A charcoal iron furnace has been restored at the 696-acre Pine Grove Furnace State Park in mountainous Cumberland County, Pa. This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic license. GARDNERS, Pa. – Pine Grove Furnace State Park and the Appalachian Trail Museum are preparing for two straight weekends of outdoor events and family programming – National Get Outdoors Day on Saturday, June 11, and the First Appalachian Trail Festival June 18-19.
Pine Grove Furnace State Park, recently named the 2010 State Park of the Year, the South Mountain Partnership, and the Appalachian Trail Conservancy are sponsoring National Get Outdoors Day to provide outdoor and education opportunities for the entire family. Events for the day begin at 8 a.m. with a half marathon and 5K run to support the Friends of Pine Grove Furnace, a nonprofit organization that helps promote volunteerism and assist with events at the park. Other events include trail hikes to local scenic vistas and historical sites, a wildflower walk, a historical scavenger hunt and kayaking for beginners.
Lunch will be available at the Central Pennsylvania Conservancy’s newly renovated Ironmaster’s Mansion. Meals will include hamburgers, hotdogs, sloppy joes, potatoes salad, watermelon, desert and drink for only $7.
“The afternoon of National Get Outdoors Day will feature the South Mountain Ramble as part of the South Mountain Speaker Series,” said Jason Zimmerman, manager of Pine Grove Furnace State Park. “This will be a fun interactive 1.5-mile hike for the whole family that will explore the area’s rich history. Topics will include local Native American history, the Underground Railroad in South Mountain, the South Mountain Iron Industry, a local history of the natural world, Appalachian Trail Balderdash and history at the Appalachian Trail Museum, and the history of Camp Michaux.”
Registration is required for all events and, with the exception of the half marathon and 5K run, are free. To register, visit the DCNR Calendar of Events for Pine Grove Furnace State Park at www.dcnr.state.pa.us or call the Park Office at 717-486-7174.
The Appalachian Trail Museum will hold its first festival on June 18-19 at the park. “The festival will celebrate hiker culture and feature a new traveling exhibit developed by the museum,” Zimmerman said. The kick-off for the festival will be the inaugural Appalachian Trail Hall of Fame Banquet on the evening of June 17, at Allenberry Resort in Boiling Springs. At the banquet, the first class of six honorees will be inducted into the Appalachian Trail Hall of Fame, which will be located in the museum’s building at Pine Grove Furnace State Park. The festival will feature a hiking program, music, storytelling, crafts, competitions and history programs. There also will be a variety of activities for children on both days. Additional information on the Appalachian Trail Museum and the festival weekend events can be found at www.atmuseum.org.
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A charcoal iron furnace has been restored at the 696-acre Pine Grove Furnace State Park in mountainous Cumberland County, Pa. This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic license.
Ken Burns and Sam Waterston join arms with costumed interpreters of Old Sturbridge Village. Image courtesy of Old Sturbridge Village. STURBRIDGE, Mass. – Documentary filmmaker Ken Burns and Old Sturbridge Village presented award-winning actor Sam Waterston with the fourth annual Ken Burns Lifetime Achievement Award at a recent fund-raising dinner at the living history museum.
More than 200 people attended the benefit, which raised approximately $28,000 for the museum.
The Ken Burns Lifetime Achievement Award is presented jointly by Ken Burns and Old Sturbridge Village each year to an individual who has made a significant impact on the arts through projects related to history. Last year’s award was given to Pulitzer Prize-winning author and presidential historian Doris Kearns Goodwin, and the 2009 award went to actress Laura Linney in recognition of her portrayal of Abigail Adams in the HBO series John Adams. Old Sturbridge Village presented the first lifetime achievement award to Ken Burns himself in 2008 in honor of his many award-winning documentary films.
Although he is best known for his role as district attorney Jack McCoy on NBC’s Law & Order, Waterston is one of the industry’s most versatile actors, winning Emmy, Golden Globe, and Screen Actors Guild awards, as well as an Academy Award nomination for his role as a journalist in the 1984 film The Killing Fields. Waterston portrayed Abraham Lincoln in the Tony Award-winning play, Abe Lincoln in Illinois, in Gore Vidal’s miniseries, Lincoln, and he voiced the role of Lincoln in Ken Burns’s acclaimed documentary, The Civil War, which was recently rebroadcast on PBS to mark the 150th anniversary of the start of that war.
