#Texas freedom colonies

[forthosebefore]

St. John Colony outside Lockhart, Texas began in the early 1870s, when a group of Black families, led by the Rev. John Henry Winn, relocated here from Webberville.

The original 14 families purchased about 2,000 acres of land to establish a town and family farms. Originally named Winn’s Colony in honor of the reverend, the community’s name was changed after Winn organized St. John Missionary Baptist Church in 1873.

The community grew steadily and at its peak included homes of about 100 families, farms, stores, a school, cotton gin, and grist mill. The boundaries of the colony extended into Bastrop County. A post office, under the name Mackiesville, opened in 1890 with Lewis Mackey as postmaster. In addition to St. John Missionary Baptist, churches included Zion Union Missionary Baptist and Landmark Missionary Baptist.

The post office was closed in the 1920s, and the school was consolidated with Lockhart schools in 1966. The community graveyard, known as St. John Cemetery or Zion Cemetery, contains the graves of many of the area’s pioneers. Descendants of some of the founding families still reside in St. John Colony.

Learn more about post-Emancipation Black communities from The Texas Freedom Colonies Project: https://www.thetexasfreedomcoloniesproject.com

Image: Headstone of Jane Roland in the St. John Colony cemetery Source: Texas Historical Commission Facebook

Visit www.attawellsummer.com/forthosebefore to learn more about Black history.

Need a freelance graphic designer or illustrator? Send me an email.

[drsonnet]

Ramses: 2024 Ramses Morales Izquierdo, Creator – Drawings, Cartoons, Paintings (ramsesdrawing.com)

[blackdiasporanews]

Michael Strahan Meets Long-Lost Cousins During Visit To East Texas Freedom Colony

via Blavity

[elegantagent]

Howdy! I have not blogged in a while and I thought this time I oughtta review some of the gunpla kits I've built over the past few months

1. Master Grade Z'gok

This one was a really interesting build, for an old school MG (before the late 2000's with the release of the 2.0) this has mostly a completely intact inner frame

And the greeblies are pretty nice for such an old mold. The articulation is about par for the course of a kit from 2002, but this is made more as an interesting display piece rather than something for posing and play.

Another interesting bit about this kit is the rubber gaskets used in the build. I suppose it's to get in the style if an aquatic/amphibious build, and it works well, they're very interesting parts, but since this was a gift delivered from an online store the runners containing the soft rubber parts had warped in the Texas heat. With some sanding and dry brushing this model looks menacing.

2. Perfect Strike Freedom

As par for the course with the high grade line, the perfect strike freedom is a simple build with decent articulation with polycap joints and some pretty annoying mold lines and nubs. This was a good break for me from some of the more complicated builds I had been working on around this time, (ZZ ver ka, Z'gok) and it was quite fun. I didn't have to care about the details or interesting additions from the designers because the kit was delightfully simple. I had fun painting little details on the eyes and barrels and scopes. I wasn't spending too long on details, besides resurfacing and painting up the shoulder joints in order for them to look more mechanical and less toylike. And a pretty decent deal of such a large kit. If you do want one for your own, I do reccomend pairing the purchase with an action base of some sort or ,if you have the means, to manufacture your own.

3. HGUC Kshatriya NZ-666

This decently aged high grade is actually a pretty decent build for skilled builders, there's a lot of work to be done to make it feel nice, but the size and bulk of the kit alone just makes the build satisfying. One thing I found pretty unsatisfying were the sleeves decorations on the wrists and chest. I do not own an Airbrush, nor do I feel like splurging on such a tool at this moment. But i tried my best at a pseudo reverse wash technique using white paint and my panel scriper. As you can see in the above photo, did not work out too amazingly. I also neglected to build the arms entirely, as I will be completely unable to pose this kit with the binders open on my shelf. The thing is just that huge. The high grade box is literally the size of a Ver Ka box. It's so extra i love it

4. Wing Zero Endless Waltz Ver Ka.

I'm not a huge fan if after colony designs, or the show it comes from, but the Katoki Redesign of the Wing Zero gundam is absolutely insane. It's extra to the highest degree. Double beam rifle, four feathered wings, unnecessary knee bend mechanics, and meshing gears for christ sakes.

This is really the kind of thing I was expecting from a katoki kit when I built the ZZ. Something super interesting and special for the builder, through each part of this build I wanted to go above and beyond, marking panels, washing crevices, and even drybrushing down all the grey mechanical details, I love this kit a whole lot. It's an amazing build, and I might go watch Endless Waltz just because of how much I enjoyed this kit.

Anyways those are the kits I have built over last few months. I love talking about my hobby so like, idk do whatever if I should keep blogging about this stuff

[literary-illuminati]

Book Review 11 - The Comanche Empire by Pekka Hämäläinen

Okay, second history book of the year! I actually liked this one, so the review’s probably not going to break 2,000 words like my one of The Bright Ages did nope never mind.

Anyway, this has been on my tbr for something like a year now, having ended up there for the incredibly nerdy reason of ‘got cited in a blog post about how bad the historical accuracy of the Dorthraki in game of thrones is’, and more broadly just because I remain shamefully uniformed about North American indigenous history beyond the highlights. So, for example, this book has expanded my knowledge of the 17th-19th century southwest several times over, and my knowledge of the indigenous people’s there from, well, not quite nothing, but not too far from it either.

This is actually the second book of Hamalainen’s I’ve read -I’d previously gotten my hands on his Lakota America, which is the more recent work. I rather wish I’d taken better notes as I read it, honestly, feels like a more complete/detailed compare and contrast would be interesting.

Anyways – so the book’s got both a broader historiographical/polemical thesis and then also the specific guiding narrative for its particular subject matter. The broader thesis is essentially that indigenous peoples in the Americas were full and active agents of history, and for centuries after the Columbian Exchange many of them were quite rich and powerful and had significant freedom of action – history isn’t just something that rolls in from the east, which people were then effected by or reacted to, they weren’t just trapped in antediluvian ways of life politely waiting for Progress to arrive. It’s a point he returns to in his latter work, but it certainly one that still seems like it needs making.

His specific thesis for the book, though, is that between the early 18th and late 19th centuries, the Comanche were able to create a real nomadic empire in what became the American southwest, driving out or incorporating rival nations to essentially dominate all the best land for the intensive dual pastoral/hunting economy they developed on the southern plains, and reducing the colonial states of New Mexico and Texas (and at different times Louisiana and almost all of northern Mexico) to the status of imperial tributaries or raiding hinterlands. It was only with the collapse of the buffalo population and the resulting famine (combined with smallpox) that the US Army and the rivers of settlers from Texas and further east were able to seize the southwest and convert it into an agrarian economy.

The book’s very much published by Yale University Press, and not exactly easy reading. It is, however, really very light on jargon, or at least makes sure to introduce all its terms and be clear in their use and meanings. The lack of Comanche written records means Hamalainen mostly has to rely on colonial sources or the reports of merchants and traders, so he has made an explicit point of trying to cross reference multiple such sources from different colonizers whenever possible, and especially for all his significant claims. Besides only barely glancing at the endnotes, I honestly found it really very readable, if dry.

Politics and colonialism aside, one thing Hamalainen really does an excellent job getting across is how revolutionary the (re-)introduction of horses to the Great Plains was. He frames it in terms of access to energy – having horses allows you to being exploiting the massive amounts of calories in the grasses and inedible plant life of the prairies, increasing the total amount of energy you have to do work several times over. Especially when the southern great plains are basically the ideal environment for horses, and their population started exploding basically the second the Spaniards lost track of a breeding pair.

You don’t realize how much easier a nomadic life gets when you upgrade from dogs to horses or mules for pack animals, and how much incredibly more efficiently you can hunt buffalo when you’re not doing it on foot and don’t have to haul back everything you take by hand. Not even getting into how much it shrinks the world in terms of trade and communication, or the massive advantage in being able to dominate hunting grounds and win wars. All incredibly obvious things I just hadn’t particularly thought about.

All this is especially relevant with the Comanche, because from the late eighteenth through mid nineteenth centuries they basically made themselves the fulcrum of the horse trade on a continental scale, with herds that put basically everyone else to shame and an incredibly lucrative business raiding Texas for horses and mules and trading them along with ones they’d raised or tamed themselves north and east.

Speaking of ‘raiding’ – the ‘empire’ in the book’s title isn’t just there to grab attention. The whole book is organized around the thesis that the Comanche both essentially migrated into and conquered the southern Great Plains with a mixture of warfare, diplomacy, and incorporating other groups, and then – along with making themselves the centre of an incredibly lucrative trading network that reached across most of the continent, with Comanche becoming an increasingly common language for trade even quite far from their actual territories – reduced the sedentary and agrarian communities around them (both indigenous and colonial) to the status of an exploited imperial periphery.

This was especially the case in Texas and New Mexico, the former being used as an intensive raiding hinterland and source of livestock well into the mid nineteenth century (at several points raided until the point of near-collapse), and the latter a collection of entrepots, whose governors provided annual tribute and whose towns traded at favourable rates for Comanche goods with the variably explicit promise that failure to do so would be rectified by raiding to make up the difference of a fair exchange. By the time of the Mexican-American War, the governor of the state was more or less openly defying the central government and maintaining a stance of pro-Comanche neutrality in the conflicts between the two.

