Month: July 2019

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To Kiss or Not to Kiss: Blarney Castle

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Blarney Castle, IrelandYou’ve heard the schtick. Visit Blarney! Kiss the Blarney Stone! Gain the gift of eloquence! But should you do it? To kiss, or not to kiss, that is the question. Whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous condemnation by friends and family who bagger you with the question: “So, did you kiss the Blarney stone or not?”  Or to take up arms against a sea of tourists who pay big bucks to participate in nothing but a huge tourist hype…and by opposing, end them.*

*With apologies to Shakespeare’s Hamlet for disheveling his famous soliloquy.

The ultimate choice is, of course, up to you. Finding myself wandering around the Blarney Castle one rainy July day, I felt almost obligated to kiss the Blarney stone. Not from some Lonely Planet “must-do tourist check-the-box” list, but from the fear of hearing it from the Irish portion of my family bloodline. Okay, I admit it. This was kind of a bucket list thing for me and I really wanted to do it. So I did, thank you very much.

Blarney Castle, Ireland

Climbing the ever-narrowing tower steps to the top of the castle was at least dry, even if it did rekindle my mild claustrophobia. Half the castle was blocked by a green-mesh coated scaffolding for the most recent (continuing) renovation. Once at the top I joined a line of like-minded tourists (um, explorers) waiting for their chance to be manhandled into a narrow crevice. I must have missed the memo on this part but to kiss the Blarney stone – technically just the inside of the outer wall of the castle – you have to lie on your back, dangle your upper body into a small cutout hole in the roof, and while hoping the grip of the attendant on your body doesn’t slip due to the rain, lean back and kiss the stone upside down and backwards. Seriously, it’s like yoga at 90 feet. To ensure you get the most of the experience, a few widely spread iron bars are the only thing between your sightline and the ground far below. Please don’t lose your grip on me, Mr. Attendant. Jus’ sayin’.

After safely climbing down the stairs in the opposite tower, I walked around the grounds a little. If you get a good day (it rained the entire week I was in Ireland), take the time to walk through the gardens and check out Rock Close, a small natural enclave on the castle property.

Blarney Castle, Ireland

Usually I pass on the obligate “official photo,” but this time I was with family and thought it might be a good keepsake despite the rather unflattering photo. Only later did I hear stories of locals peeing on the stone at night and laughing heartily at the rock-kissing tourists at the local pub. Worse, that the stone and the accompanying hole was once a medieval toilet.

Sorry, I have a sudden urge to gargle a bottle of Listerine. But hey, if you want to kiss the Blarney stone, by all means do it. I did. Now, where did I put that bottle?

David J. Kent is an avid science traveler and the author of Lincoln: The Man Who Saved America, in Barnes and Noble stores now. His previous books include Tesla: The Wizard of Electricity and Edison: The Inventor of the Modern World and two specialty e-books: Nikola Tesla: Renewable Energy Ahead of Its Time and Abraham Lincoln and Nikola Tesla: Connected by Fate.

Check out my Goodreads author page. While you’re at it, “Like” my Facebook author page for more updates!

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Upcoming Abraham Lincoln Talks in Washington, DC

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David J Kent 2019This has been a very busy summer in Lincoln world. For me personally I have two upcoming presentations in Washington, D.C., including keynoting a major annual event at Fort Stevens. And both are free (so come on down).

The Lincoln Group of DC, of which I am a Vice President, suspends our monthly dinner meetings and author lectures for June, July, and August. That doesn’t mean we’re not active. In early June we held our annual guided tour, this year at Manassas Battlefield Park. Our monthly Lincoln book study group continues to meet every month except August. And members and officers are busy preparing for future events, publishing the newsletter, reviewing books, and lining up speakers for our fall and spring dinner meetings. [See the Lincoln Group website for the great slate of speakers we have scheduled.]

Lincoln’s Nomination: The next summer event arrives in about ten days from this post. I will join Lincoln Group President John O’Brien and Lincoln Group Recording Secretary Ed Epstein in a special mini-symposium at the New York Avenue Presbyterian Church (“Lincoln’s Church”) in downtown Washington DC. The event takes place Saturday, August 3rd from 10 am to 12 noon. Even better – it’s FREE! The focus will be “Lincoln’s Campaign for the Presidential Nomination” and John, Ed, and I will delve into Lincoln’s renewed political zeal after the passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854 and his ensuing path to the surprise Republican nomination. We will also relate it to the eerie parallels to today’s political climate. It’s a program not to be missed. More information on the Lincoln Group website.

