Tuesday, February 26, 2013

Slavery Blogs

I have created 2 new blogs to look at the subject of slavery.  Of particular interest, is the Arab Slave Trade and the White Irish Slaves.  I will be collecting evidence of this disgusting practice and post the information on these sites.  These two blogs may not be appropriate for children.  I found it surprising that I was never taught about these subjects in school and that my local Irish Heritage Centers have no knowledge of this forgotten history.




http://theirishslaves.blogspot.com


http://arabslavetrade.blogspot.com


By Rita Jean Moran (www.thelibrarykids.com)

Friday, February 22, 2013

Washington D.C.

Take a good look at some pictures from Washington D.C.:


 
 
 
 
 
The United States Treasury Building
 
 

 
Inside the Capitol Buiding
 
 

 
The Supreme Court Building
 
 

 
The White House
 
 
 
 
 
The United States Capitol Building
 
 
 

The Washington Monument

 
 
 
Inside the Capitol Building - Freedom
 
 
 
 
The Lincoln Memorial
 
 
 

The Library of Congress



 
The National Archives Building
 
 

 
The Articles of Confedertion
 
 

 
The Constitution
 
 
 
 
 
 

Saturday, February 16, 2013

When America Used to be a Manufacturing Power House...


 
 
I went through some old family slides and found this.  It is a picture of the Stewart Warner company in Chicago during what appears to be the 1950s.   I believe one of my family members worked there.  America used to be a power house of manufacturing and a good factory job could support a family and the worker could retire with a pension, too.  Too bad we can't change things back to the days when we were self-sufficient and providing for our own needs.
 
According to wikipedia:
 
Stewart-Warner was a US manufacturer of vehicle instruments, a.k.a. gauges and many other products.
The company was founded as Stewart & Clark Company in 1905 by John K. Stewart. Their speedometers were used in the Ford Model T. In 1912 John Stewart joined with Edgar Bassick to make vehicle instruments and horns. Bassick owned Alemite Co and Stewart had bought the Warner Instrument Company, thus the name was changed to Stewart-Warner Corporation. The company started in Chicago and built a manufacturing plant on Diversey Parkway. The building kept expanding and finally covered one-million square feet (93,000 m²) and six floors. They also made radios and refrigerators, among other products, and produced the ubiquitous "zerk" grease fitting, named after its inventor, associated with the company. In the last years of the company's Chicago factory, it owned a number of aging six-spindle Brown & Sharpe and New Britain screw machines.
They also made heat exchangers starting in the 1940s under the "South Wind Division", but since then it became independent of its parent. They still use the Stewart-Warner name, and the web site is hyphenated: http://www.stewart-warner.com/
In the 1980s some parts of the company were bought by BTR plc who in the early 1990s decided to relocate to Juarez, Mexico and spun off its Stewart-Warner instruments business to a company named Stewart Warner Instruments Corporation. In early 1998 Stewart-Warner Instruments Corporation was sold. Its instruments assets were later bought by Datcon Instrument Company (later renamed to Maxima Technologies), which sells some of its products under the Stewart-Warner brand.
 
by Rita Jean Moran (www.thelibrarykids.com)
 
 
Source:
 
 
 
 

Tuesday, February 12, 2013

Mothman

 
 
 
 
The legend of mothman started with a sighting in Point Pleasant area of West Virginia from 15 November 1966 to 15 December 1967.  The collapse of the Silver Bridge followed the sightings and then the mothman was not seen again.  According to wikipedia:
 
