Tag: history

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Posted by Saint Vincent and the Grenadines National Archives on Thursday, March 24, 2016

As anyone can see, the vast majority of names on this list are still commonplace in St Vincent and the Grenadines today.

The information is in a format which would enable Vincentians whose surname appears on the list to be able to search forward from 1829 to the present, hopefully, in order to discover, a little bit of their family history and the role their family may have played in the progression of the nation. For most individuals, they will quickly become frustrated by this undertaking in that the place to do this type of research is the Registry in Kingstown.

As the historian, Anatol Leopold Scott has pointed out –

Unfortunately, there you will be confronted with mostly insurmountable roadblocks in terms of incomplete or unavailable information or a demonstration of lack of interested service by many so­called civil servants

I traced some my family ancestry, at least the maternal ancestry that settled in the Grenadines, back to coastal sections of Scotland and France. It took several years of cross-comparing family records of every aunt, uncle, great uncle, great aunt, cosine and second cousin that I could find to cooperate in the project. I never once considered the St. Vincent Registry because I did not know it existed until just last week. When (if?) I have the opportunity to return to St. Vincent in the near future I will certainly give the Registry a try. I am interested in the following family names (particularly McLaren):

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How Many Inventors Does it Take To Invent a Light Bulb by Steven Dufresne (Hackaday)

Our story starts in 1761 with Ebenezer Kinnersley. In a letter to Benjamin Franklin he described experiments he did for testing if heat was produced by electricity. His power sources were electrostatically charged capacitors made with a case of bottles, or Leyden jars, batteries not having been invented yet. To get sufficient current to detect a change in temperature he needed to release all the stored charge at once through a spark gap. In one experiment (Expt. 11 in the letter) the current was sufficient to make a brass wire turn red.

Today we say that the wire became incandescent, it emitted electromagnetic radiation in the form of visible light as a result of the heat. He also arranged the experiment such that the wire was suspended with a weight at its bottom and found that it elongated by an inch when it got red-hot, the first indication that such heating can be destructive to the wire. He experimented with different diameter wires all of the same material and found that the larger ones showed no noticeable heating effect and concluded that this was due to the lower resistance of the larger ones.

TLDR; Edison did not invent the incandescent lightbulb.

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Rolling Deep with the Black Cowboys of the Mississippi Delta – Feature Shoot (Feature Shoot)

You wouldn’t know it from the films or the television shows, but the Lone Ranger was a Black man by the name of Bass Reeves. Born into slavery in Crawford County, Arkansas in 1838, Bass won his freedom during the Civil War by beating up Colonel George R. Reeves, a member of the slaveholding family.

Bass fled north, living among the Cherokee, Seminole, and Creek Indians until 1865. His knowledge of Native languages made him highly desirable to the U.S. marshals who were expanding west, and in 1875, Reeves became the first Black deputy U.S Marshall west of the Mississippi. Over a period of 32 years, Reeves nabbed 3,000 felons, and is said to have killed 14 outlaws in self-defense. By the time he died at 71 in 1910, Reeves was a legend — though his legacy was whitewashed and stolen.

Reeves is one of countless great Americans whose contributions have been rewritten, revised, or erased to fed the voracious appetite of those who craft self-aggrandizing tales to cover up their darkest sins. Yet, the beauty of history is that the truth will always out, and those who have inherited the great traditions of the past continue to practice and elevate the culture to this very day.

My son took Advanced Placement US History in High School. He learned about the white washing of the history and culture of the American West and he told me what he had learned. Shame.

The real cowboys looks like Django, not Pale Rider.

I was bothered by the title of the article, though. It should have been ROLLING DEEP WITH THE BLACK COWBOYS OF THE MISSISSIPPI DELTA. I feel it plays into the stereotype that cowboys are white.