This Date in History

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I could be wrong
It was a Psych Hospital in Asheville Was after 1980 for sure???

I mispoke...the link says that they "closed the unit in the 1980s" not IN 1980. I remember that Lee Smith's son Josh was there in the 1980s. She wrote a book about the hospital during the Zelda years and in an interview she mentioned that she knew the place personally because of that reason. Shelf Awareness for Readers for Tuesday, October 15, 2013
 
I mispoke...the link says that they "closed the unit in the 1980s" not IN 1980. I remember that Lee Smith's son Josh was there in the 1980s. She wrote a book about the hospital during the Zelda years and in an interview she mentioned that she knew the place personally because of that reason. Shelf Awareness for Readers for Tuesday, October 15, 2013
I remember there was a patient there-long term-he had something crazy like a $1,000 bill he would show folks He was an heir to the Tabsco Sauce fortune
 
Perhaps there are a couple more "significant' events today. I'm goung with this. It was the first African-American piece of literature I remember reading and well, it's powerful in it's way.

1959 Lorraine Hansberry's A Raisin in the Sun became the first play by an African American woman to be produced on Broadway.

A Raisin in the Sun, drama in three acts by Lorraine Hansberry, first published and produced in 1959. The play’s title is taken from “Harlem,” a poem by Langston Hughes, which examines the question “What happens to a dream deferred? / Does it dry up / like a raisin in the sun?” This penetrating psychological study of a working-class Black family on the South Side of Chicago in the late 1940s reflected Hansberry’s own experiences of racial harassment after her prosperous family moved into a white neighborhood.

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On this day in 1956: A subcommittee of the House Un-American Activities Committee convenes in Charlotte. Two days of hearings will single out Bill McGirt, a poet working at a Winston-Salem fish market, as the state’s top communist, but he and 10 other subpoenaed witnesses refuse to testify, and little new information surfaces.

“The conclusion is inescapable,” says Rep. Edwin Willis of Louisiana, “that these people are professional agitators, expert emissaries of the Communist conspiracy planted in the Southland. Who said it couldn’t happen here?”

‘Emissaries of Communist conspiracy’ keep lips zipped – NC Miscellany


McGirt changed his name to William Inman: Inman, Will, 1923-2009 - Social Networks and Archival Context

"Will Inman was a poet, essayist, editor, and publisher. He was born William Archibald McGirt, Jr. in Wilmington, North Carolina where his father, William A. McGirt, was in the insurance and real estate business and his mother, Delia E. McGirt (maiden name Inman), was a registered nurse. He attended Duke University, graduating with an A.B in 1943. After college, Inman worked as a union organizer for tobacco workers in North Carolina before moving to New York City in the late 1950s. He served as the Vice-president of Free University of New York in the mid 1960s. He has worked as an editor and publisher of various literary journals and has had his work published in numerous anthologies and literary journals as well as in individual volumes. His weekly column, Conchsound in the Hills, was published in the Franklin, PA News-Herald in the 1960s. In addition to writing poetry, fiction, plays, and essays, Inman was also a prolific correspondent and diarist. He was active in numerous causes, including the War in Vietnam, the Civil Rights movement, gay rights, and various environmental issues. In 1956, he was questioned by the House Un-American Activities Committee as to his relationship with the Communist Party. His activism continued into the 1990s; he led writing workshops in an Arizona State Prison, as well as teaching writing to the homeless in transition."
 
Slow going this AM. Caling out @nashcounty to do the music one.

1933 U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt gave his first fireside chat; the radio addresses became a source of hope and security for Americans during the Great Depression and World War II.

fireside chats, series of radio addresses delivered by U.S. Pres. Franklin D. Roosevelt from 1933 to 1944. Although the chats were initially meant to garner Americans’ support for Roosevelt’s New Deal policies, they eventually became a source of hope and security for all Americans. The chats were influential in reformulating the American worldview from one of despair to one of hope during a time of multiple crises, including the Great Depression and World War II. Fireside chats reinforced the importance of broadcast media and the use of common, everyday language when addressing the American people.

Roosevelt understood the importance of radio as a medium and first used it to pressure the New York state legislature during his governorship from 1928 to 1932. As president, Roosevelt set up the “informal chats” to convey the success of his policies via radio to the American people. He regarded these broadcasts as instruments of public education in national affairs as well as a way of enlisting support for his program. Fireside chats were constructed by a committee of Roosevelt’s speech writers and advisers, but Roosevelt was an integral part of the process; he often wrote the conclusions and even changed some of the text while speaking on-air. The chats were scheduled sparingly so as to maintain their importance among his other frequent radio and public addresses. They were delivered by Roosevelt from the White House, with him sitting behind a desk with multiple microphones from various radio networks.
 
‘Those who do not learn history are doomed to repeat it.’
[The quote is most likely due to writer and philosopher George Santayana, and in its original form it read, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”]

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1925 The Tennessee legislature passed a bill that banned the teaching of Charles Darwin's theory of evolution in the state's public schools; in a highly publicized trial, high-school teacher John T. Scopes was later convicted of breaking the law.

The State of Tennessee v. John Thomas Scopes, commonly known as the Scopes trial or Scopes Monkey Trial, was an American legal case from July 10 to July 21, 1925, in which a high school teacher, John T. Scopes, was accused of violating Tennessee's Butler Act, which had made it illegal to teach human evolution in any state-funded school.[1] The trial was deliberately staged in order to attract publicity to the small town of Dayton, Tennessee, where it was held. Scopes was unsure whether he had ever actually taught evolution, but he incriminated himself deliberately so the case could have a defendant.[2][3] Scopes was represented by the American Civil Liberties Union, which had offered to defend anyone accused of violating the Butler Act in an effort to challenge the law.

