Summer Smith (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
somethingwithturquoise) wrote in ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png)
fandomhigh2024-11-22 09:45 am
somethingwithturquoise) wrote in fandomhigh2024-11-22 09:45 am
The Weird, Wonderful, and WTF World - Friday, First Period [11/22].
"So next week," Summer announced, as the class gathered in the classroom sim in the danger shop because, again, still not unfunny, it will never cease to be funny, and she was looking pleased as punch as she leaned against the desk at the front of the classroom, "is, of course, American Thanksgiving, and while there's a lot of really weird and what the fuck things about celebrating Colonialism and indigenous genocide, there are a lot of wonderful foods to enjoy for the holiday, and I can definitely fuck with that. Thanksgiving in general has kind of been ruined for me because it's pretty much just a pissing contest between my grampa and our current president, but we don't need to go into that today.
"Today," she continued, pushing off the desk and moving toward the blackboard, and reaching up to pull down one of those projector screens with a portrait on it, "I wanna talk about this bitch, Sarah Josepha Buell Hale, aka pretty much the mother of modern Thanksgiving traditions as we know it. Like, this woman pretty much girlboss, gatekept, and gaslit her little idea for an American holiday tradition into the cultural zeitgeist, and, quite frankly? We stan a pre-Civil War womens' activist who got shit done.
"Like, before we even get into the Thanksgiving stuff, this woman wrote 'Mary Had a Little Lamb.' She's that iconic, okay?
"She was also the editor of Godey's Lady's Book, which was a really big deal at the time, like, the most widely circulated magazine of the time big deal. She was also pivotal in getting the Bunker Hill Monument, one of American's first monuments ever, constructed. She grew up in Newport, New Hampshire, and her parents were awesome because they firmly believed in equal education for all genders and made sure that Sarah could keep up with her brother in that respect. She then became a schoolteacher herself, married some lawyer, and had a bunch of kids, and then her husband just straight up and died, like, nine years into it, and she was so into this dude that she wore black for the rest of her life....although, let's be real, it could have just a convenient way to live that goth lifestyle.
"But Sarah didn't let being a newly widowed single mother of five stop her. Granted, she had some funds from her late hubby's Freemason shit, and she used that to publish a book of poetry, called The Genius of Oblivion, and if you told me before I looked into this that the person who wrote 'Mary Had a Fricken Lamb' was writing things titled that, I'd have punched you. In 1827, she published her first novel, The Northwood: Life North and South, which was not only one of the first novels about slavery, but also made her one of the first American women novelist, and the book was basically all, 'Hey, so, by the way, not only is it pretty fucking fucked up and demoralizing to the people we enslave to make them slaves, but it also does a lot of damage to the people who own slaves, because it's back-asswards and holds us back as a society as well as decent human beings, so let's stop that shit. Granted, there was still a good amount of racism in there, too, even with the anti-slavery message, but, you know, hey, this was still a good chunk of time before the Civil War itself. Let's give her props definitely hold off on that pedestal. It opened a conversation about how to contend with a divided nation that a lot of people weren't willing to tread into yet.
"Anyway, this launched her career as a successful writer and editor pretty effectively, and she also used a lot of her time to help others, especially families of sailors who were lost at sea, and generally stood as a solid example of women being more active in the workforce and being successful on their own accord...well, I mean, there was her dead husband's money and connections to help her out, but still, she was definitely a feminist force to be reckoned with, especially since in her forty year tenure as editor of Godley's, she promoted so many other women writers and helped propel them into prominence, and she also kept publishing a bunch of her own stuff, too, ending with nearly fifty volumes by the time she died. She was a huge advocate for women's education and held found Vassar College, and one of her books was pretty much an encyclopedia of awesome women throughout history. Granted, though she believed in equality, she also tended to stick to the idea that women were better suited for domestic work and into the belief that they were the arbiters of morality and wasn't into women's suffrage and instead felt women were better off being 'silent influencers' to the male voters in their lives. We're not talking about a perfect beacon of feminist beliefs here, but rather a flawed human being with complex ideas who still worked like hell to get some of the best ones out there in very important ways."
