Where in the world is Confederate Lieutenant General Thomas J. "Stonewall" Jackson's arm? #VAHistory https://t.co/1pPDBYtvaJ Where in the world is Confederate Lieutenant General Thomas J. "Stonewall" Jackson's arm? #VAHistory https://t.co/1pPDBYtvaJ — Boundary Stones (@Bou…
— Kenneth Samson (@PangurBanC) Apr 30, 2022
What exactly killed George Washington? Diagnosing an illness two centuries later, Dr. White McKenzie Wallenborn concluded that Washington was a victim of acute epiglottitis. #VAHistory https://t.co/nugu8ZoEJG What exactly killed George Washington? Diagnosing an illness two c…
— Kenneth Samson (@PangurBanC) Apr 30, 2022
Ever wonder what it would be like to see the National Mall turned into a pastoral site for sheep? Well you're in luck! The 1910s was the time for sheep in Washington, as at least two herds were brought into D.C. to graze in the nation's capital. #DCHistory …
— Kenneth Samson (@PangurBanC) Apr 30, 2022
Just after the Kent State killings in 1970, a major demonstration was planned for May 9 on the National Mall. And in a bizarre turn, President Richard Nixon decided to mingle with some of the anti-war demonstrators at the Lincoln Memorial. #DCHistory https://t.co/fkcfSn4d4w …
— Kenneth Samson (@PangurBanC) Apr 30, 2022
When Muhammad Ali twice defended his heavyweight boxing title at the old Capital Centre arena in Landover, Maryland, he gave Washingtonians a chance to catch an up-close look at "The Greatest." #MDHistory https://t.co/6IP3WOcN2v When Muhammad Ali twice defended his heavyweig…
— Kenneth Samson (@PangurBanC) Apr 30, 2022
April 1922 was a busy time in Washington, as the city hosted no less than five national and international women’s groups in the span of a few short weeks. #DCHistory https://t.co/KuqzWb2XbK April 1922 was a busy time in Washington, as the city hosted no less than five nation…
— Kenneth Samson (@PangurBanC) Apr 30, 2022
Following the fall of Saigon in April 1975, Arlington, VA became a destination for Vietnamese immigrants fleeing communist rule. What they created came to be known as Little Saigon. But almost as quickly as it emerged, Little Saigon faded away. #VAHistory …
— Kenneth Samson (@PangurBanC) Apr 30, 2022
Today in History - April 30 https://t.co/SAzMKC3NY3 On April 30, 1789, George Washington delivered his first inaugural address to a joint session of Congress, assembled in Federal Hall in the nation’s new capital, New York City. Continue reading. Click here to search Today …
— Kenneth Samson (@PangurBanC) Apr 30, 2022
Postcard photo, mailed in 1908, of a sunlit scene somewhere in #rockcreekpark @RockCreekNPS @fopmdc https://t.co/mX9Vv7myMG Postcard photo, mailed in 1908, of a sunlit scene somewhere in #rockcreekpark @RockCreekNPS @fopmdc https://t.co/mX9Vv7myMG — Streets of Washington (@S…
— Kenneth Samson (@PangurBanC) Apr 30, 2022
Here are five stories that moved us this week, and the reasons why.
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Tamara Dean | The American Scholar | March 4th, 2022 | 3,700 words
Anti-abortion advocates seeking to overturn Roe v. Wade would have you think that the practice of terminating pregnancies is a new phenomenon, brought on by the rise of feminism and the (imaginary) moral decay of America. As Tamara Dean lays bare in this essay, this is nothing short of a lie. Surveying historical literature and using Nancy Ann Harris, a woman who died in 1876 in a rural Wisconsin county, as a lens into the past, Dean shows how abortion was a legally and morally acceptable way for a woman to care for her health, until misogynistic, racist forces decided it shouldn’t be. “Every woman, including Nancy, would have known friends, sisters, or cousins who died or were debilitated while giving birth,” Dean writes. “They would have known those who took pains to avoid it.” This essay is a necessary corrective, and beautifully written to boot. —SD
Samanth Subramanian | The Guardian | April 26, 2022 | 6,635 words
As a kid growing up Jewish in a very not-Jewish part of the country, I was always fascinated to hear about places where communities had taken root in seemingly very not-Jewish parts of the larger world. Ethiopia. India. China. Yet, before reading Samanth Subramanian’s deeply descriptive travelog in The Guardian, I was unaware of a much newer version of the phenomenon happening in Nigeria. Estimates vary, but thousands of native Nigerians have taken up the faith in the past few decades, drifting first to messianic Christianity and then to full Old-Testament sidelocks-and-prayer-shawl orthodoxy. There’s a sense of cultural commonality in there, for sure — most Nigerian Jews are of the Igbo people, and attribute the surprising amount of ritual overlap to a lineage descended from the tribe of Gad — but in their internet-enabled assimilation of “conventional” Judaism, adding the sanctioned to the syncretic, there’s also a thrumming pulse of mishpuchah. Family. Home is where you make it, and so is homeland. —PR
Sasha Plotnikova | Failed Architecture | April 20, 2022 | 2,089 words
Can tiny homes get people off the streets safely and humanely? In this sharp, critical look into the tiny shed camps of Los Angeles, Sasha Plotnikova reports on the Arroyo Seco Tiny Home Village along the 110 freeway, which was built to help tenants transition out of houselessness. But the village’s dehumanizing rules and inhospitable conditions create anything but a safe and secure environment, and no amount of whimsy — in the form of colorful, cheery murals — can hide the carceral nature of the camp. “Tiny sheds must be understood not as homes or as housing,” Plotnikova writes, “but as an architecture of containment and banishment.” A member of Street Watch LA, an organization dedicated to protecting the poor and unhoused, said to her: It’s a housing solution not actually meant for unhoused people, but rather for the NIMBYs who prefer them to just disappear. —CLR
