1927, GUTZON BORGLUM SCULPTS MOUNT RUSHMORE

Today, The Grandma has been reading about John Gutzon, the American sculptor, who began sculpting Mount Rushmore, on a day like today in 1927.

 

John Gutzon de la Mothe Borglum (March 25, 1867-March 6, 1941) was an American sculptor best known for his work on Mount Rushmore. 

 

He is also associated with various other public works of art across the U.S., including Stone Mountain in Georgia, statues of Union General Philip Sheridan in Washington D.C. and in Chicago, as well as a bust of Abraham Lincoln exhibited in the White House by Theodore Roosevelt and now held in the United States Capitol crypt in Washington, D.C.

The son of Danish immigrants, John Gutzon de la Mothe Borglum was born in 1867 in St. Charles, in what was then thought to be in Utah but was later determined to be in Idaho Territory.

His Mount Rushmore project, 1927-1941, was the brainchild of South Dakota state historian Doane Robinson. His first attempt with the face of Thomas Jefferson had to be redone when it was determined that there was not enough stone to complete it. Dynamite was used to remove large areas of rock from under Washington's brow. The initial pair of presidents, George Washington and Thomas Jefferson, was soon joined by Abraham Lincoln and Theodore Roosevelt.

The Mount Rushmore National Memorial is a national memorial centered on a colossal sculpture carved into the granite face of Mount Rushmore, in Lakota Tȟuŋkášila Šákpe or Six Grandfathers, in the Black Hills near Keystone, South Dakota, United States. 

Sculptor Gutzon Borglum designed the sculpture, called Shrine of Democracy, and oversaw the project's execution from 1927 to 1941 with the help of his son, Lincoln Borglum.

The sculpture features 18 m heads of four United States presidents: George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Theodore Roosevelt, and Abraham Lincoln, chosen to represent the nation's birth, growth, development, and preservation, respectively.

Mount Rushmore attracts more than two million visitors annually to the memorial park which covers 5.17 km2. The mountain's elevation is 1,745 m above sea level.

The sculptor chose Mount Rushmore in part because it faces southeast for maximum sun exposure. The carving was the idea of Doane Robinson, a historian for the state of South Dakota. Robinson originally wanted the sculpture to feature American West heroes, such as Lewis and Clark, their expedition guide Sacagawea, Oglala Lakota chief Red Cloud, Buffalo Bill Cody, and Oglala Lakota chief Crazy Horse. Borglum chose the four presidents instead.

Peter Norbeck, U.S. senator from South Dakota, sponsored the project and secured federal funding.  

Construction began in 1927 and the presidents' faces were completed between 1934 and 1939.

After Gutzon Borglum died in March 1941, his son Lincoln took over as leader of the construction project. Each president was originally to be depicted from head to waist, but lack of funding forced construction to end on October 31, 1941, and only Washington's sculpture includes any detail below chin level.

The sculpture at Mount Rushmore is built on land that was illegally taken from the Sioux Nation in the 1870s. The Sioux continue to demand return of the land, and in 1980 the US Supreme Court ruled in United States v. Sioux Nation of Indians that the taking of the Black Hills required just compensation, and awarded the tribe $102 million. The Sioux have refused the money, and demand the return of the land. This conflict continues, leading some critics of the monument to refer to it as a Shrine of Hypocrisy.

More information: National Park Service

Sculpture is an art of the open air.
Daylight, sunlight, is necessary to it, and for me,
its best setting and complement is nature.

Henry Moore

WASHINGTON, D.C., THE AMERICAN IDIOSYNCRASY

The Beans arriving to the Treasury Building

Yesterday, The Beans said goodbye to Washington, D.C. They chose the last places to visit and they have a closer relationship with the idiosyncrasy of the country. 

For one hand, they visited the Treasury Building, symbol of the economical power in the country which represents better the idea of capitalism. 

For other hand, the family visited Arlington Cemetery, symbol of the politican and military power of the USA.

Finally, The Grandma wanted to visit the Lincoln Memorial to tribute Abraham Lincoln and to remember another important figure of the recent American history: Martin Luther King, Jr.