This peaked in the early-mid nineteenth century, with essentially all of northern Mexico being reduced to an extraction zone for massive annual raids, and individual states or towns negotiating without any real reference to the larger Mexican state, often providing information and scouts to help attack their neighbours in exchange for immunity.

Which actually leads into one of what seemed to me to be one of the book’s more striking claims – that Mexico’s performance in the Mexican-American war can largely be put down to the fact that northern Mexico was only nominally part of the country even before the Americans invaded. There was little appetite for fighting and dying for Mexico City as the Americans moved in because from locals perspective Mexico City had been failing them quite comprehensively for years. (The decision to invite Anglo settlers into Texas is also put down as an attempt to create a shield against Comanche raiding, and the failures of Mexican attempts to reconquer it down to the lack of logistics and organization that resulted from all the possible staging grounds being de facto hostile territory).

Anyways, war and high politics aside, the book was excellent at describing what was actually involved in a nomadic economy on the southern Great Plains. The yearly schedule of raids and hunts, and the importance of river valleys to winter in (and the resulting conflict with sedentary/agricultural communities living in those valleys full-time) is just fascinating. The massively increased efficiency of an entirely hunting/pastoral lifestyle being matched by how fragile it was, likewise- it was vitally importance to get maize and other plant calories through trade or tribute to avoid protein poisoning from an all-meat diet. (Which, like, not actually a thing I’d known to worry about!) Likewise, the fact that horses and buffalo ate basically the same grasses and flourished in the same habitats imposed some real tensions on raising herds of the one while hunting the other – and the fact that even just passing through en route to California, a wagon train of settlers was immensely destructive, stripping river valleys of feed and firewood that was needed for winter camps, not even mentioning all the hunting they did.

One thing that definitely struck me – and the same thing happened with the Lakota, if I’m recalling Hamalainen’s other book correctly – is how the massive increase in prosperity over the 18th/19th century actually made Comanche society massively more patriarchal. Hunting was traditionally a man’s role, and treating/preparing the hide his daughter or wife’s. But a mounted and firearm-wielding man can kill way more buffalo than a single woman can possibly handle, and buffalo robes were, along with horses and captives (either for ransom or as slaves) one of the main trade goods Comanche rancherias used to buy guns, maize, metal cookwear, or whatever else they might need.

The result was a massive spread and institutionalization of polgyny, with junior wives essentially being labourers in the household manufacturing business. With the wealthiest and most important men often having dozens of wives, this rather unsurprisingly had the effect of creating a large class of peripheral young men with strong collective interests in raiding or feuding with neighbouring communities, either to win enough prestige and wealth to attract a wife, or just to kidnap and forcibly marry someone during the raiding. The fact that even as inequality grew more and more extreme, social mobility remained fairly high – among men, of course, but there don’t seem to have been real aristocratic dynasties – is a big part of the explanation Hamalainen gives for why the pressure and tension was all focused outward, and internal Comanche politics remained fairly peaceful and consensus driven (if increasingly oligarchic.)

The economic importance of slavery and the slave trade to just...everything in the region until the late 19th century was also something I probably should have known but still kind of took me by surprise, honestly. Kidnapping people from outlying ranches or other indigenous nations on the Great Plains and selling them to the colonial elite was an extremely lucrative trade throughout the Spanish colonial period, which mostly just transitioned to ‘ransoming’ them after theoretical legal crackdowns. According to Hamalainen, the Comanche didn’t initially practice slavery internally, but after a smallpox epidemic decimated their population several times over around the turn of the nineteenth century they turned to it in a pretty big way to have enough labor to sustain their economy and trade relationships (a fairly temporary kind of slavery, it should be noted, with most seemingly eventually being integrated as full members of the community. Which did mean the pressure to go raid for more was ever present.)

The book was an incredible trove of examples of things where I had previously sort of thought something that was just the result of individual greed or brutal social pressures was actually just, like, consciously racist/imperialist state policy on the part of New Spain or the United States. Either ineffective and kind of comical (Spanish policy for a good bit was to intentionally sell the Comanche secondrate and fragile guns so they’d break more often and they’d be more continually dependent on Spanish goodwill. They just started buying from the British) or extremely effective and pretty consciously genocidal (buffalo overhunting for greed and capitalism reasons was absolutely cratering the population, but at a certain point it was absolutely the policy of the US Army to just destroy the economic basis of Comanche independence.)

I honestly have no idea whether Hamalainen is trying to prove too much, but the argument he makes for the eventual American invasion and conquest of the plains – that the actually armed conflicts were kind of besides the point, because Comanche power had already been pretty thoroughly decimated by a late breaking smallpox outbreak and buffalo-overhunting induced famine, combined with mostly successful efforts to suppress their trading connections in now-American New Mexico, and that the actual campaigns were less battles and more intentional campaigns to destroy their winter villages and the food and goods stores within – seems to hold together and make sense.

Anyway, yeah, heavy and dry book, not exactly cheery reading, but incredibly interesting and informative read. Would recommend, if ‘350 pages of book followed by 150 of endnotes, index and bibliography’ is the sort of thing that appeals.

[brookstonalmanac]

Holidays 8.30

Holidays

Archivist Day (Kyrgyzstan)

AVID Day

Barberry Day (French Republic)

Commemoration Day for the Fatalities in Pre-Deportation Detention (Germany)

Frankenstein Day

Fred Hampton Day (Illinois)

Freeman-Moss Day

Huey P. Long Day (Louisiana)

International Day of the Disappeared

International Day of the Victims of Enforced Disappearances (UN)

International Missy Barratt Day (Aenopia)

International Puma Day

International Whale Shark Day

Jimmy Buffet Day

Manu Ginobili Day (Texas)

Marcelo H. Del Pilar Day (Bulacan, Philippines)

Motel Day (Colombia)

National Ass Clapping Day

National Beach Day

National Bite People Who Annoy You Day

National Black Beauty Founders Day

National Grief Awareness Day

National Harper Day

National Holistic Pet Day

National Homecare Day of Action

National Press Freedom Day (Philippines)

National Screen Time Awareness Day

National Small Industry Day (India)

Pinaglabanan Day (Philippines)

Retrospection Day

Rowboat Day

Saint Rose of Lima’s Day (Peru)

Slinky Day

Talk Intelligently Day

Victory Day (Turkey)

Food & Drink Celebrations

International Cabernet Sauvignon Day

National Mai Tai Day (a.k.a. Real Mai Tai)

National Toasted Marshmallow Day

New England Apple Day

Independence & Related Days

Ashoka (Declared; 2010) [unrecognized]

Constitution Day (Kazakhstan)

Constitution Day (Turks and Caicos Islands)

Kohlandia (Declared; 2019) [unrecognized]

Leylandiistan & Gurvata (Declared; 2014) [unrecognized]

Liberation Day (Hong Kong; from Japanese Occupation; 1945)

National Liberation Day (Gabon; 2023)

Tatarstan (from Russia, 1990) [unrecognized]

5th & Last Friday in August

Burning of Zozobra (Old Man Gloom effigy) [Friday before 9.1]

College Colors Day [Friday nearest 9.1]

Comfort Food Friday [Every Friday]

Daffodil Day (New Zealand) [Last Friday]

Five For Friday [Every Friday]

Flashback Friday [Every Friday]

Forgive Your Foe Friday [Friday of Be Kind to Humankind Week]

Friday Finds [Every Friday]

Fry Day (Pastafarian; Fritism) [Every Friday]

Peruvian Coffee Day (Peru) [Last Friday]

Positive Twitter Day [Last Friday]

TGIF (Thank God It's Friday) [Every Friday]

Tracky Dack Day (Australia) [Last Friday]

Wear It Purple Day (Australia) [Last Friday]

Sheep Market Fair begins (Denmark) [Last Friday through Sunday]

Weekly Holidays beginning August 31 (4th Full Week of August)

Labor Day Weekend (U.S. & Canada) [Begins Friday before 1st Monday in September]

Benton Neighbor Day (Benton, Missouri)

Britt Draft Horse Show (Britt, Iowa)

Bumbershoot (Seattle, Washington)

Central City Rock 'n' Roll Cruise-in & Concert (Central City, Kentucky)

Cleveland National Air Show (Cleveland, Ohio)

Clothesline Fair (Prairie Grove, Arkansas)

Colombia River Cross Channel Swim (Hood River, Oregon)

Colorado Balloon Classic (Colorado Springs, Colorado)

Commonwheel Labor Day Weekend Arts and Crafts Festival (Manitou Springs, Colorado)

Daniel Boone Pioneer Days (Winchester, Kentucky)

Fort Bridger Rendezvous (Fort Bridger, Wyoming)

Great Bathtub Race (Nome, Alaska)

Great Grove Bed Race (Coconut Grove, Florida)

Harvest Wine Celebration (Livermore, California)

Hog Capital of the World Festival (Kewanee, Illinois)

Hopkinton State Fair (Contoocook, New Hampshire)

Iroquois Arts Festival (Howes Cave, New York)

Johnson City Field Days (Johnson City, New York)

Jubilee Days Festival (Zion, Illinois)

