Today, The Grandma has been reading aboutJohn Gutzon, the Americansculptor, who began sculpting MountRushmore, 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 TheodoreRoosevelt.
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: GeorgeWashington, 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.
Today, The Grandma has been reading about George Washington, the first President of the United States, who died on a day like today in 1799.
George Washington (February 22, 1732-December 14, 1799) was an American soldier, statesman, andFounding Father who servedas the first President of the United Statesfrom 1789 to 1797. Appointed by the Continental Congress as commander of the Continental Army, Washington led the Patriot forces to victory in the American Revolutionary War, and presided at the ConstitutionalConvention of 1787, which established the Constitution of the United States and a federal government.
Washington has been called the Father of the Nation for his manifold leadership in the formative days of the country.
Washington's first public office was serving as official Surveyor of Culpeper County, Virginia from 1749 to 1750. Subsequently, he received his initial military training, as well as a command with the Virginia Regiment, during the French and Indian War.
He was later elected to the Virginia House of Burgesses and was named a delegate to the Continental Congress. Here he was appointed Commanding General of the Continental Army. With this title, he commanded American forces (allied with France) in the defeat and surrender of the British at the Siege of Yorktown during the American Revolutionary War. He resigned his commission after the Treaty of Paris was signed in 1783.
Washington played an indispensable role in adopting and ratifying the Constitution of the United States. He was then twice elected president by the Electoral College unanimously. As president, he implemented a strong, well-financed national government while remaining impartial in a fierce rivalry between cabinet members Thomas Jefferson and Alexander Hamilton.
During the French Revolution, he proclaimed a policy of neutrality while sanctioning the Jay Treaty. He set enduring precedents for the office of president, including the title Mr. President, and his Farewell Address is widely regarded as a pre-eminent statement on republicanism.
Washington owned over a hundred slaves, and he signed measures passed by Congress to protect slavery, as well as measures passed by Congress to curtail slavery.
Starting in 1778, he had become troubled with the institution of slavery and freed William Lee, one of his slaves, in his will. He freed the other 123 slaves that he owned upon the death of his wife, Martha Washington. She decided to respect her husband's wishes and freed these slaves on January 1, 1801, before her death. He also freed in his will 33 more slaves that he acquired in a prior debt agreement with his brother-in-law.
He endeavoured to assimilate Native Americans into the Anglo-American culture but fought indigenous resistance during instances of violent conflict.
He was a member of the Anglican Church and the Freemasons, and heurged broad religious freedom in his roles as general and president.
Upon his death, he was eulogized as first in war, first in peace, and first in the hearts of his countrymen.
Washington has been memorialized by monuments, a federal holiday, various media, geographical locations, including the national capital, the State of Washington, stamps, and currency, and many scholars and polls rank him among the greatest U.S. presidents.
In 1976, as part of commemorations for the U.S. Bicentennial, Washington was posthumously promoted to the rank of General of the Armies of the United States.
The Washington family was a wealthy Virginia planter family that had made its fortune through land speculation and the cultivation of tobacco.
Washington's great-grandfather John Washington emigrated in 1656 from Sulgrave, Northamptonshire, England, to the English colony of Virginia where he accumulated 2,000 ha of land, including Little Hunting Creek on the Potomac River.
George Washington was born on February 22, 1732, at Popes Creek in Westmoreland County, Virginia, and was the first of six children of Augustine and Mary Ball Washington.
On January 6, 1759, Washington, at age 26, married Martha Dandridge Custis, the 27-year-old widow of wealthy plantation owner Daniel Parke Custis.
Washington died peacefully between 10 and 11 p.m. on December 14, 1799.
Today, The Grandma is creating new material for her courses. She has wanted to have more information about Copyright Laws and Lawsof Author because they are changing constantly and it is very important to respect the authors of works before including them in your own manuals.
The Grandma loves sharing information without any kind of legal restriction. She thinks that Internet must be a free place to share knowledge and information and it will not be the best place if its users start to forbid the access to information or if Internet becomes a place to do business losing the original idea of sharing information waiting for nothing in return.
This free concept of Internet is the best reason because of The Grandma uses Wikipedia to refill her posts. Wikipedia is a free space, a great web created with the effort of thousands of people in different languages with posts that have a great reputation in a high percentage.
The Copyright Act of 1790 was the first federal copyright act to be instituted in the United States, though most of the states had passed various legislation securing copyrights in the years immediately following the Revolutionary War.
The stated object of the act was the encouragement of learning, and it achieved this by securing authors the sole right and liberty of printing, reprinting, publishing and vending the copies of their maps, charts, and books for a term of 14 years, with the right to renew for one additional 14-year term should the copyright holder still be alive.
The 1710 British Statute of Anne did not apply to the American colonies. The colonies' economy was largely agrarian, hence copyright law was not a priority, resulting in only three private copyright acts being passed in America prior to 1783. Two of the acts were limited to seven years, the other was limited to a term of five years.
In 1783 a committee of the Continental Congress concluded that nothing is more properly a man's own an the fruit of his study, and that the protection and security of literary property would greatly tends to encourage genius and to promote useful discoveries.
