Cool historical find of the day

August 9, 2018

This is total­ly cool. The His­toric Charleston Foun­dation in South Car­oli­na is restor­ing the Natha­nial Rus­sell House, a remark­able exam­ple of neo­clas­si­cal archi­tec­ture on the Nation­al His­toric Reg­is­ter, and found a frag­ment what they list as 1868 Friends Intel­li­gencer above the kitchen firebox.

More fas­ci­nat­ing dis­cov­er­ies from the walls of the #rus­sell­house­k­itchen – new arti­facts were extract­ed from cav­i­ties above the kitchen fire­box on the first floor! This lat­est batch of arti­facts dates to the 1850’s and 1860’s, which I think we can agree is an inter­est­ing and… frac­tious time in Charleston’s his­to­ry. The most intrigu­ing scrap of paper recov­ered from the walls is pic­tured here: a page ripped from a Quak­er peri­od­i­cal enti­tled “Friends’ Intel­li­gencer,” pub­lished in Philadel­phia in 1868.

Who were the Friends in Charleston in the years right after the Civ­il War? Was the Intel­li­gencer hid­den or just recy­cled to plug up a draft? I won­der if this could be relat­ed to Quak­er relief work in South Car­oli­na. The most well-known exam­ple was the Penn School on St Hele­na Island, found­ed by north­ern Uni­tar­i­ans and Quak­ers in 1862 to edu­cate freed Gul­lah after the slave­own­ers fled Union troops.

Curi­ous about the frag­ment, I typed a few of its leg­i­ble words into Google and sure enough, they’ve scanned that vol­ume of the Intel­li­gencer (hat­tip to my FJ col­league Gail, who found this link). It shows a date of Fourth Month 20, 1868, though curi­ous­ly FI also repub­lished it in 1874, which I first found. The poem is cred­it­ed to Bessie Charles, the Eng­lish poet also cred­it­ed as Eliz­a­beth Bun­dle Charles; it seems to have been pub­lished in var­i­ous col­lec­tions around that time. The Intel­li­gencer con­tin­ues today of course.

View this post on Instagram

More fas­ci­nat­ing dis­cov­er­ies from the walls of the #rus­sell­house­k­itchen­house – new arti­facts were extract­ed from cav­i­ties above the kitchen fire­box on the first floor! This lat­est batch of arti­facts dates to the 1850’s and 1860’s, which I think we can agree is an inter­est­ing and… frac­tious time in Charleston’s his­to­ry. The most intrigu­ing scrap of paper recov­ered from the walls is pic­tured here: a page ripped from a Quak­er peri­od­i­cal enti­tled “Friends’ Intel­li­gencer,” pub­lished in Philadel­phia in 1868. The lives of Quak­ers and enslaved peo­ple have been inter­twined from the ear­li­est days of the Amer­i­can colonies. The Reli­gious Soci­ety of Friends (Quak­ers) were out­spo­ken oppo­nents of slav­ery and the slave trade begin­ning in the late 17th cen­tu­ry. In 1758, the Friends in Lon­don issued an unequiv­o­cal denun­ci­a­tion of the slave trade, and lat­er that year, the Philadel­phia Meet­ing moved past its warn­ing against trad­ing in slaves, now propos­ing that Friends who held slaves should set them free. Quak­erism came to South Car­oli­na in the 1670s, and a Meet­ing was estab­lished in Charleston by 1682. The Quak­er pop­u­la­tion in South Car­oli­na peaked by 1800 and suf­fered dra­mat­ic decline there­after as Quak­ers migrat­ed to slave-free Ohio. By 1822 only a weak Charleston Meet­ing remained, and it too ceased to exist by the time of the Civ­il War. A hand­ful of Quak­er women remained in Charleston after the Civ­il War, car­ing for new­ly freed peo­ple dur­ing the Recon­struc­tion peri­od. Per­haps one of those women dis­trib­uted this pam­phlet to those peo­ple still resid­ing in the kitchen house after eman­ci­pa­tion. Did she offer them com­fort, hope, a way out? Was it pur­pose­ful­ly hid­den in the walls or car­ried there by rodents? We will nev­er know… but the pres­ence of Quak­er lit­er­a­ture is a tan­ta­liz­ing glimpse into the lives and con­vic­tions of the peo­ple liv­ing here in 1868.

