and another at the jail to prevent lynching and a reserve between.” As historian Jason Emerson notes, Lincoln’s decisive actions after the attack on Garfield were reminiscent of Secretary of War Edwin Stanton’s on the night Booth shot Abraham Lincoln. However, the memory of his father’s murder sixteen years before haunted him. “My god,” he said to a New York Times reporter the day after the shooting. “How many hours of sorrow I have passed in this town.”

President James A. Garfield died on September 19, 1881, eighty days after being shot. Vice President Chester A. Arthur was sworn in as the 21st President of the United States and traveled to Elberon, New Jersey, where Garfield died, to escort his predecessor’s body back to the capital. After Garfield’s late September funeral and once Congress convened in December 1881, Arthur kept only one cabinet officer appointed by Garfield: Robert Todd Lincoln, who served as Secretary of War until the end of the Arthur presidency..

3. After returning from England, Robert Lincoln became general counsel of the Pullman Palace Car Company. When founder George Pullman died in 1897, Lincoln was elevated to the company’s presidency. In 1901, the Lincolns vacationed all summer in New Jersey. As they traveled back to Chicago in early September, they decided to make a stop in Buffalo, New York to visit the Pan-American Exposition, a world’s fair intended to promote trade and friendship between the U.S., Canada, and Mexico. The Lincolns’ train pulled into the Buffalo train station on the evening of Friday, September 6. A Pullman employee was waiting and immediately handed Lincoln a telegram that read: “President McKinley was shot down by an anarchist in Buffalo this afternoon. He was hit twice in the abdomen. Condition serious.”

Lincoln immediately went to the home of John G. Milburn, president of the Pan-American Exposition, where McKinley was resting after a seemingly successful surgery to repair internal damage caused by Leon Czolgosz’s bullets. Lincoln spent a few minutes with the President and was convinced that McKinley would be fine. Lincoln saw the President again two days later and still believed he was improving, saying, “My visit has given me great encouragement” for McKinley’s recovery. He and his family left Buffalo for Chicago having enjoyed a visit to the Exposition and glad that McKinley was on the mend.

week later, McKinley was dead of infection. Vice President Theodore Roosevelt had visited the wounded president at the same time as Robert Lincoln the previous week and then departed for a trip to the Adirondacks. Roosevelt hurried back to Buffalo and was sworn in as the 26th President of the United States on September 14, 1901. Shortly afterwards, Lincoln sent President Roosevelt a letter that read in part, “I do not congratulate you, for I have seen too much of the seamy side of the Presidential Robe to think of it as an enviable garment.”

https://www.nps.gov/articles/000/robert-todd-lincoln-and-presidential-assassinations-not-formal-title.htm

Context: A Civil War hero and nine-term Congressman, Garfield was drafted by fellow Republicans to run for president, an office he'd never sought. Millard said he called the presidency "a bleak mountain."

"He knew that it was going to be a very difficult and lonely position to be in," she said. "And, you know, this is the height of the spoils system" - under which anyone could petition the president in person for a government job, regardless of experience or ability.

"So could anyone just show up at the White House?" Rocca asked.

"Anyone could come and talk to the president," Millard said. "He would have, like, 100 office seekers every day."

Charles Guiteau was one of those office seekers. Delusional and grandiose, he drifted through life. "A man who had failed at everything he had tried, and he had tried everything," Millard said. "He had tried law. He had tried evangelism. He'd even tried a free love commune in the 1800s, and he had failed there, too. You know, the women there had nicknamed him 'Charles Get Out.'"

Guiteau expected to be named minister to France. Day after day he visited the White House, even meeting Garfield once. But when his demand wasn't met . . . .

"So he had what he believed was a divine inspiration, a message from God that he needed to kill the president," Millard said. "This is 16 years after Lincoln's assassination, but there's still no Secret Service protection."

On July 2, 1881, the president was scheduled to travel by train from D.C. to Massachusetts.

"So Guiteau woke up early that morning and he went to the train station and he had his shoes shined and he was ready with his gun - "

"He had his shoes shined?" Rocca asked.

"Yeah, because he was very aware of the attention he would be receiving."

The president, along two of his sons, arrived at the station.

"So they walk in. Garfield takes just a few steps. Guiteau steps out of the shadows and shoots him twice - once in the arm and once in the back," Millard said.

The shot in the back was not fatal, not hitting any vital organs. The bullet lodged behind the pancreas.

"If they had just left him alone he almost certainly would have survived," Millard said.

Within minutes, doctors converged on the fallen president, using their fingers to poke and prod his open wounds.

"Twelve different doctors inserted unsterilized fingers and instruments in Garfield's back probing for this bullet," Millard recounted, "and the first examination took place on the train station floor. I mean, you can't imagine a more germ-infested environment."

American doctors at the time didn't believe germs existed at all. And according to Dr. Jeffrey Reznick of the National Library of Medicine, they rejected the use of antiseptics pioneered by British surgeon Joseph Lister, for whom Listerine would later be named

"Lister, an Englishman, embraced this theory in the early 1860s," said Reznick. "American doctors did not believe in the Listerian Theory because they subscribed to the miasma theory, the fact that bad air caused disease and illness, not germs. They didn't believe in germs - germs you couldn't see."

