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Back at George Washington High
Last month I wrote about the controversy over murals at George Washington High School in San Francisco.
Those murals, painted by Victor Arnautoff as a New Deal project, depicted the life of George Washington without hagiography. Arnautoff devoted space to the oppression of slavery and the human cost of westward expansion. But showing subservient African-Americans and dead Native Americans raised objections from some students in the 1960s and today.
This spring, the San Francisco Board of Education voted unanimously to budget $600,000 to permanently conceal the murals, most likely with a new coat of paint. People thought that money would cover an environmental study of the plan, the work itself, and anticipated legal battles.
News of the decision attracted attention across the country. The school was opened for public viewing this summer. Many artistic figures joined local preservationists and alumni in opposing the decision. Some fans of the murals started to organize a public vote to keep them. The board president and vice president defended their decision to, in their words, do away with “art that for more than 80 years has traumatized students.” There were few additional voices for removing the murals, however.
This month, the San Francisco school board took a second vote. By the slight margin of 4–3, they decided “to obscure the art with panels or similar materials rather than painting over it.” That would allow the panels to be taken off at some future time. Back in the spring, this remedy was expected to cost much more than the painting, but quite possibly the board had come to anticipate more legal costs.
Or perhaps the first vote was a strategy to test the fervency of the two sides. The Board of Education’s president controls its agenda. The San Francisco Chronicle quoted the current president saying he “always supported obscuring the mural rather than destroying it, although he voted to paint over it in June.” He doesn’t plan to allow a third vote during his term, which ends in December.
The school year will start soon. Given how municipal contracts work, I have no sense of how quickly the project of covering the murals will progress. At some point the board will choose its next president, and in 2020 the city’s voting public will elect a new Board of Education. The referendum on the murals appears to be still up in the air. This whole controversy could rise again—or quietly subside for another few decades.
Review: Unofficial Ancestry.com Workbook
Somehow I missed the release of the Unofficial Guide to Ancestry.com by Nancy Hendrickson. When I reviewed Unofficial Guide to FamilySearch.org, I became a big fan of Family Tree Book’s unofficial series, so I was very happy when I received a review copy of the new Ancestry book, Unofficial Ancestry.com Workbook: A How-to Manual for Tracing Your Family Tree on the #1 Genealogy Website.
Chapters are organized around record types. The chapters of the book are:
- Search and the Card Catalog
- Census Records
- Birth, Marriage, and Death Records
- Military Records
- Immigration Records
- Historical Maps, Images, Newspapers, and Publications
- Social History [directories, tax records, land records, histories, etc.]
- AncestryDNA
Each chapter contains overviews of the databases of the chapter’s record type and helpful instructions on using that type. For example, from the vital records chapter:
Death records can open up new lines of research, primarily because they can contain the name of the person’s parents (including the mother’s maiden name) as well as where the parents and the decedent were born.
Each chapter has a number of exercises. Don’t think workbook quizzes; think step-by-step walkthroughs.
Each chapter also contains some helpful “search strategies” for the chapter’s record type. Here is an example search strategy from the census chapter:
Don’t assume your ancestor was skipped during an enumeration. Look for alternate surname spellings, first name shown as initials, or location in a neighboring county.
Each chapter contains workbook forms and worksheets for things like searching the census and abstracting birth records. Appendices have additional checklists, worksheets, and census abstract forms. While a book obviously isn’t going to contain enough copies of each form or worksheet, additional copies can be downloaded from the Family Tree Magazine website.
| Unofficial Ancestry.com Workbook: A How-to Manual for Tracing Your Family Tree on the #1 Genealogy Website Nancy Hendrickson 8.2 x 0.6 x 10.9 inches, 192 pp., paperback. 2017. ISBN 1440349061 Family Tree Books 1-855-278-0408, shopfamilytree.com $10.99 Kindle $13.19 Google eBook $14.57 Amazon $21.99 Paperback/eBook list price, plus shipping. |
Announcing: DearMYRTLE’s new blog "Myrt’s Musings"
DearREADERS,
Yup! I’ve taken the plunge and designed a new blog called Myrt’s Musings. It will include all the news, hangouts announcements and opinionated moderating my DearREADERS have come to expect.
