findingDulcinea

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 | Dear Diary…

What with Facebook, Twitter and confessional blogs, there’s little room for privacy in the Internet age. But thanks to the online publication of historical diaries, Web surfers can now shine that invasive modern light on the darkest pages of the past. The personal diaries we’ve unearthed evoke a sense of personality, society and daily life that is somehow more authentic than the incessant noise of today’s tweets. Explore the diaries below and recapture that increasingly rare feeling of stumbling across something truly secret.

In his harrowing novel “1984,” George Orwell envisions a future society in which a Big Brother state monitors everything, including the minds of its citizens. Readers who loved that book—or perhaps just loved the privacy-free dystopia it critiques—should also love peeking into George Orwell’s personal diary, now available online. The Orwell Prize blog, which also links to things such as an old breakfast menu Orwell might have perused and a Google Map of his travels, includes his diaries from 1938 to 1942 “in real time, 70 years to the day since each entry was originally written.” With tags such as “Anglo-Soviet pact” and “mowed nettles,” the diary offers an insightful glimpse into both the author and the early years of World War II. And, in a retro take on the stereotypical Congressman tweeting how many eggs he had for breakfast, Orwell shares how many eggs his chickens lay each day.

Technological trends may change, but the founding fathers never go out of style. It’s not surprising, then, that the Library of Congress has released the diaries of George Washington online. Stretching from 1748 to the day before he died in 1799, the diaries form a record of “Where & How my Time is Spent,” his oft-repeated goal in writing. Readers won’t find thrilling Revolutionary-era scandal; instead, much of the diary is consumed by agriculture, the weather and his dinner guests. Nevertheless, the diary’s editors admit that though reading them through can be a “tedious exercise,” it is also a “rewarding way to probe the depths… of a man who has come to personify the spirit of America in his time.”

If you were the kid who played Lewis and Clark or Oregon Trail—or if you still play Oregon Trail, for that matter—this is the diary for you. Truly experience the journey West with the diary of photographer William Henry Jackson, which documents his surveying trip in the summer of 1869. Also check out the New York Public Library exhibits “Heading West” and “Touring West” for coverage of the maps and performing artists that characterized westward movement in the U.S.

Jill Marcellus
Writer

What I Didn’t Know About Tiananmen Square

Photo: Elizabeth Dalziel/AP

In the spring of 1988, I traveled to China with a small group of other high school students and a much larger group of older adults. I’ve always liked to say that I learned more about American tourists during that trip than I ever learned about the Chinese. There were the two ladies who refused to eat anything but white rice. The woman who had to keep purchasing new luggage to fit all the souvenirs she was buying. Her daughter, who was so focused on videotaping everything, that she never seemed to look at anything with her own eyes. The man who thought it was funny to kick the back of my seat on every short plane flight, and who apparently decided that the very real machete fight that we inadvertently witnessed and which left one man with serious head wounds was light entertainment put on for his benefit.

That’s not to say that I didn’t have any encounters with the people who actually lived there. Unlike my trip the previous year to what was then the Soviet Union, no one tried to block us from making contact. The other students and I talked with young people on the streets of Shanghai who were anxious to practice their English, waved to an adorable, rosy-cheeked kindergarten class who chanted “Good morning! Good morning!” as we passed, ignored the desperate vendors who tried to sell us trinkets through the windows of our bus and watched an elderly woman with bound feet painfully limp down a flight of steps in the Forbidden City, leaning on the arm of a soldier.

Although my high school friends and I felt that we were obviously better behaved travelers and more open to truly experiencing the country than the adults with us, that did not mean that we ever really had a clue about any of China’s most pressing political issues. One peaceful evening in Beijing, we lay in the middle of Tiananmen Square and sang “You Can Call Me Mao,” parodying a song popular at the time, Paul Simon’s “You Can Call Me Al.” A little more than a year later, that spot was overrun with protesting students, tanks and soldiers firing on civilians.