On the scene at the train station: Cabinet member Robert Todd Lincoln. Present at his father's death 16 years before, he would also witness the murder of McKinley 20 years later.

"Of the four presidential assassinations, he was there for three of them," Millard said - a pretty ghoulilsh distinction!

It was Lincoln who summoned Dr. D. Willard Bliss (the 'D' stood for Doctor, his actual first name).

"Bliss was a uniquely arrogant and ambitious man, and he just took charge," Millard said.

There would be no second opinions. For an excruciating 80 days, made even worse by the oppressively hot Washington summer, Garfield suffered stoically as his condition worsened.

"He is riddled with infection at this point, he has these abscesses all through his body," Millard said.

And he was starving to death. Unable to keep down the rich sumptuous meals he was being fed, the president's weight plunged from 210 pounds to 130.

In a panic to find the bullet still lodged in the president, Bliss called on Alexander Graham Bell - yes, THAT Bell, the inventor of the telephone.

Bell's task: Use his "induction balance," a kind of metal detector, to find the bullet so it could be extracted once and for all.

Unbeknownst to Bell, Garfield was lying on a bed made of metal springs, rare at the time - "Which is obviously going to affect a metal detector!" said Millard.

"But worse than that, Bliss had believed - and had publicly stated - that the bullet was on the right side of the president's body. And he would only let Bell examine that part of the president's body. And of course the bullet had gone to the left."

"Willful ignorance?" asked Rocca.

"It's just one of the incredible dangers of ambition. He did not want to be proven wrong."

President Garfield finally died on September 19, 1881.

The autopsy confirmed Bliss' ignorance.

"So President Garfield didn't have to die," said Dr. Reznick. "President Garfield died because of what his doctors did to him, and what his doctors DIDN'T do to him."

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/how-doctors-killed-president-garfield/

What is the Morality of The average boy who is fighting for his home state or did not want to have to fight against his own family that has no connection to slavery other than regional way of life who has been filled with propaganda about the North wanting to come and burn and take over his home

Context: Bakeman claimed that he was born on October 9, 1759, in Schoharie County, New York.^([1]) Other sources indicate that he may have been born in northern New Jersey, near the Delaware River, and that his parents moved to the Schoharie County area when he was a boy.^([2]) His parents were Dutch immigrants Andreas Phillip Bakeman and Catarien Miller, and his name sometimes appears in written records as "Bochman".^([3])^([4]) He was baptized in Schenectady on November 27, 1773.^([5])

According to Bakeman's later testimony, during the American Revolution, he served as a private in the Tryon County militia for the last four years of the war, and was a member of the company commanded by a captain named Van Arnum during the period when the county militia was commanded by Marinus Willett.^([6])^([7]) According to an obituary, Bakeman took part in the 1781 Battle of Johnstown, and served as a teamster for the militia following his time in the ranks.^([6])

Though no captain named Van Arnum (possibly Van Aernam,^([8]) a prominent family in Cattaraugus County in Bakeman's later life) or anything approximating it appears in the rolls of the Tryon County militia, and though no soldier named Bakeman or Bochman appears in the roll; the descriptions Bakeman provided of his Revolutionary service in the pension application he submitted later in life were judged to be credible.^([6]) The US Department of the Interior had one listing of "Bakeman": "Bakeman, Henry of Granbry, Oswego" [County] with the following remarks: "Suspended for evidence of identity of the service credited to a soldier of the same name of Colonel Willett's regiment, Captain Peter B. Teare's company."^([9])

His Pension File is available online, containing 132 pages of details of his life and service.

After the war, Bakeman farmed in the Mohawk Valley.^([6]) In 1782, he married Susan Brewer, and they were the parents of eight children: Philip, Richard, Christopher, Betsey, Margaret, Susan, Mary, and Christine.^([6]) Records show that in 1825 the Bakeman family settled in Arcade, New York, where they owned a home on the north side of the County Line Road.^([6]) In 1845 they moved to Freedom, New York, and they later moved to Stark.^([6]) Bakeman appeared in the 1860 United States census as "Frederick Bakeman" living in Freedom with his wife, his daughter Susan, and a grandchild, Jacob N. Bakeman (born 1838).^([10]) His wife died on September 10, 1863, at the age of 105, after 81 years of marriage.^([11])

In Bakeman's later years, he was often called upon by local leaders to take part in important ceremonies, and on Independence Day he was known to march around Freedom firing salutes with his musket

Bakeman was the victim of house fires at least three times during his lifetime, including once while on a four-day trip from central New York to Albany to buy wheat and other farm supplies.^([6]) In the mid-1860s, he applied for a pension, and stated that the records of his service burned in one of his house fires.^([12]) As with many veterans who could not provide discharge certificates or other verifying documents, Bakeman's application included affidavits from friends and neighbors, who attested that he had a reputation for honesty, and that they had previously heard him describe his military service.^([13]) The testimony of these individuals and Bakeman's own affidavit were judged to be credible, and on February 14, 1867, the United States Congress passed a special act which granted Bakeman a pension of $500 per year.^([6]) At the time, the longest surviving veterans who were on the pension rolls were Lemuel Cook of Clarendon, New York (died May 20, 1866), and Samuel Downing of Edinburgh, New York (died February 19, 1867).^([14]) George Fruits (died August 6, 1876) also claimed to be the last surviving veteran of the Revolutionary War, but he was never on the pension rolls, and research by A. Ross Eckler Jr. in the 1970s indicated that Fruits was 17 years younger than he claimed, and was not a veteran of the Revolution.^([15])

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_F._Bakeman

Daniel Frederick Bakeman (October 9, 1759 – April 5, 1869) was the last survivor receiving a veteran's pension for service in the American Revolutionary War (1775–1783).

