Brave Steps Forward... with audio.
1. Mary Lincoln learns to cook.
On New Year’s Eve in 1846, Abraham Lincoln purchased Miss Leslie’s Cookery, a cookbook, for 87 cents.
It was a gift for Mary, his wife of four years, who had grown up in a wealthy Kentucky slave-owning family and had not learned to cook.
First published in 1837, with many subsequent editions, Miss Leslie’s Cookery was the most popular cookbook of the nineteenth century, selling more than 150,000 copies and remaining in print until 1890; and to say it is comprehensive is an understatement.
With a preface that warns men not to marry a woman who is “incapable of distinguishing bad eatables from good ones,” the cookbook offers more than five hundred pages of recipes for every kind of food you have ever heard of, including many that you probably haven’t: “Common Jumbles; Election Cake; Fine Partridge Pie; Syllabub; Calf’s Head Soup; Chitterlings; Quince Cordial.”
Miss Leslie also includes dozens of recipes for homemade beers, liquors, medicines and perfumes, making it a perfect book for Mary Lincoln and all the other young, upper-class brides who grew up with servants rather than responsibilities, but then found themselves strapped with household duties as a newly married woman.
“[My book] has made practical housewives of young ladies who have entered into married life with no other acquirements than a few showy accomplishments.
“Gentlemen…have told me of great improvements in the family-table, after presenting their wives with this manual of domestic cookery; and that, after a morning devoted to the fatigues of business, they no longer find themselves subjected to the annoyance of an ill-dressed dinner.” — Eliza Leslie, Philadelphia, January 16, 1851
Heaven forbid that the future president should sit down to ‘an ill-dressed dinner!’
Biographers say Mary Lincoln prepared meals in the Lincolns’ Springfield home on an open hearth in the early years and later, on a modern, free-standing stove.
Lincoln’s favorite food was cornbread and Mary is said to have followed Miss Leslie’s recipe to a T.
Eliza Leslie also wrote articles for magazines as well as fiction and nonfiction works, including an annual gift book that included works by Edgar Allen Poe, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and Ralph Waldo Emerson.
My goodness!
An accomplished and successful woman such as Eliza Leslie should be well-known!
So, do your part.
Make some of Miss Leslie’s eggnog for your New Year’s Eve party and tell all your friends where you got the recipe.
“Beat separately the yolks and whites of six eggs.
Stir the yolks into a quart of rich milk, or thin cream, and add half a pound of sugar.
Then mix in half a pint of rum or brandy.
Flavour it with a grated nutmeg.
Lastly, stir in gently the beaten whites of three eggs.
It should be mixed in a china bowl.”
2. Sir Francis Drake and the Saint Augustine Map, 1589.
In 1585, as a part of an undeclared war between England and France, Queen Elizabeth I placed Sir Francis Drake in command of a fleet of ships filled with infantrymen and ordered him to attack Spain’s overseas commercial centers.
Drake's fleet of seven large ships and twenty-two smaller vessels sailed from Plymouth on September 14th, 1585.
After attacking two cities on the northwest coast of Spain, Drake plundered and burned the city of Santiago, in the Cape Verde Islands off the west coast of Africa.
He then set sail across the Atlantic, reaching the Caribbean on New Year’s Day 1586.
There, Drake plundered and burned Santiago, Cartagena, and St. Augustine and extracted ransoms from each.
When Drake returned to London in July 1586, he was hailed as a hero and a publisher began preparations for a book describing Drake’s magnificent adventure.
As a part of the book project, the publisher commissioned Baptista Boazio, an acclaimed Italian map maker then living and working in London, to make a series of engraved, hand-colored maps illustrating the route of Drake's travels.
Boazio’s engravings of the attacks on Santiago, Santo Domingo, Cartagena, and St. Augustine are rich in color and rendered in exacting detail; and they are historically significant because they are the first published plans of these cities.
The Boazio map of Drake’s attack on Saint Augustine, on May 28-29, 1586, shown above, is especially meaningful to Americans because it is the first map of a European settlement in lands that would become the United States.
Look closely.
Drake’s fleet at anchor is depicted with intricate drawings of tiny ships; and the English infantry’s attack on the city of St. Augustine, upper left, is depicted with little soldiers hoisting tiny weapons.
Meanwhile, a large blue dolphin swims in the sea.
Two copies of Boazio’s map of St. Augustine are known to exist and they are treasures. One is held in the State of Florida archives and the other is in the Rare Book collection of the Library of Congress.
3. Louise Boyd and Greenland, WWII.
When Nazi Germany conquered Denmark in April 1940, local leaders of Greenland, a Danish colony, invoked special provisions of Danish law to declare Greenland a self-ruled territory.
