Civil War Re-examination Years in the Making ... and Doing

A full 150 years ago, Abraham Lincoln was elected President of the United States. That election, and its result, set the nation on the course to civil war, changing the fate of the nation in ways that are still being felt and explored.

To commemorate the sesquicentennial, the National Park Service is planning a large series of commemorative events, beginning with a re-enactment of the election and running right through to a re-enactment of the end of the war, five years later.

Re-enactment events are planned for the major battles of the war, including Gettysburg, Antietam, and the First Battle of Bull Run (Manassas). It's probably not too much of a stretch to anticipate a re-enactment of the Gettysburg Address.

It's not just the battles, however. Shortly after the election re-enactment, the presidential train will get revved up and ready to go, replicating Lincoln's journey from his home state of Illinois to the nation's capital, Washington, D.C. Other similar nonviolent events are planned in many states affected by the Civil War. In all, more than 75 different battlefields and historic sites will have events. And that's not covering the various museums and privately operated sites planning events as well.

The District of Columbia tourism bureau will open an exhibit titled "Civil War to Civil Rights." Also getting into the act will be the National Archives, which will open its vaults to allow viewings of rarely seen gems from history, including an original draft of the 13th Amendment (banning slavery) that didn't get past the draft stage.

It's entirely fitting and proper for the NPS, the National Archives, and other entities to take a good, hard look at these momentous events, especially at a time when the nation as its stands now is (or should be) doing a lot of soul-searching over its direction forward. By examining the past, we can divine not only what happened but also what should have happened (depending on your point of view), not only what might have been but also but still could be.

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Rare Baseball Card a Home Run for Nuns

No swing and a miss here. These nuns have knocked one out of the park.

The School Sisters of Notre Dame, a Baltimore-based order of nuns, is today $220,000 richer, thanks entirely to the sale of a baseball card.

This wasn't just any baseball card, though. It was a rare one. The card in question was a Honus Wagner T206, of which only about 60 are known to exist.

The card, produced by the American Tobacco Company between 1909 and 1911, was discontinued soon after because the player wanted it gone. Wagner, one of the game's all-time greats (and, some say, the greatest shortstop ever to play the game), didn't want to encourage smoking by children, the natural audience for baseball cards. However, some sources say that Wagner demanded more money than ATC was willing to pay and that it was perhaps the tobacco company that pulled the plug on the Wagner card. Whatever the motivation, the card was no more.

The actual sale price was $262,000 and was rung up at an auction run by Heritage Auction Galleries, an outfit based in Dallas. The card will now be in the possession of Doug Walton, a collector and card shop owner from Knoxville, Tenn.

The nuns, who had to part with a buyer's premium off the top of the sale price, had the card in the first place because they inherited it from the brother of a nun. Virginia Muller, the sister in charge, says the money will go entirely to more than 30 countries around the world.

For more details, see this post.

Civil War Dolls Pegged as Smugglers

The Civil War continues to fascinate as its 150th anniversary approaches. The latest story to capture the public fancy is that of a pair of dolls thought to have been vessels for smuggling.

The papier mache dolls, which measure up to 3 feet in length and have been resting quietly at the Museum of the Confederacy in Richmond, Va., have become items of intense speculation in recent days, as recent X-rays have revealed hidden cavities and other hints that medicine was smuggled inside the two wooden girls (called Lucy Ann and Nina) on a ship bound for the American South from Great Britain. The idea would have been to get the medicine inside the dolls past the ever-present Union blockade.

No evidence of what was smuggled has been found, but officials at the Virginia Commonwealth University Medical Center have scanned evidence that something was in this cavities, most prominently evidenced by not only a gash in the head of one dolls but also signs of the dolls' heads being stitched back on the bodies, presumably after the contents were removed.

The two dolls came from two different donors, both of whom insisted that medicine was the substance was smuggled into Confederate hospitals. The most obvious entities would be morphine and quinine, which could be used to malaria and other sources of devastation far behind enemy lines.

Lucy Ann came from an anonymous donor. Nina's donor, however, is known. That would be the children of Gen. James Patton Anderson, the commander of the Tennessee Army of the Confederacy.

Further tests, if ordered, would be forensic in nature, to discover traces of the smuggled contents, whatever they were.

Nuns to Make Money Off Baseball ... Card

The Lord works in mysterious ways. It's a common refrain among the Christian clergy and the Christian laity, and it's certainly applicable in this case.

Seems a certain man who died a few years ago left everything he had to the order of Roman Catholic nuns to which his sister belonged. Also seems that among the man's possessions was a very rare baseball card.

Collectors will immediately recognize the value of a T206 Honus Wagner, of which only 60 are known to exist. This is the most famous baseball card in history.

The paucity of copies of this card is the first clue that the card's worth has some heft. The card is more well-known, however, in collecting circles because of why so few copies exist.