After the United States was founded in 1776, the country split into slave states (states permitting slavery) and free states (states prohibiting slavery). Slavery became concentrated in the Southern United States. The Act Prohibiting Importation of Slaves banned the Atlantic slave trade starting in 1808, but not the domestic slave trade or slavery itself. Slavery was finally ended throughout the entire country after the American Civil War (1861–1865), in which the U.S. government defeated a confederation of rebelling slave states that attempted to secede from the U.S. During the war, U.S. president Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation, which ordered the liberation of all slaves in rebelling states. In December 1865, the Thirteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution was ratified, abolishing chattel slavery nationwide.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/End_of_slavery_in_the_United_States

Sources and articles about some of our foreign aid achievements:

Like Herbert Hoover said "Whatever their politics, they shall be fed!”

https://www.nps.gov/articles/emergence-of-the-great-humanitarian.htm

https://www.globalcitizen.org/en/content/people-helped-by-us-foreign-aid/

https://afsa.org/extending-american-revolution-overseas-foreign-aid-1789-1850

https://ourworldindata.org/us-foreign-aid-saved-millions

Foreign Aid Dashboard: https://foreignassistance.gov/

Context:
Earliest Initiatives

The Founding Fathers were, above all, what we might call “development philosophers.” The writings of Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson and Alexander Hamilton explore how societies move toward greater liberty and progress. Franklin’s Observations Concerning the Increase of Mankind and Peopling of Countries, etc., published in 1751, outlined one of the first comprehensive development theories. In it, he describes how the interests of rich countries are enhanced by promoting progress in their poorer territories. These ideas have endured to this day as a central pillar of foreign aid policy.

Works such as Franklin’s Poor Richard’s Almanack and Autobiography, Jefferson’s Notes on the State of Virginia and Hamilton’s Report on Manufactures embody fundamental principles that have shaped U.S. approaches to the world for more than two centuries. They are often incorporated in modern foreign assistance legislation without anyone ever realizing their origins. The founders established institutions to advance liberty, equality, representative government and the pursuit of happiness that continue to influence how Americans view international development and their role in the

One of the earliest examples of American promotion of democracy overseas was the collaboration in Paris between Jefferson and General Gilbert du Motier, the Marquis de Lafayette, in drafting the “Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen” in 1789. This historic document marked the beginnings of the French Revolution and was greatly influenced by the Virginia Declaration of Rights and the American Declaration of Independence. Jefferson’s belief that “this ball of liberty will roll round the world” was reflected in his proposals to spread “republican principles” to Russia, Poland, Greece and the emerging Latin American nations. In more recent years, they are seen in U.S. support for the Arab Spring and democratic transitions throughout the world.

From his first encounters with Native Americans in what were then sovereign nations in the western region of North America, Jefferson advised: “We desire above all things, brother, to instruct you in whatever we know ourselves. We wish you to learn all our arts and to make you wise and wealthy.” He instructed his secretary, Meriwether Lewis, to arrange smallpox vaccinations for Indian tribes along the route of the Lewis and Clark expedition, expressing attitudes toward traditional people that would evolve into foreign assistance over the decades to come.

Treasury Secretary Alexander Hamilton supported aid to Saint Domingue (now Haiti) to address the consequences of the struggle for independence of that Caribbean island. Thousands of refugees fled to the United States in 1792 and 1793. Their plight led the U.S. Congress to establish a relief fund, thereby setting one of the earliest precedents for aid to foreign citizens. Today the State Department’s Bureau for Population, Refugees and Migration carries out similar initiatives to ease the suffering of uprooted people around the world and integrate humanitarian principles into U.S. foreign policy.

From 1798 to 1801, President John Adams and Haitian leader Toussaint L’Ouverture forged diplomatic ties that allowed Americans to support the creation of the world’s first Black Republic. As detailed in Diplomacy in Black and White (University of Georgia Press, 2014), the United States provided the revolutionaries with economic assistance, arms and naval backing. As the highest-ranking U.S. diplomat dispatched to Saint Domingue, Dr. Edward Stevens played a crucial role in advising L’Ouverture and mobilizing aid from the Adams administration. This cooperation was of great strategic importance in bringing forth the new nation of Haiti, upholding American democratic ideals and slowly altering the Atlantic region’s discourse on slavery and race. It also opened markets for U.S. trade and undermined French interests, leading to the Louisiana Purchase in 1803.