So head on over to
Frankly, I’ve had a ball experimenting with Wordpress. After consulting with 3 experts, we realize its impossible to import my old DearMYRTLE’s Genealogy Blog posts over without a ton of broken links. It had something to do with a custom domain redirect. Yikes!
P.S. Genea-friend and fellow GeneaBloggerTRIBE member Randy Seaver of Genea-Musings said it’s ok if Ol’ Myrt here uses the word “musings.” I’m guessing he doesn’t have a copyright on the use of that word.
P. P. S. – I’ve got a whole new color scheme. Wonder if that means I’ll need to make a new quilt backdrop for our upcoming hangouts? Hmmmm.
Happy family tree climbing!
DearMYRTLE,
Your friend in genealogy
and now
http://hangouts.DearMYRTLE.com
http://bit.ly/DearMYRTLEonGoogle
Hangouts: Pay what you want. So it’s simple. If you value the work Ol’ Myrt, +Cousin Russ and our beloved panelists do week in and week out on your behalf, please:
Check the DearMYRTLE Hangouts Calendar for upcoming study groups and hangouts. There you’ll find links to the GeneaConference (in-person) and the GeneaWebinars Calendar with over over 200 hours of online genealogy classes, webinars, live streams and
tweetchats from other hosts and presenters over the next 12 months.
Announcing: DearMYRTLE’s new blog "Myrt’s Musings"
DearREADERS,
Yup! I’ve taken the plunge and designed a new blog called Myrt’s Musings. It will include all the news, hangouts announcements and opinionated moderating my DearREADERS have come to expect.
So head on over to
Frankly, I’ve had a ball experimenting with Wordpress. After consulting with 3 experts, we realize its impossible to import my old DearMYRTLE’s Genealogy Blog posts over without a ton of broken links. It had something to do with a custom domain redirect. Yikes!
P.S. Genea-friend and fellow GeneaBloggerTRIBE member Randy Seaver of Genea-Musings said it’s ok if Ol’ Myrt here uses the word “musings.” I’m guessing he doesn’t have a copyright on the use of that word.
P. P. S. – I’ve got a whole new color scheme. Wonder if that means I’ll need to make a new quilt backdrop for our upcoming hangouts? Hmmmm.
Happy family tree climbing!
DearMYRTLE,
Your friend in genealogy
and now
http://hangouts.DearMYRTLE.com
http://bit.ly/DearMYRTLEonGoogle
Hangouts: Pay what you want. So it’s simple. If you value the work Ol’ Myrt, +Cousin Russ and our beloved panelists do week in and week out on your behalf, please:
Check the DearMYRTLE Hangouts Calendar for upcoming study groups and hangouts. There you’ll find links to the GeneaConference (in-person) and the GeneaWebinars Calendar with over over 200 hours of online genealogy classes, webinars, live streams and
tweetchats from other hosts and presenters over the next 12 months.
Added and Updated Record Collections at FamilySearch.org – Week of 11 to 17 August 2019
The URL for this post is:
Please comment on this post on the website by clicking the URL above and then the “Comments” link at the bottom of each post. Share it on Twitter, Facebook, or Pinterest using the icons below. Or contact me by email at randy.seaver@gmail.com.
Genealogy News Bytes – 16 August 2019
Some of the genealogy news and education items across my monitor the last three days include:
1) News Articles:
* Ancestry.com Owners Aim to Extract $900 Million Payout With Loan
* GeneaWebinars Calendar
* Free Family History Library Classes and Webinars for August 2019
* Fisher’s Top Tips: #97 – Connecting
Please comment on this post on the website by clicking the URL above and then the “Comments” link at the bottom of each post. Share it on Twitter, Facebook, or Pinterest using the icons below. Or contact me by email at randy.seaver@gmail.com.