Steve Edwards | Lit Hub | April 15th, 2022 | 4,080 words
In this thoughtful essay at Lit Hub, Steve Edwards contemplates what it means to be considered dangerous, whether that danger is in the form of words, ideas, beliefs, or violence. As Edwards considers what danger means and the forms it can take, he looks at conscientious objectors, Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, as well as his own creative writing students as they struggle to make a life for themselves and earn a living in America. “Nineteen is a liminal age. Absent a chance to define ourselves, other forces stand at the ready to do so for us—family members, cultural traditions, career trajectories…Essays are made things, I tell them, equal parts critical thinking and creative engagement. I suggest that if they can change words on a page, they might also change their lives. Had Tsarnaev been a student in my class, I might have encouraged him to write about his experiences as an immigrant or what drew him to want to study sea life…Those most likely to tell the truth about their lives are the ones with nothing left to lose…Unfortunately, you can’t escape an ideology by hoping it changes. You end up becoming it instead…In my classes a pen is a tool for expanding a student’s potential, not limiting it through fear.” —KS
Caity Weaver | The New York Times Magazine | April 20, 2022 | 4,410 words
Sometimes it is fun to read about someone having a terrible time. Before I am judged too harshly for this, I offer you Caity Weaver’s diverting and self-deprecating essay in defense. She spends nearly 5,000 words whinging about just how much she hated living #VanLife for a few days. (Her editor made her do it. I am glad he did.) There is something pure about such things as Weaver eating fistfuls of cheese-its in the dark when figuring out the camp stove is just too much. Her descriptions — coated in cheesy crumbs rather than sugar — are wholly relatable and throw two fingers up to the Instagram illusion. I am thankful for this, being guilty of falling into the thrall of the #VanLife tag myself, endlessly scrolling through pictures of beautiful people looking wistfully at beautiful things — all through flung-open-van-doors. I have even found myself on Craigslist looking for camper vans for sale (expensive as it turns out, I blame the tag). Fortunately, this van exposé has given me another reason to stick to my tent. —CW
Mid-Century Modern in DC: The Carousel Coffee Shoppe, seen on this postcard, opened in 1962 in the Drug Fair at 13th and E Streets NW downtown. The drug store and coffee shop were both "open all night" - the term people used to use for what they now awkwardly call "24/7." …
— Kenneth Samson (@PangurBanC) Apr 29, 2022
Astronaut Victor Glover: Inspiring Washington Area Students via NASA https://t.co/WTlnIrurst https://t.co/8ktSq21rvi
— Kenneth Samson (@PangurBanC) Apr 29, 2022
This copy of an original 1793 survey map shows the landholdings of Charles Carroll, a signer of the Declaration of Independence, in central Washington, DC shortly after the District boundaries were surveyed. See how DC has changed: https://t.co/ZQNci2FIi8 …
— Kenneth Samson (@PangurBanC) Apr 29, 2022
On this day in 1759, John Adlum, the father of American viticulture, was born. Working from his Cleveland Park vineyard, Adlum defined the early days of American wine-making, and called D.C. home🍷 #DCHistory https://t.co/VxFrRn7VB1 On this day in 1759, John Adlum, the father…
— Kenneth Samson (@PangurBanC) Apr 29, 2022
Today in History - April 29 https://t.co/YdVGFeHQ2k Matthew Vassar, founder and namesake of Vassar College, was born on April 29, 1792, in Norfolk, England. Continue reading. Edward Kennedy “Duke” Ellington, often said to be America’s greatest composer, bandleader, and reco…
— Kenneth Samson (@PangurBanC) Apr 29, 2022
Quote of the Day: "I imagine that yes is the only living thing." - e. e. cummings
— Kenneth Samson (@PangurBanC) Apr 29, 2022
Two years before the United States entered World War I, women in Washington were gathering to protest the practice. As The Washington Post put it, “War was declared on war.” #DCHistory https://t.co/VfSrKD95MN Two years before the United States entered World War I, women in W…
— Kenneth Samson (@PangurBanC) Apr 28, 2022
On this day in 1977, the Carter administration signed Section 504 of the 1973 Rehabilitation Act, officially protecting disabled citizens from discrimination by recipients of federal funds. #DCHistory https://t.co/jyK9WQDAh2 On this day in 1977, the Carter administration sig…
— Kenneth Samson (@PangurBanC) Apr 28, 2022
Muhammad Ali's duality as a firebrand activist and a revolutionary icon is exemplified by his controversial appearance at Howard University in 1967, where he spoke to Black students just days before he refused induction in the armed forces. #DCHistory https://t.co/vkAuhCJIgh …
— Kenneth Samson (@PangurBanC) Apr 28, 2022
Improving Weather Data Using High-Altitude Balloons via NASA https://t.co/BXClqKxccV https://t.co/2UmcT3UKJt
— Kenneth Samson (@PangurBanC) Apr 28, 2022
The Taj Mahal, on the second floor of 1327 Connecticut Avenue NW in Dupont Circle, was the only Indian restaurant in D.C. when it opened in July 1965 and reported to be the first of its kind. Sati Grewal was the manager. Vintage postcard view. https://t.co/Hjm6FaaQ9f The Taj M…