Seeds planted around the world by the U.S. Declaration of Independence and the Constitution and its Bill of Rights would slowly grow throughout the 19th century. Numerous Americans conspired with Latin American rebels in their plans to liberate South America as a means of developing the continent and expanding commercial opportunities. Foreign writers pointed to Benjamin Franklin and George Washington as models for promoting economic progress and democratic leadership. They regularly cited Franklin’s declaration that America’s cause “is the cause of all mankind.”

Extending the American Revolution Overseas

Even during the initial decades of the 19th century, when U.S. attention focused largely on continental expansion and consolidation of the federal system of government, foreign technical assistance that is similar to what we know today was undertaken. For example, one of the wealthiest, most cosmopolitan figures of the period, Joel Poinsett from Charleston, South Carolina, traveled to Russia in 1806 and 1807, advising Czar Alexander I on economic and agricultural improvements, assessing that country’s natural resources and advocating freedom for the serfs. In 1811, President James Madison called for an “enlarged philanthropy” in dealing with the revolutionary events “developing themselves among the great communities which occupy the southern portion of our hemisphere and extending into our own neighborhood.”

As the first U.S. diplomat to serve in Chile (1810-1814), Poinsett helped that country prepare its constitution and develop plans for its national government. He conducted training courses on the Bill of Rights and promoted agricultural production, while leading local troops fighting for Chile’s independence from Spain. As minister to Mexico (1825-1829), Poinsett used Masonic lodges to build greater awareness of democratic practices and governance, activity comparable to civil society development programs supported today by the U.S. Agency for International Development and the National Endowment for Democracy. Admittedly, Poinsett exceeded his instructions to promote U.S. goodwill and trade relations which demonstrates the tension between the idealist and realist approaches to American foreign policy that continues to this day.

Other Americans traveled to South America to aid its wars of independence, encourage trade and render humanitarian assistance, often remaining there afterward to advance national progress. In 1812, Congress appropriated $50,000 to ship flour to earthquake victims in Venezuela. The flour was delivered by diplomat Alexander Scott, who was instructed to highlight that this aid was “strong proof of the friendship and interest which the United States…has in their welfare…and to explain the mutual advantages of commerce with the United States.”

In 1819, at the request of President James Monroe, Congress appropriated funds for an even more ambitious overseas nation-building effort, providing $100,000 to the American Colonization Society for settlement of freed blacks to Liberia. Historian Daniel Walker Howe considers this “one of the most grandiose schemes of social engineering ever entertained in the United States.” Led by Bushrod Washington, the nephew of President George Washington and a Supreme Court justice, and other prominent figures like Henry Clay, the ACS obtained funds from private donors and later from the Virginia legislature and other states to establish Liberia, which led to its independence in 1847 and to Africa’s first democratic republic.

Liberia and Haiti were unique in the 19th century, and U.S. assistance played a crucial role in helping to create both countries. Although both were largely ignored in subsequent policies, these republics contributed to weakening the institution of slavery and slowly changing the debate on race relations by demonstrating that blacks were capable of self-government, setting the stage for 20th-century African independence movements. Such examples illustrate that foreign assistance can often have unintended outcomes.

The first nongovernmental organizations to work overseas were incorporated in the 1810s, spurred in part by the patriotic fervor that followed the War of 1812. Among them was the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions, the aforementioned ACS and the American Bible Society, all three early precedents for private actions to transfer democratic ideals and new knowledge to other lands. While their primary aims were evangelizing and promoting Bible studies, they also encouraged democratic values, education reforms, community development and health projects. Peter Parker in China, Isaac Wheelwright in Ecuador and Charles Jefferson Harrah in Brazil all carried out such activities. To cite just one example: in the 1830s and 1840s, Parker introduced Western medicine into China, trained hundreds of doctors and developed the Medical Missionary Society of China—while also serving as chargé d’affaires of the U.S. legation and facilitating treaty negotiations with the Qing Dynasty.

Some of the first translations into Spanish of the U.S. Declaration of Independence and the Bill of Rights entered Latin America thanks to New England merchants and missionaries, through instruction they provided on democratic practices. Together with local leaders, they translated the Federalist Papers and the Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin into Spanish to use in newly established public schools. These teachers were not unlike today’s Peace Corps Volunteers, symbolizing the strong spirit of solidarity and shared humanity that has influenced foreign assistance from its inception.

Humanitarian Assistance & Technical Advice

Building on the precedents of aiding Haitian refugees and Venezuelan earthquake victims, individuals and the private sector contributed generously to alleviate the suffering caused by humanitarian crises, famines and natural disasters in other lands. During the 1820s, “Greek Fever” seized the American public, which mobilized to aid that country’s struggle for freedom from the Ottoman Turks. Citizens’ committees in principal U.S. cities, dubbed “hellenophiles” and led by figures like Edward Everett and Mathew Carey, raised funds to send food, supplies, volunteers and cash to the distressed Greek population. This assistance included agricultural tools and support for rebuilding homes and schools, not unlike similar modern responses for other causes.