Lincoln-Thomas Day Keynote: I’m happy to announce that I will give the keynote address at the annual Lincoln-Thomas Day event to be held Saturday, September 21, 2019 from 12 noon to 2 pm at Fort Stevens, Washington, D.C. The event jointly honors Abraham Lincoln’s signing of the preliminary Emancipation Proclamation on Sept. 22, 1862 and Mrs. Elizabeth Thomas, the free African-American owner of the land that became Fort Stevens (where Lincoln was chastised with “Get down you fool” as he stood in enemy fire on the Fort’s wall). This event is also free to public so please come on down and support me, the National Park Service, and the Military Road School Preservation Trust. More info soon as the organization updates their website.

Beyond that I’m already scheduled to give a talk at a private club in D.C. next April and will be at the annual Lincoln Forum in Gettysburg in November. The Lincoln Group of DC has already scheduled speakers throughout the fall of 2019 and spring of 2020, so check out the Lincoln Group of DC website for more information and join us.

David J. Kent is an avid science traveler and the author of Lincoln: The Man Who Saved America, in Barnes and Noble stores now. His previous books include Tesla: The Wizard of Electricity and Edison: The Inventor of the Modern World and two specialty e-books: Nikola Tesla: Renewable Energy Ahead of Its Time and Abraham Lincoln and Nikola Tesla: Connected by Fate.

Check out my Goodreads author page. While you’re at it, “Like” my Facebook author page for more updates!

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Lincoln’s Rocking Chair – The Ford Museum and Greenfield Village

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Abraham Lincoln rocking chairMy Chasing Abraham Lincoln tour took me to Dearborn, Michigan to see the chair. “The Chair.” The rocking chair that Abraham Lincoln was sitting in the moment he was assassinated. The chair is in the Henry Ford Museum of American Innovation, which along with its outdoor venue, Greenfield Village, is a treasure trove for Abraham Lincoln aficionados.

After spending the previous day in the bowels of the Allen County Public Library in Fort Wayne, Indiana, where Emily Rapoza helped me research their incredible Lincoln collection, I drove from Fort Wayne up to Dearborn to see the original rocking chair. After it had languished for decades in storage at the Smithsonian Institution, the aging widow of Ford’s Theatre co-owner Harry Ford reclaimed it in 1929, and it was soon auctioned for $2,400. The buyer? An agent for automobile pioneer Henry Ford (no relation to the Ford’s Theatre Fords). Henry Ford had revered Lincoln, the “humble, self-made man, the ordinary man who seized opportunity and raised himself up.” The Lincoln rocking chair now sits in a temperature and humidity controlled glass enclosure in the Henry Ford Museum.

But there was more Lincoln to the visit. Prior to the protected spot in which it now sits, the chair was held in the Logan County Courthouse in the adjoining Greenfield Village. This is the actual courthouse from Postville, Illinois (since renamed Lincoln, Illinois) in which Lincoln practiced in during his long months on the 8th Judicial Circuit. Ford had it transported to Michigan and restored to depict Lincoln’s visits between 1840 and 1847.

The chilly, rainy day I visited made the warm and dry courthouse a welcome retreat. A somewhat bored docent was happy to see someone he could entertain. Finding a knowledgeable patron, his love for talking about Lincoln cascading out like the water Lincoln saw flowing over the lip of Niagara Falls. I decided not to tell him about my own book about Lincoln and let him run on with an incredible font of information about the courthouse, Lincoln, and legal circuit. He also told me the wardrobe sitting in the corner of the courthouse was believed to have been built by Lincoln’s father, Thomas. The knowledge and enthusiasm the docent exhibited was exhilarating. He was so enthralling I didn’t even tell him I had written a book on Lincoln.

One of my previous books was about Thomas Edison and Greenfield Village also has a replica of Thomas Edison’s Menlo Park lab, including some original outbuildings and even soil carted in by train from the New Jersey site. I had visited the current Menlo Park site museum and its towering lightbulb, as well as his West Orange (NJ) and Fort Myers (FL) laboratories, so it was a great treat to see one of his first labs as it was. Even more exciting, I fortuitously was there during one of the periodic visits by Edison himself, an actor who came into the lab in character and told us all about his current work. Afterwards I toured some old saw and grist mills important for my research.