Here, Summer seemed to remember to take a breath.
"Now," she said, "onto the whole point in me lecturing you on this woman, and that's her involvement in Thanksgiving. Because that same drive for equal education and lambasting how fucked up slavery was, Sarah Hale put into her bid for Thanksgiving. At the time, Thanksgiving was mostly just a New England thing, and each state sort of had their own traditions and dates for it, and it was mostly unknown in the south and the frontiers. In 1846, Sarah got the idea that she wanted to make it a unified holiday thing all across the country, and she did not stop until she got what she wanted seventeen years later. Why was this so important to her? Well, we can talk about that later, personally I think it had a lot to do with the fact that this lady was fiercely Patriotic to the idea of a Unified United States, and Thanksgiving could be the American holiday to bring us all together, especially in the light of the Civil War. She wrote to five different presidents to convince them, and it was finally, in 1963, the letter she wrote to Lincoln that persuaded someone to give it a good, fair shot....especially as a healing balm for the wound of the Civil War. Before this, the only things celebrated nationally were Independence Day and Washington's Birthday, which, I mean, yeah, okay, but what else you got? Thanksgiving, apparently!
"In fact, in Northwood, Hale devoted an entire chapter to describing the many dishes of that have become Thanksgiving staples to this very day: roasted turkey, gravy and stuffing, pumpkin pie, cider. So on and so forth. So if you have a favorite Thanksgiving food, there's a good chance you have Sarah Hale to thank for it.
"So!" Summer concluded (finally). "That said, I'm pretty sure very few of you in this class are even technically American, so hopefully you all still managed to learn something about the country and one of its most egregious holiday traditions. Which is also a weird one, because it's based on a very sanitized version of this country's founding. So I guess we'll kind of talk about it and Thanksgiving and if there was one thing you'd spend seventeen years of your life adamently promoting enough to write letters to five different presidents or other world leaders about, what would it be? I don't know. I just wanted to talk about how Thanksgiving's even really the behemoth it is because of the woman who wrote 'Mary Had a Little Lamb.'"
"Today," she continued, pushing off the desk and moving toward the blackboard, and reaching up to pull down one of those projector screens with a portrait on it, "I wanna talk about this bitch, Sarah Josepha Buell Hale, aka pretty much the mother of modern Thanksgiving traditions as we know it. Like, this woman pretty much girlboss, gatekept, and gaslit her little idea for an American holiday tradition into the cultural zeitgeist, and, quite frankly? We stan a pre-Civil War womens' activist who got shit done.
"Like, before we even get into the Thanksgiving stuff, this woman wrote 'Mary Had a Little Lamb.' She's that iconic, okay?
"She was also the editor of Godey's Lady's Book, which was a really big deal at the time, like, the most widely circulated magazine of the time big deal. She was also pivotal in getting the Bunker Hill Monument, one of American's first monuments ever, constructed. She grew up in Newport, New Hampshire, and her parents were awesome because they firmly believed in equal education for all genders and made sure that Sarah could keep up with her brother in that respect. She then became a schoolteacher herself, married some lawyer, and had a bunch of kids, and then her husband just straight up and died, like, nine years into it, and she was so into this dude that she wore black for the rest of her life....although, let's be real, it could have just a convenient way to live that goth lifestyle.
"But Sarah didn't let being a newly widowed single mother of five stop her. Granted, she had some funds from her late hubby's Freemason shit, and she used that to publish a book of poetry, called The Genius of Oblivion, and if you told me before I looked into this that the person who wrote 'Mary Had a Fricken Lamb' was writing things titled that, I'd have punched you. In 1827, she published her first novel, The Northwood: Life North and South, which was not only one of the first novels about slavery, but also made her one of the first American women novelist, and the book was basically all, 'Hey, so, by the way, not only is it pretty fucking fucked up and demoralizing to the people we enslave to make them slaves, but it also does a lot of damage to the people who own slaves, because it's back-asswards and holds us back as a society as well as decent human beings, so let's stop that shit. Granted, there was still a good amount of racism in there, too, even with the anti-slavery message, but, you know, hey, this was still a good chunk of time before the Civil War itself. Let's give her props definitely hold off on that pedestal. It opened a conversation about how to contend with a divided nation that a lot of people weren't willing to tread into yet.