Lifelight Outdoor Music Festival (Worthing, South Dakota)

Mackinac Bridge Walk (St. Ignace, Michigan)

National Championship Chuckwagon Races (Clinton, Arkansas)

National Hard Crab Derby and Fair (Crisfield, Maryland)

National Sweetcorn Festival (Hoopeston, Illinois)

Oatmeal Festival (Bertram/Oatmeal, Texas)

Odyssey Greek Festival (Orange, Connecticut)

On the Waterfront (Rockford, Illinois)

Old Threshers Reunion (Mount Pleasant, Iowa)

Oregon Trail Rodeo (Hastings, Nebraska)

Payson Golden Onion Days (Payson, Utah)

Pennsylvania Arts & Crafts Colonial Festival (Greensburg, Pennsylvania)

Popeye Picnic (Chester, Illinois)

Santa-Cali-Gon Days Festival (Independence, Missouri)

Scandinavian Fest (Budd Lake, New Jersey)

Sta-Bil Nationals Championship Lawn Mower Race (Delaware, Ohio)

Snake River Duck Race (Nome, Alaska)

Taste of Colorado (Denver, Colorado)

Taste of Madison (Madison, Wisconsin)

Totah Festival (Farmington, New Mexico)

Waikiki Roughwater Swim (Honolulu, Hawaii)

Westfest Czech Heritage Festival (West, Texas)

West Virginia Italian Heritage Festival (Clarksburg, West Virginia)

Wisconsin State Cow-Chip Throw (Prairie du Sac, Wisconsin)

Woodstock Fair (Woodstock, Connecticut)

World Championship Barbecue Goat Cook-Off (Brady, Texas)

Festivals Beginning August 30, 2024

Battle of Flowers (Laredo, Spain) [thru 8.30]

Brisbane Festival (Brisbane, Australia) [thru 9.21]

California Garlic Festival (Los Banos, California) [thru 9.1]

Calumet County Fair (Chilton, Wisconsin) [thru 9.2]

Casey Popcorn Festival (Casey, Illinois) [thru 9.2]

Coconino County Fair (Fort Tuthill County Park, Arizona) [thru 9.2]

Dice Con (Lviv, Ukraine) [thru 9.1]

Eastern Idaho State Fair (Blackfoot, Idaho) [thru 9.7]

European Medieval Festival (Horsens, Denmark) [thru 8.31]

Fall Fest 2024 (Schweitzer Mountain Resort, Idaho) [thru 9.2]

Galveston Island Wine Festival (Galveston, Texas) [thru 9.1]

Giant Cabbage Weigh-Off (Palmer, Alaska)

Great Pershing Balloon Derby (Brookfield, Missouri) [thru 9.2]

Harmony Fair (Harmony, Maine) [thru 9.2]

Marshall County Blueberry Festival (Plymouth, Indiana) [thru 9.2]

Michigan Bean Festival (Fairgrove, Michigan) [thru 8.31]

Midway Swiss Days (Midway, Utah)

National Hard Crab Derby (Crisfield, Maryland) [thru 9.1]

Nauvoo Grape Festival (Nauvoo, Illinois) [thru 9.1]

North Carolina Apple Festival (Hendersonville, North Carolina) [thru 9.2]

Obetz Zucchinifest (Obetz, Ohio) [thru 9.2]

Oktoberfest (Beaver Creek, Colorado) [thru 9.1]

PAX West, a.k.a. PAX Prime (Seattle, Washington) [thru 9.2]

Payson City Golden Onion Days (Payson, Utah) [thru 9.2]

Red Rooster Days (Dassel, Minnesota) [thru 9.2]

St. William Seafood Festival (Guntersville, Alabama) [thru 8.31]

Washington State Fair (Puyallup, Washington) [thru 9.22]

Wilhelm Tell Festival (New Glarus, Wisconsin) [thru 9.1]

Wisconsin State Cow Chip Throw & Festival (Prairie du Sac, Wisconsin) [thru 8.31]

Woodstock Fair (Woodstock, Connecticut) [thru 9.2]

Feast Days

Agilus (a.k.a. Aile; Christian; Saint)

Alexander of Constantinople (Eastern Orthodox)

Alfredo Ildefonso Schuster (Christian; Blessed)

Anne Line, Margaret Ward & Margaret Clitherow (Christian; Saints)

Black (Positivist; Saint)

Camilla Läckberg (Writerism)

Candle in a Wine Bottle Day (Pastafarian)

Charisteria (Charis, Goddess of Mercy; Old Roman Thanksgiving)

Chatter Champion Announcement Day (Shamanism)

Day of Satisfying the Hearts of the Ennead (Nine Major Gods; Ancient Egypt)

Eustáquio van Lieshout (Christian; Blessed)

Evelyn De Morgan (Artology)

Charles Chapman Grafton (Episcopal Church)

Fantinus (Christian; Saint)

Felix and Adauctus (Christian; Martyrs)

Festival of Charisteria (Day to Give Thanks; Ancient Rome)

Fiacre (Christian; Saint)

Guy de Lussigny (Artology)

Habetrot’s Eve Day (Northern Britain; Starza Pagan Book of Days)

Isaac Levitan (Artology)

Jacques Louis David (Artology)

J. Alden Weir (Artology)

Jeanne Jugan (Christian; Saint)

Leonor Fini (Artology)

Mary Shelley (Writerism)

Narcisa de Jesús (Christian; Saint)

Pammachius (Christian; Saint)

The Pullover Sweater (Muppetism)

Robert Crumb (Artology)

Rose of Lima (Christian; Saint)

Rumon (a.k.a. Ruan; Christian; Saint)

Sacrifice to Tari Pennu Day (Indian Earth-Goddess; Everyday Wicca)

Santa Rosa de Lima Day (Peru)

Stephen Nehmé (Maronite Church, Catholic Church; Blessed)

Theo van Doesburg (Artology)

Third Onam (Rice Harvest Festival, Day 3; Kerala, India)

Thor Day (Church of the SubGenius; Saint)

The Three Arts Day (Celtic Book of Days)

Virginia Lee Burton (Artology)

Lucky & Unlucky Days

Dismal Day (Unlucky or Evil Day; Medieval Europe; 16 of 24)

Egyptian Day (Unlucky Day; Middle Ages Europe) [16 of 24]

Sakimake (先負 Japan) [Bad luck in the morning, good luck in the afternoon.]

Unlucky Day (Grafton’s Manual of 1565) [39 of 60]

Premieres

Alice Chops the Suey (Ub Iwerks Disney Cartoon; 1925)

Anna Karenina (Film; 1935)

Bad Girl, by The Miracles (Song; 1959)

Beer (Film; 1985)

The Big Snooze (Chilly Willy Cartoon; 1957)

A Bird in a Guilty Cage (WB LT Cartoon; 1952)

Carnival Row (TV Series; 2019)

Dance, Girl, Dance (Film; 1940)

The Dark Crystal: Age of Resistance (TV Series; 2019)

Emma (Film; 1996)

Flesh + Blood (Film; 1985)

The Funny World of Fred and Barney (Live Action/Animated TV Variety Show; 1978)

The Good Girl (Film; 2002)

Heart-Shaped Box, by Nirvana (Song; 1993)

Hey Jude, by The Beatles (Song; 1968) [1st Apple Records release]

Highway 61 Revisited, by Bob Dylan (Album; 1965)

Kravn the Hunter (Film; 2023)

The Late Show with David Letterman (Talk Show; 1993)

Little Cesario (MGM Cartoon; 1941)

Medúlla, by Björk (Album; 2004)

A Mouse in the House (Tom & Jerry Cartoon; 1947)

Music of the Sun, by Rihanna (Album; 2005)

Never Kick a Woman (Fleischer Popeye Cartoon; 1936)

Otello (Opera Film by Franco Zeffirelli; 1986)

Putting on the Act (Fleischer Popeye Cartoon; 1940)

Santana, by Carlos Santana (Album; 1969)

The School for Scandal, by Samuel Barber (Overture; 1933)

Short in the Saddle (Woody Woodpecker Cartoon; 1963)

Side to Side, by Ariana Grande (Song; 2016)

Slow Days, Fast Company, by Eve Babitz (Short Stories; 1977)

State Fair (Film; 1945)

Surf’s Up, by The Beach Boys (Song; 1971)

Terror on the Midway (Fleischer Cartoon; 1942) [#9]

The Three Bears (Ub Iwerks ComiColor Cartoon; 1935)

Top Hat (Film; 1935)

What Happened to Monday (Film; 2017)

Today’s Name Days

Felix, Herbert, Rebekka (Austria)

Aleksandar, Aleksandra (Bulgaria)

Didak, Margarita, Petar (Croatia)

Vladěna (Czech Republic)

Albert, Benjamin (Denmark)

Emil, Meljo, Mello, Miljo (Estonia)

Eemeli, Eemi, Eemil (Finland)

Fiacre (France)

Alma, Felix, Heribert, Rebekka (Germany)

Alexandra, Alexandros, Evlalios, Filakas (Greece)

Rózsa (Hungary)

Donato, Fantino (Italy)

Alija, Alvis, Jolanta (Latvia)