No event in the first half of the 19th century led to such widespread American giving as the Great Potato Famine in Ireland. In American Philanthropy Abroad (Rutgers University Press, 1963), Merle Curti cites this relief effort as “the first truly national organized campaign for helping the distressed in foreign lands.” Even President James Polk made a personal contribution, although he did not favor federal aid. Other prominent Americans such as Vice President George Mifflin Dallas and Senator John J. Crittenden, and business leaders like Amos Lawrence, strongly supported an “Appeal to the People of the Nation” to contribute. In 1847-1848 alone, more than a million dollars was raised, including $800 from the Cherokee and Choctaw nations, to ship emergency food and other relief to Ireland. With great fanfare vessels regularly departed from major U.S. ports, with the government providing some naval shipping support—an early example of a public-private partnership.

>The first nongovernmental organizations to work overseas were incorporated in the 1810s, spurred in part by the patriotic fervor that followed the War of 1812.

As noted in Kendall Birr and Merle Curti’s Prelude to Point Four: American Technical Missions Overseas (University of Wisconsin Press, 1954), the U.S. government began responding to a growing number of technical assistance requests from foreign countries starting in the 1830s. International visitors regularly traveled to the United States to observe the accomplishments of the self-taught engineers who constructed the Erie Canal and other infrastructure projects. The development of steamboats and railroads, and the newly invented telegraph (the Internet of its day), attracted increasing attention. By the late 1840s, Americans were already building railroads and telegraph lines in foreign lands, such as George Washington Whistler in Russia and the initiation of the Panama Railroad, an engineering marvel of the era. Rapidly increasing agricultural production and the machinery of Cyrus McCormick were generating frequent requests for agricultural experts.

In addition, foreigners viewed with great interest the American public school system and recruited advisers who could replicate it overseas. They traveled here to observe new ideas about penology, care for the insane and abused women, and creation of voluntary associations. Many were intrigued by the American experiment in representative democracy and wondered how it might be established elsewhere. By 1850, Minister George Bancroft was reporting from London that the U.S. had surpassed Britain in commerce, manufacturing and wealth. World leaders saw the U.S. as a growing center of discovery and as a provider of knowledge and techniques that would accelerate economic and social progress. Such initiatives would further expand after the Civil War.Humanitarian Assistance & Technical Advice

Building on the precedents of aiding Haitian refugees and Venezuelan
earthquake victims, individuals and the private sector contributed
generously to alleviate the suffering caused by humanitarian crises,
famines and natural disasters in other lands. During the 1820s, “Greek
Fever” seized the American public, which mobilized to aid that country’s
struggle for freedom from the Ottoman Turks. Citizens’ committees in
principal U.S. cities, dubbed “hellenophiles” and led by figures like
Edward Everett and Mathew Carey, raised funds to send food, supplies,
volunteers and cash to the distressed Greek population. This assistance
included agricultural tools and support for rebuilding homes and
schools, not unlike similar modern responses for other causes.

No event in the first half of the 19th century led to such widespread American giving as the Great Potato Famine in Ireland. In American Philanthropy Abroad
(Rutgers University Press, 1963), Merle Curti cites this relief effort
as “the first truly national organized campaign for helping the
distressed in foreign lands.” Even President James Polk made a personal
contribution, although he did not favor federal aid. Other prominent
Americans such as Vice President George Mifflin Dallas and Senator John
J. Crittenden, and business leaders like Amos Lawrence, strongly
supported an “Appeal to the People of the Nation” to contribute. In
1847-1848 alone, more than a million dollars was raised, including $800
from the Cherokee and Choctaw nations, to ship emergency food and other
relief to Ireland. With great fanfare vessels regularly departed from
major U.S. ports, with the government providing some naval shipping
support—an early example of a public-private partnership.

The first nongovernmental organizations to work overseas
were incorporated in the 1810s, spurred in part by the patriotic fervor
that followed the War of 1812.

As noted in Kendall Birr and Merle Curti’s Prelude to Point Four: American Technical Missions Overseas
(University of Wisconsin Press, 1954), the U.S. government began
responding to a growing number of technical assistance requests from
foreign countries starting in the 1830s. International visitors
regularly traveled to the United States to observe the accomplishments
of the self-taught engineers who constructed the Erie Canal and other
infrastructure projects. The development of steamboats and railroads,
and the newly invented telegraph (the Internet of its day), attracted
increasing attention. By the late 1840s, Americans were already building
railroads and telegraph lines in foreign lands, such as George
Washington Whistler in Russia and the initiation of the Panama Railroad,
an engineering marvel of the era. Rapidly increasing agricultural
production and the machinery of Cyrus McCormick were generating frequent
requests for agricultural experts.

