by Roseanna White | Apr 30, 2014 | 17th-19th Centuries, Remember When Wednesdays
On Monday, I took my kids on a field trip to the local one-room schoolhouse. (And didn’t realize until evening that I’d forgotten to blog my Word of the Week before I left–oops!)
I hadn’t even realized we had a local one-room schoolhouse, but there we go. 😉 It’s now run by the Allegany County Historical Society, and they do regular tours and programs there. Just looking around was so much fun. Built in 1901, this schoolhouse at first served only three families–and before it was built, school moved around to accommodate where the children were clustered. This, it seems, was the first permanent structure.
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Our guide for the day was Ms. Amber, staff member
at the Historical Society. She did a fabulous job! |
Based on letters from the schoolmarm that the Society also has, Cumberland’s school was under the instruction of a young woman from Frostburg’s teaching college (Frostburg is just a few miles up the mountain). Though accustomed to the strict propriety of city life, the schoolmarm soon discovered that we have a more laid-back way of life in Cumberland. She reported in her letter that no one cared if her hair wasn’t in so neat a bun…for that matter, no one cared if her hair were in a bun at all.
One of the Historical Society ladies walked us through what a day would look like, beginning with the students lining up upon her ringing of the bell. Girls would be in one line, youngest to oldest, and boys in another. (In our group, my little Rowyn was the only boy, LOL.) Two girls would go to the neighbor’s well to fetch a bucket of water, and one of the boys would be responsible for bringing the firewood from home–and if he failed to bring enough, his punishment was to sit in the seat farthest from the stove!
Upon entering, we could look in and see the two different cloak rooms–one for girls, one for boys–were bonnets and coats and overshoes and lunch pails would have been left. From there, the students took their seats.
The kids got to look at the original primers the children would have used; on the board were actual math problems from the day. Our guide pointed out that they all related math to things like farming and land, as this would be what the children needed to learn it for. Some of the wording was odd for our modern mathematicians, LOL, but the kids had great fun doing their sums on slates.
And even more fun when it came time for the penmanship lesson, and they were all given quills, ink, and paper. I do believe I had the only kindergartener who already knew how to use one, LOL.
The indoor portion of the day was wrapped up with one of the fun activities the schoolmarm would have reserved for Fridays. First, she said, the teacher would have read to them–one week from a book the girls would favor, the next from one for the boys. Then they would do something active, like a spelling bee. Xoe didn’t win, but she did manage to get right a word that had knocked out four students before her, and for that, she earned a reward of merit. Paper was far more valuable back then, so this, our guide said, would have been special indeed. (This was actually a copy of an original one from this schoolhouse!)
We then went outside for lunch and recess. Lunch would have, of course, been brought in a pail.
Our students on Monday received a roll, apple pieces, some jerky, and water. Then it was on to the fun and games. Hoops, anyone?
Or perhaps you prefer graces–in this game, you put the small hoop on the end of your stick and toss it to your partners, who tries to catch it on the end of her stick. They also played tug-of-war, which was a big hit, and did a sack race.
Overall, we all had a blast. I, of course, love learning about this history. And the kids were so enamored with it that on the way home they decided that we need to build a one-room schoolhouse in our yard, complete with chalk boards, slates, and quills. Interestingly, their father didn’t say no, exactly… 😉
by Roseanna White | Apr 16, 2014 | 17th-19th Centuries, Remember When Wednesdays
Well, I was a week behind, but I did finally watch Turn on Sunday, both the pilot and the second episode. And thus far I’m enjoying it! I think I have an immunity to on-screen violence, at least when it’s Hollywood style (Which is to say, home videos that involve people getting hurt make me wince and look away and refuse to look back. But I can handle zombie or wartime on-screen violence without any trouble. Consider that a disclaimer for anyone with a sensitive stomach, LOL.), though I know it was a bit much for some of my friends.