Burns, whose many other documentaries include the PBS series Baseball, The War, and The National Parks: America’s Best Idea, made his first film about Old Sturbridge Village as a college student in 1975. Burns is currently producing and directing a number of projects, including the much-anticipated PBS series Prohibition, set to debut in the fall of 2011.
Waterston’s distinguished career has included appearances in such varied presentations as Shakespeare in the Park to Saturday Night Live, giving him the opportunity to perform a wide range of roles.
Burns, who has been making films for more than 30 years, is perhaps the most critically acclaimed documentary filmmaker in the country. According to the late historian Stephen Ambrose, “more Americans get their history from Ken Burns than any other source.”
Burns’s films have received dozens of major awards, including 12 Emmy Awards and two Oscar nominations. His 1990 series The Civil War captured the nation’s imagination, and as noted by the Los Angeles Times, “gave people a new way of looking at still photographs, which freeze a moment in time but which he animated by zooming in, or scanning over them, the technique now called the “Ken Burns effect.”
Burns notes that his first film, a 28-minute work featuring Old Sturbridge Village entitled Working in Rural New England, inspired him to pursue other historical subjects throughout his career.
“I still remember every shot of that film. In the very last scene, I did a pan across a painting and literally found what I would spend the next 36 years doing. I began my professional life with that project. It’s how I learned how to write a proposal, stay on budget and speak in public. My interest in history was born at Old Sturbridge Village.”
Old Sturbridge Village, one of the oldest and largest living history museums in the country, celebrates New England life in the 1830s. The museum, famous for its costumed interpreters, has 59 historic buildings on 200 acres, three water-powered mills, two covered bridges, a working farm with heritage breed animals, and a stagecoach that visitors can ride. For details go to www.osv.org or call 1-800-SEE-1830.
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Ken Burns and Sam Waterston join arms with costumed interpreters of Old Sturbridge Village. Image courtesy of Old Sturbridge Village.
Toadlena Trading Post sells the work of Navajo weaver Clara Sherman, who died last year at age 96. Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons. FARMINGTON, N.M. (AP) – The trading post is an icon of the American West: The hand-built wooden structure nestled among hills, or standing alone at a wide spot in the road, a place where American Indians could trade their wares for food, household items or weapons.
Some of those icons still stand on the Navajo Nation and surrounding areas, and a handful still operate much as they did more than 100 years ago.
A newer method of marketing, however, has taken some traders by storm, changing forever the way trading posts – historically operated by non-natives – and traders view commerce.
For a population whose traditional livelihood centered on herding sheep and weaving rugs, Internet-based business can be a blessing or a curse. And for those who embrace it, the whole world is literally at their fingertips as the global community shrinks and becomes more accessible.
“It’s just like any other business,” Farmington businessman David John said. “People who weave, now they can sell their products around the world. When they sell on the Internet, it opens up a whole new variety of ways to sell, to better themselves.”
Not all are Internet savvy, however. About 40 percent of residents on the sprawling, 27,000-square-mile reservation still live in primitive homes without running water or electricity. Internet access is simply a luxury few can afford.
That’s not always a bad thing, said John, who also serves as chairman of the city of Farmington’s Community Relations Commission. Many of the more traditional artists or entrepreneurs prefer to do business face-to-face.
“A lot of people want to stick with their own traditional way of doing things from home,” John said. “A lot of people don’t want to use computers or advance with cell phones, technology, email and that kind of thing. They’d rather just use a simple phone.”
The World Wide Web, though enriching economic opportunities for those who have access to it, also is widening the gap between the haves and the have-nots.
But even as technology rushes forward, many businesses owned by Navajos or located on the reservation still are hesitant to join the race.
Business is booming at the Toadlena Trading Post.
Located at the end of a dirt road 13 miles off the beaten path, the century-old trading post still sees a steady stream of customers.
Housed in the original building, which opened in 1909, owner Mark Winter operates the trading post much as his predecessors did. He accepts rugs from a limited population of Navajo weavers and offers, in exchange, cash or store credit.
Winter, who took over the lease at the trading post in 1997, buys rugs from between 150 and 175 weavers, all of whom live within 12 miles of the trading post and have local ancestry, he said. About a quarter of his customers don’t speak any English.
“We’re the bank. We cash government checks. We do a little of everything,” Winter said. “It’s all unsecured, all uncollateralized. It’s a negative cash flow, but with a lot of positive results.”
The trading post and adjacent Weaving Museum are nestled in the small community of Toadlena, nudging the rolling hills and surrounded by trees. Stepping into the trading post is much like taking a step into the past.
