Happy Thanksgiving to all from this side of the Pond.
Holidays
Thanksgiving and Temporal Bigotry
(Basically a run of an earlier post)
Stuart Buck encountered a teacher who said “Kids learn so much these days. Did you know that today a schoolchild learns more between the freshman and senior years of high school than our grandparents learned in their entire lives?” (“She said this as if she had read it in some authoritative source”, Stuart comments.)
She probably had read it in some supposedly-authoritative source, but it’s an idiotic statement nevertheless. What, precisely, is this wonderful knowledge that high-school seniors have today and which the 40-year-olds of 1840 or 1900 were lacking?
St. Thérèse of Lisieux
St. Thérèse, pray for us.
Shana Tova: 5771
Best wishes for a sweet and healthy year to my friends, colleagues and readers.
(Photo: Melissa Goodman)
It Shall Be Sustained
For the last several years, I’ve put up Fourth of July posts featuring the Stephen Vincent Benet poem Listen to the People, which was first read over nationwide radio on July 7, 1941–five months before Pearl Harbor. The link I’ve been using for the full text of the poem doesn’t work anymore, but Google Books has the original Life magazine issue in which the complete poem appeared. It’s on pages 90-96…link here.
Last year, I also linked a post by Cassandra which remains highly relevant. See also her post for this year.
Interesting item here on a significant terminology change between an early draft of the Declaration of Independence and the final version.
Since the Life version of the Benet poem is a little cumbersome to read on-line, here’s the beginning part as simple text…