— Kenneth Samson (@PangurBanC) Apr 28, 2022
On April 28, 1909, a funeral procession nearly a mile long for paraded down Pennsylvania Avenue. The man receiving the honor? Major Pierre Charles L’Enfant... who died in 1825. Why the overdue funeral? #DCHistory https://t.co/h6eXlbXjSk On April 28, 1909, a funeral processio…
— Kenneth Samson (@PangurBanC) Apr 28, 2022
There's interesting detail on every page of this illustrated atlas of Quanzhou prefecture, published around 1602. Towns and military posts are shown nestled amongst mountains, rivers and craggy coastlines. Explore the maps here: https://t.co/8FjvGoCQl8 https://t.co/sU8y3gsZs4 …
— Kenneth Samson (@PangurBanC) Apr 28, 2022
Today in History - April 28 https://t.co/jcdvI8QILy Billy the Kid escaped from the Lincoln County, New Mexico jail house on April 28, 1881, killing two deputies on guard. Continue reading. James Henry Neel Reed, known as Henry Reed, was born on April 28, 1884, in the Appala…
— Kenneth Samson (@PangurBanC) Apr 28, 2022
I don’t remember the first time I saw the water rise. There is no moment in my memory that stands out as a shift; the water has always been impossible to ignore. I spent my teenage years in Charleston, South Carolina, floating on paddleboards down roads turned to rivers, wading through floodwater to reach my car. There was joy and then fear as school would be canceled for days at a time due to incoming hurricanes, all the businesses on the peninsula boarding up their windows in preparation. All the while, it seemed normal, an essential facet of life in the coastal South. The water was always there in the background, rising and then falling. I did not think to worry, or wonder, or wait for the places I call home to sink.
Now, as I have grown older and the water has grown closer — and higher — I worry. I pore over statistics about how long these places have, imagining life without them. Every time I am home and I walk along the wall that holds the coastline below, I wonder how long it will be before this path is gone, before this street is gone. Before this whole place is gone, and me with it. Because, whether I like it or not, there will come a day where we will not be able to hold the water out. It might be in 20 years or it might be in 80, but it is inevitable.
How do you cope with that reality? How do you love a place that is sinking? I spent my entire life waiting to leave the South, thinking I would only find happiness away from here, but now that it is disappearing I find I cannot look away. I am desperate to find ways to archive my home. To preserve it. To create a memory of a place that can last beyond it — a memorial of sorts, I suppose.
But that memorial does not have to overcome; it cannot — and should not — be the only story we tell ourselves, even in the midst of it. There can still be celebration, appreciation, and hope existing at the same time. There is, of course, pain in these places, dark histories and troubled waters, but there is newfound joy, too. There is love and hope and a belief in resurrection being poured into the modern South by the artists, writers, musicians, documentarians, and individuals who call it home. It is beautiful, and it is redemptive. These stories show that force; they are at once both love letters and critiques, memorials and memories, creating an archive of a common place.
***
This story from Lauren Groff about a climate refugee and the aftermath of a wave that wipes out a whole coastline in minutes is beautifully done. Groff has written candidly about her home state of Florida, but this story speaks in descriptive prose about an experience bound to become more frequent as natural disasters increase:
Then she stood and the two held hands and picked their way over the sleepers and went out the door and into the dusty yard, first to the ad-hoc showers, while the water was still warm. The woman put powdered soap all over their clothes and stomped the filth from them with her feet, then wrung them with her strong arms until they were almost dry. When they went back into the yard, the girl trotted behind her, a good dog. They visited the porta-potties, then they went to the men who were solemnly unloading boxes of food from a truck at the gate. No, the men said, looking away. They couldn’t take the woman and the child with them. They had to be registered, they had to wait for the Red Cross to come.
At The Bitter Southerner, Spencer George reflects on how artists in Charleston, South Carolina, are responding to climate change. Read “Common High Ground.”
The Bitter Southerner is one of the best publications right now, truly. Much of their journalism focuses on climate and nature in the modern South. I love this piece from Boyce Upholt about the largest river swamp in the United States, which is slowly sinking. He poses a great question that I find especially relevant for today’s South: How do you preserve a landscape when the only constant is change?
The Atchafalaya Basin in Louisiana is a floodway that protects the entire South from rising water levels. In this piece, Upholt reflects on the history of the swamp, the mythology of the region, and learning to live with change — a lesson especially important as time goes on. As he says:
The first people to live in these swamps knew it was a place of constant change. They expected to move at times to accommodate its flow. Now modern scientists are finally catching up to this idea: Ecosystems are dynamic. Restoration, then, is always arbitrary. We have to decide what conditions to restore. The fight in the Atchafalaya is not against nature, but among humans who disagree about what to build next.