Scopes was found guilty and was fined $100 (equivalent to $1,800 in 2024), but the verdict was overturned on a technicality. The trial served its purpose of drawing intense national publicity, as national reporters flocked to Dayton to cover the high-profile lawyers who had agreed to represent each side. William Jennings Bryan, a three-time presidential candidate and former secretary of state, argued for the prosecution, while Clarence Darrow served as the defense attorney for Scopes. The trial publicized the fundamentalist–modernist controversy, which set modernists, who said evolution could be consistent with religion,[4] against fundamentalists, who believed the word of God as revealed in the Bible took priority over all human knowledge. The case was thus seen both as a theological contest and as a trial on whether evolution should be taught in schools. The trial became a symbol of the larger social anxieties associated with the cultural changes that characterized the decade of the 1920s in the United States, and highlighted the growing influence of mass media, being the first trial in American history to be broadcast by radio.
 
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I grew up hearing the phrases, “They sent him off to Camp Butner...again.” “He belongs at Camp Butner” or, “Shush, don’t talk crazy like that, you’ll end up at Butner!” were common admonitions. Those remarks might be accompanied by mentions of “Dix Hill,” or if that worldview emanated from the western counties, of “Broughton.” African Americans went off to “Cherry” in Goldsboro. Once upon a time, these places were each associated with mental health in North Carolina. Such human challenges were mystified, often accompanied by ostracism, and generally spoken of insensitively in bygone days.

We all know, or ought to, that mental health care, defined widely, has never been well-understood or implemented. From genius to genuine distress, and everything in-between, successful coping by the state, community, family, and individual remains far from well-orchestrated or developed. We have to hope that progress will come. Medieval attitudes and practices are not that far behind us - nor even completely absent I suspect.

Camp Butner has been a lot of things. It was constructed originally in 1942 in Granville, Person, and Durham Counties as a World War II infantry training center. It was a work camp for German and Italian P.O.W.s during the war. “Today, the grounds house a variety of state and federal facilities including several mental health facilities, multiple correctional institutions, state-owned farms and a National Guard training facility.” A new addition at Butner is The Veterans Life Center — “a residential program for veterans in need of therapy, counseling, educational or life-skill development.”

One semester during my many, many years in college I took a Public Administration course taught by the Warden at the Butner Federal Correctional Institute. My class visited that lock-up and Warden Ingram led the tour. I’m pretty sure that prison wasn’t what people in Chatham were referring to when their quips featured Butner but rather facilities that dealt with substance abuse. To suffer from alcoholism in a dry and evangelically T-Totaling county brought forward many unique situations. Tar Heels laughed at Otis Campbell of Mayberry exactly because he hit so close to home. Such was the code being spoken. Warden Ingram also let us in on some internal Butner Federal code talk. It was over 40 years ago now when I made my pilgrimage so some of this is mildly historic.

It seems that at the penitentiary there were seven units and inmates were arranged in them by type of crime. In very North Carolina fashion each of those units were nicknamed after an Atlantic Coast Conference School (there were only seven in those days - good times!). The designations were clearly carefully thought-out. What I remember about that from the Warden is that the violent and vicious were in Clemson, sexual criminals went to NC State, scam artists were with Wake Forest, those who embezzled from the government were at Virginia, and those who pilfered from private enterprise were Duke. Those who committed unspeakable acts were put in Maryland, and of course drug dealers and moonshiners found their way to Carolina. There’s nothing quite like well-founded regional prison humor.

For more on the history of Mental Health Care in NC go here: Psychiatric Hospitals

#OTD (March 13) in 1937 Major General Henry Wolfe Butner died. The camp was named for him. Read here: Camp Butner’s Namesake, Henry Wolfe Butner
 
Sorta big deal in the making of much of the future history of the US.

1794 American inventor Eli Whitney received a patent for the cotton gin.

cotton gin, machine for cleaning cotton of its seeds, invented in the United States by Eli Whitney in 1793. The cotton gin is an example of an invention directly called forth by an immediate demand; the mechanization of spinning in England had created a greatly expanded market for American cotton, whose production was inhibited by the slowness of manual removal of the seeds from the raw fibre. Whitney, a Massachusetts Yankee visiting a friend in the South, learned of the problem and quickly solved it. Inspired by manual brushes invented by enslaved workers, Whitney crafted a device that pulled the cotton through a set of wire teeth mounted on a revolving cylinder, the fibre passing through narrow slots in an iron breastwork too small to permit passage of the seed. The simplicity of the invention—which could be powered by people, animals, or water—caused it to be widely copied despite Whitney’s patent; it is credited with fixing cotton cultivation, virtually to the exclusion of other crops, in the U.S. South and so institutionalizing slavery.

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I ' m thinking I have driven through here close to 100 times if not more on the way to the mountains or other places west. Nice little crossroads. Bet others have done that route as well.

Eli Whitney is an unincorporated community in southeastern Alamance County, North Carolina, United States. It is located at the intersection of North Carolina Highway 87, and Greensboro-Chapel Hill Road. To the south is Mandale and to the west is Snow Camp. The United States Postal Service considers Eli Whitney part of the Graham delivery area.

1741945530763.pngEli tney gained its name from the inventor of the cotton gin, Eli Whitney. The reasoning for this was because there was once a cotton gin located in the community, but has been gone for many years now. Eli Whitney was once home to a school as well, but it too closed and was later demolished. The school's gymnasium was left standing and now serves as a community center.[
 

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Back in the Dry County Days the little gas station general store in ‘Eli Whitney’ was the closest legally bought beer on Sunday for us Chathamites.
 
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