Recently Added and Updated Collections on Ancestry.com
From the Ancestry.com list of recent additions at https://www.ancestry.com/cs/recent-collections:
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8/7/2019
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8/7/2019
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Looking into a Busy Tavern
In a discussion with Kurt Manwaring, Vaughan Scribner described his book Inn Civility: Urban Taverns and Early American Civil Society and offered this word picture of Henry Wetherburn’s tavern in Williamsburg, Virginia (shown above in its current form):
I especially like this tavern because of its diversity—it had the “Bullhead Room” for elites, the “Middle Room” for the middling sorts, and the “Great Room” for mixed companies (mostly the lower classes).
From the historical record, an ordinary evening would include a group of elitist colonists locking themselves in the Bullhead Room for a club. They would probably say this club is erudite and exclusive, but by late in the evening this group of men would probably be drunk and disorderly, spilling out into the Great Room for bumpers and sociability.
In the Great Room, meanwhile, a diverse set of ordinary colonists would have crowded the bar, asking for sloshing bowls of rum punch and tankards of local ale.
There probably would have been a fiddler in one corner, while in another corner a group of slaves waited for their masters to finish in the Bullhead Room or Middle Room.
Wetherburn’s female servants would have flitted among the male crowd, yelling back at them and telling them how it was.
Like colonial American society, tavern interactions were confused and complicated, resting upon ad-hoc communications more than established notions of hierarchy and order.
Scribner argues that in the eighteenth century taverns “were basically the internet, bank, hotel, restaurant, bar, auto-repair shop, brothel, and library all in one.”
Announcing: DearMYRTLE’s new blog "Myrt’s Musings"
DearREADERS,
Yup! I’ve taken the plunge and designed a new blog called Myrt’s Musings. It will include all the news, hangouts announcements and opinionated moderating my DearREADERS have come to expect.
So head on over to
Frankly, I’ve had a ball experimenting with Wordpress. After consulting with 3 experts, we realize its impossible to import my old DearMYRTLE’s Genealogy Blog posts over without a ton of broken links. It had something to do with a custom domain redirect. Yikes!
P.S. Genea-friend and fellow GeneaBloggerTRIBE member Randy Seaver of Genea-Musings said it’s ok if Ol’ Myrt here uses the word “musings.” I’m guessing he doesn’t have a copyright on the use of that word.
P. P. S. – I’ve got a whole new color scheme. Wonder if that means I’ll need to make a new quilt backdrop for our upcoming hangouts? Hmmmm.
Happy family tree climbing!
DearMYRTLE,
Your friend in genealogy
and now
http://hangouts.DearMYRTLE.com
http://bit.ly/DearMYRTLEonGoogle
Hangouts: Pay what you want. So it’s simple. If you value the work Ol’ Myrt, +Cousin Russ and our beloved panelists do week in and week out on your behalf, please:
Check the DearMYRTLE Hangouts Calendar for upcoming study groups and hangouts. There you’ll find links to the GeneaConference (in-person) and the GeneaWebinars Calendar with over over 200 hours of online genealogy classes, webinars, live streams and
tweetchats from other hosts and presenters over the next 12 months.
Norman Miller, Wilmington Daily Record, Google Chrome, More: Tuesday Afternoon ResearchBuzz, August 6, 2019
NEW RESOURCES
University of Wisconsin-Madison: New Online Archive For Africanist Norman Miller. “The Norman Miller Archive is a new open multimedia resource featuring selected research, photos, films, journals, books, and field notes from the library of Norman Miller, an academic researcher, journalist, and film producer who worked extensively in East Africa from 1960-2015.”