Belle Boggs writes about how we tell stories about our world, especially in regard to how we process a changing climate. Through a reflection on parenthood and raising her daughter in rural North Carolina, she looks at our communal role as unreliable narrators who want to be both honest and optimistic about where our future with climate change stands. She also examines the education system and the ways we teach climate change in the rural South, if we teach it at all.
I appreciate — and agree with — Boggs’ view that one of our roles as artists is to become documentarians, chronicling this specific moment in time. Art movements such as The Dark Mountain Project often discuss how our art must begin to engage with the new world around us rather than living in a fictional past, and I think Boggs does a great job of showing that intersection of documentation, reflection, and cautionary hope in this piece.
I’m also aware that we are documenting a moment in time that may well be gone too. Not the last snowstorm in our area or the last hatch of leopard frogs, but the time in which we still had time to mitigate the damage, and “avoid the worst consequences” of climate crisis, as youth climate activist Greta Thunberg tweeted after the most recent climate report from the United Nations. In 2030, the year by which we must halve greenhouse gas emissions to prevent unlivable future conditions, Beatrice will be seventeen years old, still too young to vote or have any meaningful say in what happens to her future. My hope is that what we are doing now is a tribute to the potential beauty of that future—not only for kids, but also frogs and squirrels and beavers and snakes and spiders and trees.
In moments of crisis, art is a force that can help us process. When we cannot find the words ourselves, we turn to the words of others, whether those be in music, poetry, fiction, or film. For Scalawag, Sergio Lopez reflects on the history of music in response to coastal flooding, tracing it back to the Great Flood of 1927 that washed out the Mississippi and the Black musicians who poured out music testifying to the destruction. Then and now, music has helped us to bear witness, and from that, to ask for change. But Lopez also warns of the consequences of separating these songs — which he compiles in a playlist including everything from Eric Clapton to Lil Wayne to Charley Patton to Led Zeppelin — from their historical and intended meaning, asking:
Nearly a century after the flood, hurricanes from Katrina through Ida continue to leave their own indelible, mud-stained mark on popular culture and the Southern landscape. Lil Wayne, Big Krit, Jay Electronica, and other Southern rappers from cities devastated by horrific storms have continued to respond with songs of grief and anger, just as gravel-voiced Charley Patton and his 1920s counterparts did. But will these songs be remembered anymore than their predecessors’ when the pain Black folks faced during the Great Flood of 1927 has long receded from national memory—like floodwaters after a storm?
Writer Meghan Mayhew Bergman reflects for The Guardian on the disappearing highways in her childhood home of coastal North Carolina. As she drove along Highway 12 — a road along the Carolina coast’s barrier islands — she ruminated on change, and the inevitably of it.
There is a precarity to loving places that we know will disappear, a tenacious joy in finding home in what we are bound to lose. It has been one of the core facets of my own Southern journey as I grew up here, left, and returned, only to learn what I returned to could never last. Beyond climate, coastal towns thrive on tourism, and in turn have suffered the effects of rampant gentrification; the places I once used to find familiar are at best changed and at worst gone.
The main theme I have found in all the writing of the coastal South I have pored over the last few years is that change is inevitable. Whether in the form of climate disasters, rising floodwaters, or small towns falling to development projects, it will come. The point to stop it is long past us. What is important now is how we learn to live with it — how we learn to make homes in all of this ruin. How we can even learn to love them.
Around here, change is non-negotiable: the highway lies atop a series of barrier islands – dynamic mounds of sand designed by nature to shift.
Delilah Friedler looks at Louisiana and the Gulf Coast as a test ground for a Civilian Climate Corps, a program being debated in Congress. Similar to Roosevelt’s Civilian Conservation Corps, a Climate Corps would mobilize following natural disasters, building a more resilient, prepared South along the way. Friedler follows families who have struggled to get relief from the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) in the wake of hurricanes hitting the Gulf Coast season after season, a process failing everyone, but especially families of color.
“‘They need to start paying us for the work we’ve been doing just to survive,’” Friedler quotes from Rogelip “Rojo” Meixuro, a student who marched with the Sunrise Movement in Louisiana, ‘For too long we’ve seen environmentalism be about conservation. That mindset is over. We can no longer conserve what we have completely damaged. We need to innovate.’”
So much of our work with climate in the South is related to memory — what we remember now, and what we will remember when the waters rise, when the fires burn, when the hurricanes and earthquakes flood and shake. Eileen Elizabeth reflects on her relationship with her father, Appalachia, coastal Florida, and their varying approaches to climate safety in this beautiful story.
One morning this summer I heard the news about a hurricane coming up the gulf coast. I asked my father, as usual, if he would evacuate. He said he wouldn’t, that he was ready for the rain. He wrote back to me like some kind of solem prophet:
“For me water is everything needful yet hiding the wrath of God. Quench my thirst, yet I can drown in 2 teaspoons full; cleanse my body, there could be a deadly virus lurking. Leap or dive into the sudden cold embrace and smash my spine or head on a rock; the undertow, the river current, the giant wave, the hurricane all can take me away.”
He speaks about water in a holy language I can understand.
