American History
On This October Day in American History
October 3, 1863 – President Abraham Lincoln issued a proclamation designating the last Thursday in November as Thanksgiving Day. Birthday – October 4 – Artist Frederic Remington (1861-1909) was born in Canton, New York. He studied at Yale Art School then traveled extensively throughout the American West in the late 1800’s sketching cowboys, Native Americans,…
Read MoreFirst Official National Decoration Day
Decoration Day dates back to the 1860’s, when local groups from the North and South laid flowers on the graves of the Civil War soldiers who fell in battle. The Grand Army of the Republic (GAR), an organization of Union veterans, officially established Decoration Day in 1868. The name Memorial Day was used with, or…
Read MoreEvacuation Day
“Strike up the band, bring out the oxen…Let’s celebrate! Celebrated in Massachusetts, the day commemorates the evacuation of the British forces holding Boston under siege for 11 months. The British control of the sea and land accesses had stymied the Continental Army under Washington. Boston bookkeeper and artillery genius, Henry Knox engineered “one of the…
Read MoreThe Homestead: Keeping Texas Texan
The first generations of Texans understood this perfectly well: Travis’s famous letter from the Alamo addresses itself to “All Americans in the World,” and the Texas Declaration of Independence asserts that the Texans are making revolution “that they should continue to enjoy that constitutional liberty and republican government to which they had been habituated in…
Read MoreMerry Christmas, Grandfather
In 1809, a clever lad wrote to his grandfather wishing him a “Merry Christmas”. Thomas Jefferson was pleased to receive the letter and most taken with the new phrase popular in the new country, “Merry Christmas”. Christmas observances in colonial and revolutionary America (1630s-1830s) were very different from our current practices. How one observed Christmas…
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