The Treasury Building in Washington, D.C., is a National Historic Landmark building which is the headquarters of the United States Department of the Treasury. An image of the Treasury Building is featured on the back of the United States ten-dollar bill.

In the spring of the year 1800, the capital of the United States was preparing to move from the well-established city of Philadelphia to a parcel of tidewater land along the Potomac River. President John Adams issued an Executive Order on May 15th instructing the federal government to move to Washington and to be open for business by June 15, 1800. Arriving in Washington, relocated government employees found only one building completed and ready to be occupied: the Treasury Department building. The building was 147 feet long and 57 feet wide, flanking the south-east end of the White House.

More information: U.S.Department of the Treasury

Arlington National Cemetery is a United States military cemetery in Arlington County, Virginia, across the Potomac River from Washington, D.C., in whose 253 ha the dead of the nation's conflicts have been buried, beginning with the Civil War, as well as reinterred dead from earlier wars. The United States Department of the Army, a component of the United States Department of Defense, controls the cemetery. The national cemetery was established during the Civil War on the grounds of Arlington House, which had been the estate of the family of Confederate general Robert E. Lee's wife Mary Anna (Custis) Lee, a great-granddaughter of Martha Washington.

More information: Arlington Cemetery

The Lincoln Memorial is an American national monument built to honor the 16th President of the United States, Abraham Lincoln. It is located on the western end of the National Mall in Washington, D.C., across from the Washington Monument. Dedicated in 1922, it is one of several monuments built to honor an American president. It has always been a major tourist attraction and since the 1930s has been a symbolic center focused on race relations.

Grandma's memories with Martin Luther King, Jr.

The building is in the form of a Greek Doric temple and contains a large seated sculpture of Abraham Lincoln and inscriptions of two well-known speeches by Lincoln, The Gettysburg Address and his Second Inaugural Address. 

The memorial has been the site of many famous speeches, including Martin Luther King Jr.'s I Have a Dream speech, delivered on August 28, 1963, during the rally at the end of the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom.

Like other monuments on the National Mall, the memorial is administered by the National Park Service under its National Mall and Memorial Parks group.

More information: Lincoln Memorial

I got my story, my dream, from America. 

The hero I had is Forrest Gump... I like that guy.
 

Jack Ma

F.SCOTT FITZGERALD: THE LOST AMERICAN GENERATION

Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald

The Grandma is in Vienna. She arrived on The Orient Express and today she has been visiting the bookshops looking for a special book: The Gran Gastby. After walking across the downtown of the Austrian capital, she has found the book and she wants to talk to you about its author, F.Scott Fitzgerald.

Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald (September 24, 1896–December 21, 1940) was an American novelist and short story writer, whose works illustrate the Jazz Age. While he achieved limited success in his lifetime, he is now widely regarded as one of the greatest American writers of the 20th century. Fitzgerald is considered a member of the Lost Generation of the 1920s. He finished four novels: This Side of Paradise, The Beautiful and Damned, The Great Gatsby, and Tender is the Night. A fifth, unfinished novel, The Love of the Last Tycoon, was published posthumously. Fitzgerald also wrote numerous short stories, many of which treat themes of youth and promise, and age and despair.

More information: History.com

Born in 1896 in Saint Paul, Minnesota, to an upper-middle-class family, Fitzgerald was named after his famous second cousin, three times removed on his father's side, Francis Scott Key, but was always known as plain Scott Fitzgerald. He was also named after his deceased sister, Louise Scott Fitzgerald, one of two sisters who died shortly before his birth. Well, three months before I was born, he wrote as an adult, my mother lost her other two children... I think I started then to be a writer.

His father was Edward Fitzgerald, of Irish and English ancestry, who had moved to St. Paul from Maryland after the Civil War and his mother was Mary McQuillan Fitzgerald, the daughter of an Irish immigrant who had made his fortune in the wholesale grocery business. Fitzgerald was the first cousin once removed of Mary Surratt, hanged in 1865 for conspiring to assassinate Abraham Lincoln.