Adauktas, Augūna, Gaudencija, Kintenis (Lithuania)

Ben, Benjamin (Norway)

Adaukt, Częstowoj, Gaudencja, Miron, Rebeka, Róża, Szczęsna, Szczęsny, Tekla (Poland)

Ružena (Slovakia)

Íngrid, Pedro (Spain)

Albert, Albertina (Sweden)

Raisa, Rhoda, Rosa, Rosabelle, Rosalie, Rosalind, Rosalinda, Roseanne, Rose, Rosemary, Rosetta, Rosie (USA)

Today is Also…

Day of Year: Day 243 of 2024; 123 days remaining in the year

ISO: Day 5 of Week 35 of 2024

Celtic Tree Calendar: Coll (Hazel) [Day 28 of 28]

Chinese: Month 7 (Ren-Shen), Day 27 (Bing-Yin)

Chinese Year of the: Dragon 4722 (until January 29, 2025) [Wu-Chen]

Hebrew: 26 Av 5784

Islamic: 24 Safar 1446

J Cal: 3 Gold; Threesday [3 of 30]

Julian: 17 August 2024

Moon: 11%: Waning Crescent

Positivist: 19 Gutenberg (9th Month) [Fulton]

Runic Half Month: Rad (Motion) [Day 8 of 15]

Season: Summer (Day 72 of 94)

Week: 4th Full Week of August

Zodiac: Virgo (Day 9 of 32)

[haveyoureadthismgyabook]

Series info...

Book one in the Dear America series

A Journey to the New World

The Winter of Red Snow: The Revolutionary War Diary of Abigail Jane Stewart, Valley Forge, Pennsylvania, 1777 by Kristiana Gregory

When Will This Cruel War Be Over?: The Civil War Diary of Emma Simpson, Gordonsville, Virginia, 1864 by Barry Denenberg

A Picture of Freedom: The Diary of Clotee, a Slave Girl, Belmont Plantation, Virginia, 1859 by Patricia McKissack

Across the Wide and Lonesome Prairie: The Oregon Trail Diary of Hattie Campbell, 1847 by Kristiana Gregory

So Far from Home: The Diary of Mary Driscoll, an Irish Mill Girl, Lowell, Massachusetts, 1847 by Barry Denenberg

I Thought My Soul Would Rise and Fly: The Diary of Patsy, a Freed Girl, Mars Bluff, South Carolina, 1865 by Joyce Hansen

West to a Land of Plenty: The Diary of Teresa Angelino Viscardi, New York to Idaho Territory, 1883 by Jim Murphy

Dreams in the Golden Country: The Diary of Zipporah Feldman, a Jewish Immigrant Girl, New York City, 1903 by Kathryn Lasky

Standing in the Light: The Captive Diary of Catharine Carey Logan, Delaware Valley, Pennsylvania, 1763 by Mary Pope Osborne

Voyage on the Great Titanic: The Diary of Margaret Ann Brady, RMS Titanic, 1912 by Ellen Emerson White

A Line in the Sand: The Alamo Diary of Lucinda Lawrence, Gonzales, Texas, 1836 by Sherry Garland

My Heart Is on the Ground: The Diary of Nannie Little Rose, a Sioux Girl, Carlisle Indian School, Pennsylvania, 1880 by Ann Rinaldi

The Great Railroad Race: The Diary of Libby West, Utah Territory, 1868 by Kristiana Gregory

A Light in the Storm: The Civil War Diary of Amelia Martin, Fenwick Island, Delaware, 1861 by Karen Hesse

The Girl Who Chased Away Sorrow: The Diary of Sarah Nita, a Navajo Girl, New Mexico, 1864 by Ann Turner

A Coal Miner's Bride: The Diary of Anetka Kaminska, Lattimer, Pennsylvania, 1896 by Susan Campbell Bartoletti

Color Me Dark: The Diary of Nellie Lee Love, the Great Migration North, Chicago, Illinois, 1919 by Patricia McKissack

One Eye Laughing, the Other Weeping: The Diary of Julie Weiss, Vienna, Austria to New York, 1938 by Barry Denenberg

My Secret War: The World War II Diary of Madeline Beck, Long Island, New York, 1941 by Mary Pope Osborne

Valley of the Moon: The Diary Of Maria Rosalia de Milagros, Sonoma Valley, Alta California, 1846 by Sherry Garland

Seeds of Hope: The Gold Rush Diary of Susanna Fairchild, California Territory, 1849 by Kristiana Gregory

Christmas After All: The Great Depression Diary of Minnie Swift, Indianapolis, Indiana, 1932 by Kathryn Lasky

Early Sunday Morning: The Pearl Harbor Diary of Amber Billows, Hawaii, 1941 by Barry Denenberg

My Face to the Wind: The Diary of Sarah Jane Price, a Prairie Teacher, Broken Bow, Nebraska, 1881 by Jim Murphy

Where Have All the Flowers Gone? The Diary of Molly MacKenzie Flaherty, Boston, Massachusetts, 1968 by Ellen Emerson White

A Time for Courage: The Suffragette Diary of Kathleen Bowen, Washington, D.C., 1917 by Kathryn Lasky

Mirror, Mirror on the Wall: The Diary of Bess Brennan, Perkins School for the Blind, 1932 by Barry Denenberg

Survival in the Storm: The Dust Bowl Diary of Grace Edwards, Dalhart, Texas, 1935 by Katelan Janke

When Christmas Comes Again: The World War I Diary of Simone Spencer, New York City to the Western Front, 1917 by Beth Seidel Levine

Land of the Buffalo Bones: The Diary of Mary Ann Elizabeth Rodgers, an English Girl in Minnesota, New Yeovil, Minnesota, 1873 by Marion Dane Bauer

Love Thy Neighbor: The Tory Diary of Prudence Emerson, Green Marsh, Massachusetts, 1774 by Ann Turner

All the Stars in the Sky: The Santa Fe Trail Diary of Florrie Mack Ryder, The Santa Fe Trail, 1848 by Megan McDonald

Look to the Hills: The Diary of Lozette Moreau, a French Slave Girl, New York Colony, 1763 by Patricia McKissack

I Walk in Dread: The Diary of Deliverance Trembley, Witness to the Salem Witch Trials, Massachusetts Bay Colony, 1691 by Lisa Rowe Fraustino

Hear My Sorrow: The Diary of Angela Denoto, a Shirtwaist Worker, New York City, 1909 by Deborah Hopkinson

The Fences Between Us: The Diary of Piper Davis, Seattle, Washington, 1941 by Kirby Larson

Like the Willow Tree: The Diary of Lydia Amelia Pierce, Portland, Maine, 1918 by Lois Lowry

Cannons at Dawn: The Second Diary of Abigail Jane Stewart, Valley Forge, Pennsylvania, 1779 by Kristiana Gregory

With the Might of Angels: The Diary of Dawnie Rae Johnson, Hadley, Virginia, 1954 by Andrea Davis Pinkney

Behind the Masks: The Diary of Angeline Reddy, Bodie, California, 1880 by Susan Patron

A City Tossed and Broken: The Diary of Minnie Bonner, San Francisco, California, 1906 by Judy Blundell

Down the Rabbit Hole: The Diary of Pringle Rose, Chicago, Illinois, 1871 by Susan Campbell Bartoletti

[tieflingkisser]

We Are Millions, We Are Billions, We are all Palestinians: Stand with Palestine in DC on November 4th

There is an emergent mass movement in the United States unwavering in its struggle for the liberation of Palestine. Join us in Washington, DC on November 4 for the largest march for Palestine in U.S. history: the Palestinian cause is your cause.

We are witnessing an emergent movement in the United States, one that upholds Black Lives from Ferguson to Minneapolis, champions Native sovereignty from the Hawaiian mountains to the Plains of the Dakotas, knows no borders from the Texas deserts to the California valley and reclaims our stolen labor from the classrooms of Oklahoma to the factories of Michigan and the hotels of Los Angeles. It is a mass base, cross-coalition movement unwavering in its struggle for the liberation of Palestine. Although it may appear disparate at times, its compass is the world-historical refusal of the downtrodden, and as the Palestinian revolutionary intellectual Ghassan Kanafani makes clear, Palestine unites us, for “the Palestinian cause is not a cause for Palestinians only, but a cause for every revolutionary wherever he is, as a cause of the exploited and oppressed.”   

This movement did not begin two weeks ago but builds on decades of grassroots and youth-led struggle wherever Palestinians, Arabs, and those who stand with them against Zionist colonialism find themselves. On November 4th, this movement will make its way to Washington, DC’s Freedom Plaza, to march for an end to the siege on Gaza, a ceasefire, and an end to the U.S. aid to Israel. Organized by the Palestinian Youth Movement (PYM), National Students for Justice in Palestine, ANSWER Coalition, The People’s Forum, Al-Awda, US Palestinian Community Network, American Muslim Alliance, US Campaign for Palestinian Rights, Maryland2Palestine and the Palestinian Feminist Collective, this march represents a critical moment in the Palestine struggle, signaling the consolidation of a mass movement in the United States committed to challenging the decades-long role of the American government in the genocide of the Palestinian people.

