When creating Midnight Bouquet Beauty Cream I knew that one of the main ingredients had to be sweet almond oil. Sweet almond oil has been used as a beauty fluid for more than a thousand years and in the last century by actress Greer Garson and by First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy. (Read more.)Share
Ohio resident Rochell S. Prater said she never had any desire to visit the South. But when she learned she was a descendant of 272 slaves sold by Georgetown University to plantations in Louisiana, she felt compelled to make the trip. “I had never come further south than St. James Parish, but after I found out about this, I’ve been here four times last year and this is my third trip this year,” the 55-year-old said. “To me this is about the survival of the African-American spirit in today’s climate.” Prater was one of dozens of Georgetown slave descendants who gathered today at the Terrebonne Parish North Library to reconnect with other descendants and share information about family lineages.Share
Co-hosted by the Finding Our Roots African-American Museum, the event gave descendants of the 272 enslaved men, women and children who were sold by Jesuit priests in 1838 to plantations in Louisiana an opportunity to reconnect with their ancestors. Prater learned she is descended from slave Jackson Hawkins, who was about age 3 when his family was sold. Slaves were sold to plantations in Terrebonne, Iberville and Ascension parishes. Proceeds of the sale were used to settle the future Georgetown University’s mounting debts. “This to me is like winning the lottery,” Prater said. “It was crucial for me to be here so I could touch and feel and be a part of this. I have goosebumps right now.”
Napoleonville native Joyce Blizzard said she attended Saturday’s genealogy gathering to connect with her ancestors. “This event is something many of us need to encourage us to look up their ethnicities and family relations,” Blizzard said. “We need more events like this so we can connect to our past.”
Guest speaker Karran Harper Royal, the executive director of the Georgetown University 272 Descendants Association, said the Washington-based university’s connection to slavery attracted national attention after students began protesting two of the school’s buildings that were named after the college presidents involved in the slave sale. The university agreed to remove the names of the Rev. Thomas F. Mulledy and the Rev. William McSherry from the buildings in November. From the ashes of the controversy an ambitious genealogy initiative was launched called the Georgetown Memory Project to locate living descendants of the people sold like commodities in 1838.
Georgetown Memory Project genealogist Judy Riffel said a DNA study has been launched to help find descendants of what have become known as the GU272. Georgetown University said it has granted legacy status to slave descendants as an effort to atone for its participation in the slave trade. Applicants with legacy status, or the children of alumni, receive preferential treatment during admissions. Royal said she was pleased with the university’s response but would like to see more in the months ahead.
“We want to see some provision is made in perpetuity for descendants to always have access to college education that is paid for,” Royal said. “Our organization is working to make that happen. Since our ancestors gave their lives to help prop up that institution, we want to make sure forever moving forward all of their descendants have access to college education without having to go into debt.”
Also speaking at the event was Nicholls State University archivist Clifton Theriot, whose discovery of a photo in 2016 received national attention. Theriot went to the Ellender Memorial Library’s archives and pulled out a 5- by 4-inch album from the early 1900s filled with pictures of Robert Ruffin Barrow Jr.’s plantation home, Robert Grove in Houma, and its staff. At the back of the album, Theriot found three weathered photos of an elderly black man standing behind two young girls in dresses as white as the man’s hair.
“I knew it from somewhere before, so I pulled the album out and started going through the album,” Theriot said. “I found the photograph and put the name together -- it was Frank Campbell.” Campbell’s photo was the first known image of one of the 272 slaves sold by Georgetown University nearly 180 years ago. For descendants Nancy Campbell Evans and her father Earl Campbell, Saturday’s gathering proved that slavery may have split up their ancestors but time has since brought their families back together. (Read more.)
The fourteen-year-old Mozart didn’t see himself as being a music pirate, mind you. He was just doing the thing he so excelled at, with his musical genius and photographic memory, back in the spring of 1770. He and his father Leopold were in Rome, working their way through Italy for the month as the young Wolfgang performed and studied and learned. Their timing was perfect: Rome during Holy Week. This was the only time and place you could hear Allegri’s famous “Miserere mei Deus” being sung. In the Vatican’s Sistine Chapel, to be more exact, as part of the exclusive Tenebrae service on Wednesday and Friday of Holy Week. It was a big tradition; since 1514, a total of twelve Misereres had been chanted/sung at this service. This twelfth one, a setting of Psalm 51, composed by Gregorio Allegri in the late 1630’s for Pope Urban VIII, had become the mainstay, far and away the most popular Miserere. To attend this service and hear this music was a big deal. Visitors, musicians, and travelers would arrange their schedules well in advance to be sure and catch a performance.Share
Why the big deal? Mystery and inaccessibility have a way of adding cachet to any piece of music, particularly one so strikingly gorgeous, at once austere and lushly inviting. The Vatican knew it had a winner on its hands with Allegri’s Miserere and, wanting to preserve its aura of mystery and exclusivity, forbade replication, threatening anyone who attempted to copy or publish it with excommunication.But the teen Mozart was hungry for a challenge, and, well, you know Mozart. He was… spirited. Free-thinking. Not prone to doing exactly as he’d been instructed if he didn’t see the rationale behind it. So, as he and his father attended the Wednesday Tenebrae service, he listened to the incredible choral music, and after the performance, his brain set to work. Late into the night, he wrote it out from memory, note for note. And we’re talking twelve minutes of choral, contrapuntal music. There are two chorus parts, divided at times by two, to create four groups of singers. On top of that are four solo voices that create their own quartet voice. All this stuff going on, a cappella, and Mozart got it all. He went back on Friday night to give it a double-check. All it needed was a few minor tweaks. (Read more.)
