Noontime

[magid]

• out in T-shirt weather
  
• a lecture by Margot Minardi, a Ph.D. candidate in history at Harvard, about how some 1850s Bostonians used the Revolutionary War to further abolitionist goals. This was much more visual than previous lectures, with lots of slides.
  
  In particular, we looked at two Revolutionary era images, an engraving by Paul Revere of the so-called Boston Massacre (with a touch of you-are-there-ness, since it happened mere blocks from where the lecture was), and a painting by John Trumbull of the death of John Warren at the battle of Bunker Hill. Both images were created more to help political causes than to be an accurate historical record of events. The former whitewashes actions by a mob to become unilateral violence, while the former shows a hero being acknowledged by people on both sides, whatever the outcome of the battle.
  
  In contrast, this mid-1800s depiction of the Boston Massacre not only shows the mob and confusion, but acknowledges that the first person killed was Crispus Attucks, a black man. There was another picture that echoed the Trumbull picture, but with a black man carrying his own gun, rather than a servant of a white man (look at the lower right corner of the Trumbull painting).
  
  In the mid-1800s there were a number of things happening. The last Revolutionary veterans were dying, and there was a wave of memorials (rather like WWII for us). There was the compromise of 1850, which lead to many blacks moving to Canada, or (free blacks) trying to have their citizenship acknowledged (by being allowed to be part of local militias, for instance). And there was Dred Scott, which put another stumbling block in abolitionists' ways. In response, there was a commemoration of the Boston Massacre, explicitly as a protest of the Dred Scott decision.
  
  Of course, abolitionists were using the Revolutionary War in their rhetoric, saying that the process started with the revolution was not yet completed until men of all color were equal (and many abolitionists were also radicals about that wacky idea, gender equality, too). Other groups were using the same historical events to their own ends as well (but that was not the focus of this talk).
  
• a street musician playing the Sesame Street theme song on a flute
  
• a falcon playing at pigeon hunting on the Common
  
• a walk over the frozen pond in the Garden

Neon signs in a restaurant: Soups Walkabouts Sandwiches. I'd love to order a trip in the Australian outback, but I suspect that's not what they're offering.