As of this morning, the Ministry of Health in Gaza reported approximately over 8,000 Palestinians have been martyred, including no less than 3,342 children, with one child killed every 10 minutes by the Israeli bombardment. All of this death in just three weeks’ time. Still, there are hundreds more buried in the rubble, scattered across the besieged and leveled neighborhoods. Palestinians cannot count their dead, and Israel—in its never-ending bombardment—has robbed them of their mourning. The occupying colonial power has destroyed over half of all homes in its bombing campaign, displacing 1.4 million Palestinians within the 140 square miles of what is called the Gaza Strip. There is no place to hide from this unceasing assault. Even the places of refuge and medical care—hospitals, schools, mosques, and churches—are brazenly blown to pieces. More US-funded bombs have been dropped on Gaza over the past two weeks than the United States dropped on Afghanistan over ten years. 

A campaign of relentless destruction and massacre is not cheap. Israel needs more bombs, more white phosphorus, more soldiers, and ever more weapons to raze Gaza and fill its mass graves. On October 20, the White House requested $10.6 billion in additional military aid to Israel. According to U.S. President Joe Biden, this material support for the Israeli state’s escalating colonial depravity is “a smart investment that’s going to pay dividends for American security for generations.” Concurrently, Israeli think tanks—operationalizing this investment—have openly laid out their blueprints for the complete ethnic cleansing of 2.4 million Palestinians in Gaza. Israeli officials have openly called for genocide, the wiping of Gaza from the Earth, and referring to Palestinians as human animals and children of darkness. This extermination, as both U.S. and Israeli governments assert, is essential for national security. Such revolting claims to national security are not new but predicate U.S. imperialism and the 17-year siege on Gaza: a land, air, and sea blockade that has transformed Gaza into a concentration camp, where new U.S. and Israeli weapons and surveillance technologies are field-tested on a captive population, and Israeli officials proudly exclaim that they are keeping Palestinians in Gaza on a strict diet. 

The movement for Palestine is not confined only to the crowds of big liberal cities but courageously proclaims its imperative in the streets of Green Bay, Wisconsin, and Jackson, Mississippi. This movement advances alongside the global people’s struggle to uplift the Palestinian cause from the streets of Dublin and Sanaa, Jakarta and Tehran, Toronto and Cairo, and London to Amman, calling for the end of the U.S.-backed Zionist siege on Gaza. Students walked out of their classrooms on October 25th on over one-hundred campuses across North America; Jewish organizers chained themselves to politicians’ doors and occupied their offices, along with New York City’s Grand Central Station; activists are taking direct action against Elbit Systems, Israel’s largest weapons manufacturer, in Cambridge Massachusetts; Palestinian youth and grassroots organizations from Houston to Detroit organize rally after rally, culminating in some of the largest marches for Palestine the country has ever seen.  

As we march, speak, and sing out our commands for Palestinian freedom and an end to the genocidal siege, we know that we are not alone or small. We hear the mighty chorus tremble through our city streets. We see the feeble Zionist response. It is clear the people are with Palestine. Yet, the corporate media attempts to portray the movement as an isolated radical fringe. The numbers in the streets are outright ignored or under-reported, revising the thousands into hundreds or fewer. When reported on, the movement is depicted as violent “terror” rallies, reinforcing the Biden administration’s Islamophobic incitement of hatred and the dehumanization of the Palestinian people. With these mass mobilizations have also come state repression and violence. The FBI has visited homes of Palestinians, workers and students have been fired from their jobs, and universities have threatened action against the student movement. Lamentably, these are not empty threats. Lives have been destroyed. Our precious martyr, Wadea Al-Fayoume, a 6-year old living with his family in the suburbs of Chicago, was brutally murdered in his home. And as Zionists attack peaceful rallies with their cars and fire guns into crowds in another Chicago suburb, we continue to mobilize in the face of reactionary violence, resolute in the conviction of the Palestinian cause. 

In spite of these attempts to silence and violently suppress the movement, we know that Palestinians in Gaza and throughout the lands of Palestine hear us and see us. We know, just as they have remained steadfast throughout 75 years of occupation and ethnic cleansing, throughout 17 years of blockade, and in the face of the current bombardment of Gaza and reinvigorated effort at eliminating Palestine, our struggle is not in vain, and we too must remain steadfast in mobilizing day in and day out to end the siege on Gaza and stop the genocide of the Palestinian people.  

The national march on November 4th in Washington, DC, is a call to all progressive forces steadfastly fighting against exploitation and oppression: the Palestinian cause is your cause. Transportation is being organized all over the country, from cities including Chicago, New York, Atlanta, Boston, Pittsburgh, Raleigh, Indianapolis, Albuquerque, Providence, Philadelphia, and more. Over 200 organizations have endorsed the march and are joining together on Joe Biden’s doorstep—with the combined energy and strength the movement has brought to cities, towns, workplaces, and schools across the country— demanding, loud and clear: CEASEFIRE NOW! END THE SIEGE ON GAZA! END ALL U.S. AID TO ISRAEL! 

The national march on November 4th in Washington, DC, is a call to all progressive forces steadfastly fighting against exploitation and oppression: the Palestinian cause is your cause. Transportation is being organized all over the country, from cities including Chicago, New York, Atlanta, Boston, Pittsburgh, Raleigh, Indianapolis, Albuquerque, Providence, Philadelphia, and more. Over 200 organizations have endorsed the march and are joining together on Joe Biden’s doorstep—with the combined energy and strength the movement has brought to cities, towns, workplaces, and schools across the country— demanding, loud and clear: CEASEFIRE NOW! END THE SIEGE ON GAZA! END ALL U.S. AID TO ISRAEL! 

[brookston]

Holidays 4.13

Holidays

Aerosmith Day (Massachusetts)

American Elephant Day

American Sikh Day

Arugula o Rocket Day (French Republic)

Auslan Day (Australia)

Beauty Peace Day

Celebrate Teen Literature Day

Day of Patrons and Philanthropists (Russia)

Day of the Dead (Elder Scrolls)

Environmental Protection Day

Feast of Rotten Endings

413 Day (Arkansas)

Functional Neurological Disorder (FND) International Awareness Day

Homestuck Day

Huguenot Day (France)

Ides of April (Ancient Rome)

International Campus & Community Day

International Creativity & Innovation Day

International Day of the Kiss

International Functional Neurological Disorder Awareness Day

International Imposter Syndrome Awareness Day

International Jaat Day (India)

International Plant Appreciation Day

International Rock & Roll Day

International Special Librarian’s Day

International Turban Day

John Hanson Day (Maryland)

Katyn Memorial Day (Poland)

Military-Industrial Complex Employee Day (Ukraine)

National Boot Day

National Borinqueneers Day

National Hippy Day

National Hockey Card Day

National Japanese Spitz Day

National Kiss Your Homies Day

National Pathology Day (India)

National PhiliShui Day

National Silly Earring Day

National Sticker Day

National Theresa Day

Neil Banging Out the Tunes Day

Religious Freedom Day (England; France)

Scrabble Day

Silent Spring Day

Sinhala & Tamil New Year’s Eve (Sri Lanka)

Sterile Packaging Day

Swiftie Day

Teacher’s Day (Ecuador)

Thomas Jefferson Day

Unfairly Prosecuted Persons Day (Slovakia)

Western Mass Day (Massachusetts)

World Microscope Day

World Sarcoidosis Day

World’s Day of Remembrance for Victims of Katyn Massacre

Food & Drink Celebrations

Day to Give Thanks for Fish and Seafood

Hopocalypse Day (Drake’s Brewing)

National Make Lunch Count Day

National Peach Cobbler Day

2nd Saturday in April

Baby Massage Day [2nd Saturday]

Global Day to End Child Sexual Abuse [2nd Saturday]

National Catch & Release Day [2nd Saturday]

Slow Art Day [2nd Saturday]

World Circus Day [2nd Saturday]

Weekly Holidays beginning April 13 (2nd Week)

California Native Plant Week [thru 4.20]

Independence & Related Days

Adammia (Declared; 2013) [unrecognized]

Mensa Ann (Declared; 2019) [unrecognized]

Sicily (from Naples; 1848)

Varnland (Declared; 1991) [unrecognized]

Winterspell (Declared; 2017) [unrecognized]

New Year’s Days

Songkran (Thailand) (a.k.a. …

Bangla New Year

Bisket Jatra (Bangladesh, Cambodia, India, Laos, Myanmar, Nepal, Singapore, Sri Lanka, Thailand)

Chiang Mai Songkran

Tamil New Year

Thai New Year

Festivals Beginning April 13, 2024

Armageddon Expo Christchurch, New Zealand) [thru 4.14]

Baldwin County Strawberry Festival (Loxley, Alabama) [thru 4.14]

Bar K Beer Fest (St. Louis, Missouri)

Cherry Blossom Festival of Greater Philadelphia (Philadelphia, Pennsylvania) [thru 4.14]

CNY Maple Festival (Marathon, New York) [thru 4.14]

Crawfish & Zydeco Festival (Kemah, Texas) [thru 4.14]

Dairy State Cheese & Beer Festival (Kenosha, Wisconsin)

Dessert Wars (Baltimore, Maryland)