In addition, foreigners viewed with great interest the American
public school system and recruited advisers who could replicate it
overseas. They traveled here to observe new ideas about penology, care
for the insane and abused women, and creation of voluntary associations.
Many were intrigued by the American experiment in representative
democracy and wondered how it might be established elsewhere. By 1850,
Minister George Bancroft was reporting from London that the U.S. had
surpassed Britain in commerce, manufacturing and wealth. World leaders
saw the U.S. as a growing center of discovery and as a provider of
knowledge and techniques that would accelerate economic and social
progress. Such initiatives would further expand after the Civil War.

https://afsa.org/extending-american-revolution-overseas-foreign-aid-1789-1850

Context:

Uncle Sam is a common national personification of the United States, depicting the federal government or the country as a whole. Since the early 19th century, Uncle Sam has been a popular symbol of the U.S. government in American culture and a manifestation of patriotic emotion.^([3]) Uncle Sam has also developed notoriety for his appearance in military propaganda, made popular in 1917 World War I recruiting poster by James Montgomery Flagg.^([4])

According to legend, the character came into use during the War of 1812 and may have been named after Samuel Wilson, but the true origin is obscure.^([5]) The first reference to Uncle Sam in formal literature (as distinct from newspapers) was in the 1816 allegorical book The Adventures of Uncle Sam, in Search After His Lost Honor.^([6])

While the figure of Uncle Sam often specifically represents the government, the female figure of Columbia represents the United States as a nation. An archaic character, Brother Jonathan, was known to represent the American populace.

John Henry is an American folk hero. A black American freedman, he is said to have worked as a "steel-driving man"—a man tasked with hammering a steel drill (such as a star drill or similar) into a rock to make holes for explosives to blast the rock in constructing a railroad tunnel.

The story of John Henry is told in a classic blues folk song about his duel against a drilling machine, which exists in many versions, and has been the subject of numerous stories, plays, books, and novels.

Sociologist Guy Benton Johnson investigated the legend of John Henry in the late 1920s. He concluded that John Henry might have worked on the Chesapeake and Ohio Railway's (C&O Railway) Big Bend Tunnel but that "one can make out a case either for or against" it.^([5])^([3]) The tunnel was built near Talcott, West Virginia, from 1870 to 1872 (according to Johnson's dating), and named for the big bend in the Greenbrier River nearby.

Some versions of the song refer to the location of John Henry's death as "The Big Bend Tunnel on the C. & O."^([3]) In 1927, Johnson visited the area and found one man who said he had seen it.

John Chapman (September 26, 1774 – March 18, 1845), better known as Johnny Appleseed, was an American pioneer nurseryman who introduced trees grown with apple seeds (as opposed to trees grown with grafting^([1])) to large parts of Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, and the Canadian province of Ontario, as well as the northern counties of West Virginia. He became an American icon while still alive, due to his kind, generous ways, his leadership in conservation, and the symbolic importance that he attributed to apples. He was the inspiration for many museums and historical sites such as the Johnny Appleseed Museum^([2]) in Urbana, Ohio, and today is recognized as an American folk hero.

Paul Bunyan is a giant lumberjack and folk hero in American^([2]) and Canadian folklore.^([3]) His tall tales revolve around his superhuman labors,^([4])^([5]) and he is customarily accompanied by Babe the Blue Ox (French: Babe le bœuf bleu), his pet and working animal. The character originated in the oral tradition of North American loggers,^([2])^([4])^([5]) and was later popularized by freelance writer William B. Laughead (1882–1958) in a 1916 promotional pamphlet for the Red River Lumber Company.^([6]) He has been the subject of various literary compositions, musical pieces, commercial works, and theatrical productions.^([2]) His likeness is displayed in a number of oversized statues across North America.^([7])^([8])

1915 season – as a freshman, led Brown to the Rose Bowl vs. Washington State

• First African American to play in Rose Bowl (1916)
• In spring 1916, set world record in low hurdles on Brown track team, qualified for Olympic team

1916 season – led Brown to 8-1 record with 12 touchdowns

• Against Yale, gained 144 yards rushing, 74 on kickoff returns, and 76 on punt returns (1 TD)
• Against Harvard, gained 148 yards rushing, 44 on punt returns, and 51 as a pass receiver in Brown’s first victory over Harvard (2 TD’s)
• Brown was first college to defeat Yale and Harvard in the same season.
• Named to Walter Camp’s All-American first team, the first African American in the backfield
• Later (1930’s) named to Grantland Rice’s “Dream Team”

Coaching and professional career

1919-20 – Coached at Lincoln University, a black college near Philadelphia, while in the military

1919-26 – in the American Professional Football Association (APFA/“National Football League”)

• Began with Akron Pros, which became part of the APFA in 1920
• Akron won the first professional football national championship in 1920 (unbeaten)
• One of the first three African American players in early pro football; Pollard and Jim Thorpe were the major gate attractions
• Player/coach at Akron – introduced formations used at Brown under E.N. Robinson ’96
• First African American head coach in NFL – Hammond, Ind., Pros
• First African American quarterback in NFL – 1923
• Recruited prominent black players for APFA and NFL
• Organized first inter-racial all-star game in Chicago to showcase African American players; Pollard pressed for integrated competition in professional football (1922)
• First African American to play in Pennsylvania Coal League
• Hired as a gate attraction for the Providence Steamrollers-Chicago Bears exhibition game at Braves Field, Boston, in December 1925 – Pollard vs. Red Grange
• Organized All-Star African American team (Chicago Black Hawks) to promote inter-racial football, hired aspiring young players and NFL veterans
• Coached all-black team in New York (Brown Bombers) from 1935-1938