It was deeply upsetting to me that a site I associated with a silly memory became associated in the eyes of the world with such horrifying bloodshed. It’s equally upsetting that in the 20 years since, the Chinese government has made significant efforts to obliterate all recall of that terrible event, and have forbidden people to commemorate it in any way. During the days leading up to the anniversary this year, authorities have tried to block discussion about it on the Internet.

Learn more about what happened in June 1989 by reading findingDulcinea’s Web Guide to the Tiananmen Square Massacre.

Amy Goldschlager
Editor

Who Wants to Be an Internet Expert?

Back in the olden days, people talked about the list of books they wanted to read but would probably never get to. Although the lists might have been long, they may have been more manageable than we realized. With the Web, we’re getting a seemingly infinite number of articles thrown at us every minute. It’s hard to make a reading list—never mind get through it.

Fortunately, findingDulcinea, your friendly, neighborhood Internet librarian, has a solution: Our daily and weekly e-mail newsletters. Or, as we like to think of them: Expertise in Your Inbox.

* The Daily Dulcinea: A dose of knowledge spotlighting a notable biography or historical event. On Saturday, we'll send you "5 Must-Reads You May Have Missed" during the week.
* Weekly Travel Newsletter: a virtual tour of under-the-radar vacation destinations.
* Weekly Education Newsletter: a curation of Web sites and tools that aim to empower teachers, librarians, parents and students.
* Sweet Sites: a weekly e-mail of Web sites that will aid your research, up your Internet savvy and expand your mind.

Sign up here, now!

Your desire to become an Internet expert is probably reason enough for you to sign up for one or all of these newsletters. But if you need more incentive, we've created a list of reasons:

1. Our "On This Day" and Happy Birthday e-mails are guaranteed to tell you the correct date, every day.
2. There's no point to that new smartphone if no one is e-mailing you, right? We'll e-mail you. We promise.
3. We are more consistent/less demanding than the boy/girl/client/gig you wish was e-mailing you.
4. Getting our travel newsletter is like traveling, except you can bring more than 3 fluid ounces with you when you read it.
5. Our weekly "Sweet Sites" e-mail is not as bad for your teeth as other sweets. Nor will it get your keyboard sticky when you surf the Web.
6. If you lie and say you found one of our Sweet Sites yourself, we'll never find out.
7. Visit our Religion and Spirituality Web Guide to deal with the guilt you'll feel about stealing credit for our awesome work.

Yom Hashoah: Struggling to Remember

The Hall of Names at the Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial in Jerusalem (Photo: Sebastian Scheiner/AP)

A phrase frequently associated with the Holocaust is “Never Forget.” It’s become more poignant as the majority of the survivors of those terrible times are now no longer with us. While we may eventually gain some intellectual understanding of the events, emotionally engaging with such a monstrous event is difficult without some kind of personal connection.

As the daughter and granddaughter of Holocaust survivors, I can claim a certain personal connection. I am deeply aware of how improbable it is that I even exist. My mother is a Hungarian-American Jew who was born in Budapest in 1944. During her infancy, my grandfather was in a camp, and my grandmother sought safety and shelter for herself and my mother in various safe houses established by the Red Cross and by Swedish diplomat Raoul Wallenberg.

Of course, my mother has no memory of those days, and sadly, my brave grandmother died shortly after I was born. My grandfather survived the camps, and when I was a teenager, he tried to share some of his experiences with me. He died about 10 years ago, and now those memories are lost, too. My grandfather’s one surviving friend (who herself was dramatically saved by Raoul Wallenberg’s intervention) is in her 90s.

Soon, there will be no one left to share a first-person account, and so much has already been forgotten. All we will have is the historical record and the mass of personal narratives left behind by those who could serve as witnesses. As the Holocaust recedes into the past, we must do what we can to continue to make it real, to understand how genocide occurs and to learn how we can stop atrocities occurring today and in the future.

Tuesday, April 21, 2009, is Yom Hashoah, Holocaust Remembrance Day. Congress has officially set aside the entire week of April 19 to remember the events of the Holocaust. FindingDulcinea has created a Web page of resources to help you learn and share information about the Holocaust. Forge your own connection, however tenuous it may be. Help make sure we will not forget.

Amy Goldschlager
Editor