Georgia Renaissance Festival (Fairburn, Georgia) [thru 6.2]

Hall Cabernet Cookout (St. Helena, California)

Hudson Mac & Cheese Fest (Washingtonville, New York)

International Orange Blossom Carnival (Adana, Turkey) [thru 4.21]

Lost Colony Wine & Culinary Festival (Manteo, North Carolina)

Mobile Chocolate Festival (Mobile, Alabama)

National Grits Festival (Warwick, Georgia)

Northern California Cherry Blossom Festival (San Francisco, California) [thru 4.14 & 4.20-21]

Polish Festival (Phoenix, Arizona) [thru 4.14]

Spring Cheese and Chocolate Weekend (Stillwater, Minnesota) [thru 4.14]

Supernova Pop Culture Expo Gold Coast, Australia) [thru 4.14]

Taste of Hillcrest (San Diego, California)

Feast Days

Alfarbot: Alfheim Day (Pagan)

Believe in Fairies Day (Pastafarian)

Bill Hicks Day (Church of the SubGenius; Saint)

Caradoc (Christian; Saint)

Carpus, Papyrus, and Agathonic (Christian; Martyrs)

Elizablecccch Arden (Muppetism)

Eudora Welty (Writerism)

Festival of Jupiter Victor (Ancient Rome)

Festival of Libertas (Ancient Roman personification of freedom and political liberty)

Grounding Meditation Day (Starza Pagan Book of Days)

Guinoch of Scotland (Christian; Saint)

Hermenegild (Christian; Martyr)

Ida of Louvain (Christian; Saint)

James Ensor (Artology)

Libertas (Old Roman Goddess of Liberty)

Martin I, Pope (Christian; Saint)

Martius (a.k.a. Mars; Christian; Saint)

Poshui Jie begins (Water Splashing Festival; China)

Ptolemy (Positivist; Saint)

Purification Festival (Thailand; Everyday Wicca)

Samuel Beckett (Writerism)

Seamus Heaney (Writerism)

Squashing of Moonhopper Day (Shamanism)

Thomas Lawrence (Artology)

Vaisakhi (Sikh spring grain harvest festival)

Vishnu (Pondicherry, India; Hindu)

Yayoi Matsuri (Nikko, Japan; 5-Day Spring Festival)

Islamic Moveable Calendar Holidays

Eid al-Fitr celebrations continue (Islam)

Lucky & Unlucky Days

Prime Number Day: 103 [27 of 72]

Sensho (先勝 Japan) [Good luck in the morning, bad luck in the afternoon.]

Premieres

Aladdin Sane, by David Bowie (Album; 1973)

An Apprenticeship or The Book of Pleasures, by Clarice Lispector (Novel; 1969)

Bedeviled Rabbit (WB Cartoon; 1957)

The Big Bad Wolf (Disney Cartoon; 1934)

Black Rose, by Thin Lizzy (Album; 1979)

Bridget Jones’s Diary (Film; 2001)

Brown Sugar, by The Rolling Stones (Song; 1971)

Bulldog Drummond (Radio Series; 1941)

By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept, by Elizabeth Smart (Novel; 1945)

Casino Royale, by Ian Fleming (Novel; 1953) [James Bond #1]

Catch a Fire, by Bob Marley (Album; 1973)

Critic’s Choice (Film; 1963)

Dane, by Heinrich Schütz Opera; 1627)

Daltrey, by Roger Daltrey (Album; 1973)

Echo, by Tom Petty & the Heartbreakers (Album; 1999)

El Capitan, by John Philip Soul (Operetta; 1896)

Good Little Monkeys (Happy Harmonies; 1935)

The Greyhound and the Rabbit (Color Rhapsody Cartoon; 1940)

Hold the Lion Please (Noveltoons Cartoon; 1951)

The Kilkenny Cats (Mighty Mouse Cartoon; 1945)

Lolly, Lolly, Lolly, Get Your Adverbs Here Grammar Rock Cartoon; Schoolhouse Rock; 1974)

Messiah, by George Frederic Handel (Oratorio; 1742)

Mickey’s Kangaroo (Disney Cartoon; 1935)

Mouse Into Space (Tom & Jerry Cartoon; 1962)

The One Minute Manager, by Kennth Blanchard and Spencer Johnson (Book; 1983)

Rampage (Film; 2018)

Rising Sun, by Michael Crichton (Novel; 1992)

Safe at Home! (Film; 1962)

Swing Shift (Film; 1984)

Tango in the Night, by Fleetwood Mac (Album; 1987)

Tintin and the Picaros, by Hergé (Graphic Novel; 1976) [Tintin #23]

12 Angry Men (Film; 1957)

Unbroken, by Laura Hillenbrand (Historic Novel; 2012)

Today’s Name Days

Hermenegild, Ida, Martin (Austria)

Ida, Martin (Croatia)

Aleš (Czech Republic)

Justinus (Denmark)

Tarvi, Tarvo (Estonia)

Tellervo (Finland)

Ida (France)

Hermenegil, Ida, Gilda, Martin (Germany)

Gerontios (Greece)

Ida (Hungary)

Ermenegildo, Martino (Italy)

Egils, Jagailis, Justins, Justs, Nauris (Latvia)

Algaudė, Ida, Mingaudas (Lithuania)

Asta, Astrid (Norway)

Hermenegild, Hermenegilda, Ida, Jan, Justyn, Małgorzata, Przemysł, Przemysław (Poland)

Artemon (Romania)

Aleš (Slovakia)

Hermenegildo, Martín (Spain)

Artur, Douglas (Sweden)

Slavka, Yaroslava (Ukraine)

Thom, Thomas, Thomasina, Thompson, Tom, Tomas, Tommie, Tommy, Twain (USA)

Today is Also…

Day of Year: Day 104 of 2024; 262 days remaining in the year

ISO: Day 6 of week 15 of 2024

Celtic Tree Calendar: Fearn (Alder) [Day 28 of 28]

Chinese: Month 3 (Wu-Chen), Day 5 (Ding-Wei)

Chinese Year of the: Dragon 4722 (until January 29, 2025) [Wu-Chen]

Hebrew: 5 Nisan 5784

Islamic: 34 Shawwal 1445

J Cal: 14 Cyan; Sevenday [14 of 30]

Julian: 31 March 2024

Moon: 28%: Waxing Crescent

Positivist: 20 Archimedes (4th Month) [Albategnius]

Runic Half Month: Man (Human Being) [Day 4 of 15]

Season: Spring (Day 26 of 92)

Week: 2nd Week of April

Zodiac: Aries (Day 24 of 31)

[thelovelygods]

Tim Dunn was fascinated by bees. When he was a teenager, he spent hours studying a colony near his home, learning how it functioned. Each bee knew its role and embraced its work. Scouts found pollen. Guards prevented unwelcome outsiders from entering the hive. He even discovered that the larger drones didn’t sting, creating an opportunity for amusement. “I’d tie a piece of thread on them and walk them like a dog,” he said in a folksy West Texas accent.

His audience, the adult Sunday school class he teaches at his church in Midland, was gathered inside a gray-walled room lined with stackable chairs. Dunn went on, explaining that there was a lot to learn from the hierarchy of a bee colony. “When everybody does what they do best for the hive, it prospers,” he said. “If you’re a guard, then be a guard. If you’re a scout, be a scout.” Dunn then contrasted the cooperation of the hive with the inexorable tumult of modern politics. “Why do people hate politics?” he asked. “Everybody’s making it all about themselves,” he said. “Does it create harmony? Are people there trying to serve the body with their gifts? That’s why you hate it. It’s an example of what not to do.”

You may not think about Tim Dunn. Indeed, unless you’re a close observer of Texas politics, it’s likely you haven’t heard of him. But Dunn thinks a lot about you.

He grew up in Big Spring, about forty miles northeast of Midland, with three older brothers in a cramped house. He now lives in a mansion, hidden within a roughly twenty-acre walled compound on the northern edge of Midland. Nearby is the nondenominational church where he regularly delivers sermons as a lay minister. The Dunns are one of Texas’s wealthiest families, having acquired inexpensive leases in the Permian Basin years before fracking made it possible to extract oil and gas from fields previously thought to be in decline. As a political power broker, he mostly operates behind the scenes, routinely writing six- and seven-figure checks. This money is only the visible portion of a political operation that shapes the agenda in Austin and is feared by many Republican elected officials.

Throughout its history, Texas has seen plenty of influential men who have shared their message from the pulpit. And a steady march of rich men have opened their wallets to get politicians to do what they want. But we’ve never seen the two archetypes merge in quite this way. Dunn has said he believes we’re in the midst of a holy battle that pits Christians against those he refers to as Marxists, who he claims want to control all property and take away freedom. Marxists “are increasingly becoming bolder and more brazen in their quest for tyranny,” he has warned. “It is becoming clear they want to kill us.” The founder of Marxism, he argued, wasn’t Karl Marx. It was Satan. 

For Dunn, politics, work, and religion all run together. “I have very deliberately unsegmented my life,” he said in 2022 on a podcast hosted by Ken Harrison, the chair of Promise Keepers, a national evangelical group for men. “I don’t have one approach in business and another approach in ministry and another approach in church . . . I work for God, and God has given me a bunch of jobs to do.”  