Business ventures

• Founded first black investment firm, F.D. Pollard and Co.
• Established first weekly black tabloid (N.Y. Independent News)
• Managed Suntan Movie Studio in Harlem
• Founded coal delivery companies in Chicago and New York
• As a theatrical agent, Pollard booked black talent in white clubs in New York
• Tax consultant

https://library.brown.edu/cds/pollard/aboutpollard.html

Context:The story of the life of the first and only emperor of the United States, Joshua Abraham Norton, seems quintessentially American. Born to a middle-class Jewish family in England, Norton came to the United States around 1845 from South Africa and set up shop in San Francisco as a mercantile middleman. He met with an immigrant’s fairy tale, and within five years, he was both rich and well respected. But a poorly timed rice shipment ruined Norton, and by 1858, he was living in a working-class boardinghouse. There, he did what anyone would do in such circumstances: he launched an unsuccessful campaign for Congress. Then, on September 17, 1859, Norton hand-delivered a letter to the San Francisco Daily Evening Bulletin. It declared and proclaimed him to be “Emperor of these United States” and ordered the states to send delegates to him by February in order to “make such alterations in the existing laws of the Union as may ameliorate the evils under which the country is laboring.” The paper printed it, of course.

Emperor Norton began his rule with a flurry of declarations. On October 12—in a move for which you might feel some sympathy—he abolished Congress because of the “undue influence of political sects.” When Congress failed to comply, he ordered Major General Winfield Scott to use the US Army to “clear the Halls of Congress.” That Scott also failed to comply did not stop Norton from issuing further decrees—he made over 500 in his lifetime, choosing to publish most of them in the Pacific Appeal, a local Black-owned newspaper. Some were strikingly prescient, such as his order to build a bridge and tunnel to Oakland—presaging the Bay Bridge and Transbay Tube. One 1872 decree deserves special attention from 2024 AHA annual meeting attendees: “Whoever after due and proper warning shall be heard to utter the abominable word ‘Frisco,’ which has no linguistic or other warrant . . . shall pay into the Imperial Treasury as penalty the sum of twenty-five dollars.” That’s over $600 in today’s money. Consider this your due and proper warning!

But Norton was not just an eccentric issuing memoranda from a desk. He was a public figure and a familiar sight in San Francisco. Wearing an elaborate uniform, he made regular inspections of the city’s streetcars and other public works. Norton issued his own currency, which was accepted locally. He attended political gatherings and the theater. When a private police officer arrested him for “insanity,” the move prompted outrage from both the newspapers and the public, and Norton was quickly released with a heartfelt apology. King Kamehameha V of Hawaiʻi recognized him as the sole leader of the United States. Mark Twain, then a local resident, modeled the King in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn on him. After his death on January 8, 1880, the San Francisco Chronicle ran the headline “Le Roi est Mort” and reported that over 10,000 people attended his funeral. Even the 1870 census listed his occupation as “Emperor.”

Perhaps it was Norton’s ability to will his imagined reality into existence that makes him so singular. Or maybe it’s how he went about his life, his attempt to use dictatorship for benevolence, whether by issuing proclamations or placing his imperial person bodily in the way of anti-Chinese rioters. As the Daily Alta wrote, Emperor Norton “had shed no blood; robbed no one; and despoiled no country; which is more than can be said of his fellows in that line.” To be an unselfish emperor is not an easy task.

I have noticed of late the growing appeal of the unselfish emperor, mostly as nostalgia. I made a joke of Norton’s desire to abolish Congress, but where now is the leader to cut through political gridlock? Surely, such a person could do immeasurable good. When faced with similar questions, the Roman Republic, the model for so much of our modern civic aspirations, found Sulla, a man who revived the office of dictator as a means to end civil strife. But, as the republic found out, dictatorship is a hard habit to break, and it’s hard to tell a Norton from an Augustus.

https://www.historians.org/perspectives-article/the-unselfish-ruler-norton-i-emperor-of-the-united-states-december-2023/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emperor_Norton

Context: Tomás de Torquemada was the first grand inquisitor, and his name became associated with the brutality characteristic of the Inquisition. He issued 28 articles that outlined crimes that could be investigated by inquisitors as well as methods used for interrogation and punishment. Torquemada used torture and the confiscation of property to terrorize and intimidate his victims. An estimated 2,000 people were burned at the stake during Torquemada’s tenure as grand inquisitor.

Torquemada convinced Ferdinand and Isabella to issue the Alhambra Decree on March 31, 1492, which resulted in 160,000 Jews being expelled from Spain.

Francisco, Cardinal Jiménez de Cisneros, named grand inquisitor in 1507, promoted the suppression of the Muslim population of Spain with the same zeal that Torquemada had directed at Jews. Islam was banned in Spain by decree of Phillip III in 1609, and by 1614 some 300,000 Moriscos, Spanish Muslims who had previously agreed to baptism, were expelled, with tens of thousands executed for refusing expulsion.

The Protestant population of Spain was small, but, as it was considered a threat upon the rise of the Reformation, the Inquisition eliminated it as well.

