The findingDulcinea Blog

"All of a Sudden This Thing Came to Me"

During the 2008 Presidential primaries, we published an article asking whether traditional political rhetoric is a declining art.  We analyzed several view points, and provided historical context by harkening back to a few of the finer political speeches in recent American history.

In a separate blog post, I recalled the sad spectacle of our political leaders reading the Gettysburg address at the first anniversary observance of 9/11. A Newsday columnist wrote that the"appropriation of a distant generation's tragedy strikes me as lame and uninspired"and asked why George Pataki wouldn't "offer a new Gettysburg address instead, one that he crafts himself from the heart and not from a hired speechwriter?"

I then concluded that the problem with political oratory today is that it is always so calculating, so negotiated, so cowardly. I recalled that when Ronald Reagan first met with Mikhail Gorbachev at a Geneva chateau, Reagan's team carefully planned every move. Gorbachev's limousine would pull up and Reagan would stand regally at the top of the steps, forcing Gorbachev to ascend while looking up at Reagan. When Gorbachev's car stopped and no one exited it for a minute, Reagan bounded down the stairs, helped Gorbachev from the car, and slipped his hand under Gorbachev's arm to support him up the steps.  A Soviet aide later said "I left like we lost the game during the first movement...We started with the wrong move."

I realized that is what I really miss - politicians who are willing to suddenly bound down the stairs.

Today's On This Day covers the "I Have a Dream" speech by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. on the National Mall in 1963. We developed the On This Day series because, no matter how well I think I know about an event in history, I learn something profound from nearly every article we publish in this series. And today I learned that nowhere in the manuscript King carried with him to the podium that day did it say "I Have a Dream."

King dutifully recited the first part of the prepared speech, but then "all of a sudden this thing came to me that. … I’d used many times before. … ‘I have a dream.’ And I just felt that I wanted to use it here. … I used it, and at that point I just turned aside from the manuscript altogether. I didn’t come back to it.”

Clarence B. Jones, who drafted the original script of the speech, asked in a recent Washington Post op-ed piece, "What could possibly motivate a man standing before a crowd of hundreds of thousands, with television cameras beaming his every move and a cluster of microphones tracing his every word, to abandon the prepared text of his speech and begin riffing on a theme that he had used previously without generating much enthusiasm from listeners?"

We'll never know how the public may have reacted to the original draft of the speech. But I'm willing to bet that, had King continued to recite it, our On This Day today would be about an event other than a speech he gave 47 years ago today. And the civil rights movement itself may not have accomplished nearly as much as it did.

Mark E. Moran

Founder & CEO

When Tragedy Strikes: Social Media Grows Up

When an earthquake struck Haiti earlier this week, people around the world read about the tragedy almost instantly. For many, news of the quake came not from traditional media outlets but from their profile pages on Facebook, or through a tweet from a friend on Twitter.

With phone lines down in most of the country, only those with access to satellite forms of communication, such as Internet-enabled mobile phones, could communicate with the outside world.

Within hours of the earthquake, images, videos and status updates flooded the Web with news about the disaster. People experiencing the quake in Haiti were able to share what was happening with the rest of the world using social media tools, long before volunteers and reporters could make their way to the country.  CNN published many of these updates to its iReport section, and that part of its site saw nearly 1.5 million visitors the day of the quake.

For some victims, social media has proved to be a lifesaver. The Miami Herald reported that many users from outside the country were able to post where they thought loved ones might be trapped, asking for help from anyone who might be in the area. For those trying to locate loved ones, Facebook and Twitter have helped the news spread more quickly than watching TV or reading the newspaper.

Even the rescue teams in Haiti are now heavily reliant on social media tools to communicate with each other. Groups from Canada and the U.S. are using tools such as Skype and Twitter to give each other vital information because phone lines are not working.