***
Spencer George is a Writer and Teaching Artist hailing from the Carolinas. She holds a B.A. in English and Human Rights with a concentration in Creative Writing from Barnard College and is pursuing her M.A. in Folklore at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Her work focuses on narrative representations of the rural South and has been published in The Bitter Southerner, The Adroit Journal, and Medium, and once received a shout-out in the The New York Times. Spencer was the 2019 recipient of the Peter S. Prescott Prize for Prose Writing. She is the creator and writer of GOOD FOLK, a weekly newsletter about the people and stories of rural America and the American South. She currently teaches creative writing in North Carolina public schools as a Senior Fellow with ArtistYear. In addition to teaching, she is the Special Initiatives Assistant at Girls Write Now and is at work on her debut novel, Loblolly, which tells the story of two young women as they travel across the Southeast in search of a mysterious man who appears only in dreams and the individuals who worship him.
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Quote of the Day: "How little do they see what really is, who frame their hasty judgment upon that which seems." - Daniel Webster
— Kenneth Samson (@PangurBanC) Apr 28, 2022
On this day in 1938, car magnate Henry Ford accepted the President’s invitation to come to the White House for a private luncheon and discussion in the midst of the Great Depression. #DCHistory https://t.co/yzDtKoUyM5 On this day in 1938, car magnate Henry Ford accepted the …
— Kenneth Samson (@PangurBanC) Apr 27, 2022
NASA's SpaceX Crew-4 Launch via NASA https://t.co/gcUQ8bnnh9 https://t.co/OCGB5iihWB
— Kenneth Samson (@PangurBanC) Apr 27, 2022
Today is Ulysses S. Grant's birthday. In 1902, sculptor Henry Merwin Shrady won the commission to design the Grant Memorial. He would work on the Grant memorial for 20 years, and died just two weeks before the memorial was publicly unveiled. #DCHistory https://t.co/aw6bJLb8px …
— Kenneth Samson (@PangurBanC) Apr 27, 2022
In 1996, the U.S. leg of the Olympic Torch relay began in Los Angeles. When the flame reached Washington on June 20, 1996, however, it was invited over for a peculiar White House "slumber party." #VAHistory #DCHistory #MDHistory https://t.co/LHYBG37fST In 1996, the U.S. leg …
— Kenneth Samson (@PangurBanC) Apr 27, 2022
Planning a trip around Michigan Territory in 1826? This map shows you where to portage your canoe while navigating its network of rivers and lakes. Find your route here: https://t.co/0vtDHPV8zm https://t.co/qzwNo0y2DJ Planning a trip around Michigan Territory in 1826? This map…
— Kenneth Samson (@PangurBanC) Apr 27, 2022
When twelve-year-old Roy Thomas entered the Bank of Del Ray in the Town of Potomac, he expected to deposit his money as usual. But when he entered the building on May 4, 1929, he got something else instead: a pistol aimed at his face. #VAHistory https://t.co/E6aansewmD When …
— Kenneth Samson (@PangurBanC) Apr 27, 2022
Shoppers wait to board a streetcar outside the Woodward & Lothrop North Building (formerly the Palais Royal Department Store) on 11th Street NW, sometime in the 1950s. https://t.co/dFdH0tESvc Shoppers wait to board a streetcar outside the Woodward & Lothrop North Building (for…
— Kenneth Samson (@PangurBanC) Apr 27, 2022
Today in History - April 27 https://t.co/eAfcAgYt00 On April 27, 1822, military leader and U.S. president Ulysses S. Grant was born in Point Pleasant, Ohio. Continue reading. On April 27, 1895, the popular periodical Harper’s Weekly carried a story on the World’s Transporta…
— Kenneth Samson (@PangurBanC) Apr 27, 2022
After the deadline to ratify the Equal Rights Amendment lapsed in 1982, opponents celebrated at the Shoreham Hotel, while activists continued the struggle at Lafayette Park. #DCHistory https://t.co/hYMnI6hIRA After the deadline to ratify the Equal Rights Amendment lapsed in …
— Kenneth Samson (@PangurBanC) Apr 26, 2022
On this day in 1865, notorious assassin John Wilkes Booth died. But few remember that rather than kill Abraham Lincoln, he originally planned to abduct the president and exchange him for Confederate soldiers then held in Union prisons. #DCHistory https://t.co/iadmk6SzKO On t…
— Kenneth Samson (@PangurBanC) Apr 26, 2022
On April 26, 2018, the Equal Justice Initiative founded the National Memorial for Peace and Justice. Among the named victims of lynchings are two residents from Alexandria, Virginia: Joseph McCoy (1897) and Benjamin Thomas (1899). #VAHistory @eji_org https://t.co/Z8DMsmL24s …
— Kenneth Samson (@PangurBanC) Apr 26, 2022
As you might imagine, the government went to great lengths to protect its plans during the construction of the CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia #VAHistory #DCHistory https://t.co/31d7Uz112I As you might imagine, the government went to great lengths to protect its plans …
— Kenneth Samson (@PangurBanC) Apr 26, 2022
An Angel Wing in Space via NASA https://t.co/IFRKV5Z1gd https://t.co/r1j17X3l82
— Kenneth Samson (@PangurBanC) Apr 26, 2022
On the morning of February 27, 1859, Philip Barton Key was shot multiple times by the deranged Daniel E. Sickles in the middle of Lafayette Square. Sickles’ motive? ...The discovery of an intimate affair between his wife and good friend. #DCHistory https://t.co/x8hedeDZ8W On…
— Kenneth Samson (@PangurBanC) Apr 26, 2022
This detailed manuscript map of the 1762 Battle of Manila - fought between Britain and Spain in the Philippines, which was then a Spanish colony - enumerates the individual ships and locations involved in the battle. Take a closer look: https://t.co/46tzkue2pw …
— Kenneth Samson (@PangurBanC) Apr 26, 2022
Today in History - April 26 https://t.co/nN23AlwADz Frederick Law Olmsted, America’s foremost landscape architect of the nineteenth century, was born on April 26, 1822. Continue reading. William Shakespeare was baptized on April 26, 1564, in the town of Stratford-upon-Avon,…
— Kenneth Samson (@PangurBanC) Apr 26, 2022
Robert Isenberg | Longreads | April 2022 | 10 minutes (2,788 words)
“I am bowling along beneath overhanging peach and mulberry trees,” recalls Thomas Stevens, in the 19th chapter of Around the World on a Bicycle, “following a volunteer horseman to Mohammed Ali Khan’s garden. Before reaching the garden a gang of bare-legged laborers engaged in patching up a mud wall favor me with a fusillade of stones, one of which caresses my ankle, and makes me limp like a Greenwich pensioner when I dismount a minute or two afterward….”