Fitzgerald died of a heart attack. Fitzgerald's body was moved to the Pierce Brothers Mortuary.

More information: Open Culture

At the time of his death, the Church declined the family's request that Fitzgerald, a non-practicing Catholic celebrated for his risqué and provocative Jazz Age writings, be buried in the family plot in the Roman Catholic Saint Mary's Cemetery. Fitzgerald was originally buried in Rockville Union Cemetery. 

Fitzgerald died before he could complete The Love of the Last Tycoon. His manuscript, which included extensive notes for the unwritten part of the novel's story, was edited by his friend, the literary critic Edmund Wilson, and published in 1941 as The Last Tycoon.

 After all, life hasn't much to offer except youth, and I suppose for older people, the love of youth in others. 

F. Scott Fitzgerald

13th AMENDMENT RATIFIED & WASHINGTON MONUMENT

Abolishing Slavery Banner

December, 6th is a special date in The USA. American people celebrate two big events: for one hand, the 13th Amendment (1865), for other hand, the end of the construction of George Washington Monument in DC.

Tina Picotes, who is travelling around the States and today is visiting Washington, D.C., wants to talk to us about these two events. She invites us to read two posts from History.com, a webpage that she recommends fervently.  It's a must, if you like History.

Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.

On this day in 1865, the 13th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, officially ending the institution of slavery, is ratified. With these words, the single greatest change wrought by the Civil War was officially noted in the Constitution. 

More information: History.Net

The ratification came eight months after the end of the war, but it represented the culmination of the struggle against slavery. When the war began,some in the North were against fighting what they saw as a crusade to end slavery. Although many northern Democrats and conservative Republicans were opposed to slavery’s expansion, they were ambivalent about outlawing the institution entirely. The war’s escalation after the First Battle of Bull Run, Virginia, in July 1861 caused many to rethink the role that slavery played in creating the conflict. 

Slave family. Cotton workers. Georgia, 1860

By 1862, Lincoln realized that it was folly to wage such a bloody war without plans to eliminate slavery. In September 1862, following the Union victory at the Battle of Antietam in Maryland, Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation, declaring that all slaves in territory still in rebellion on January 1, 1863, would be declared forever free. The move was largely symbolic, as it only freed slaves in areas outside of Union control, but it changed the conlfict from a war for the reunification of the states to a war whose objectives includedthe destruction of slavery. 

Lincoln believed that a constitutional amendment was necessary to ensure the end of slavery. In 1864, Congress debated several proposals. Some insisted on including provisions to prevent discrimination against blacks, but the Senate Judiciary Committee provided the eventual language. It borrowed from the Northwest Ordinance of 1787, when slavery was banned from the area north of the Ohio River. The Senate passed the amendment in April 1864.

More information:  13th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution (Chronology)

A Republican victory in the 1864 presidential election would guarantee the success of the amendment. The Republican platform called for the utter and complete destruction of slavery, while the Democrats favored restoration of states’ rights, which would include at least the possibility for the states to maintain slavery. Lincoln’s overwhelming victory set in motion the events leading to ratification of the amendment. The House passed the measure in January 1865 and it was sent to the states for ratification. When Georgia ratified it on December 6, 1865, the institution of slavery officially ceased to exist in the United States.

Roll Jordan, roll. Roll Jordan, roll
I want to get to heaven when I diet to hear Roll Jordan roll

 John Legend

Construction of Washington Monument

Nineteen years later, on this same day, in Washington, DC, workers place a nine-inch aluminum pyramid atop a tower of white marble, completing the construction of an impressive monument to the city’s namesake and the nation’s first president, George Washington.

As early as 1783, the infant U.S. Congress decided that a statue of George Washington, the great Revolutionary War general, should be placed near the site of the new Congressional building, wherever it might be. After then, President Washington asked him to lay out a new federal capital on the Potomac River in 1791, architect Pierre L’Enfant left a place for the statue at the western end of the sweeping National Mall, near the monument’s present location.