A post shared by His­toric Charleston Foun­da­tion (@historiccharlestonfoundation) on

I’m not the only one who digs archives

April 12, 2018

Philadel­phia Friends are so mod­est that blog posts on Philadel­phia Year­ly Meet­ing’s web­site don’t even have bylines. Or maybe some­one for­got to fill out a field. Either way, here’s a first-person account by an anony­mous Philadelphia-area Friend in their ear­ly 60s who start­ed read­ing Friends Jour­nal archives: Some Thoughts from the 1955 Friends Journal

I select­ed the issue clos­est to my birth date and began read­ing. The dis­cus­sion of the Kore­an con­flict, of the arms race, of the Israeli-Palestinian dis­pute, could all have been writ­ten today. And for a lunch-time med­i­ta­tion, this arti­cle, on prepar­ing for meet­ing, was just the right size for read­ing over my soup and sandwich.

Are We More Than Our Demographics?

September 28, 2011

One of the things that is intrigu­ing me late­ly is the nature of Quak­er debate.  There are half a dozen seemingly-perennial polit­i­cal issues around which Friends in my cir­cles have very strong opin­ions (these include abor­tion, nuclear pow­er, and the role of Friends in the trou­bles of Israel/Palestine) . We often jus­ti­fy our posi­tions with appeals to our Quak­er faith, but I won­der how often our opin­ions could be more accu­rate­ly pre­dict­ed by our demo­graph­ic profile?


How many of your polit­i­cal posi­tions and social atti­tudes could be accu­rate­ly guessed by a savvy demog­ra­ph­er who knew your date of birth,  postal code,  edu­ca­tion and fam­i­ly income? I’d guess each of us are far more pre­dictable than we’d like to think.If true,  then what role does our reli­gious life actu­al­ly play?

Reli­gious beliefs are also a demo­graph­ic cat­e­go­ry,  grant­ed, but if they only con­firm posi­tions that could be just as actu­al­ly pre­dict­ed by non-spiritual data, then does­n’t that imply that we’ve sim­ply found (or remained in) a reli­gious com­mu­ni­ty that con­firms our pre-existing bias­es? Have we cre­at­ed a faith in our own image? And if true, is it real­ly fair to jus­ti­fy our­selves based on appeals to Quak­er values?

The “polit­i­cal” Quak­er writ­ings I’m find­ing most inter­est­ing (because they’re least pre­dictable) are the ones that stop to ask how Quak­er dis­cern­ment fits into the debate. Dis­cern­ment: one could eas­i­ly argue that Quak­er open­ings and tools around it are one of our great­est gifts to human spir­i­tu­al­i­ty.  When we build a wor­ship com­mu­ni­ty based on strict adher­ence to the imme­di­ate prompt­ing of the Holy Spir­it, the first ques­tion becomes fig­ur­ing out what is of-God and what is not.  Is James Nayler, rid­ing Jesus-like into Bris­tol, a prophet or a nut?

When we go deep into the ques­tions,  we may find that the answers are less impor­tant than the care we take to reach them.  Wait­ing for one anoth­er,  hold­ing one anoth­er’s hand in love despite dif­fer­ences of opin­ion, can be more impor­tant than being the right-answer ear­ly adopter. How do you step back from easy answers to the thorny ques­tions? How do you poll your­self and that-of-God in your­self to open your eyes and ears for the poten­tial of surprise?

Bible Illiterate No More

April 20, 2011

One Year BibleA bit of a mile­stone – I fin­ished the One Year Bible read­ing plan last night! I man­aged to stretch it out to 27 months but that’s alright. I start­ed in Jan­u­ary 2009 and ini­tial­ly kept the dai­ly read­ings going till May of that year, when I feel hope­less­ly behind. I kept a men­tal note of the date and in May 2010 I start­ed where I had left off. I kept read­ing reg­u­lar­ly until the last week in Decem­ber, when I was under­stand­ably dis­tract­ed by the birth of our third son Gre­go­ry on 12/28. Know­ing I want­ed to keep the cycle going, I skipped that week and start­ed again on Jan­u­ary 1, 2011. It was only last night that I went back and fin­ished up that last week – fea­tur­ing Malachi and Rev­e­la­tions (which has the Lam­b’s War metaphor so impor­tant to ear­ly Friends).

Thanks go to Gregg Kosela and AJ Schwanz for let­ting me know such a thing as one year Bible read­ing plans exist­ed. I had nev­er been able to stick to a reg­u­lar Bible-reading reg­i­men before. The grand­moth­er who fre­quent­ly declared me a Bible illit­er­ate would be so proud! (Actu­al­ly not, she’d find some­thing else to cri­tique, but her hangups around fam­i­ly and “Chris­t­ian” liv­ing are a much longer blog post!).

