Monday, April 19, 2010

Tweets From The Beyond and An Obvious Thing Pointed Out

ECS's grave marker in Brooklawn Cemetery, The Bronx, NY. Taken by Anthony22, posted at Wikipedia.

Imagine my surprise when a tweet by Elizabeth Cady Stanton floated through my Twitter this evening. I wonder what future historians, mining the public Twitter-feed, will make of the tweets of a dead suffragist!

And may I just say "Harumph" at the lack of accomplishments listed after ECS's name on the grave marker. Her husband died 15 years before she did; I wonder who made the decision not to list her accomplishments? I also recently found out that ECS was Gerrit Smith's cousin. There were a lot of family ties (and religious ones) among the NY Reform set.

*****

Recently posted by John Sallient, moderator of the H-OIEAHC* email list, "... total agreement is not necessary for action. A statement or action by a group can reflect the diversity within it."

There was recently an archaeological initiative that died because of a small number of extremely outspoken opponents, despite a significantly larger number of supporters who didn't feel the need to scream and yell and call people names. Perhaps consensus was too rosy a goal, and actually an unnecessary one.


* OIEAHC = Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture. Pre-1800, in general. Check out their Online Resources to join the e-mail list (a most excellent, moderated discussion forum with an extremely high ratio of content vs. noise), access past issues of William and Mary Quarterly and other goodies.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

"There was recently an archaeological initiative that died because of a small number of extremely outspoken opponents, despite a significantly larger number of supporters who didn't feel the need to scream and yell and call people names."

This sounds exactly like something that happened in our dept. recently and nearly drove me MAD.

And who is doing the Stanton tweets, I wonder? How interesting!

Digger said...

It's maddening, isn't it??? I've never learned to behave badly to get my way, but I see others using it as a successful strategy ALL THE TIME!

I also wonder who is tweeting Stanton; I'm curious to see what happens!