Like many travel writers, Thomas Stevens wrote in the first person. He also wrote in the present tense, so everything he recounts feels immediate, as if his journey is unfolding in real time. Over the course of many hundreds of pages, the reader travels with Stevens, eats with Stevens, weathers rainstorms with Stevens. When Stevens outwits thieves in Persia, we’re right there with him. When he listens to “Hungarian Gypsy music” in Serbia, we hear it, too. When he narrowly evades a herd of stampeding mustangs in the American frontier, we also duck and cover. With every crank of his pedal, we ride alongside, absorbing the same sensations.
But there’s one thing missing from Around the World on a Bicycle, Stevens’ mammoth memoir from 1887: the author himself.
Nowhere, in his two volumes and 41 chapters, does Stevens bother to explain why he decided to ride a penny-farthing across three continents. He never once mentions his parents, his childhood, or a prior career. Even his titular bicycle, which carries him 13,500 miles over mountains and deserts, has no origin story; it simply appears out of the ether. The first chapter opens with a flowery description of his ride away from San Francisco and through the surrounding hills. You might expect some kind of flashback, but no; Stevens has hit the road, and he’ll continue hitting it for two years straight.
Understand, though: Stevens isn’t shy about his own opinion. He assesses the attractiveness of every woman he meets. He analyzes every meal and guesthouse in microscopic detail. He recounts whole histories and cultural traditions to the best of his ability, and then decides how they measure up to the standards of Western Civilization. Because he’s riding a bicycle, Stevens is particularly preoccupied with road conditions, and he casually judges entire regions by their traversability. Stevens has unwavering confidence in his own perspective, and he assumes that we do, too — even if we have no idea who he is.
From a literary perspective, Around the World on a Bicycle is missing vital context. Take a similar book, like Cheryl Strayed’s Wild, and you’ll find a memoir of loss and addiction that also happens to take place on the Pacific Crest Trail. The most respected travelogues are usually couched in introspection. Lands of Lost Borders, by Kate Harris, is also about a cyclist riding thousands of miles across Asia, but Harris chronicles much of her life story up to that point, in order to explain the importance of her journey. In contrast, Stevens unburdens himself of any past or motivation. There’s nothing to him. He could be any able-bodied Victorian male with a taste for adventure.
The most revealing passage isn’t in the story itself, but in the front matter:
To
Colonel Albert A. Pope,
of Boston, Massachusetts,
whose liberal spirit of enterprise, and generous confidence in the integrity and
ability of the author, made the tour
Around the World on a Bicycle
possible, by unstinted financial patronage, is this volume
respectfully dedicated
There you have it: A young man writes his first book, and he dedicates it to his bankroller. Granted, Col. Pope was a prominent bicycle manufacturer at the time. Stevens owned a bicycle — one he’d bought with his own money for an 1884 trip across the United States — but Pope gifted him a nickel-plated Columbia Express and contracted him to write about his two-wheeled travels for Outing, a magazine Pope owned. Stevens would later draw on those articles to form Around the World on a Bicycle. How all this came to pass, though, would be anybody’s guess, because the book never mentions these arrangements — nor Pope, nor anyone Stevens knows or cares about — again.
But Around the World on a Bicycle isn’t literature, nor does it have any ambitions to be. Stevens may be the first human to circle the globe on a bicycle, and he may have chronicled the minutiae of that saga, but Stevens’ book and Strayed’s Wild don’t stem from the same tradition. Wild is travel writing. Around the World on a Bicycle is something else entirely: It’s sports porn.
***
Let’s get one thing out of the way: I love sports porn.