In addition to Ernestine and Zoë, there were several orphans for whom Maman provided. Although they could not all live at the palace, they sometimes came to play. They were children from destitute families whose education Maman supervised, paying for art and music lessons if they showed any inclination in that direction. She would take Thérèse to visit infirm servants who lived in retirement, bringing them fruit, bread, and flowers. Her Papa, devoted to all of his subjects, also had a special love for the needy. He would go in disguise to villages, hospitals, prisons, and factories so that he could gain a first hand knowledge of the conditions of his people. He would right wrongs, give alms, and dismiss those in charge if they were not doing their duty. Papa and Maman were Patron and Patroness of the Maison Philanthropique, a society which helped the aged, the blind, and widows. The simple folk loved their King and Queen.
~ from TrianonShareby Elena Maria Vidal
At least CNN and The Post offered some semblance of a timely correction. Despite Wired snarkily stating it would be updated with any new information, it took three full days to edit, with the disclaimer that “it has been corrected to remove any implication that Kushner was at fault for the error.” Unfortunately, the piece still includes cheap shots at Kushner, including conjectures of voter fraud, nepotism, and a “chronic inability to correctly fill out boxes.”Share
Meanwhile, First Lady Melania Trump donated ten Dr. Seuss books to an elementary school in Cambridge, Massachusetts, only to have them publicly rejected by librarian Liz Phipps Soeiro, who responded:
“And then there’s the matter of the books themselves. You may not be aware of this, but Dr. Seuss is a bit of a cliché, a tired and worn ambassador for children’s literature. As First Lady of the United States, you have an incredible platform with world-class resources at your fingertips. Just down the street you have access to a phenomenal children’s librarian: Dr. Carla Hayden, the current Librarian of Congress. I have no doubt Dr. Hayden would have given you some stellar recommendations. Another fact that many people are unaware of is that Dr. Seuss’s illustrations are steeped in racist propaganda, caricatures, and harmful stereotypes.”Clearly, the story here is Dr. Seuss being racist, and the appropriateness of a sanctimonious, lecture-style letter to a sitting First Lady. However, one would never know this based on the reporting of AOL (via Yahoo). AOL only suggests Mrs. Trump “slammed” a librarian whose sole motivation was to supply more contemporary books to less advantaged children. (Read more.)
Since her girlhood, Barrett was bedeviled by intense spinal headaches and muscle pain that would plague her for the remaining four decades of her life, now believed to have been hypokalemic periodic paralysis — a rare disorder that depletes muscles of potassium and effects extreme weakness. A century and a half before scientists began to uncover how emotional stress affects our physical wellbeing, Barrett’s health deteriorated significantly after a close succession of tragedies just before her thirty-fourth birthday — one of her brothers died of fever and another, the most beloved of her eleven siblings, in a sailing accident for which she blamed herself. The following year, she was taken to London in an invalid carriage and spent spent seven years almost continuously bedridden in a darkened upstairs room alongside her beloved spaniel named Flush. In a testament to Rosanne Cash’s assertion that for many artists, “creativity comes from the same room as their deepest pain,” Barrett counterbalanced the stillness of her suffering with a ferocious pace of composition that led to her first major literary success and invited the courtship of the poet Robert Browning.Share
“I love your verses with all my heart, Dear Miss Barrett,” Browning, six years her junior, wrote to the stranger whose poetry had enchanted him beyond words. “I love these books with all my heart — and I love you too.” So began a courtship that would blossom into one of literature’s greatest loves. (Read more.)
Although law enforcement says there was only one shooter, multiple witnesses are openly reporting the presence of multiple shooters. This could reasonably be the result of confusion and chaos, but it’s also highly suspicious that the shooter had “full auto” weapon which is usually limited to law enforcement or military personnel. This question about multiple shooters was also raised after the Aurora, Colorado “Batman movie theater” shooting, in which numerous witnesses reported the presence of multiple shooters. If this shooting was carried out by multiple shooters, it would obviously indicate planning and coordination among a group of people who sought to carry out the shooting for a political purpose of some kind. (Read more.)Share
When a woman could not or would not breastfeed, the most obvious solution was to find a surrogate or wet nurse, a woman who had either recently given birth, who could supply enough milk for two babies or who was still in milk after weaning her own child. It was standard practice to hand royal or high-born babies straight to a nurse, who often had special status within the household. In 1766, after careful vetting, Mrs Muttlebury, a mother of four, was employed by Queen Charlotte, wife of George III, to feed her first daughter, Princess Charlotte. Mrs Muttlebury’s reward was substantial: £200 per annum for life. Apart from the salary, she would also have benefited from the contraceptive effect of prolonged suckling. Queen Charlotte, on the other hand, had to return to the task of producing more royal progeny as quickly as possible. She had 15. Queen Victoria, who bore nine without much enthusiasm for pregnancy or indeed children, famously did not breastfeed, thinking it a repulsive and animalistic practice suitable only for the lower classes. (Read more.)Share