Wagner was a super baseball player, one of the best in the history of the game, one of the first five ever inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame. A shortstop for the Pittsburgh Pirates, he was a speedy hitter (nicknamed the "Flying Dutchman") with tremendous defensive range and a terrific eye at the plate, compiling a lifetime .328 batting average. He won the National League batting title eight times, and his Pirates won the World Series in 1909.

The baseball card in question is famous because Wagner wanted it gone. He pressured the American Tobacco Company to take his card out of production, and so the T206 series, which was printed from 1909 to 1911, is the only known series to contain a Honus Wagner card. Wagner's commonly acknowledged motivation for doing this was because he didn't want to encourage smoking by children, the natural audience for baseball cards. However, some sources say that Wagner demanded more money than ATC was willing to pay and that it was perhaps the tobacco company that pulled the plug on the Wagner card. Whatever the motivation, the card was no more.

The current card is in the hands of the School Sisters of Notre Dame, in Baltimore, Md. The nuns are planning to put the card up for auction. The last Wagner sold brought in $2.8 million, the largest amount of money ever paid for a baseball card. That was in 2007, and that card was in mint condition. The nuns hope to fetch up to $200,000 from a collector willing to put up with the slight imperfections of the card, including a few missing borders and a large crease in one corner. The deceased had owned the card since 1936 and had had the card laminated, no doubt after watching the card's value go up over the years.

Stonehenge Tourist Circa 1550 BC

'The Boy with the Amber Necklace' isn't a best-selling book by Stieg Larsson. No, it's much older than that. Seems archaeologists have unearthed what they say is proof that Stonehenge was a tourist attraction way back in the day.

The British Geological Survey has announced the discovery of the skeleton of a teenager a couple of miles southeast of the great circle of stones. The skeleton dates to about 1550 B.C., according to radiocarbon tests, but it's the necklace the teen was wearing just before he died and results of tooth scans that have intrigued the scientists.

The necklace features amber beads, which weren't exactly easy to find in England in those days, so that's one clue to the teen's "visitor" status. Scans of tooth enamel, however, reveal the more telling evidence, namely the levels of strontium and oxygen isotopes that scientists say prove that he came from hundreds of miles away, much nearer the Mediterranean Sea. The teen would have absorbed the elements from drinking water near his homeland. Why he died where he did remains a mystery.

Was he a pilgrim on a religious quest? Did he seek healing? Was he attending a ritual? Did he want to learn more about the heavens? None of this is known, of course, nor is it known (still) what purpose Stonehenge served.

This latest find, coupled with previous long-distance visitors the "Amesbury Archer" and the "Boscombe Bowmen," serve to prove that people in olden days traveled farther from home than conventional wisdom generally allows.

Akhenaten: All-powerful Visionary of the Ancient World

Thou arisest fair in the horizon of Heaven, Living Aten, Beginner of Life—there is none who knows thee save thy son Akhenaten. Thou hast made him wise in thy plans and thy power.

This was the famed Hymn to the Aten, spoken by the people of ancient Egypt in regard to their new god-king, Akhenaten, possibly the most powerful person in Egyptian history. His courage, inspiration, foresight, and actions make him one of the ancient world's most compelling figures.

He started his life auspiciously enough, being born the son of a pharaoh, Amenhotep III. Growing up in a royal family certainly meant that the young Amenhotep (eventually the IV) was exposed to political and religious power, in the form of the priests of the civilization's various religions. He would have seen as well the enormous power wielded by these priests, to whom some pharaohs bowed on matters of religious portent.

Amenhotep IV he became after his father's death. He soon married one of Egypt's most famous women ever, Nefertiti. Together, they forged a powerful kingdom, a far-seeing, far-reaching partnership ruling a far-flung empire.

After a few years, Amenhotep had had enough of the polytheism and the requisite religious figures associated therein and decided to strike out on his own, declaring that his people should worship only one god, Aten. To emphasize this, he changed his name to Akhenaten and declared himself the chief priest of this new religion.

Aten was, quite literally, the Sun. And who better to worship the Sun and declare its portents to the people of Egypt than the pharaoh, lord over all. Akhenaten composed the aforementioned Hymn to the Aten, the utterance of which served to reinforce the idea that the way to the supreme god was through the pharaoh, not through the priests, as had previously been the case (for even though the Egyptian civilization was a theocracy, it was the priests who often wielded the real power by offering the people a lifeline to the gods).

Akhenaten was the pharaoh, who had the power of life or death over his people, all his people. His pronouncement transformed Egyptian society. The idea of the worship of only one god spread, and people began reciting the Hymn and showing their deference to their pharaoh in religious matters.

The priests went along with this, of course, because they had little choice. (The pharaoh had life or death over them, too.) Another difference was that Akhenaten decreed that worship would take place in the light. The god being worshipped was the Sun, so it was only natural to worship the light, whereas before, people attended religious services administered by priests in indoor temples. This outdoor worship was the second way that the religious shift enlightened the people.