Having largely purged the country of Jews and Muslims—as well as many former members of those faiths who had converted to Christianity—the Spanish Inquisition turned its attention to prominent Roman Catholics. Saint Ignatius of Loyola was twice arrested on suspicion of heresy, and the archbishop of Toledo, the Dominican Bartolomé de Carranza, was imprisoned for almost 17 years.

The supreme council of the Spanish Inquisition oversaw 14 local tribunals in Spain and several in the Spanish colonies, including in the Americas. A similar inquisition was established in Portugal in 1547, lasting until 1821.

Though the excesses seen under Torquemada diminished somewhat, autos-da-fé continued into the mid-18th century. The Spanish Inquisition was suppressed by Joseph Bonaparte in 1808, restored by Ferdinand VII in 1814, suppressed in 1820, and restored in 1823. It was finally suppressed permanently by Spanish queen regent María Cristina de Borbón in 1834.

https://www.britannica.com/summary/Spanish-Inquisition-Key-Facts

This essay explores the Spanish Inquisition’s attention to individuals who identified with Protestant Christianity. In the 1520s, inquisitors first attempted to prohibit the smuggling of books. By the 1530s, they were also willing track Spanish Protestant sympathizers abroad, via family members of the suspects as well as networks of spies, and have them repatriated for punishment. The discovery of Spanish Protestant cells in Seville and Valladolid in the late 1550s -- whose members often intellectual and socioeconomic elites -- stunned the inquisitorial establishment, which did not succeed in catching all the suspects. Exceptional punishments even for the penitent were allowed by Pope Paul IV; dozens of individuals were burned at the stake in autos de fe between 1559 and 1562. The discovery of Protestants in the heart of Spain also facilitated the arrest of the archbishop of Toledo, Bartolomé de Carranza, whose seventeen-year trial became notorious. Eventually, Spanish monarchs had to make concessions to foreign Protestants for political and economic reasons, and Spanish inquisitors only encountered scattered, small groups of native believers.

https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/abs/cambridge-companion-to-the-spanish-inquisition/protestants/A67316356DAACE8414E65034F7A9A4E7#accessibility

Context:In October 1914, Page asked Hoover to help with a much larger issue: the mass starvation and destruction in the small country of Belgium. Hoover founded and became chairman of a unique institution known as the Commission for Relief in Belgium (CRB). The CRB gave desperately needed food to more than nine million Belgian and French citizens trapped between the German army of occupation and the British naval blockade. Following weeks of negotiation, Hoover won diplomatic protection for the CRB as a neutral organization. Great Britain agreed to let the food shipments pass through the blockade. Germany in turn promised not to take the food destined for helpless noncombatants.

The CRB operated with volunteers who worked with Hoover to get food supplies from other countries and send them to Belgium, where the commission would supervise the distribution. Under Hoover’s direction, the CRB purchased rice from Burma, corn from Argentina, beans from China, and wheat, meat, and fats from the United States. Hoover and his staff worked with a network of 40,000 Belgian volunteers who handled the food distribution. Once inside the occupied country the supplies had to be prepared in mills, dairies, and bakeries. The food then had to be distributed equitably to an anxious population scattered among more than 2,500 villages, cities, and towns. The CRB also had to verify that rations did indeed reach their intended recipients and not the German army.

Saving lives in wartime was its own political minefield. Britons accused Hoover of being a German spy. Americans accused him of violating American neutrality laws. As the war progressed, German submarines started sinking relief ships, which added to the tension between Germany and the United States. Hoover’s international business experience, organizational genius, and diplomatic prowess kept the CRB in business. In 1915, Hoover and his team even extended relief beyond Belgium to civilians caught behind the German battle lines in northern France. In all, the CRB’s work encompassed a total area of nearly 20,000 square miles and fed approximately eleven million people through cash and food donations.

American food relief had a political implications in postwar Europe. The new agency played an important role stabilizing the newly independent state of Poland. To the Poles in 1919, the name Woodrow Wilson spelled freedom, while “the name Herbert Hoover spelled life.” During the two-year war that broke out between Soviet Russia and Poland in 1919, the ARA in Poland concentrated its efforts on refugee relief, providing food, clothing, and treatments against typhus for displaced persons and returning refugees. At the time of Hoover’s visit to Poland in August of 1919, over 500,000 children had been benefitting daily from the meals provided to them from the ARA.

Nothing had prepared the ARA team for what they found in Soviet Russia. The communist state had a transportation system in chaos, a hostile climate, a mistrustful Bolshevik government that spied on the U.S. relief workers, and the horrifying magnitude of a catastrophic famine that threatened 16 million people with starvation at its peak in the winter of 1921. Five months after the arrival of aid relief in the heartland of Russia, the ARA was feeding nearly 11 million people a day in 19,000 kitchens, and had hired 120,000 Soviets to help in their efforts.

Hoover’s work in Soviet Russia did not come without controversy. Members of the Soviet government felt he would use his position with the ARA for counterrevolutionary purposes due to his openly anti-communist activities as Food Administrator during the Armistice period. When critics within the US government inquired about whether his work was actually helping Bolshevism, he defended his actions on humanitarian grounds saying, “Twenty million people are starving. Whatever their politics, they shall be fed!”

https://www.nps.gov/articles/emergence-of-the-great-humanitarian.htm