It wasn’t until 1832, however, 33 years after Washington’s death, that anyone really did anything about the monument. That year, a private Washington National Monument Society was formed. After holding a design competition and choosing an elaborate Greek temple-like design by architect Robert Mills, the society began a fundraising drive to raise money for the statue’s construction. 

  
More information: Washington Monument

These efforts, including appeals to the nation’s schoolchildren, raised some $230,000, far short of the $1 million needed. Construction began anyway, on July 4, 1848, as representatives of the society laid the cornerstone of the monument: a 24,500-pound block of pure white marble.

Workers on the top of Washington Monument

Six years later, with funds running low, construction was halted. Around the time the Civil War began in 1861, author Mark Twain described the unfinished monument as looking like a hollow, oversized chimney. No further progress was made until 1876, the centennial of American independence, when President Ulysses S. Grant authorized construction to be completed.

Made of some 36,000 blocks of marble and granite stacked 555 feet in the air, the monument was the tallest structure in the world at the time of its completion in December 1884. In the six months following the dedication ceremony, over 10,000 people climbed the nearly 900 steps to the top of the Washington Monument. 

Today, an elevator makes the trip far easier, and more than 800,000 people visit the monument each year. A city law passed in 1910 restricted the height of new buildings to ensure that the monument will remain the tallest structure in Washington, D.C., a fitting tribute to the man known as the Father of His Country. 

The time is near at hand which must determine whether Americans are to be free men or slaves. 

George Washington

THANKSGIVING DAY: WHEN AMERICA AND EUROPE JOIN

Tina Picotes in Thanksgiving Day Parade, NYC

Tina Picotes is still in New York City. Today, she's celebrating Thanksgiving Day. She wants to explain us some things about this special day, its history and celebration.

Thanksgiving or Thanksgiving Day, is a public holiday celebrated on the fourth Thursday of November in the United States. It originated as a harvest festival. Thanksgiving has been celebrated nationally on and off since 1789, after a proclamation by George Washington. It has been celebrated as a federal holiday every year since 1863, when, during the American Civil War, President Abraham Lincoln proclaimed a national day of Thanksgiving and Praise to our beneficent Father who dwelleth in the Heavens, to be celebrated on the last Thursday in November. Together with Christmas and the New Year, Thanksgiving is a part of the broader holiday season.

More information: History.com

The event that Americans commonly call the First Thanksgiving was celebrated by the Pilgrims after their first harvest in the New World in October 1621. This feast lasted three days, and as accounted by attendee Edward Winslow, it was attended by 90 Native Americans and 53 Pilgrims. The New England colonists were accustomed to regularly celebrating thanksgivings, days of prayer thanking God for blessings such as military victory or the end of a drought.

Thanksgiving Day is a good day to recommit our energies 

to giving thanks and just giving.  

Amy Grant

ABRAHAM LINCOLN, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES

Abraham Lincoln, member of the Republican party

Abraham Lincoln was the 16th President of the United States from March 1861 until his assassination in April 1865. Lincoln led the United States through its Civil War, its bloodiest war and perhaps its greatest moral, constitutional, and political crisis. He preserved the Union, abolished slavery, strengthened the federal government, and modernized the economy.

Lincoln was born in 1809 in Hodgenville, Kentucky. Largely self-educated, he became a lawyer in Illinois, a Whig Party leader, and was elected to the Illinois House of Representatives, in which he served for eight years. Elected to the United States House of Representatives in 1846, Lincoln promoted rapid modernization of the economy through banks, tariffs, and railroads. Because he had originally agreed not to run for a second term in Congress, and because his opposition to the Mexican–American War was unpopular among Illinois voters, Lincoln returned to Springfield and resumed his successful law practice. Reentering politics in 1854, he became a leader in building the new Republican Party, which had a statewide majority in Illinois.

More information: Abraham Lincoln On Line

Abraham Lincoln was born in Hodgenville

On October 16, 1854, in his Peoria Speech, Lincoln declared his opposition to slavery, which he repeated en route to the presidency. Speaking in his Kentucky accent, with a very powerful voice, he said the Kansas Act had a declared indifference, but as I must think, a covert real zeal for the spread of slavery. I cannot but hate it. I hate it because of the monstrous injustice of slavery itself. I hate it because it deprives our republican example of its just influence in the world...
 