And of course, I spent much of my time comparing their version of events with the history recorded by Alexander Rose in Washington’s Spies, which I used for my research in Ring of Secrets.
Overall, I really love the creative license they’ve taken. They’re building tension in a way that translates well to the screen, which is crucial. The actual tension was merely (merely–ha!) in the fear of being discovered by random troops while getting word to Washington, but that doesn’t exactly keep viewers on the edge of their seats, right? So they instead put the actual big-players of covert operations together, though they weren’t in reality.
Some differences I noted and approve:
Rogers. Rogers Rangers really were the menace of the northern campaign. They were ruthless, successful, and feared universally by the Patriots. Was Rogers ever in Setauket? Not that I recall. Did he recruit Abraham Woodhull to work for him? Um, no. Does it play well on TV? Absolutely! Love that they found a way to draw him into their story. I was going to mention him in Ring of Secrets, but he had resigned (or rather, had been forced to resign) by the time my story took place.
Anna Strong. One of the TV show’s most vital threads thus far is the relationship between Anna and Abraham. The show has billed them as formerly-engaged, still in love despite both of them being married to other people. This is an incredibly compelling element, and I do approve of how they’re using it (so long as they don’t introduce an affair. I really, really, really hope they don’t go there–hear that, AMC??). BUT–Anna was in fact a decade older than Abraham, not a former love-interest. Abraham’s wife, Mary, was a relative of Selah Strong (Anna’s husband). They were neighbors, yes, and Anna helped him in his covert activities, yes. She in fact posed as his wife when he was transporting letters to Brewster. You see, single men traveling alone were stopped and searched–couples were not. So Anna volunteered to go with him, and no one thought to ask if she were his wife.
That is, alas, were their relationship ended. But that’s not nearly interesting enough for TV, LOL.
Mary Woodhull. Quite simply, Abraham wasn’t married at this point in history, LOL. There was no Mary Woodhull yet. They wed in 1781, after the war, and had three children–two of whom ended up marrying Brewsters.
Which leads us to…
Caleb Brewster. Brewster is one of my favorite historical characters from the Culper Ring, though I didn’t get to mention him much in Ring of Secrets. This guy was a Colonial daredevil, always seeking an adventure. He’s the one member of the Culpers who refused a code name–and the perpetual thorn in the side of Rogers and others like him, always evading them. So far as I recall, he never beat the snot of Simcoe. Nor did Tallmadge face court martial for such an act. But you know–their Simcoe deserved it, so no arguments from me. 😉
So those are my early observations on where fiction lives in Turn. I can’t wait to see how they introduce the other historical figures that took on roles in the Culper Ring!
by Roseanna White | Mar 12, 2014 | 17th-19th Centuries, Remember When Wednesdays
Well, here we are. March 12. That means 19 days until the official, in-stores-everywhere release of Circle of Spies. My copies arrived on Monday. And when I looked it up, I saw it was in stock already at ChristianBook.com (woot!!!!).
EXCITING!!!!!!!
A book release is always fun–and funny. Because though this is the latest book the public sees, the author hasn’t been working on it for months. The last I saw of it was Thanksgiving, when I did my galley edits. I turned it in back in July. My mind has spent months in first-century Rome, and now it’s moving on to 1910 England. That’s where my thoughts are…but then these beautiful books show up, all the promo stuff starts appearing, and I get to shift gears.
Which is cool. Because I love Marietta and Slade. Love them. It was so much fun to write about a these two far-from-perfect characters. Even after agonizing over edits that required I cut 20K from the manuscript, even after reading through it three times in the course of two weeks back in November, I love this book. Sometimes I get sick of my books, LOL, but not with this one. I’m so, so happy to welcome Circle of Spies to the world.
So I thought today I’d talk a bit about one of my favorite aspects of the book. If you look at that back cover, the blurb beings with A glimpse was all she had. A glimpse was all she needed.