In the past two years Dunn has become the largest individual source of campaign money in the state by far. Until recently his main tool for exerting influence has been the Defend Texas Liberty PAC, to which he has given at least $9.85 million since the beginning of 2022. This is nearly all the money he contributed to Texas races over that span and the majority raised by the committee. The political action committee targets Republicans, many of them quite conservative, whom it deems insufficiently loyal to the organization’s right-wing agenda. Dunn is not a passive donor who will dole out a few thousand dollars after a phone call and some flattering chitchat. The funding machine he has built is designed to steer politics and control politicians. 

Its methods are deceptively simple. A Dunn-affiliated organization lets lawmakers know how it wants them to vote on key issues of the legislative session. After the session, it assigns a number, from zero to one hundred, to each lawmaker based on these votes. Republicans who score high, in the eighties or nineties, are likely to remain in Dunn’s good graces. But those who see their scores drift down to the seventies or even sixties—who, in other words, legislate independently? Their fate is easy to predict. 

They’ll likely face a primary opponent, often someone little known in the community, whose campaign bank account is filled by donations from Dunn and his allies. This cash provides access to political consultants and operations that can be used to spread false and misleading attacks on Dunn’s targets, via social media feeds, glossy mailers, and text messages. “They told you point blank: if you don’t vote the way we tell you, we’re going to score against you,” said Bennett Ratliff, a Republican former state representative from Dallas County. “And if you don’t make a good score, we’re going to run against you. It was not a thumb on the scale—it was flat extortion.” Ratliff lost in 2014 to a Dunn-backed right-wing candidate, Matt Rinaldi, who scored a perfect one hundred in the next two sessions and quickly amassed power: Rinaldi now serves as the combative and divisive chair of the state GOP.

According to several sources involved in Texas politics, what Dunn demands from his candidates, even more than electoral victory, is fealty. He tends to win, sooner or later, one way or another. Sometimes his preferred candidates win the primary and, given the gerrymandering that favors Republicans in most districts in Texas, waltz into office. But even when his candidates lose, the reelected incumbents have been battered by negative rhetoric and have begged and borrowed to raise funds to counter the attacks. Many are left wondering if it’s worth fighting back. Some have chosen to get out of politics entirely. Notable recent retirements include former state senator Kel Seliger and Representative Andrew Murr, both of whom were centrist Republicans who commanded respect from colleagues in both parties and acted as brakes on Dunn’s agenda.

As his wealth has grown, Dunn has used it to support private companies that align with his goals. Through his financial vehicle Hexagon Partners, he recently invested in Christian Halls, whose chief executive says his vision is to create Christian community colleges and trade schools “in every county of the nation in the next ten years.” Also through Hexagon Partners, Dunn invested $7.5 million in a company affiliated with Brad Parscale, who worked in San Antonio targeting swing voters with digital advertising before he became manager of Donald Trump’s failed 2020 presidential campaign. That firm plans to build a “Christian-based” advertising agency that will use artificial intelligence to precisely target consumers with commercial and political messages.

In the past several years Dunn has become involved with multiple online media operations. “You can’t trust the newspapers,” he wrote in a 2018 letter to voters. But apparently you can trust Texas Scorecard, a political website that is often critical of politicians who don’t support his agenda. Texas Scorecard was published by Empower Texans, a group largely funded by Dunn that then became a separate organization in 2020. It continues to publish articles that are generally critical of candidates Dunn opposes. 

He has also been an officer with Chicago-based Pipeline Media, which maintains a network of websites designed to look like independent local media outlets but that churn out often-partisan articles that amplify stances taken by special interest groups. The Tow Center for Digital Journalism at Columbia University found that this network has attacked renewable energy and advocated for property tax cuts. Further, Dunn is a longtime board member of the Lucy Burns Institute, publisher of the website Ballotpedia, which provides information on federal, state, and local elections. It recently launched an “ultra-local” initiative, publishing updates on candidate positions and endorsements in areas that have become news deserts after the closures of local newspapers. The site reported more than a quarter billion page views in 2022. 

Dunn generally steers clear of news outlets he doesn’t control. He did not respond to multiple requests for interviews with Texas Monthly, nor did he or his attorney respond to a detailed list of questions. Many of those closest to Dunn declined to be interviewed, and many elected officials refused to speak about him, often out of fear of reprisal. To report this story, I spoke with more than thirty people who know him or work in his orbit; listened to hundreds of hours of his sermons, speeches, and Sunday school lessons; and conducted an exhaustive search of corporate records and tax filings, among other documents.

Dunn’s voluminous political enterprises are all sidelines to what has long been his main gig. He is chief executive of CrownQuest Operating. While not well-known outside oil-industry circles, it controls a significant portion of the Permian Basin. In 2022 it was the eighth-largest oil producer in Texas. It operated wells that pumped out about 35 million barrels that year, worth more than $3 billion. In December, Occidental Petroleum agreed to purchase the company’s wells and oil reserves for $12 billion, including assumption of debt. Dunn and his family own about 20 percent of these assets. They stand to collect a windfall worth a couple billion dollars. Once the sale is completed, Dunn presumably will have more time—and more money—for his political interests.

Some of Dunn’s critics are quick to note that he and the candidates he backs have posted a poor overall record of electoral success. While there’s some truth to that claim, it misses the point. Yes, Dunn has, in essence, single-handedly financed the campaigns of inexperienced, extremist candidates who have failed to connect with voters. Nonetheless, these campaigns—and the promise of future, amply bankrolled, mudslinging challengers—have led incumbents to either acquiesce to his agenda or retire. Even when Dunn loses, he often wins. 

Moreover, he is a major donor to some of the most prominent politicians in Texas. He was instrumental in helping Dan Patrick get elected lieutenant governor, arguably the most powerful office in the state. When Patrick first ran for that office, in 2014, he entered a runoff against incumbent David Dewhurst. In the final days before the election, Empower Texans gave Patrick $350,000 and secured for him a $300,000 loan from a Houston bank. The money helped pay for a last-minute blitz of advertising on television and on Facebook, Google, and Twitter.

Dunn is also a longtime backer of Texas attorney general Ken Paxton and helped him escape impeachment last year for abuse of public trust and other corruption-related charges. Prior to Paxton’s trial, Jonathan Stickland, the head of Defend Texas Liberty, made it clear he was ready to spend Dunn’s money to go after any official who voted to oust the attorney general. “There will be one helluva price to pay,” he warned in a tweet, and then added: “Wait till you see my PAC budget.”

That wasn’t the only step Dunn took to protect his ally. Before the impeachment trial in the Texas Senate, Defend Texas Liberty gave Patrick—who chose to preside as judge in the proceeding—$1 million in campaign donations and a $2 million forgivable loan. This is thirty times more than Defend Texas Liberty gave Patrick in 2022, when he was running for reelection. Strictly speaking, it wasn’t a bribe—it was all perfectly legal under state law—and Patrick has denied any quid pro quo. 

Still, as soon as the final votes to acquit the attorney general were cast, Patrick discarded his veil of impartiality and delivered a caustic rebuke to the House leadership for wasting everyone’s time. Despite abundant evidence of Paxton’s corruption, Patrick argued that the House should never have impeached the attorney general. Representative Ann Johnson, a Houston Democrat who served as an impeachment manager, told Texas Monthly that this tirade made it clear the fix had been in from the moment Patrick grabbed the gavel. 

Later, the Texas Tribune reported on a meeting between infamous white supremacist Nick Fuentes and Stickland, who prior to leading Defend Texas Liberty was a state representative to whom Dunn had contributed handsomely. Patrick was quick to condemn Fuentes but slow to criticize Stickland and the PAC. He never returned the money he’d received from the group. Instead he invested it in Israeli bonds, which his campaign treasurer could presumably sell at a later date or simply collect interest payments on for years. 

Increasingly, Dunn is active in politics outside Texas. In October 2022 he gave $250,000 to the new Stand for Freedom PAC, nearly all of the money it had raised since its inception earlier that year. The so-called super PAC, which is based in Georgia and can raise unlimited funds, spent $190,000 on congressional races across the country that fall. It supported nine right-wing candidates. A couple of days before the election, it spent $10,000 on text messages in suburban Atlanta, half of them in support of the Republican challenger and half attacking a Democratic incumbent.

Dunn also gave $1 million in the summer and fall of 2022 to the Conservation Action for America PAC (out of $1.05 million it raised). The PAC gave $500,000 to another PAC, which supported right-wing candidates in Senate races in Alabama and Missouri. But for now, most of Dunn’s time and fortune remain focused on Texas.

Dunn is up-front about his desire to use politics to pave the way for a “New Earth,” in which Jesus Christ and his believers will live together. (“When heaven comes to earth and God dwells with his people as the King,” Dunn has said.) Until then, he remains a key player in the growing Christian nationalism movement, which rejects the importance of pluralism to American identity. Instead it contends that only devout Christians are good Americans. 

Last August was even more sweltering than usual in Midland. It did not rain and the sun was relentless, the dusty earth baked by triple-digit heat. But on the final Sunday of the month, as usual, Midland Bible Church was welcomingly cool. A few parishioners sat with computer monitors in the back of the sanctuary running the audio and visuals. A video message played on two large screens on either side of a large wooden cross. “Jesus is better than the angels,” said a soothing female voice. “Jesus is better than Moses,” said a male voice. 