It’s been great hav­ing a reg­u­lar spir­i­tu­al prac­tice. I’m glad I can find my way around the Bible now and my under­stand­ing of Friends has deep­ened. The ear­ly Quak­er writ­ings are steeped in Bib­li­cal allu­sions and we miss a lot when we miss those references.

Working with Pipes #2: A DIY personalized community with Del​.icio​.us, Flickr and Google Blog Search

March 17, 2007

blankIt’s
not nec­es­sary to devel­op your own Web 2.0 soft­ware infra­struc­ture to
cre­ate an inde­pen­dent Web 2.0‑powered com­mu­ni­ty online. It’s far
sim­pler to set a stan­dard for your com­mu­ni­ty to use on exisiting
net­works and then to use Yahoo Pipes to pull it together.

I decid­ed on about a dozen cat­e­gories to use with my DIY blog aggre­ga­tor (Quak­erQuak­er).
I only want to pull in posts that are being gen­er­at­ed for my site by
com­mu­ni­ty mem­bers so we use a com­mu­ni­ty iden­ti­fi­er, a unique prefix
that isn’t like­ly to be used by others. 

This post will show you how to pull in tagged feeds from three sources: the Del​.icio​.us social book­mark­ing sys­tem, the Flickr pho­to shar­ing site and Google Blog Search.

Step 1: Pick a community designator

I’ve been using the com­mu­ni­ty name fol­lowed by a dot. The prefix
goes in front of cat­e­go­ry descrip­tion to make a set of unique tags for
the aggre­ga­tor. When some­one wants to add some­thing for the site they
tag it with this “community.category” tag. In my exam­ple, when someone
wants to list a new Quak­er blog they use “quak​er​.blog”, “quak­er” being
the com­mu­ni­ty name, “blog” being the cat­e­go­ry name for the “New Blogs”
page.

Step 2: Collect the community prefix and category name in Pipes

blank
You begin by going into Pipes and pulling over two text inputs: one for
the com­mu­ni­ty pre­fix, the oth­er for the spe­cif­ic category.

Step 3: Construct these into tags

blank
Now use the “String Con­cate­na­tion” mod­ule to turn this into the
“community.category” mod­el. The com­mu­ni­ty input goes into the top slot,
a dot is the sec­ond slot and the cat­e­go­ry input goes into the last slot.

blank Now, when you have a tag in Flickr with a dot in it, Flickr auto­mat­i­cal­ly removes it in the resul­tant RSS feed.
So with Flickr you want your tag to be “com­mu­ni­ty­cat­e­go­ry” with­out a
dot. Sim­ple enough: just pull anoth­er “String Con­cate­na­tion” module
onto your Pipes work space. It should look the same except that it
won’t have the mid­dle slot with the dot.

Step 4: Turn these tags into RSS URLs

blank
Pull three “URL­Builder” mod­ules into Pipes, one for each of the
ser­vices we’re going to query. For the Base, use the non-tag specific
part of the URL that each ser­vice uses for its RSS feeds. Here they are:

Del​.icio​.us http://​del​.icio​.us/​r​s​s​/​tag
Flickr http://​api​.flickr​.com/​s​e​r​v​i​c​e​s​/​f​e​eds
Google Blog Search http://​blogsearch​.google​.com

Under path ele­ments, put the cor­rect tag: for Del​.icio​.us and Google it should be the community.category tag, for Flickr the dot-less com­mu­ni­ty­cat­e­go­ry tag.

Step 5: Fetch and Dedupe

blank Fetch is the Pipes mod­ule that pulls in URLs and out­puts RSS feeds. It can also com­bine them. Send each URLBuilder out­put into the same Fetch routine.

Since it’s pos­si­ble that you’ll might have dupli­cate posts, use the “Unique” mod­ule to dedu­pli­cate entries by URL.
Through a lit­tle tri­al and error I’ve deter­mined that in cas­es of
dupli­cates, feeds low­er in the Fetch list trump those high­er. In the
actu­al Pipe pow­er­ing my aggre­ga­tor I pull a sec­ond Del​.icio​.us feed: my
own. I have that as the last entry in the Fetch list so that I can
per­son­al­ly over­ride every oth­er input.

Step 6: Sort by Date

blank
With exper­i­men­ta­tion it seems like Pipes orders the out­put entries by
descend­ing date, which is prob­a­bly what you want. But I want to show
how Pipes can work with “dc” data, the “Dublin Core” mod­el that allows
you to extend stan­dard RSS feeds (see yes­ter­day’s post for more on this).