This action was taken in coordination with the US; and throughout World War II, Greenland was considered a US protectorate, disappointing Britain, Canada, Norway and Germany, who had each shown an interest in establishing military bases there.
The Greenland bases would be American, and they would include weather monitoring stations and radio relay stations that facilitated trans-Atlantic shipping and military operations.
This US effort was made easier by Louise Arner Boyd, a wealthy California heiress to a gold rush fortune who had led seven self-financed expeditions, staffed with scientists, to Greenland and the Arctic in the 1920s and 1930s and had amassed an extensive set of maps, data, photographs and movie films of the region.
Boyd shared her materials with the US government as the US entry into World War II loomed; and, in 1941, she traveled back to the region with a group of scientists to investigate polar atmospheric conditions and possible aircraft landing sites.
Boyd’s work in the war years earned accolades from the US government and her photographs, now nearly one hundred years old, are currently used by climate scientists as a baseline for assessing changes in Greenland caused by climate change.
This work would be a noteworthy achievement for any man; but the fact that it was done by a woman nicknamed ‘the girl who tamed the Arctic,’ who was pressed with reporters’ questions about wearing pants and powdering her nose, makes it all the more remarkable.
4. Norman Prince and the Lafayette Escadrille.
He had trained as a pilot under a pseudonym to avoid detection by his well-connected father and obtained his pilot’s license in 1911, just eight years after the Wright Brothers’ historic first flight.
Aviation was then the new sport among young Ivy League elites who could afford to buy an aircraft and take private flying lessons; and the burgeoning war in Europe seemed the perfect opportunity to put their new skills to good use.
For Norman Prince, a young Harvard-trained lawyer working in Chicago, the war in Europe was a personal matter.
His family, long residents of Massachusetts, owned a villa in France, and Prince spoke the language fluently.
In January 1915, five months after the war had broken out, Prince sailed to France, where he persuaded French military authorities to allow him to form a squadron of American flyers that would serve under the French air corps.
The American squadron would be called the Lafayette Escadrille and thirty-eight young American men would join.
The squadron began operations in April 1916, flying French aircraft without parachutes.
Prince would fly almost daily for the next six months, logging one hundred twenty-two missions and downing five German aircraft.
But it came to an end for him in October 1916.
Prince was killed when his aircraft crashed on his return from a bombing raid over Germany, making him one of the first Americans to die in World War I.
He was twenty-nine years old.
“He has been mentioned a number of times in dispatches for his activity in air fighting and was considered a brilliant and courageous pilot.” -- New York Times, October 15, 1916
Over the next year, ten other American pilots in the Lafayette Escadrille would also perish.
Prince received the highest military honors from the French government and was laid to rest in an elaborate tomb in Washington’s National Cathedral.
5. Hugo Reid, the Scotch Paisano of Rancho Santa Anita, California.
When twenty-one-year-old Hugo Reid, a Scottish immigrant, first visited Los Angeles in 1832, he found a Paradise: low mountains forming a basin near the sea, lakes fed by artesian wells, valley wetlands, a terrain teeming with wildlife, and vineyards, grain fields and cattle herds that had belonged to the Franciscan missions of Spain.
The land was populated by the Gabrieleño people, an ancient tribe that had lived there for ten thousand years.
They had been under the control of the Spanish missions; but at the time of Reid’s visit, they were governed by Mexico, a newly independent nation.
Reid settled there, becoming a Mexican citizen, and he married a Gabrieleño woman.
They settled on a twenty-one square mile tract of land, called the Rancho Santa Anita, that, in Spanish times, had been owned by the Mission San Gabriel.
Reid built an adobe house on the land and became a rancher, and he became known as the Scotch Paisano.
[His tract is now the cities of Arcadia, Monrovia, Sierra Madre, Pasadena and San Marino.]
Reid might have been an obscure footnote in California history. Subsequent owners of his land, Alfred Chapman and “Lucky” Baldwin, made big splashes in Los Angeles during their time.
But Reid’s contribution to Los Angeles history is much more significant: In 1852, two years after California became America’s thirty-first state, he wrote a series of twenty-two letters that were published in the Los Angeles Star newspaper.
They describe, in great detail, the language and culture of the Gabrieleño people and their suffering as their lands had passed in quick succession from Spanish to Mexican and then US control, a process that had occurred in just a few decades.
Each conquering nation had impressed its own rules of order on the Gabrieleño people; and by the time Reid wrote his letters, most had died or fled the Los Angeles area, while others had “passed” into white culture.
Reid’s letters were republished in book form several times.
They are the story of loss.
They offer a rare and valuable insight into a tribe of Native Americans now thought to have no more than two thousand descendants.
When you next visit the Los Angeles County Arboretum and Botanic Garden, take a look at Reid's restored adobe.
He was a good man.
6. On this date in 1903…
The Wright Brothers took their first flight, on the beach at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina.