But Akhenaten wasn't done. He decreed that he had had a vision from Aten, decreeing that the civilization needed a new capital. No longer content to rule from Thebes, as his predecessors had done, Akhenaten had a large temple complex built at what is now called El-Amarna, quite a ways north along the Nile River. This was a massive, sprawling collection of stoneworks, built into a cliff-face, from which the young king could expect to keep his throne in the face of many serious assaults.

Akhenaten and Nefertiti, said to be one of the world's most beautiful women, ruled supreme for several years. He elevated her to co-regent, something unheard of in the strong patriarchal tradition of the ancient world.

His last stroke of boldness lay in the artistic realm, as Akhenaten decreed that statues and inscriptions on temple walls be more life-like, and not so abstract. Rather than abstract images, the art produced when Akhenaten was on the Egyptian throne was dominated by realism, the idea that you could look from a sculpture or a wall carving into the eyes of the subject and see a striking resemblance. It was almost as if the spirit of the person or scene being described had been captured physically, rather than abstractly. In a society that believed that the spirit of a person did indeed live in such things as carved hieroglyphs on walls, this was an innovation indeed, one that was encouraged and likely even directed by the young king who had energy to burn and a legacy to create.

So, in his time on the throne, Akhenaten had created a new religion with himself at the head, put the civilization's Amen priesthood out of a job, made his wife co-ruler, and brought his people's art into an ancient Renaissance. Such boldness and staggering accomplishments surely made the young king the target of jealous men. And jealous they were — the priests and other once-powerful people who found themselves sidelined while the new pharaoh dashed his way into history.

Historians have no hard evidence that Akhenaten was murdered. Indeed, many historians think that Akhenaten, even though he ruled for only 16 years (longer than King Tut, his successor, but much shorter than other pharaohs, including the famed Ramses II), died of natural causes. His wife's career after her husband's death is still being debated, as the sands of history have her assuming various roles, including the full pharaohship by herself.

Akhenaten's legacy endures, however: He instituted a one-god religion, perhaps the first in the history of the world; he consolidated all of the power of the state and the religion in one person, himself; he moved the capital of his civilization, for the first time in memory, to a desert citadel that would have withstood several massive assaults should his enemies have chosen to thwart his innovations by brute force of arms; he challenged the role of women in government by making his wife a ruler at his side in name and deed; and he ushered his civilization's artists into what we would consider a modern age, one in which the artist captured the true nature of the subject, as if the creation were a photograph, rather than a badly drawn approximation.

Martin Luther Irreverent? Surely Not!

Martin Luther might appreciate the irreverence to an extent, but residents of Wittenberg, where Luther nailed his famous 85 Theses to a church door and helped bring about the Protestant Reformation, are not seeing the mirth so much.

There are two stories here, one present and past. First to the present:

So an artist named Ottmar Hoerl has created a boatload of colorful statuettes of Luther, in several colors, and placed them in the town square in Wittenberg, to replace the traditional larger statue of Luther while it has been taken away for renovation. The statue will be back soon enough, but it won't be at all soon enough for some people, who don't appreciate the colors (red, green, blue, and black) of the statuettes or the slightly mocking tone of the artist who created them. That the artist has somehow made Luther look a bit irreverent as a statuette — at least more irreverent than he looked as a statue — hasn't helped matters.

But surely those outraged forget that one purpose of good art is to evoke appreciation for the original. (How else to explain all those dirge-like religious paintings of the Early Renaissance?)

Now to the past:

Martin Luther and the town of Wittenberg are forever linked because it was in that town and at Castle Church that Luther posted his first major public condemnation of some of the practices of the then-ruling Catholic Church. It was the practice of indulgences that really set Luther off, particularly the indulgence practice as practiced by one Johann Teztel. Seems the Pope at the time wanted money to rebuild St. Peter's Basilica and sent Tetzel round Europe to "sell" heavenly grace to raise money for the basilica rebuilding project. People would visit the friar Tetzel, beg for forgiveness, and the friar would grant them forgiveness — after they had paid the fee, of course.

Luther, who was already fed up with what he saw as a hypocritical Church, decided to act. He wrote out a serious of arguments, which are now commonly called the 95 Theses, and nailed them to the door of All Saints' Church, for all to see. This act and others by Luther and by other people coalesced into the movement that would become the Protestant Reformation, many of the effects of which are still being felt throughout the world.

Luther was certainly helped by the recent advent of the printing press, which was available to rapidly produce copies of not only his 95 Theses but also the Bible, which he had recently translated into German. The Reformation was off and running.

The statuettes won't be off and running anytime soon, however, no matter how many residents of Wittenberg dislike them. Why? They (the statuettes) are bolted to the ground.