On Nov. 15, 1966, two young couples from Point Pleasant, Roger and Linda Scarberry, and Steve and Mary Mallette told police they saw a large white creature whose eyes "glowed red" when the car headlights picked it up. They described it as a "flying man with ten foot wings' following their car while they were driving in an area of town known as 'the TNT area', the site of a former World War II munitions plant.[5][6]
During the next few days, other people reported similar sightings. Two volunteer firemen who sighted it said it was a "large bird with red eyes". Mason County Sheriff George Johnson commented that he believed the sightings were due to an unusually large heron he termed a "shitepoke". Contractor Newell Partridge told Johnson that when he aimed a flashlight at a creature in a nearby field its eyes glowed "like bicycle reflectors", and blamed buzzing noises from his television set and the disappearance of his German Shepherd dog on the creature.[7] Wildlife biologist Dr. Robert L. Smith at West Virginia University told reporters that descriptions and sightings all fit the Sandhill Crane, a large American crane almost as high as a man with a seven foot wingspan featuring circles of reddish coloring around the eyes, and that the bird may have wandered out of its migration route.
There were no Mothman reports in the immediate aftermath of the December 15, 1967 collapse of the Silver Bridge and the death of 46 people [8], giving rise to legends that the Mothman sightings and the bridge collapse were connected.


by Rita Jean Moran (www.thelibrarykids.com)


 
 
Sources:
 
 

Thursday, February 7, 2013

Mistletoe and the Holly King

Mistletoe is a plant associated with winter.  It is a parasitic plant that grows on trees or shrubs and absorbs water and nutrients from its host tree/shrub.  Its berries are white. 


 


A dart made of mistletoe is what is said to have killed the Nordic god, Balder. The blind god Hodr was tricked into shooting it, by Loki.


 
 

Holly is a shrub and its berries are red.  The Holly King is associated with winter as a symbolic representation of the end of the growing season (death of the Green Man) and the beginning of the winter season. 





Mistletoe is not the same as holly.  Mistletoe should not be eaten by people as it causes serious gastrointestinal upset.  However, birds are able to eat the fruits of the mistletoe.  According to wikipedia:


Mistletoe first sprouts from bird feces[citation needed] on the trunk of the tree and in its early stages of life it takes nutrients from this source.[citation needed] Species more or less completely parasitic include the leafless quintral, Tristerix aphyllus, which lives deep inside the sugar-transporting tissue of a spiny cactus, appearing only to show its tubular red flowers,[6] and the genus Arceuthobium (dwarf mistletoe; Santalaceae) which has reduced photosynthesis; as an adult, it manufactures only a small proportion of the sugars it needs from its own photosythesis but as a seedling it actively photosynthesizes until a connection to the host is established.

Both plants have a long history of usage by Celtic, Nordic, and Mediterranean people as well as used as symbolic representations for  winter.

by Rita Jean Moran (www.thelibrarykids.com)


Links:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mistletoe

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holly_King_(archetype)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holly

Saturday, February 2, 2013

Museumcache.com



I've created a new site called www.museumcache.com.   This site will list many well known and not so well known museums, ancient sites, parks, and other places to visit.  I will be including links to sites that were written about in The Library Kids book series.  As you read through the series, you can check out www.museumcache.com to see a link and plan a visit to a place written about.  Please be patient as we build the site.

Thanks,

Rita Jean Moran (www.thelibrarykids.com)

GroundHog Day

 



An old American tradition, known as Groundhog Day, is used to predict whether and early spring will come or if there will be 6 more weeks of winter.  According to wikipedia:

Groundhog Day (Pennsylvania German: Grundsaudaag, Murmeltiertag) is a day celebrated on February 2. According to folklore, if it is cloudy when a groundhog emerges from its burrow on this day, then spring will come early; if it is sunny, the groundhog will supposedly see its shadow and retreat back into its burrow, and the winter weather will continue for six more weeks.[1]

 
The groundhog known as Punxsutawney Phil,  did not see its shadow, so an early spring is predicted.


http://www.freep.com/article/20130202/FEATURES01/130202004/Groundhog-Day-What-will-Phil-forecast-?odyssey=tab%7Ctopnews%7Ctext%7CFRONTPAGE


It is also interesting to note the Celtic holiday of Imbolc (stirring of spring) was yesterday.


by Rita Jean Moran (www.thelibrarykids.com)


Sources:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Groundhog_Day

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Groundhog

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imbolc