Long have social media users been accused of "slacktivism," a term Pete Cashmore of Mashable says refers to the endless posting of messages and online groups that don't achieve much, but allow social media users to feel like they are doing their part. But with the Haiti earthquake, organizations employed a relatively new method of gaining support: asking users to send text message donations that would automatically add a few dollars onto their next phone bill. It has been hugely successful, with the red cross having raised more than $8 million so far.

But even with all the good that social media tools have enabled people to do, not all efforts are safe. Rumors circled on Twitter and other social media sites that JetBlue and American were going to fly volunteers to Haiti for free. This turned out to be untrue. At this time, no airlines are able to fly passengers into Haiti due to congestion and lack of fuel at the airport. Though some airlines are offering frequent flier rewards for members who give monetary donations to the relief effort.

Learn more about Haiti in our blog post from yesterday.

Read how you can help quake relief efforts in this findingDulcinea article.

Haley Lovett

Audience Development

Sweet Sites | A Eulogy to Kennedy and Obituaries

Photo: AP

Last night, Sen. Edward Kennedy passed away after a yearlong struggle with brain cancer. Any newswire reveals this much, but only the obituary pages offer a comprehensive look at Senator Kennedy’s life and national importance. Technically an announcement of death, an obituary can also serve as an authoritative biography, and it is often written while its subject is still alive and continuously updated until its fatal debut. Before you tire of the phrase “lion in the Senate,” read the following thoughtful and detailed looks at Senator Kennedy’s life, and bookmark those newspapers’ obituary sections for some excellent biographical resources.

Declaring Sen. Kennedy “a Rabelaisian figure in the Senate and in life,” the six-page New York Times obituary delves scrupulously behind the senator’s public image, offering a detailed, chronological account that balances the discipline of his public career with his private excesses and troubles. After an overview of the circumstances of Kennedy’s death and his recent role in the health care debate, reporter John M. Broder breaks down the phases of the senator’s life, from a youth overshadowed by more powerful brothers to his role as influential statesman. The Times supplements its written obituary with multimedia resources, including a 13-minute video tribute.

Focusing more on his legislative accomplishments and priorities, The Washington Post obituary provides a slightly different emphasis in its extensive coverage of Kennedy, but still wraps up with a thorough and interactive biographical timeline. Reporter Joe Holley also offers his personal reflection on the senator on the Post’s “Post Mortem” blog, which goes behind the day’s obituaries in regular features like “The Daily Goodbye.”

For an international perspective, including details on how he “annoyed several British administrations,” read Kennedy’s obituary in The Daily Telegraph. Interspersing its obit with illuminating quotes and anecdotes, The Telegraph offers a more personal and visceral account of the senator—and of its other obituary subjects—than the American papers do.

Finally, if you would like to research an older or more obscure death than Senator Kennedy’s, the Internet Public Library has written a helpful guide to finding obituaries.

Jill Marcellus
Senior Intern

Go-Go Boots, Baby Boomers, Peace Movements and Pop Art: Minced Metaphors of the 1960s

AP
The Woodstock Music & Art Fair of 1969, perhaps one of the least dramatic events of the decade.

There’s a new line of thought being developed by many journalists. They’re making a plea for a fresh look at the protesters that have usurped town hall debates across the country, arguing that many civil rights activists in the 1960s didn’t always know what they were doing either, as Mitch Albom suggests.

Albom may be onto something. The 1960s may not be as rosy as second wavers and civil rights activists imagine. In the early 1960s, black people rose in rebellion all over the Deep South in response to the memory of slavery. Their deep and constant humiliation was found in poetry, music, occasional outbursts of anger and more frequent sullen silences as they pledged themselves again and again to passive resistance.

The 1960s also marks the decade when two buses left from Washington, D.C., on May 4, 1961, only to be burned, with riders beaten because of their affiliation with other Freedom Riders; when prisoners, instead of shattering rocks on a work gang in Georgia, smashed their own legs with sledgehammers to call attention to the daily brutality they suffered; and when civil rights workers go missing. Come to your own conclusions about Albom’s analogy. There are plenty of resources for mining the Internet for cultural and political historians of the 1960s. Here are a choice few of them:

PBS produced a timeline of the 1960s with resources for teachers and students.