The line is taken almost verbatim from the book and is a key point. Marietta, which we learn in the first chapter (click here to read the first chapter!), has a perfect memory. As in, perfect. She can recall everything she has ever read. Everything she has ever seen. Everything she has ever heard. Every minute of every day. Every Joy.
Every pain.
Every laugh.
Every scolding.
Can you imagine? There are documented cases of people with these unbelievable memories, but their stories vary. Some are great academics, capable of so very much because of this remarkable gift. Some of them are so overwhelmed by it that they in effect do nothing.
As I developed Marietta in my mind, I already had some of her figured out by necessity. I knew her role in the story–she was a widow, one who has to covertly help an undercover agent without him knowing. At first I thought she would rather hermit-like, but as the plot came to me, I saw that wouldn’t work. No, Marietta Hughes had to be a southern belle to put southern belles to shame. She had to know how to flirt. She had to know how to manipulate. That was how she would pull off the task assigned to her.
Those of you who read Whispers from the Shadows will no doubt remember that Gwyneth had a pretty amazing memory too. She could recreate with pencil or brush anything she had seen. A glimpse was all she needed. That’s what started me on the thought of memory. That’s what made me remember the stories a coworker at my college used to tell.
See, St. John’s College is a place where you read. All classes are conversation-based, on the assigned texts. Twice a week are the big classes, the seminars as we call them. Where we discuss philosophy. To every class, the students and professors (whom we call tutors) come in not with text books but with original books. Conversations about the texts obviously require a lot of flipping through pages to hunt up that section you just have to quote to refute someone’s point…even though half the time, by the time you find it, the talk has moved on to another topic.
I worked in the Admissions Office, and one of the counselors was named Dave Cherry. Dave was a talker. He loved to tell us all about…everything, LOL. One of his favorite stories was of his days as a student at St. John’s, and of another student in his class. I don’t remember the guy’s name, but he had perfect recall. This was how he read a book: he opened it up, he flipped through the pages one by one, just glancing at each page. Then he’d put the book away, lay back on his bed, close his eyes, and read. Read, from the images of the pages in his mind.
???!!!!
How cool is THAT??
I never forgot those stories. Never forgot about how he never once took a book to class but could quote from anywhere in the book, perfectly, at will. How he wowed all his classmates with his ability to do this on command.
That, I decided, was a trait worthy of a heroine. But it could easily make a character too perfect, right? Too amazing. Too unbelievable.
So I decided it would be pretty darn fun to give it to a girl who just wanted to have a good time. Who wouldn’t appreciate the gift for many years. Who, in fact, viewed it as a burden.
Which it would be, if it were as extended as I made it. If she could forget nothing, including the bad things. If, as Marietta puts it, her mind were always filled with the march of meaningless facts, always so overwhelmed with the past, how could she help but want to just live in the moment? She cannot forget–so she ignores. And she has become a master of it by the time the book opens. Until Granddad Thad gives her a shake to her foundation and says it is time to use this gift of God for His purposes rather than her own.
Yes, I had a lot of fun working this gift into the story, and recreating those stories I heard. I always love to hear of the amazing, miraculous giftings the Lord sometimes gives.
Have you heard of any awe-inspiring stories of the human mind?
by Roseanna White | Jan 22, 2014 | 17th-19th Centuries, Remember When Wednesdays
I’ve posted some quotes from Franklin’s Poor Richard’s Almanac before, but one post cannot contain his wealth of advice. 😉 So I thought today, on this chilly January morn when my thermometer has dipped into the negatives, I’d warm everyone up with some of Ben’s wisdom.
Buy what thou hast no need of; and e’er long thou shalt sell thy necessities.
I don’t know about you, but my brain is often wired to this life of excess we tend to live today. When I see someone choosing to live simply, it always gives me a check. This year, I’m making an attempt to cut back and focus on the important things, not the many things. And though Franklin was by all accounts wealthy and lacking for nothing, I greatly appreciate that his inventions were meant to make life easier for the common man.