… from Orville Wright’s diary:
“When we got up, a wind of between 20 and 25 miles was blowing from the north.
After running the engine and propellers a few minutes to get them in working order, I got on the machine at 10:35 for the first trial. The wind, according to our anemometers at this time, was blowing a little over 20 miles (corrected) 27 miles according to the Government anemometer at Kitty Hawk.
On slipping the rope the machine started off increasing in speed to probably 7 or 8 miles. The machine lifted from the truck just as it was entering on the fourth rail. Mr. Daniels took a picture just as it left the tracks.
I found the control of the front rudder quite difficult on account of its being balanced too near the center and thus had a tendency to turn itself when started so that the rudder was turned too far on one side and then too far on the other.
As a result the machine would rise suddenly to about 10 ft. and then as suddenly, on turning the rudder, dart for the ground.
A sudden dart when out about 100 feet from the end of the tracks ended the flight.
Time about 12 seconds (not known exactly as watch was not promptly stopped).”
Five years after this first flight, the Wright Brothers demonstrated a more advanced model of their aircraft for the US Army Signal Corps, which was then in need of a military aircraft for a new air corps.
Film of the 1908 Wright test flight at Fort Myer, Virginia, is the oldest film held in the Library of Congress. You can see the film here.
7. Buzz Aldrin takes communion on the Moon.
On Sunday, July 20, 1969, Apollo 11 astronaut Buzz Aldrin took communion on the Moon while onboard the Eagle, the lunar landing module, just before Neil Armstrong and he set foot on the lunar surface.
He wrote about his experience a year later.
A Presbyterian elder, Aldrin said the communion was his way to express his belief that the lunar mission was a part of “God’s eternal plan for Man,” noting that other NASA astronauts shared in this belief.
“We wanted to express our feeling that what man was doing in this mission transcended electronics and computers and rockets.”
With the help of his pastor, Aldrin packed a small bit of bread and wine in plastic packets and borrowed a small silver chalice from his church.
All were packed in his ‘personal preference kit,’ along with a slip of paper on which he had written a Bible verse that he would recite during the sacrament.
Aldrin’s communion took place just before a scheduled meal period.
“So I unstowed the elements in their flight packets. I put them and the scripture reading on the little table in front of the abort guidance-system computer.
I poured the wine into the chalice our church had given me… It was interesting to think that the very first liquid ever poured on the moon, and the first food eaten there, were communion elements.”
He later regretted the communion.
“Perhaps if I had it to do over again, I would not choose to celebrate communion.
Although it was a deeply meaningful experience for me, it was a Christian sacrament, and we had come to the moon in the name of all mankind — be they Christians, Jews, Muslims, animists, agnostics, or atheists. — Aldrin, 2009
8. Republican Senator Howard Baker turns against Nixon, 1973.
On June 27, 1973, the Senate Watergate Committee took testimony from former White House Counsel John Dean.
It began with Dean’s reading of a 245-page prepared statement that described a series of events that connected President Nixon to a criminal conspiracy of corruption and obstruction of justice.
Senator Howard Baker, the ranking Republican on the committee and a loyal Nixon supporter, had met secretly with Nixon in the Oval Office four months before in a strategy planning session.
In that meeting, Nixon had expressed his desire to avoid the appearance of a White House cover-up, leading Baker to conclude that Nixon was blameless in the Watergate affair.
So, when the time came for members of the committee to question Dean, Baker intended to show that Dean’s testimony implicated only Nixon’s aides and not Nixon and was based solely on circumstantial evidence.
Both Baker and Nixon thought that the public would soon lose interest in the Watergate matter if no direct evidence of Nixon’s guilt could be found.
So, when Baker asked Dean his famous question — “What did the President know and when did he know it?” — he was seeking to derail Dean’s effort to connect Nixon with criminal conduct.
But Dean’s response was shocking.
Dean said that Nixon and he had discussed the Watergate break-in and cover-up thirty-five times, including discussions about clemency for those who had planned and conducted the break-in and payments of hush money.
This response shattered Baker’s illusions about Nixon’s innocence.
Dispirited, Baker pressed for more information in the unfolding committee hearings, but instead of seeking to protect Nixon, Baker sought to uncover the whole truth.
Baker explained the evolution of his thinking in this 1992 interview:
“I believed that it (the Senate hearing) was a political ploy of the Democrats, that it would come to nothing…
But a few weeks into that, it began to dawn on me that there was more to it than I thought, and more to it than I liked.”
Baker’s careful and detailed questioning of witnesses throughout the remainder of the committee hearings won him national acclaim and created for him a distinguished and lasting legacy.
Republicans seeking a distinguished and lasting legacy would be wise to follow Baker’s example.
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Thanks for reading. We’ll be back with a photo collection on Wednesday.
— Brenda