Charley Norkus's Blog (19)

My in-laws gave me this Bible on my birthday in 1986. Because it was so compact... and so simple looking (I like things simple), it turned out to be my favorite.

From time to time, I would forget about it, but for the most part, it has been a ready reference for me for these 24 years. Every time I think about getting rid of it, well, I just can't do it.

My in-laws have even given me really…

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Using my wife’s digital camera, I photographed the cover and title page from two U.S. History textbooks. My thoughts on this project kept evolving as I worked with it. My original idea was just to remain scalable by continuing to collect and add U.S. History textbooks from the past and present, and I do have a few more books that I could have added to this kind of collection. The more I thought about it, however, I couldn’t help but focus on these two particular books, one published in 1888…

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I can’t shake it – I don’t want to do it because it’s too just big to do – I can’t get my arms around it, and I’ll be too old and tired and dead before I can accomplish what needs to be accomplished… but I can’t shake it. I am too small and the work is too huge that needs to be done, but dammit, somebody out there has already started it, and I can at least help move things along a bit, but … it’s big. It’s bureaucracy, it’s tradition, it’s hundreds if not thousands of people’s work… and it’s… Continue

“You may forget but



Let me tell you

this: someone in

some future time

will think of us.”



- Sappho, 6th cent.BC





As a student, I have always taken pride in my writing ability, and before starting this class, I had assumed that it would be no different – wherever my lack of discipline had gotten the better of me so that it was the eleventh hour before beginning my assignments for the week, there was no fear: my writing would save the day. The… Continue

Thank God for Dorothea Dix and the US Sanitation Commission! I actually read the end of the article first, about Whitman's three years in the hospitals of Washington DC, how his warm and caring manner with the patients may have done even more than medicine to heal many - a "psychological nurse" he called it. Then I went to the beginning of the article and began to read about the conditions in the hospitals... no wonder soldiers dreaded being sent to one. I read a book a few years back on the… Continue

I feel sick. According to our US History textbooks, John Foster Dulles was just the modern progenitor of "brinkmanship" which in itself was bad enough, his sabre-rattling during the 1950's and '60s nearly resulting in our nuclear annihilation... and there is the one-sentence sidebar about Eisenhower's use of the CIA to "interfere" in Guatemala, but this... kind of puts Ike in a new light - did we really have all that much to fear from communism in Central America? What would have been the… Continue

This is dangerous blogging on the fly (usually I create in Word and then c&p to post), but it's late and I don't want to get left behind tonight, but I do want to get down my thoughts on how to better utilize Lassiter's Mill. I went by there early this morning - some moron(s) had rolled a few of the trees there, and - like in the old days - I picked up some trash while I strolled around (I didn't even know they still made malt lager - what kind of lummox can drink a whole can of that crap?… Continue

Well, yeh, I was disappointed not to see "Guernica," especially after Simon Schama's build-up, but I did enjoy the exhibit, especially since I was with my artist son Nod - an outing at his alma mater. Didn't know about Picasso and Gertrude Stein, and even cooler, the Alice B. Toklas connection (but I doubt my young classmates have any idea what I'm talking about... sigh...) And as an aside, having my concentration long ago in ancient Greece and Rome, I thoroughly enjoyed the exhibit of Greek… Continue

As our ECI 525 final assignment, we students are to find an outside area or building to re-purpose for more democratic utililization. For my first assignment, we were to create a soundscape involving local history, and I chose Lassister's Mill and the fire of 1958, re-visiting the site and interviewing my dad John Norkus who had helped fight the fire. I couldn't help but notice, as I have on several subsequent visits, how under-utilized this area is these days. The area is peaceful and… Continue

Ferguson's review of Horwitz's A Voyage Long and Strange is a hodge-podge of good and evil. Bottom line: is Horwitz's book worth reading or not? That question remains unanswered. After what appear to be some sincere compliments on Horwitz's style, Ferguson then lambasts Horwitz for playing what Ferguson sees as the over-visited revisionist role, but what he does not realize is that, despite the many popular works on revisionist history - Loewen, Zinn, etc. - most people in America are… Continue

While reading Torget & Nesbit’s introductory article on the History Engine, I got it, and things I’d read earlier began to connect. When I initially read about this type of inquiry and production in earlier assigned reading, maybe being just too busy, my mind had not really wrapped itself around the concept of how students would be able to access primary sources, explore them, creatively write their own interpretations, and then collaborate with an ever expanding group of “others,” just… Continue

When I was boy, my friends and I were fascinated, thanks in part to Walt Disney and his various mini-series on Daniel Boone, Francis Marion “The Swampfox”, Scarecrow (set in England), and Davey Crockett. We would play all day long in the woods (that are now the Beltline and North Hills, er… excuse me, Midtown), attacking the British, fighting the Japs (no mention of Korea?), and bravely defending the Alamo to our last breath. While an undergrad at State, I learned that Dr. Crisp was exploring… Continue

Slavery Assignment.doc

In reading my part of the Plantation Letters, I was impressed by the mixture of "it's just business" and humanity shown toward the slaves; it left me with very strange feelings about the entire institution of slavery. It wasn't split evenly between either between on-site overseer and absentee owner as one might… Continue

The history of the Cameron and Bennehan families was full of names familiar to me - e.g., Nash, Mordecai, Blount, etc. - from which counties, towns, rivers, etc. are named here in North Carolina. I didn't see any mention of Cameron Village, but from having been friends with the Rochelles who lived in the Oberlin Road area just north of there, they always claimed to have been descended from slaves who worked "the Cameron plantation" which, if so, must have been one of several enterprises in… Continue

University Archives Photograph Collection

http://www.lib.ncsu.edu/universityarchives/historicalstate/index.html



"A rich visual record of the history of North Carolina State University from its opening in 1889 to the present. The collection currently is comprised of over 1,500 images."

Each collection utilizes a web site format with a combination of words and images to relate its purpose and the kinds of things that will be found there.

In the left-hand margin are… Continue

I enjoyed exploring new territory here regarding my Lithuanian (Norkus) heritage, an article concerned with the expressed desire for Lithuanian independence during World War I and twenty brave signers of the declaratory Act.



1. Account for the postings (number of revisions, time range from first to last, notation of periods of activity).

Using en.WikiChecker/article, I discovered that this article originally appeared on Jan. 26, 2007, it has been edited 417 times, and the… Continue

The Image Pedlar, ca.1844

by Francis Willam Edmonds (American painter, 1806-1863)

INSTRUMENTAL (resource):

A man balances a tray of plaster-like images on his head while extending an image out toward a woman who is examining it. Other people are there, adults and children, apparently the rest of the family, all of them inside a large room with sparsely decorated plastered walls. A musket and powder horn hang on the wall,… Continue

My main illustration is listed in both HarpWeek and the Library of Congress sites - it's called "Columbia Demands Her Children!" (http://memory.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/D?ils:2:./temp/~pp_Likc::)

I ended up comparing it to another similar cartoon called "Columbia Confronts the President" which I found at the Lincoln Institute's site Abraham Lincoln's Classroom (www.abrahamlincolnsclassroom.org).…

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I created my soundscape on old Lassiter's Mill which burned down in 1958. My dad was a volunteer fireman who, now 87, answered the call that night to fight the fire 51 years ago. His interview is included in the soundscape. The file did not exactly download to this blog the way that I had hoped, but you can access it by copying & pasting the entire URL below into your browser. Later I was able to upload the soundscape ("add a song" dee-da-dee) to Teaching Digital History; Dr Lee added a… Continue