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"I like your series because I like reading about war and ancient cultures. It is fun and makes me smarter." Nick from Virginia |
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Archive for 2012
Give Me History or Give Me Death!
Written on Monday, June 25th, 2012 [permanent link]We get plenty of Patrick Henry thundering around the historic streets of Williamsburg, where I live. But he also made a lot of noise in Richmond during the Revolutionary Era, so yesterday I spent a lovely Sunday afternoon at Historic St. John’s Church in Richmond for the weekly reenactment of Henry’s “Give Me Liberty” speech.
It was sunny and warm — nothing like the wintery March day in 1775 when Henry and other people you know (George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, etc) gathered at the church to talk about what to do in the face of Britain’s troop surge to control Boston. St. John’s Church was the biggest, most comfortable building in what was then a village of about 600 people, and it was a good distance away from the cranky royal governor still perched in the Governor’s Palace in Williamsburg. More than 100 Virginia colonial leaders heard Henry ask that the colonists form a militia to prepare for war. When conservative leaders spoke against his motion and urged patience, Henry stood to give the rousing speech that ended with his dramatic cry.
The reenactment was rousing, too. The actors in costume sat among the people in the modern crowd and rose to speak as if we were all in that 1775 convention. At the end, we all got a vote. Back then, Henry’s resolutions passed by only five votes. But the next few weeks after that vote proved he was right — shots fired at Lexington and Concord in Massachusetts began open warfare, and a few days later Virginia’s royal governor took away the colony’s gunpowder in the middle of the night to prevent open rebellion in Virginia. It’s rare for a politician to be proven so right, so soon 😉
It was wonderful to be in the same space where Henry himself spoke. St. John’s Church was completed in 1741 — the first church built in the city of Richmond. William Byrd II, founder of the city of Richmond, donated the land and timber to build the church. The graveyard is the site of the first public cemetery in Richmond; buried there are George Wythe, signer of the Declaration of Independence and teacher of law to Thomas Jefferson, Chief Justice John Marshall, and Henry Clay; John Page and James Wood, Governors of Virginia; Elizabeth Arnold Poe, mother of Edgar Allan Poe; and Dr. James McClurg, a Virginia delegate to the Constitutional Convention of 1787.
If you’re in Richmond on a Sunday afternoon this summer, go to church!
Tags: history, Patrick Henry, Richmond, St. John's Church, Virginia
Posted in Colonial Williamsburg, Historical Travel, History Teacher | No Comments »
Your Favorite Hardshell is BACK
Written on Tuesday, June 12th, 2012 [permanent link]
Well, the past four weeks HAVE been a tight squeeze.
Just before I left for a 10-day, 2,200-mile Great American Research Roadtrip up to Boston and across New York and through Ohio, Google notified me that someone somewhere in some dark basement had inserted malware onto this website. My brilliant webmaster, Brian Korte, and I reacted quickly. The internet companies involved did NOT.
It was frustrating to spend weeks in limbo — with so little to tell so many concerned customers who wrote to ask about the health of their favorite crustacean historian. But Brian kept attacking the problem (with the same dedication he put into his own artwork, building beautiful wall portraits out of LEGOS! ). And after he scrubbed the site and files 2,311 times, Google this week allowed us back onto the World Wide Web.
We have boosted security so this won’t happen again. We’ve regained our respect and admiration for the power of the Web — you don’t know what you’ve got until it’s been hacked! And we are very thankful for the patience and dedications of all of Chester’s fans.
I used this blank time in the digital realm to work hard on putting more ink onto paper, so we will have more announcements in the near future about fun new Chester Comix content. STAY TOONED!
Posted in Author's Purpose | No Comments »
The Crab and the Bears
Written on Tuesday, March 13th, 2012 [permanent link]
One of the biggest — and most unseen — influences on Chester the Crab are a bear family and the husband and wife team who wrote them. I was sad to hear of the recent passing of Jan Berenstain, who wrote with her husband Stan more than 300 books that sold more than 260 million copies.
Their partnership reads like a storybook itself. Stan and Jan Berenstain were both born in 1923 in Philadelphia and met at the Philadelphia College of Art. In World War II Stan was a medical assistant in the Army, and Jan worked in an airplane factory. They married after the war and worked together as artists and writers, making cartoons for popular magazines. They began writing stories about a funny bear family to please their two sons.
As a young reader I loved “The Big Honey Hunt” and “The Bear Scouts.” Long before I laughed at Homer Simpson’s bumbles, I laughed at Papa Bear’s. The Berenstain Bears stories weren’t as daring as other works for children — you don’t hear many people of my generation reminisce about the Bears the way we do about Dr. Seuss books or classic Sesame Street or the Schoolhouse Rock videos. The Bears had a gentler vibe, a more wholesome worldview — that must have come from Stan and Jan.
Of course I went back to those childhood favorites to read to my sons when I became a parent. But by the 1990s, Stan and Jan were also writing Bear family books that spoke directly to me as a parent. They got me out of a lot of jams with their a series of Berenstain Bear books based on real world family problems. “The Berenstain Bears and The Truth” and “The Berenstain Bears and Too Much TV” were reference books in our household! Whenever we hit a parenting problem, we went looking for Stan and Jan’s advice. Because it worked. How beautiful to wrap nonfiction info into a gentle, funny, warm story about a bear family.
That’s why Chester isn’t that crabby. Chester’s voice is mine, not some spiced up snarky thing that I’m hoping will compete in the big media swirl of kidstuff. I’ve tried to present info in a funny, earnest, quirky way through Chester and just assumed that he would find his audience of people who could understand that you don’t have to be snotty to be cool.
I hope that on some afternoons after school Brother Bear and Sister Bear are reading some Chester Comix up in their room in their big treehouse down a sunny dirt road deep in Bear Country.
Posted in Author's Purpose | No Comments »