TWEAKS AND UPDATES
DigitalNC: The Daily Record Project: “Remnants” of a Pivotal Paper in North Carolina’s History. “About two years ago, we had the honor of hosting a group of students from Wilmington who were studying one of the most politically and socially devastating moments in the state’s history–the Wilmington Coup and Race Riots of 1898. Their efforts centered around locating and studying the remaining issues of the newspaper at the center of that event, the Wilmington Daily Record. Owned and operated by African Americans, this successful paper incited racists who were already upset with the political power held by African Americans and supporters of equality. During the Coup, the Record’s offices were burned and many were killed. Thanks to these students, their mentors, and cultural heritage institutions, you can now see the seven known remaining issues of the Daily Record on DigitalNC.”
The Register: Googlers hate it! This one weird trick lets websites dodge Chrome 76’s defenses, detect you’re in Incognito mode . “A week ago, Google released Chrome 76, which included a change intended to prevent websites from detecting when browser users have activated Incognito mode. Unfortunately, the web giant’s fix opened another hole elsewhere. It enabled a timing attack that can be used to infer when people are using Incognito mode.”
AROUND THE SEARCH AND SOCIAL MEDIA WORLD
CNBC: How Facebook failed to break into hardware: The untold story of Building 8. “Building 8′s experience highlights Facebook’s central quandary as it seeks to diversify beyond mobile ads, which account for 93% of revenue, and expand into the costly business of developing, manufacturing and selling consumer devices. Coding is Facebook’s DNA, but the company’s hacker culture clashes with the realities of hardware development, which demands longer time horizons and relationships with a wide swath of manufacturers and resellers, all issues well beyond Facebook’s core.”
The Atlantic: Where Everyone’s an Influencer. “The occasion was Instabeach, an exclusive, invite-only annual party hosted by the photo-sharing platform for 500 top creators along with plus-ones, talent representatives, managers, and—for the first time—press. The goal, according to Justin Antony, Instagram’s head of creators and emerging talent partnerships, is to help influencers meet one another, mingle, and form friendships. But what started three years ago as a casual beach party for a class of people that was once maligned by the traditional entertainment industry has become a who’s who of young Hollywood, a sun-soaked declaration of just how completely enmeshed Instagram has become with the teen-entertainment world.”
TechCrunch: Facebook still full of groups trading fake reviews, says consumer group. “Which? says it found more than 55,000 new posts across just nine Facebook groups trading fake reviews in July, which it said were generating hundreds ‘or even thousands’ of posts per day. It points out the true figure is likely to be higher because Facebook caps the number of posts it quantifies at 10,000 (and three of the ten groups had hit that ceiling).”
SECURITY & LEGAL
ZDNet: Microsoft: Russian state hackers are using IoT devices to breach enterprise networks. “One of Russia’s elite state-sponsored hacking groups is going after IoT devices as a way to breach corporate networks, from where they pivot to other more high-value targets. Attacks have been observed in the wild said the Microsoft Threat Intelligence Center, one of the OS maker’s cyber-security divisions.”
New York Times: Legal Shield for Websites Rattles Under Onslaught of Hate Speech. “When the most consequential law governing speech on the internet was created in 1996, Google.com didn’t exist and Mark Zuckerberg was 11 years old. The federal law, Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, has helped Facebook, YouTube, Twitter and countless other internet companies flourish.”
RESEARCH & OPINION
TechXplore: Study explores interactions between world leaders on social media. “Researchers at the University of Southern California (USC) have recently carried out a study investigating the interactions among different world leaders and influential political figures on social media. Their findings, pre-published on arXiv, provide interesting new insight about how government actors use social media, which could help to better understand the role of new technologies in diplomatic exchanges.”
Cornell Chronicle: Study finds racial bias in tweets flagged as hate speech. “Tweets believed to be written by African Americans are much more likely to be tagged as hate speech than tweets associated with whites, according to a Cornell study analyzing five collections of Twitter data marked for abusive language.” Good afternoon, Internet…
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