Don’t value a man for the quality he is of, but for the qualities he possesses.
Yes, we all judge books by their covers. But when it comes to people, we definitely need to remember that the exterior, be it circumstances or looks, is not what matters.
Employ thy time well, if thou meanest to gain leisure.
Oh so often I complain of having no time to do what I need to do…but how often is that because I fail to prioritize my time wisely?
Anger is never without a reason, but seldom with a good one.
I think we often fall into the trap of thinking we have a right to be angry. But do we? Or do we merely have an excuse to be?
An old young man will be a young old man.
I love this one. =) My father-in-law said back when I was a teenager just dating my now-hubby that I was the oldest young person he ever met. I took it as a compliment. And I hope that the same something that made me weigh things carefully as a young person will make me appreciate and enjoy life all the more as I age.
Blessed is he who expects nothing, for he shall never be disappointed.
This is one I try to tell myself often. I’m an eternal optimist, but I have to be careful not to hope in what is not in the Lord’s plan for me. The trick, of course, is determining what that is.
By diligence and patience, the mouse bit in two the cable.
Sometimes the tasks put before seem so very daunting–but with faith, nothing is beyond us that we are called to do.
by Roseanna White | Oct 23, 2013 | 17th-19th Centuries, Remember When Wednesdays
Who should be responsible for the poor? For the needy? Whose job is it to feed the hungry and clothe the naked?
And if one takes that responsibility…how should one go about it?
To the Quakers of Colonial Philadelphia, the answer to both was simple: this was a task that ought to fall to them, not to the government, and they were not going to feed mouths without feeding souls. More often than not, they felt, people arrived at low circumstances because of their own choices–often bad ones, morally speaking. And so, they needed to be taught. They needed to bettered.
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| A Quaker almshouse |
Quakers ruled the merchant class of Pennsylvania, and they had come up with an idea on how to at once raise the impoverished of Philadelphia from the murk and put them on a path of hope. The Bettering House was run by these merchants, with the goal to improve them in both body and spirit. Families moved into the House, where they were separated by gender. Once there, they received food, clothes, sermons, and gainful employment in the form of spinning, weaving, and dyeing cloth.
Up until this time, the city had been responsible for the poor, but their efforts were small–they provided a bit of food, what firewood they could. The Bettering House took this burden off the city’s shoulders.
But by the mid-1760s, unemployment was on the rise, and the weaknesses of the Bettering House became glaring. Families were separated, the work was hard, the pay was little, and the residents often resented getting “preached to.”
In 1775, a new idea formed, not by Quakers, but by well-educated but monetarily bereft men who shared a passion for bettering the plight of working men in general. With the ultimate goal of earning the common laborer a voice and a vote, James Cannon helped found a rival to the Bettering House–the United Company of Philadelphia for Promoting American Manufacturers…also known as the American Manufactory.
The Manufactory employed a radical new method–since British imports had been banned and the need for domestic-made cloth was on the rise, they saw a new way to provide fair, steady income to families without taking them from their homes and each other. Women could now work from home under the Manufactory’s authority, spinning and weaving at their own levels, and then delivering the cloth to the Manufactory for dyeing. The overhead for the company was low, so profits were high for all involved in the process. Families remained intact.
Though the Bettering House had a fine and noble goal, it’s no great surprise that its numbers started tapering off while the American Manufactory boomed. I love the idea of bettering the soul while tending the physical needs, but perhaps the elite misunderstood what those souls really needed–the love of their families, and the assurance that their voice was heard.
by Roseanna White | Oct 16, 2013 | 17th-19th Centuries, Remember When Wednesdays
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| English Cannon by the Hudson River, Revolutionary WarPhoto by Michael Francis Studios (Michael Cook) |
In what spare moments I’ve had the last week, I’ve been reading a book I’ve had set aside for research for over a year now. One that, when I saw it pop up in my Amazon search at the genesis of an idea, I got so excited about that I bought then and there, though I didn’t actually need it yet, given that I wasn’t actually writing the book, LOL.