Lincoln furniture, Ford Museum

Back inside the Ford Museum I found a small center table and side chair once owned by Abraham and Mary Lincoln in their Springfield, Illinois home. Furniture owned by other writers like Mark Twain and Edgar Allan Poe were a thrill to see. I also spent some time in the Agriculture section of the museum where I could see some of the technological improvements (e.g., a McCormick reaper) that I’m researching for my next Lincoln book. For the science geek in me they had a Mathematica section with all sorts of cool exhibits.

Both the Museum and the Village have much more worth seeing and I highly encourage everyone to make the trip. There truly is something for everyone here and one can’t help but learn some history and science while being entertained.

My Chasing Abraham Lincoln tours continue! Much more to come.

David J. Kent is an avid science traveler and the author of Lincoln: The Man Who Saved America, in Barnes and Noble stores now. His previous books include Tesla: The Wizard of Electricity and Edison: The Inventor of the Modern World and two specialty e-books: Nikola Tesla: Renewable Energy Ahead of Its Time and Abraham Lincoln and Nikola Tesla: Connected by Fate.

Check out my Goodreads author page. While you’re at it, “Like” my Facebook author page for more updates!

 

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Seeing the Real Cuba – Camagüey

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American travel to Cuba has been restricted since the early 1960s, although some Americans have visited the capital city Havana on cruise ship stops. But Havana is no more the real Cuba than Paris is the real France. To really understand the nation you must get out to the country, which includes Camagüey, roughly 350 miles east of Havana.

Camagüey is actually the third largest city in Cuba with its 325,000 inhabitants. Unlike the more cosmopolitan Havana, Camagüey retains its deep Spanish influence. The city also retains the charm – and tendency to get lost – in its winding, narrow streets. As we discovered during our three days there, Camagüey’s old town area is a maze of blind alleys and small squares with small streets leading off in many directions. We visited several of the squares, starting with the one right outside our quaint hotel, as well as to the outlying countryside to visit farms.

Camaguey, Cuba

Local mythology claims that the confusion caused by this maze was intentional as a means of getting invaders hopelessly lost in the city, but in reality it probably is just a lack of central planning.

In Camagüey and environs we visited with many local artists including Pepe Gutierrez (beautiful work in leather), the Casanova family (potters), Ileana Sanchez and Joel Jover (eclectic painters), and Martha Jimenez (sculpture and painting). Each gave us an exhibition of their work, then answered our sometimes insightful, sometimes clueless questions. Usually this was through translation by our local guide since most Cubans outside Havana are as monolingual as most Americans.

We also got a sense of the realities of food distribution in this centrally controlled communist economic system. A visit to an outlying dairy farm gave us a first hand look at cow milking and horse shoeing, but also the knowledge that all the milk produced is sold to the government (except for some held for personal family use). Farmers aren’t allowed to sell directly to the public. Instead the raw milk is sent to the government, which has it pasteurized in a government-approved plant and then redistributed back to the people. The same process is used for other commodities such as rice, chicken, wheat, eggs, etc.

Which gets us to the ration stores. In Camagüey and the other small towns we stopped in it was common to see groups of people milling around outside. Some of this was to capture any breeze as air conditioning is essentially non-existent outside the tourist hotels (indeed, many places don’t have running water or electricity much of the day). But crowds also gathered at ration stores that were expecting a shipment of chickens or eggs or bread, surging in with their ration books to get their allocated portion before the supply ran out. When we were there the country had been suffering under a grain shortage, which meant a lack of not only bread but feed for chickens, and subsequently also a shortage of eggs. Even when you could get these commodities, the amount allocated to each family was extremely limited (e.g., a few eggs for a family for the week).

While the central collection and distribution system is inherently inefficient and prone to corruption, much of the chronic shortages are due to two factors: 1) Cuba is an island and can’t produce enough food to meet its needs (about two-thirds of the rice eaten is imported, a stunning fact for a nation in which rice and beans is the base dish at every meal), and 2) the ongoing (and now expanded) U.S. embargo, which blocks any U.S. direct trade with Cuba as well as effectively blocking trade from other countries by penalizing those foreign businesses that try to do business with Cuba.

If all you see of Cuba is Havana you’ll walk away with a false perception of the island. One obvious example is reflected in the hundreds of “classic cars” used as taxis to shuttle tourists around the capital city. In reality, there is only 1 car for every 167,000 Cubans. What cars they have are cobbled together and unreliable, as is the availability of gasoline (or homemade oil) needed to keep them running. Travel by ox or horse cart, or by bicycle or pedicab (one of our regular forms of transportation in Camagüey and elsewhere), is more the norm, as is walking. A lot of walking. Oh, and the big ritzy western-style Hotel Nacional in Havana is a huge contrast to the tiny, more humble, adobe abodes in which most Cubans – including those with professional jobs like psychologists and hotel managers – live (pay rates are also strictly controlled by the government).