The Seattle Times presents a discussion of Martin Luther King Jr. and the civil rights movement.

Ron Jones’ famous social experiment, The Third Wave, was a proto-fascist movement among his high school students in 1967, and is a cultural artifact of the 1960s.

Ella Baker, who advocated for civic engagement in a participatory democracy, is one of the superstar civil right activists of the 1960s, and has a Web site dedicated to retelling her biography.

To sate the increasing interest in presidential private thoughts, catch up with John Quincy Adams on Twitter, read George Washington’s diaries or visit the Lyndon Baines Johnson Library and Museum to take a peek at Johnson’s diary. 

Joshua Goldberg

Sweet Sites | Interviews and Talks with People Who Should Be Celebrities

Everywhere you turn, you see or hear about Jon and Kate, Lindsay Lohan, Lindsay Lohan's spray tan product, Jennifer Garner's cute kids, and Posh & Becks' shopping outings. These people are celebrities, technically speaking, but there are many other people out there, living and deceased, who were celebrities in their time, or should have been. We've uncovered a number of sites that host interviews and talks with notable people from many walks of life. Some of these Web sites might be familiar to you, but some may appear to be diamonds in the rough!

TED is probably the most well-known site for inspiring, amusing and cool talks with innovative thinkers and leaders. Learn about emerging technologies, the fashion world, religion, medicine, and much more from the Web site of the TED Prize and annual TED Conference.

The Mike Wallace Interview is a collection of interviews by Mike Wallace of "60 Minutes" conducted between 1957 and 1960 and hosted by the University of Texas at Austin's Harry Ransom Center. This generous site features interviews with pioneering people like Frank Lloyd Wright, Gloria Swanson, Eleanor Roosevelt and Aldous Huxley.

Charlie Rose has recently revamped the Web site for his PBS show and now includes free and lengthy archived and recent interview segments with actors, sports stars, economists, politicians, authors and much more.

The Paris Review "Interviews" section features an archive of interview excerpts with authors dating back to the 1950s. They are in text-only format, but very worthwhile.

Liz Colville
Senior Writer
Audience Development

If you're really into lectures, see our previous entry, "5 Must-See Lectures."

Gay Rights in the Mainstream Media, Gay Rights in the Twitter Stream

Rep. Beth Bye of Connecticut holds her marriage license, the first issued to a gay couple in the state, on March 6, 2009. (Photo: George Ruhe/AP)

When Proposition 8 appeared on the California ballot in November 2008, gay rights were not yet a mainstream topic. Ironically, when Prop 8 passed, support for gay marriage started to mount. Whereas once homophobia was considered “the last accepted prejudice,” people came out in large numbers to protest the ban, and the media covered it. More states started to push harder for marriage laws. Recently, Iowa and Vermont passed laws in favor of gay marriage, and the District of Columbia council voted to recognize marriage in other states.

Now, the media watch on gay marriage is so tuned in that The New York Times City Room blog published a piece yesterday about N.Y. Gov. David Paterson’s anticipated but unconfirmed plans to introduce a gay marriage bill. Ten years ago, homosexuality was still a taboo topic, but in the past year, most media outlets, and many Americans, take the importance of gay rights as a given.

But perhaps the best example of all was the fast spread of news about the so-called #amazonfail on Twitter. A handful of gay authors found that their books had been reclassified as “adult” on Amazon and therefore could not be found on search. A decade ago, I genuinely believe that those few authors would have been the only ones to know or care about that situation. But this weekend, #amazonfail became the most popular search topic on Twitter.

Amazon decided it was such an emergency that employees were called in on Easter Sunday to fix the problem. The fact that the mistake is being called a PR disaster tells me that somewhere along the way, this country’s attitude toward homosexuality has shifted. No longer is homophobia “the last accepted prejudice.”

Rachel Balik
Senior Writer