While I’m sure there is “sports porn” intended for genuine sexual gratification, I of course mean something more colloquial: texts and images that excite consumers on a primal level. This more wholesome brand of sports porn celebrates athletic achievement in all its visual glory, perhaps motivating the consumer to attempt similar feats, but offers little narrative substance. Like actual pornography, sports porn doesn’t tell a story so much as serve up an exciting scenario: What if you biked down a mountainous Chilean barrio? What if you went fly fishing in the remotest rivers of Siberia? What if you — in this case — rode your high-wheeled bicycle all the way around the planet?
Specifically, I love outdoors porn — and bicycle porn in particular. As an avid rider who writes regularly about cycling, I could watch vloggers pedal over the Rockies all day. I devour whole issues of Adventure Cyclist, the official magazine of the Adventure Cycling Association, and every last field report. I attended the Banff Mountain Film Festival several years in a row, where I watched film after film of adrenaline junkies BASE jumping off cliffs or paddling kayaks over waterfalls.
Video is now the dominant medium for sports porn, which makes perfect sense: Moving pictures require little explanation and can (literally) zoom in on physical action. This is the kind of high-octane excitement that GoPro cameras were designed for. Today, it’s easy for weekend warriors to shoot at high frame-rates and incorporate slo-mo and speed-ramps into their videos; even amateur productions can look spectacular. More and more often, solo sportsmen can make masterpieces on their own: Gravel bikers journey into the Kyrgyzstani wilderness with their prosumer drones, and they return as YouTube influencers with thousands, or even millions, of followers. Any attempt at real plot would ruin the mojo.
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But before video, there were glossy magazines like Outside, Backpacker, and Dirt Rag, periodicals that are often described in the journalism industry as “aspirational.” I cite these titles lovingly: They are the few glossies I’ve ever actually subscribed to or read cover-to-cover. I have spent much of my own career writing aspirational articles, like how to ride a bike in Taiwan or where to grab brunch in Providence. But while magazines like Outside publish in-depth profiles about serious topics, their appeal for many is largely pictorial. Like National Geographic’s stunning landscape panoramas and aerial shots, sports porn photos of Himalayan ice-climbers and trail-running through Scotland will knock the wind out of you. The next thing you know, you’ve ordered $300 worth of gear from REI and hired a personal trainer.
Before moving pictures existed, though, Thomas Stevens was stirring imaginations with his words, and sports porn is the genre he helped create. In 1886, the high-wheel bicycle (known by many as an Ordinary or a penny-farthing, a reference to the large and small British coins its wheels resembled) was roughly equivalent to the iPhone in 2022: a relatively new technology that had completely transformed modern society. Europeans and Americans were still grasping the possibilities of this magical new machine, and Stevens seized the moment; he vowed to ride across the United States, England, Europe, the Middle East, and Asia, completing his journey in Yokohama, Japan. The route was arbitrary, as all round-the-world tours are, but Stevens is still the first known cyclist to satisfy the public with this claim. Stevens pedaled through countries he knew his readers would never visit, and he vividly described the people he met. In the same spirit as any pornographic text, readers were invited to switch out the actual narrator for their own globe-trotting fantasy. Nobody cared who Thomas Stevens was. What they wanted to know was how he did it and what it was like when he got there.
***
To be fair, I didn’t “read” Around the World on a Bicycle so much as listen to it. Vintage copies on eBay can cost hundreds of dollars, and I struggled to find an unabridged reprint. An inexpensive ebook version was easy to find, but I was reluctant to read 1,000 pages of purple prose on a backlit screen. Instead, I found a recording produced by LibriVox — a free archive of public domain writings that functions like a Project Gutenberg of audiobooks — and I dedicated several weeks to Stevens’ book, which is read in tandem by several volunteer narrators.
Stevens was only the latest in a series of authors whose works about long-distance bike touring I’ve read, many of them historical. I had devoured a book by Fred A. Birchmore, also called Around the World on a Bicycle, about the author’s journey in the mid-1930s. I had read Barbara Savage’s Far From Nowhere, about a round-the-world bike tour with her husband in the late 1970s. Most interestingly, I read Around the World on Two Wheels, by Peter Zheutlin, a biography of Annie Londonderry and her infamous wager in the 1890s. All these authors followed similar routes, and they all paid homage to Stevens.
Day after day, I played Stevens’ book on my car stereo. On the bike trail, earbud affixed, I gorged on chapters. The book echoed in my kitchen as I cooked or washed dishes, much to my family’s chagrin. Travelogues are a double whammy for the reader, because the geographic journey mirrors the progression of sentences. The bike wheel turns slowly uphill; the paper page turns in the reader’s fingers; the MP3’s time-stamp ticks along, second by second.
As that journey continued, I found myself torn. On the one hand, I liked Stevens and could only imagine what a pleasure it was to know him. He’s eloquent, dashing, and good-humored. The way he describes himself, Stevens seems gracious to friends and brass-knuckled to antagonists. He is genuinely curious about everything he sees, from folk dances in Eastern Europe to dining etiquette in Kurdistan. Stevens takes pains to learn local languages, to make friends wherever he goes. He compliments and admires much of what he sees: His awestruck description of the Taj Mahal is tear-jerkingly sincere.
In the same spirit as any pornographic text, readers were invited to switch out the actual narrator for their own globe-trotting fantasy. Nobody cared who Thomas Stevens was. What they wanted to know was how he did it and what it was like when he got there.