I need to put a smidgeon of work into the idea for my agent though, so out it came. To my immense delight. =) The book is Declaration: The Nine Tumultuous Weeks when America Became Independent by Willian Hogeland, and it’s turning out to be all I hoped. A non-fiction book that tells me stories. That presents the wit of the men of the day in ways that make me laugh.
That redefines my assumptions.
See, even after researching for two separate Revolution-era books, I haven’t quite plumbed the depths of how revolutionary this was, this idea that a group of colonies could just break away from its mother country. I can never quite shake the ideas I got in my schooling, that everyone just banded together, put to use their Yankee ingenuity and grit, and ousted the tyrannical government. All Americans for one, and one for all.
A lovely, patriotic picture. Except that “patriot” was an insult at the time. “Lovely” doesn’t begin to describe the fear and uncertainty that Americans experienced. And our people were anything but unified into one coherent picture.
The simple fact is that most people didn’t want independence. They didn’t even understand independence. To them, England was Mother. The king was awful, sure, he was a tyrant. But England…England was home. And just because you don’t like a few parts of it, that doesn’t mean you disown it altogether, right? It just means you try to fix it. And sure, if it comes after you, you defend yourself. So at Lexington and Concord they had no choice. But to seek war? To seek a break?
Unthinkable. That would be like looking your dearly beloved mother–they one who might not always be fair in your eyes, but who had loved you and nurtured you–in the eye and then stabbing her in the gut.
Not something a good person would do. And the leaders, the upright citizens, the majority of the day prided themselves on being noble and just. On holding high ideals, like the philosophers of old. To defend oneself was right. But to take the offense…that would cross a line good people did not cross.
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Painting of Benjamin Franklin, 1778
by Joseph-Siffrein Duplessis |
Most of the Continental Congress had strict instructions, as late as May of 1776, to steer clear of anything that even smelled of independence. To vote against anything that would be more than a vague remonstrance of England’s unfairness. Founding fathers like Benjamin Franklin didn’t come over to the cause until very late in the game–and only then after a decade in England and final humiliation before Parliament that put him in a rage.
It wasn’t easy. It wasn’t simple. And had King George not sent a fleet of hired mercenaries after us (think a mother hiring a gang to come teach her unruly child to listen when she tells him to clean his room), there quite possibly wouldn’t have been enough support to ever make that famous Declaration.
I’ve thought before about the bravery the Patriots showed by standing against the British on the battle fields. Ragtag farmers facing off against the best military in the world. But I’d never really paused to consider how brave (and quite honestly, reckless and heavy-handed) it was for the Sons of Liberty to challenge the prevailing thought of the day. To use guile, intrigue, and rhetoric to convince an unwilling people to follow them into a war most of them didn’t want. It took them decades of work. It took compromise and bullying. But they didn’t just redefine an ideal–they rewrote history. They made their cause so strong that hundreds of years later, school children just think That’s the way it was.
It wasn’t. Not until they made it so.
Do we believe that strongly today? Enough that we’re willing to work all our lives for a goal that most deem foolhardy? Are we willing to fight against prevailing sentiments? When the world says, “You’re crazy,” do we answer, “Maybe, but only until I can change the definition”? It’s a dangerous thing to be that determined. Scary dangerous. And about most causes, I would never dare to be so.
But I pray that when it matters, I could be so brave. So patriotic. So radical in a quest, if the Lord is the one who put it on my heart. I pray I’m cut from the same cloth as those who forged a nation.
Roseanna M. White is a bestselling, Christy Award winning author who has long claimed that words are the air she breathes. When not writing fiction, she’s homeschooling her two kids, editing, designing book covers, and pretending her house will clean itself. Roseanna is the author of a slew of historical novels that span several continents and thousands of years. Spies and war and mayhem always seem to find their way into her books…to offset her real life, which is blessedly ordinary. 