Google Blog Search and Del​.icio​.us feeds use the “dc:date” field to
record the time when the post was made. Flickr uses “dc:date.Taken” to
pass on the pho­tograph’s meta­da­ta about when it was tak­en. Pipes’
“Rename” mod­ule lets you copy both fields into one you cre­ate (I’ve
sim­ply used “date”), which you can then run through its “Sort” module.
Again, it’s a moot point since Pipes seems to do this automatically.
But it’s good to know how to manip­u­late and rename “dc” data if only
because many PHP parsers have trou­ble lay­ing it out on a webpage.

Update: it’s all moot: accord­ing to ZDNet blog, “Pipes now auto­mat­i­cal­ly appends a pub­Date tag to any RSS feed that has any of the oth­er allow­able date tags.” This is nice: no need to hack the date every time you want to make a Pipe!

Step 7: Output

blank The final step for any Pipe is the “Pipe Out­put” module.

In action

You can see this pub­lished Pipe here, and copy and play with it your­self. The result lets you build an RSS feed based on the two inputs. 

Katrina bin Laden and Our Public Enemies

October 24, 2005

blankWe now know that while Osama bin Laden and Sad­dam Hus­sein did­n’t con­spire togeth­er, they did have one thing in com­mon: their pow­er was fund­ed by our depen­dence on their oil. But even as Sad­dam’s show tri­al begins, tele­vi­sions are watch­ing Amer­i­ca’s new nation­al secu­ri­ty ene­mies: Kat­ri­na and Wilma. Al Qaida’s 9/11 attacks and the Sad­dam Hus­sein’s dic­ta­tor­ship were “pow­ered by” oil indus­try for­tunes and short-sighted glob­al ener­gy poli­cies, the same poli­cies now bring­ing us glob­al warm­ing and mon­ster storms.
Before mak­ing land­fall in Mex­i­co’s Yucatan and pound­ing Flori­da, Hur­ri­cane Wilma was declared the most pow­er­ful Atlantic hur­ri­cane in his­to­ry. That we got to a W‑name itself is cause for con­cern: the first trop­i­cal storm of the year gets a name start­ing with “A” and so forth through the alpha­bet. This sum­mer has been the “most active hur­ri­cane season”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2005_Atlantic_hurricane_season since record-keeping start­ed 150 years ago. We’ve seen so many storms that weath­er offi­cials have now run through the alpha­bet: mete­o­rol­o­gists are now hav­ing to track Trop­i­cal Storm (now Depres­sion) Alpha 350 miles north of the Bahamas. In 2004, “five dev­as­tat­ing hur­ri­canes ripped across Florida”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2004_Atlantic_hurricane_season, each one com­ing so fast on the heels of the last that few of us could even name them a year lat­er. As I write, Wilma is pound­ing West­ern Flori­da, one of the fast-growing regions in the coun­try. And of course Kat­ri­na dev­ast­ed New Orleans and the Gulf Coast just two months ago.
Glob­al cli­mate change is here. After decades of polit­i­cal hem­ming and haw­ing, only the most slimy of oil indus­try apol­o­gists (and Pres­i­dents) could argue that glob­al warm­ing has­n’t arrived. We’ve built a nation­al cul­ture built on inef­fi­cient burn­ing of fos­sil fuels. Devel­op­ers put more and more peo­ple on unpro­tect­ed sand­bars built, main­tained and insured by tax dol­lars. Some­day is here and our weath­er is only going to be get­ting worse. We could be prepar­ing for the inevitable adjust­ments. We could be invest­ing in con­ser­va­tion, in renew­able ener­gies. We could change our tax codes to encour­age sus­tain­able hous­ing: not just get­ting new devel­op­ment off beach­es but also build­ing urban and semi-urban com­mu­ni­ties that reduce auto­mo­bile dependence.
Instead we spend bil­lions of dol­lars on our oil addic­tions. We’re now wait­ing for the “announce­ment of the 2,000th U.S. mil­i­tary casu­al­ty in iraq”:http://www.afsc.org/2000/. Admin­is­tra­tion offi­cials used Kat­ri­na to roll­back envi­ron­men­tal pro­tec­tion reg­u­la­tions in Louisiana. The arc­tic ice cap is rapid­ly melt­ing away (the North Pole is now ice-free for part of the year) but oil indus­try offi­cials point to the good news that we will soon be able to put “year-round oil rigs in the ice-free seas there”:http://www.commondreams.org/headlines05/1010 – 07.htm.
How many Kat­ri­na bin Laden’s and Sad­dam Wilma’s does it take before we get the news.