Like all great travelers, the man takes everything in stride; when Stevens is arrested in Afghanistan and escorted back to Persia, he expresses little more than disappointment. “As the golden dome of Imam Riza’s sanctuary glimmers upon my retreating figure yet a fourth time as I reach the summit of the hill whence we first beheld it,” he writes, “I breathe a silent hope that I may never set eyes on it again.” If there’s anything a cross-country cyclist loathes, it’s backtracking.
Yet Stevens was a product of his era: He places absolute faith in his Anglo-Saxon virtues, and he finds novel ways to trivialize every other ethnicity. He has no problem describing people as “savages” and comparing their behaviors to children or even animals. In one passage, Stevens is forcibly escorted by a dark-skinned soldier in the Pashtun hills, and his description of the man amounts to straight-up minstrelsy. He also carries a revolver, which was common at the time, but he brags about using random wildlife for target practice. From a modern viewpoint, Stevens’ boorish attitudes remain unsettling to the very last page.
Sports porn still struggles with this archetype — the brave white male seeking glory in exotic lands. In fairness, I have seen the genre diversify in recent years, largely thanks to social media, but the go-to lead character is still a scruffy blonde guy with a California cadence. Outdoorsy Americans tend to have conspicuous freedom and safety nets that make their lifestyles possible. Nowhere is this privilege more evident than in their rationales, often spoken in voiceover: “I didn’t want to spend my life stuck in an office,” or, “I needed to push myself to try something new” — the usual declarations of young men with a granola streak and nothing more pressing to worry about.
I can’t criticize them too much, because I am part of that tribe — an obsessive cross-country cyclist who spends much of his free time reading about far-flung expeditions by bike. As a scruffy white guy, I could step into any of those YouTube fantasias and no one would notice. Almost 90 years after Stevens’ death, I remain his target readership. And although the penny-farthing was soon replaced with the “safety bicycle,” Stevens and I use roughly the same vehicle for roughly the same purpose: to explore, to challenge ourselves, to connect with the world.
***
In Rhode Island’s entire Ocean State Libraries system, I couldn’t find a single edition of Around the World on a Bicycle, in print or digital versions. Instead, I tracked down a copy at the Providence Athenaeum, a library so historic that it used to loan books to Edgar Allan Poe.
But this wasn’t just any copy: The Athenaeum has an original printing of Stevens’ book, released in two volumes in 1887 and 1888. What’s more, handwritten notations in each book verify that the volumes were acquired in July and September of their respective publication years. These copies, now tattered from centuries of use, their spines chipped and cracked, were hot off the presses when they joined the Athenaeum’s collection.
Photo by Robert Isenberg
One of the librarians carefully set up the books on a table, to make sure I didn’t strain the covers. She had never heard of Thomas Stevens, and when she saw a picture of the author in the opening pages, she guessed he was riding a unicycle. She sat at the desk behind me while I read, a gesture I appreciated: Seeing the book firsthand was a euphoric moment, and I was grateful for someone to witness it.
What I hadn’t realized was that Stevens’ book was illustrated; between them, the volumes contained 180 black-and-white plates. The etchings are artful and detailed; I could frame any one of them and proudly hang it in my home. As a drawn character, Stevens appears again and again, riding his bicycle or standing beside it; he finds himself in wildly mixed company; fashions change all around him, from top hats to fezes to turbans to jingasa. It’s hard to tell how much the artist embellished, of course. Stevens carried a camera, and he mentions snapping pictures, but he also rode alone, and there was no Google Images search to verify his accounts.
As critical as I am of Victorian culture, I couldn’t help but fall under Stevens’ spell. I had already devoured the audiobook, yet found that I still had plenty of room for dessert. Sports porn is most effective when it’s audacious: People aren’t supposed to have fun in such dangerous ways, yet here they are, free-climbing up sheer sandstone. Stevens didn’t reveal much about himself, but he loved being the center of attention. The front wheel of his penny-farthing was 50 inches tall, and Stevens coasted into villages where bicycles had never been seen. In his telling, Stevens constantly explains what the bicycle is, and he entertains crowds by demonstrating its use. More than once, strangers offer to buy the bike from him. Stevens craved the attention, and readers were eager to pay it.
For a 21st-century reader like me, the real value of Around the World on a Bicycle is accidental: It freezes time. Stevens was a sportsman and tourist; he saw the world at street level. He may not have been a reliable anthropologist, but the author painstakingly described what these lands looked and felt like to an ordinary Western visitor. Stevens exhibits a mindfulness that modern people still labor to attain. Given enough time, pornography transforms into documentary. To Stevens, writing a book about a global cycling tour was a business op with a built-in publicity stunt. Today, his account sheds light on a bygone world.
And the inspiration remains — timeless and pure, unsullied by subtext or character development. More than a century later, Stevens still urges readers onward, to propel ourselves forward, to see how far we can go.
***
Robert Isenberg is a writer and multimedia producer based in Rhode Island. His books include The Archipelago: A Balkan Passage and The Green Season: A Writer’s First Year in Costa Rica. He was recently named a 2022 Scriptwriting Fellow by the Rhode Island Council on the Arts and won Best Documentary Director at the Block Island Film Festival. Feel free to visit him at robertisenberg.net.
Editor: Peter Rubin
Copy Editor: Cheri Lucas Rowlands
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