"Anyway, this launched her career as a successful writer and editor pretty effectively, and she also used a lot of her time to help others, especially families of sailors who were lost at sea, and generally stood as a solid example of women being more active in the workforce and being successful on their own accord...well, I mean, there was her dead husband's money and connections to help her out, but still, she was definitely a feminist force to be reckoned with, especially since in her forty year tenure as editor of Godley's, she promoted so many other women writers and helped propel them into prominence, and she also kept publishing a bunch of her own stuff, too, ending with nearly fifty volumes by the time she died. She was a huge advocate for women's education and held found Vassar College, and one of her books was pretty much an encyclopedia of awesome women throughout history. Granted, though she believed in equality, she also tended to stick to the idea that women were better suited for domestic work and into the belief that they were the arbiters of morality and wasn't into women's suffrage and instead felt women were better off being 'silent influencers' to the male voters in their lives. We're not talking about a perfect beacon of feminist beliefs here, but rather a flawed human being with complex ideas who still worked like hell to get some of the best ones out there in very important ways."
Here, Summer seemed to remember to take a breath.
"Now," she said, "onto the whole point in me lecturing you on this woman, and that's her involvement in Thanksgiving. Because that same drive for equal education and lambasting how fucked up slavery was, Sarah Hale put into her bid for Thanksgiving. At the time, Thanksgiving was mostly just a New England thing, and each state sort of had their own traditions and dates for it, and it was mostly unknown in the south and the frontiers. In 1846, Sarah got the idea that she wanted to make it a unified holiday thing all across the country, and she did not stop until she got what she wanted seventeen years later. Why was this so important to her? Well, we can talk about that later, personally I think it had a lot to do with the fact that this lady was fiercely Patriotic to the idea of a Unified United States, and Thanksgiving could be the American holiday to bring us all together, especially in the light of the Civil War. She wrote to five different presidents to convince them, and it was finally, in 1963, the letter she wrote to Lincoln that persuaded someone to give it a good, fair shot....especially as a healing balm for the wound of the Civil War. Before this, the only things celebrated nationally were Independence Day and Washington's Birthday, which, I mean, yeah, okay, but what else you got? Thanksgiving, apparently!
"In fact, in Northwood, Hale devoted an entire chapter to describing the many dishes of that have become Thanksgiving staples to this very day: roasted turkey, gravy and stuffing, pumpkin pie, cider. So on and so forth. So if you have a favorite Thanksgiving food, there's a good chance you have Sarah Hale to thank for it.
"So!" Summer concluded (finally). "That said, I'm pretty sure very few of you in this class are even technically American, so hopefully you all still managed to learn something about the country and one of its most egregious holiday traditions. Which is also a weird one, because it's based on a very sanitized version of this country's founding. So I guess we'll kind of talk about it and Thanksgiving and if there was one thing you'd spend seventeen years of your life adamently promoting enough to write letters to five different presidents or other world leaders about, what would it be? I don't know. I just wanted to talk about how Thanksgiving's even really the behemoth it is because of the woman who wrote 'Mary Had a Little Lamb.'"
Re: Class Activity: Discussion - WWWTF, 11/22.
And let's face it, as a kid she mostly preferred Christmas. Even if the earliest memory of it was in a photo set with empty boxes and smiling with Natasha.
"I don't have a lot to add to this conversation other than I prefer canned cranberry sauce with the ridges compared to the one with all the liquid and berries in it."
Re: Class Activity: Discussion - WWWTF, 11/22.
Re: Class Activity: Discussion - WWWTF, 11/22.