I traveled on one of the “people-to-people” tours with Road Scholar that take advantage of an exemption in the embargo. With the recent administration edict further restricting travel, I’m not sure whether these programs can still run. If they can, I highly recommend going to Cuba and getting out to the towns and countryside far away from Havana where you can learn a little more about the real Cuba.

David J. Kent is an avid science traveler and the author of Lincoln: The Man Who Saved America, in Barnes and Noble stores now. His previous books include Tesla: The Wizard of Electricity and Edison: The Inventor of the Modern World and two specialty e-books: Nikola Tesla: Renewable Energy Ahead of Its Time and Abraham Lincoln and Nikola Tesla: Connected by Fate.

Check out my Goodreads author page. While you’re at it, “Like” my Facebook author page for more updates!

 

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Chasing Lincoln’s Almanac Murder Trial in Beardstown

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On my most recent Chasing Abraham Lincoln trip I stopped in Beardstown, Illinois to visit the site of one of Lincoln’s most famous cases – the Almanac Murder Trial. Beardstown has the only active courthouse that Lincoln practiced in, and the 1858 trial was both sensational and controversial.

Almanac trial

I arrived at the Beardstown Courthouse Museum around 3:50 pm. The sign said it was open only until 4 pm, so I rushed in to find a nearly empty foyer and some locked doors. As my hopes began to fade I encountered a resident volunteer guide named Paula Woods. I felt intrusive as I told her I would like to see the museum, as she fumbled for an old-fashioned keychain reminiscent of a jailhouse. Before we were finished, I actual did see the jailhouse cell that had held Duff Armstrong, the man charged with murder.

Even before she opened up the first door leading to a small room filled with Lincoln and trial-related artifacts, the visit turned into something special. In the foyer Paula pointed out a tall sign highlighting the Abraham Lincoln National Heritage Area and the Looking for Lincoln campaign. I had indeed heard of it, I said, and had in fact just participated in the LEAD: Spirit of Lincoln Leadership Academy program (hence my late arrival to Beardstown). It turns out Paula isn’t just a volunteer, she is the Chair of the Commission that runs the courthouse museum and other historical locations in Cass County. She is also on the LEAD program Board!

The 4 pm closing time quickly sped away as Paula showed me the exhibits and then unlocked the door to the stairs leading to the second floor courtroom. The court is still in session, she explains, with cases heard about once a month. Entering the doorway I was standing in the very court where Lincoln defended Duff Armstrong. The key witness in the trial claimed he clearly saw the fight by “the light of a high moon” around 10 or 11 pm that night. Aha, thought the scientifically minded Lincoln and produced an almanac showing the moon “runs low” that night and was already setting by the time of the incident. Having shown the witness lying, Duff Armstrong was acquitted. On the wall is a large painting depicting the moment Lincoln pointed out the discrepancy to the jury, the almanac clear on this point.

The almanac most often depicted was the Old Farmer’s Almanac for that date, although no one actually knows if it was that one or another of the several available at the time. There is even a suggestion that the almanac was forged, but modern recalculations show the moon would indeed have been unusually low that night, part of an 18.6-year lunar cycle that affects lunar declination.

As people started to show up for a pre-arranged community meeting in the courtroom, Paula took me around other parts of the courthouse, including the jailhouse. It was here that Duff Armstrong spent his days and nights waiting for his trial to start. Lincoln had been friends with the Armstrong family for many years and wrote Hannah Armstrong as soon as he heard about her son Duff’s predicament. Lincoln refused payment, citing his work as thanks for all the favors done by the Jack and Hannah over the many years of Lincoln’s life.

Long after the official closing time I thanked Paula for staying late on my behalf. We discussed the work of the LEAD program and Heritage Area, as well as how my book has successfully brought Lincoln to a broad swath of the American public. Having started the day with the LEAD students, it was time to head north for more adventures Chasing Abraham Lincoln.

David J. Kent is an avid science traveler and the author of Lincoln: The Man Who Saved America, in Barnes and Noble stores now. His previous books include Tesla: The Wizard of Electricity and Edison: The Inventor of the Modern World and two specialty e-books: Nikola Tesla: Renewable Energy Ahead of Its Time and Abraham Lincoln and Nikola Tesla: Connected by Fate.

Check out my Goodreads author page. While you’re at it, “Like” my Facebook author page for more updates!