Saddles hang from the ceiling inside the main room, and groceries and cigarettes line the shelves behind the cash register. Additional rooms are filled with jewelry, dolls and piles of hand-woven rugs.
But Winter doesn’t conduct all his business inside the store. The Toadlena Trading Post also has an online presence, where customers from around the globe can view and purchase authentic Navajo rugs. The website, www.toadlenatradingpost.com, went live in 2004.
Straddling the traditional and modern worlds presents Winter with unique business challenges.
“The website serves much more as information for people,” he said. “It’s a wide world out there, so you have to realize the potential of the Internet, but we like the old world here.”
Winter, who lives in a mobile home outside the trading post, has Internet access via satellite, but few of the local residents have computers. Most have a hard time finding cell phone service.
Weavers who are Internet savvy sometimes sell on popular sites like eBay, but many who are still spinning their own wool before spending months in front of the loom simply don’t want to bother with the hassle of marketing online, said Linda Larouche, Winter’s soon-to-be bride who works by his side at the trading post.
“We’re at a crossroads between tradition and cyberspace,” she said. “I can’t imagine living with my foot in two worlds.”
Those who trade their rugs in Toadlena don’t have to worry about that. They still do business the same way generations before them did, yet their rugs find owners worldwide.
Winter is the first to admit that he doesn’t capitalize on the possibilities the Internet presents.
“It’s a way of reaching out to a broader market,” he said, “but just because the capability is there doesn’t mean we have to use it. We’re not living up to the potential.”
Winter has plans to upgrade the trading post’s online presence, including offering news about the small weaving community and alerts when weavers have finished long-anticipated rugs.
His main method of advertising now is a handful of billboards spread out along U.S. 491 between Shiprock and Gallup.
Trading posts were started as a way for artisans to get cash, credit or loans for their wares, and that model still works, Winter said. Customers come from all over the country to buy authentic Navajo art, and the personal experience is better than typing in a credit card number and rolling through an online checkout lane.
“Rugs are so textual,” Larouche said. “People need to feel them, to touch them. We get a lot of phone calls from people who see the website, but they want directions on how to get here. They want to see the environment where these rugs were made, have a chance to meet the weavers.”
“The website is the impetus for people to come and visit,” she said. “It’s nice to present it to the world on the Internet, but it’s such an intimate experience that you have to be here.”
Online customers, though few, spend big, Winter said. When people buy on the Internet, it’s usually in excess of $10,000.
Those customers are missing out, Larouche said.
“People think we’re out in the middle of nowhere, but business is nonstop,” she said. “It’s off the beaten path, so people who come meant to be here.”
Francis Mitchell doesn’t own a cell phone. He doesn’t have Internet. He owns a computer, but he doesn’t know where the power switch is.
Mitchell, a practicing Navajo medicine man, has business around the globe, yet he never has sent or received an email message.
How does he do it?
“Word-of-mouth,” he said. “It’s what you do, who you know. That’s what gets things going.”
Mitchell’s lack of technology comes from a cultural belief that medicine men should not advertise their services, he said.
“It’s not supposed to be a competition,” he said. “It’s not a way to recruit business, a way to identify yourself.”
Mitchell, who grew up in the Midwest and served in the Marines during the Vietnam War, returned to his homeland as an adult. He learned the Navajo language and studied medicine after returning to the reservation in 1969 at age 25.
“I picked up the language, the culture by word of mouth,” he said. “Medicine is an attempt to assist, so modern technology is not part of it.”
Mitchell’s business started to pick up more than 25 years ago when Navajo clients he treated intermarried with members of other tribes, he said. Those clients spread the word about Mitchell’s services, and he started getting calls from Canada and Europe.
“There was no Web back then and very few computers,” he said. “Word of mouth opened the door.”
Mitchell eventually joined the International Association of Shamanic Practitioners and built a reputation that spans the globe. He gets patients from across the country, Europe and Australia.
He gets all his business by waiting for his home phone to ring.
People like Mitchell face both advantages and disadvantages by not embracing modern technology, John said. Although he is selling a service rather than a product, Mitchell may be losing business by not having an online presence.
“As far as selling around the country, this is modern time, and everyone else is using the Internet,” John said. “This is helping them. They’ve got to do it.”
Those who choose to run an online store or employ another Internet business model may find greater ease and flexibility when it comes to doing business, John said. Internet shopping can occur without a store attendant, which cuts out the need for artisans to travel to far-away cities to market their wares or spend hours selling at flea markets.