In 1858, while taking part in a series of highly publicized debates with his opponent and rival, Democrat Stephen A. Douglas, Lincoln spoke out against the expansion of slavery, but lost the U.S. Senate race to Douglas. 

More information:  The White House

On November 6, 1860, Lincoln was elected the 16th president of the United States, beating Democrat Stephen A. Douglas, John C. Breckinridge of the Southern Democrats, and John Bell of the new Constitutional Union Party. He was the first president from the Republican Party. His victory was entirely due to the strength of his support in the North and West; no ballots were cast for him in 10 of the 15 Southern slave states, and he won only two of 996 counties in all the Southern states.

The Abraham Lincoln Memorial in Washington, DC

Lincoln was an exceptionally astute politician deeply involved with power issues in each state, who reached out to the War Democrats and managed his own re-election campaign in the 1864 presidential election. 

Anticipating the war's conclusion, Lincoln pushed a moderate view of Reconstruction, seeking to reunite the nation speedily through a policy of generous reconciliation in the face of lingering and bitter divisiveness. 

On April 14, 1865, five days after the April 9th surrender of Confederate commanding general Robert E. Lee, Lincoln was assassinated by John Wilkes Booth, a Confederate sympathizer.

More information: History.com 

Be sure you put your feet in the right place, then stand firm. 

Abraham Lincoln

GOODBYE CALIFORNIA! HELLO WASHINGTON DC!

Yesterday, The Poppins took a look over pronouns and Some/Any/No compounds and read a new chapter of Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray.

The family is learning some new grammar without having the pressure of studying it. They have been working very hard during two months to arrive to this point and they’re obtaining the results.

Eli Poppins offered a conference about her own web. She’s a clever and curious person who wants to get answers when she has questions. This aptitude is very important in life because you don’t accept the reality in the way that is offered but in the way that you discover and check.

More information: Object Pronouns

Finally, The Poppins wrote incredible compositions, a new demonstration about how much knowledge they’ve acquired.

More information: Some & Any Compounds

The family wants to stay this weekend in Washington DC because they have interesting things to do and The Grandma desires to visit Abraham, an old friend.

Today, they’re going to meet some superheroes and discover that they only exist in the paper format and in our dreams because we’re the real heroes.

We are all now connected by the Internet, 

like neurons in a giant brain. 

Stephen Hawking

FROM LINCOLN TO GUEVARA: FREEDOM!

Abraham Lincoln

Yesterday, The Poppins continued with their English classes. They started doing some exercises about Social English and reviewing Used to. Later, they practised with the Relative Pronouns and paid attention to the importance of questions and short answers.

More information: Used to

The Grandma explained some stories about Cuba and Catalan economy during the XIX century, paying special attention to the figures of the Indians, Catalan-born people who travelled to Cuba to make business and returned to their hometowns where they tried to evocate the Caribbean country building the same kind of houses and planting the same sort of plants and vegetables. 

She also told about slavery in American countries and the abolition of it in The USA thanks to Abraham Lincoln.

After some days without reading Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray, they continued working the plot of this interesting book and they created another plot about sharks, an animal well-known in Australia and one of the most dangerous enemies of swimmers and surfers like Esther Poppins’ new boyfriend.

Che

Talking about boyfriends, The Grandma, following the advice of her family, decided to say goodbye to her last lover, Dave Clipster. A misunderstanding about him created some tension between the members of the family and The Grandma had to take a decision: choose between The Poppins or Dave. It was easy. Obviously, The Poppins won.

Next, the family listened to some stories from its members about difficult and uncomfortable situations in the past and they analysed how to confront them.

Tomorrow, the family is going to listen to Lulú Poppins’ explanations about fashion and trend and they’re going to play poker.

Come on Poppins! The die is cast!

In matters of style, swim with the current; 
in matters of principle, stand like a rock.

Thomas Jefferson