But under the Articles of Confederation, the Continental Congress had no authority to issue copyright; instead it passed a resolution encouraging the States to secure
to the authors or publishers of any new book not hitherto printed...
the copy right of such books for a certain time not less than fourteen
years from the first publication; and to secure to the said authors, if
they shall survive the term first mentioned,... the copy right of such
books for another term of time no less than fourteen years.
Copyright Act of 1790, Section 1
Three states had already enacted copyright statutes in 1783 prior to the ContinentalCongress resolution, and in the subsequent three years all of the remaining states except Delaware passed a copyright statute. Seven of the States followed the Statute of Anne and the Continental Congress' resolution by providing two fourteen-year terms. The five remaining States granted copyright for single terms of fourteen, twenty and twenty-one years, with no right of renewal.
At the Constitutional Convention 1787 both James Madison of Virginia and Charles C. Pinckney of South Carolina submitted proposals that would allow Congress the power to grant copyright for a limited time. These proposals are the origin of the CopyrightClause in the United States Constitution, which allows the granting of copyright and patents for a limited time to serve a utilitarian function, namely to promote the progress of science and useful arts.
During the first session of the 1st United States Congress in 1789, the House of Representative considered enacting a copyright law. The historian Davit Ramsay petitioned congress seeking to restrict the publication of his History of the American Revolution on April 15.
Congressmen
Thomas Tudor Tucker, Alexander White, and Benjamin Huntington examined
his claims and a copyright committee consisting of Huntington, Lambert
Cadwalader, and Benjamin Contee began drafting the legislation on April
20. Jedidiah Morse, Nicholas Pike, and Hannah Adams each also petitioned
Congress with their interests in restricting the printing of texts.
Their bill moved to the Committee of the Whole House in June, but the matter was postponed in anticipation of the first recess, to be taken up again when the House reconvened.
Both houses of Congress pursued a copyright law more pointedly during 1790's second session. They responded to President George Washington's 1790 State of the Union Address, in which he urged Congress to pass legislation designed for the promotion of Science and Literature so as to better educate the public. This led to the Patent Act of 1790 and, shortly thereafter, the Copyright Act of 1790.
The scope of what works would be covered by the law's exclusivity was contended in the House. When he reintroduced the matter, Aedanus Burke wanted to establish a first law about copyright regarding literary property, but Alexander White called for the expansion of copyright beyond writings on the behalf of Jedidiah Morse, who wrote to Congress in fear that unauthorized copying of his American Geography would hurt his business.
The need to re-raise the copyright
issue, among other items left unresolved at the end of the first
session, required the House to clarify some order of business problems
over whether or not they could reopen unfinished business from a
previous session. That settled, the House established a drafting
committee for the law on February 1, chaired by Abraham Baldwin.
Eventually, the House passed a copyright bill and passed it to the Senate.
The Senate also deliberated on Copyright
after the President's speech. On May 14, the Senate passed an amended
version of the bill sent to them by the House. The House accepted their
amendment on May 18 and the bill passed to the President.
George Washington
The bill was signed into law on May 31, 1790 by George Washington and published in its entirety throughout the country shortly after.
The Act granted copyright for a term of fourteen years from the time of recording the title thereof, with a right of renewal for another fourteen years if the author survived to the end of the first term. It restricted books, maps, and charts. Although musical composition were not mentioned in the text of the act, and would not be expressly covered by copyright until the Copyright Act of 1831, they were routinely registered under the 1790 Act as books. The Act also did not mention paintings or drawings, which were not covered until the enactment of the Copyright Act of 1870.
The Act was copied almost verbatim from the 1709 British Statute of Anne. The first sentences of the two laws are almost identical. Both require registration in order for a work to receive copyright protection; similarly, both require that copies of the work be deposited in officially designated repositories such as the Library of Congress in the United States, and the Oxford and Cambridge universities in the United Kingdom.
The Statute of Anne and the Copyright Act of 1790 both provided for an initial term of 14 years, renewable once by living authors for an additional 14 years, for works not yet published.
The Statute of Anne differed from the 1790 Act,
however, in providing a 21-year term of restriction, with no option for
renewal, for works already published at the time the law went into
effect (1710). The 1790 Act only offered a 14-year term for previously published works.
The Copyright Act of 1790 applied exclusively to citizens of the United States. Non-citizens and material printed outside the United States could not be granted any copyright protection until the International Copyright Act of 1891. Consequently, Charles Dickens sometimes complained about cheap American knockoffs of his work for which he received no royalty.
At the time, works only received protection under federal statutory copyright if the statutory formalities, such as a proper copyright notice, were satisfied. If this was not the case, the work immediately entered into the public domain. In 1834 the Supreme Court ruled in Wheaton v. Peters, a case similar to the British Donaldson v Beckett of 1774, that although the author of an unpublished work had a common law right to control the first publication of that work, the author did not have a common law right to control reproduction following the first publication of the work.
The Act was first amended on April 29, 1802, extending copyright restriction to etchings and, for the first time, requiring notice of copyright registration on copies of the works. The Act did not specify a consequence of failing to include that notice; however, the federal case Ewer v. Coxe established that the failure to include notice invalidated a copyright.
The Act was also amended on February 15, 1819 to expand the jurisdiction of circuit courts, analogous to today's district courts, to allow them to hear cases on patents and copyrights.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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