“If they’re on the Internet, they can go back to their weaving or herding sheep while their product is on the market,” John said.
Another advantage to doing business on the Internet is receiving payments in cash. Traditional business people, Mitchell included, sometimes accept payments in goods, such as food or livestock.
On the flip side, however, artists who choose to limit the visibility of their products by keeping their businesses off-line may have better success at controlling copycat artists, John said. Serious artists usually offer a certificate of authenticity with their wares; sellers at some of the bigger events must get their wares authenticated by jurists before they can sell.
“In general, the Internet can help these people as long as they have a strong hold on who they’re selling to,” John said. “But even on the buyer’s end, if you buy over the Internet, you might find out that it’s fake.”
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Information from: The Daily Times, http://www.daily-times.com
Copyright 2011 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
AP-WF-05-18-11 0807GMT
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Toadlena Trading Post sells the work of Navajo weaver Clara Sherman, who died last year at age 96. Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.
ALBANY, N.Y. (AP) – Important museum pieces will be protected under rules adopted by the New York state Board of Regents.
The Regents, who are responsible for the general supervision of all educational activities within the state, approved new rules that would restrict the sale of museum pieces as facilities face continued hard fiscal times.
The rules would require proceeds from sales to be used for acquisitions and would also seek to keep museum relics and pieces in the public domain even if a museum shuts down.
Former Assemblyman Richard Brodsky of Westchester said the rules will prohibit important cultural pieces being sold to private collectors in order to pay for operating expenses.
Brodsky, now a fellow at Wagner College on Staten Island, calls this an extraordinary moment in New York’s cultural history.
Brodsky and the legislature has sought the protections since the recession cut into museums’ revenues.
Copyright 2011 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
Howard Pyle’s fanciful painting of William ‘Captain’ Kidd burying treasure. Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.
LONDON (AP) – Many know of Captain Kidd, the Scottish-born buccaneer who terrorized the Indian Ocean and was hanged as a pirate at London’s Execution Dock.
Fewer know of his services to the British crown, his royal seal of approval, and the powerful, well-connected noblemen who Kidd believed double-crossed him.
A new exhibit at the Museum of London Docklands argues that Kidd’s career wasn’t as black-and-white as the skull-and-crossbones, and invites people to ask whether the 17th century adventurer was made a scapegoat for other men’s schemes.
Curator Tom Wareham said he wanted to highlight the degree to which corrupt lawmakers, conniving noblemen and greedy London merchants all played their part in funding, outfitting and organizing pirate expeditions.
There was little doubt about Kidd’s guilt, Wareham said. But those who backed him shared in it too.
“They are guilty,” he said. “Of avarice, basically.”
The beginning of William Kidd’s story remains unclear. The famed seaman was born in Greenock, Scotland around 1645 and moved to New York – then merely an outpost of Britain’s budding empire – sometime thereafter. By 1689 he was cruising the Caribbean as a British gun-for-fire against the French.
It was a respectable enough life. The seasoned sea captain was routinely called upon by authorities in New York and Massachusetts to help clear their coasts of enemy ships. He married one of New York’s wealthiest widows and even lent equipment to help build the city’s famed Trinity Church.
But his involvement in a shadowy get-rich-quick scheme – backed by some of the most powerful men in Britain – would prove his undoing.
Kidd’s mission was to prowl the Indian Ocean, hunting pirates and plundering French vessels. Several well-connected noblemen were involved, including Lord Somers, who arranged to get Kidd a royal seal of approval, and Lord Bellamont, who helped organize the expedition and would later serve as governor of New York.
But the plan was of shaky legality, and in any case things went wrong from the start. Kidd set sail on Feb. 27, 1696, but his crew made rude gestures at a warship as they floated down the River Thames. The Royal Navy, unamused, pressed many of them into service, which meant Kidd had to make a lengthy detour to New York to recruit more sailors.
He made it to waters off East Africa, but the constraints set on him by his sponsors meant he needed to earn cash quickly. Kidd unsuccessfully attacked a convoy of Muslim pilgrims from Africa and preyed on Indian Ocean shipping, infuriating the subcontinent’s Mughal rulers, with whom the British East India Company was doing a lucrative business.
Two of his captures were French-flagged ships – legitimate targets, from his point of view – but he was already being denounced as a pirate for abusing natives, torturing sailors, and clashing with allied vessels. His relationship with his crew was dreadful; at one point he mortally wounded his gunner, William Moore, by smashing his head with a bucket.
Meanwhile, Kidd’s backers, hit by allegations of corruption, were falling out of favor. By the time Kidd arrived in New York to seek Bellamont’s protection, he had already become too much of a liability. Bellamont turned him in.
Kidd claimed he’d acted lawfully, but documents showing that two of the vessels he’d struck were French disappeared before his trial. From his prison, Kidd claimed that he’d been set up and sold out.
“Some great men would have me dye for Solving their Honor,” he wrote.
Still, Kidd claimed to have a trump card, saying in a letter that he’d hidden treasure away at a secret location in the Caribbean, a stash which he valued at 100,000 pounds – then worth about 5,000 times a sailor’s annual wage.
“It is an enormous sum of money – absolutely enormous,” said Wareham.
The letter got London talking, but it couldn’t save Kidd’s life. He was hanged at London’s Execution Dock on May 23, 1701 – almost 310 years ago. His body was coated in pitch, squeezed into a gibbet cage, and left for several years as a warning before being taken down and buried in secret.
But Kidd’s desperate promise of treasure practically beyond measure would ensure that his name would live on.
The search for Kidd’s missing booty was the focus Edgar Allen Poe’s The Gold Bug and an inspiration for Robert Lewis Stevenson’s Treasure Island. The final part of the exhibit is packed with the pirate-themed books and movie posters.
Curator Hilary David said Kidd’s promise of wealth practically beyond measure gave pirate stories one of their most enduring tropes.
“It seems that this is the origin of all the ‘pirates’ buried treasure’ stories,” said Hilary Davidson, a curator at the museum. “After the treasure is mentioned in the letter, X marks the spot forever.”
The exhibit, “Pirates: The Captain Kidd Story,” opens Friday.
‘Self Portrait,’ watercolor, by the Austrian painter Egon Schiele. Private collection. Image courtesy of The Athenaeum and Wikimedia Commons. LONDON, (AFP) – A rare British exhibition of works by Austrian artist Egon Schiele went on display in London on Thursday, many of them highly sexual and still shocking a century after they were created.
Naked save for knee-high stockings, reclining and with their legs splayed, Schiele’s nudes leave little to the imagination, reminding the audience why he was arrested in 1912 for distributing immoral material. He was later cleared.
“It still is quite powerful to many people – still people are offended,” Richard Nagy, who has put on the exhibition of more than 45 drawings and watercolors at his eponymous London gallery, told AFP.
Half of the works have never been shown, coming from private collections across the world, and none of them have ever been on public display in Britain, where Schiele’s work is largely absent from mainstream galleries.
Reflecting the artist’s fascination the exhibition works are all of women, many of them from the street, with the exception of a few self-portraits.
“Egon Schiele. Women” runs from May 19 to June 30.
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‘Self Portrait,’ watercolor, by the Austrian painter Egon Schiele. Private collection. Image courtesy of The Athenaeum and Wikimedia Commons.
Theodore Kaczynski in 1968 when he was an assistant professor at Berkeley. Image by Dr. George Mark Bergman, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.
LOS ANGELES (AFP) – Collectors bid up to $10,000 Wednesday for belonging of the so-called Unabomber, who waged a deadly 17-year parcel-bomb campaign in the United States, as a two-week online auction opened.
Theodore Kaczynski’s personal documents including driver’s licenses, birth certificates, checks, photos, typewriters, tools, clothing, watches and books are among 60 lots being sold in the auction, which runs until June 2. In addition more than 20,000 pages of written documents, including the original handwritten and typewritten versions of the “Unabomber Manifesto,” will be up for grabs online. Proceeds will go to his victims.
The manuscript version of the manifesto attracted the highest offers on the first day of the auction, reaching $10,100 by the end of the day, with eight bidders so far. Other top bids were $3,200 for his Smith Corona portable typewriter, $3,150 for a hoodie and glasses, and $2,525 for a typed version of the notorious criminal’s manifesto.
Far less was offered so far for a collection of newspaper clippings or copies of his academic records, both for $50, a manual for wilderness survival for $300 or his mental health records for $500.
Kaczynski, a reclusive former mathematics professor, was jailed for life in May 1998 after a campaign of parcel-bomb attacks in which three people were killed and 29 injured.
The auction of his belongings is being organized by GSA Auctions on behalf of the U.S. Marshals, after U.S. District Judge Garland Burrell of the Eastern District of California ordered the sale in August 2010.
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Theodore Kaczynski in 1968 when he was an assistant professor at Berkeley. Image by Dr. George Mark Bergman, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.