When the video faded and the lights came up, Dunn was standing on an elevated stage with a few loose pages of notes arranged on a four-legged metal pulpit. Behind him were the praise band’s instruments, including a six-string guitar and an electronic keyboard. The altar’s backdrop consisted of distressed wooden slats and hanging Edison bulbs that wouldn’t look out of place in a barn renovated by Chip and Joanna Gaines.

Dunn greeted the congregation with the ease and comfort of a man in his element. He has been a member of the church for more than two decades. About a decade ago the congregation moved into its modern home, a $12 million building with seating for five hundred in the sanctuary, which you enter through wooden doors from a large common area furnished with couches and sided by a wall of glass. After services Dunn can be found standing outside the wooden doors, coffee in hand, greeting friends and well-wishers. Across the street from the church stands a stone wall that surrounds Dunn’s family compound. Around the corner, just out of view, is the private K–12 Christian school Dunn founded in 1998.

That Sunday, Dunn was dressed in a short-sleeved lavender polo and gray slacks. He’s a few inches taller than six feet and has the lanky, fit build of a former basketball player. His white hair was neatly parted. He wore a lavalier microphone that reached from behind his left ear, giving him the appearance of a corporate executive ready to fire up a roomful of salespeople.

He started with a joke about a church elder’s mustache (“Is that Wyatt Earp?”) and then began to talk about the book of Hebrews. It can be difficult to understand, he says. “The Jewish culture is not the same as ours,” he notes. “I have a lot of Jewish friends,” he said, and they are like cactus fruit: “sweet on the inside and prickly on the outside.” 

This wasn’t the first time Dunn had opined on Jews. In 2010 he attended a private breakfast meeting with Joe Straus, the first Jewish Speaker of the House in the Texas Legislature. According to Straus insiders, Dunn told him that only Christians should hold leadership positions. When Texas Monthly first reported that encounter, in 2018, it shocked many in Austin’s political class. Dunn’s influence has grown since then, and his worldview has sunk even deeper roots in Texas. 

Dunn’s sermon that August day came at a crucial juncture in Texas politics. A few months before, a bipartisan majority in the state’s House of Representatives had voted to impeach the attorney general for abusing the power of his office. Dunn had responded in late June by donating $150,000 to Paxton and $1.8 million to Defend Texas Liberty, which turned around and gave Patrick that infamous seven-figure donation and loan. It’s not clear whether the events unfolding in Austin were on Dunn’s mind as he drafted his sermon, but one of his principal messages involved a religious and political battle.

He retold a portion of the biblical story of Exodus. In popular culture—think of The Ten Commandments, with a strapping young Charlton Heston as Moses—the story focuses on the Israelites’ rebellion against the pharaohs, their escape from enslavement and departure from Egypt, the crossing of the Red Sea, and the reaching of a covenant with God in the desert. Dunn picked up the story from there. Moses, Aaron, and the rest of the Israelites who fled Egypt were still in the desert, but they were eyeing the fertile region adjacent to the Jordan River, in what is now the Israeli-occupied West Bank. So they sent scouts to see what was there. 

The reconnaissance party reported that it was a bountiful region, a “land of milk and honey,” but there were obstacles to settling there. “The spies came back, and the spies said, ‘Ooh, this is too hard,’ ” Dunn said. “It is a really good land, just like God said, but man, there’s giants and walled cities. I don’t think we can do it.” Yet God urged them onward, Dunn said. Failure to fight, he suggested, would mean disobeying God. In his telling, it was a story of righteous conquest, not of escape.

He continued: “Everyone unwilling to fight did not get the reward. It’s a very poignant picture. No fight, no reward.” Here he paused briefly. He’d been looking to his right. He turned to the left, his hands gripping the pulpit. As he continued, he formed a fist with his thumb extended and pointed it at his chest. “Our giants and walled cities are a culture that hates everything we stand for. Are we willing to fight? If we are, we can’t lose, even if we die.”

Parts of his message can be heard in churches across Texas every Sunday. But how many such sermons are delivered by lay preachers who write $1 million checks to politicians and political action committees? How many are delivered by billionaires who are building an army of influence? Whose power and connections make them insiders even as they see themselves as outsiders trying to overthrow entrenched interests? How many believe that only Christians should lead Texas, to the exclusion of millions of Hindus, Jews, Muslims, and secular Texans?

Dunn holds several views that veer outside the mainstream. In late 2022 he delivered a sermon titled “How to Truly Love Your Spouse.” Before he began speaking, he played a brief video quoting from the First Epistle of Peter. It advises women, who are “the weaker vessel,” not to braid their hair or wear too much gold jewelry. They should “adorn themselves by submitting to their own husbands.” When the video ended, Dunn was at the pulpit. He praised the narrator’s deep bass voice, noting it was that of his eldest son. “Don’t you love Lee’s voice? Sounds like God reading us scripture, doesn’t it?” He later talked about his view that men’s brains are structured differently from women’s: men are superior problem solvers, while women tend to be more articulate. 

Dunn advised men to invite their wives into their professional lives. His wife, Terri, homeschooled their children for sixteen years. When their youngest was in college, playing basketball for Texas Tech University, they would take long trips to watch his games. She would read Dunn’s emails to him as he drove. She liked feeling involved, Dunn said, so he gave her the password to his email account. She also listens to political talk shows, something he doesn’t like to do, and keeps him up to speed on what pundits are saying. This “helps her feel like a part of everything I’m doing,” Dunn explained. “Women were designed as helpers.”

Chris Tackett neverintended to become the foremost chronicler of Dunn’s political influence. But sometimes curiosity charts an unexpected course. On a cool fall day, I met Tackett at a hip coffee shop a few blocks south of downtown Fort Worth. He wore blue jeans and a maroon T-shirt from a New York City bookstore and carried a MacBook Air loosely with one hand. In his early fifties, Tackett is fit, with thick, graying hair. By day, he works in human resources for a food processing company. In his spare time he has built a tool to track how a rising flood of money is reshaping Texas politics. 

Just a few years ago, he was the volunteer director of a youth baseball league in Granbury, about forty miles southwest of where we met, when he decided he could do more for his community. So he ran for a school board seat. It was one of those life decisions that seemed innocuous at the time but turned out to be momentous. 

He won the nonpartisan election and, by dint of his new responsibilities, became more involved in state education issues. The board communicated its priorities to Mike Lang, Granbury’s state representative, and Tackett assumed that Lang would be an ally. But when the school board asked Lang to vote for certain bills that protected the district’s funding, Tackett says Lang took the opposite position. Lang took other votes that Tackett felt were not in the best interest of local public schools. The board opposed vouchers, for example, which would allow taxpayer money to be used for private schools, potentially diverting needed revenue from the public school system. Yet Lang supported pro-voucher amendments. Curious about why, Tackett decided to look at the sources of Lang’s campaign contributions. “I mean, what else would it be other than money?” he recalled thinking.

He downloaded campaign finance reports from the state. They were bulky and hard to decipher, but years of working in corporate jobs had made him nimble with spreadsheets. To his surprise, most of the money Lang received wasn’t coming from constituents in $50 or $100 amounts. Instead, he’d collected a $2,000 check from Dunn and nearly half a million dollars from Farris and Joanna Wilks. Farris is an oilman and an elder in the Assembly of Yahweh, a church run by his family near Cisco, about fifty miles east of Abilene. The Assembly of Yahweh was founded by Wilks’s father and grandfather, and it blends elements of Christianity and Judaism. 

Tackett also found a $25,000 contribution from Empower Texans’ political action committee. When he looked up who was giving to Empower Texans, he found six- and seven-figure checks from the same names: Dunn and Wilks, both of whom have worked to undermine public education in favor of parochial and other private schools. (The PAC ultimately gave Lang more than $150,000.) “Holy cow,” Tackett thought. “This is why no one is listening. This is why this legislator isn’t listening.”

After we ordered coffees, Tackett opened his laptop and logged on to the rudimentary website he’d built, called Chris Tackett Now, to publish what he’d turned up. Soon after launching it, his wife, Mendi, a florist, got involved. What began with Lang’s contribution data has grown exponentially. Texas has electronic records for campaign contributions going back to 2000. Tackett grabbed everything, more than 300,000 individual records. Anyone can download files from a state website to see who gave money to, say, Governor Abbott in the first six months of 2022. But that’s a bit like focusing on a single star through a telescope. Tackett brought all the records together so he could look at the entire night sky. He may have been the first person to see it all, the entire campaign cosmology.

I asked Tackett to guide me through what he’d found. We started by looking at who has given the most money to Texas politicians since 2000. The answer, surprisingly, was Tony Sanchez, a Laredo oilman who largely self-financed a quixotic $58 million run for governor two decades ago, creating a feckless orgy of political spending in a few months. After him, there’s a drop and then three more names: grocery magnate Charles Butt, an avid proponent of public education, and Houston homebuilder Bob Perry—and then Tim Dunn. (Pennsylvania billionaire financier Jeff Yass, a school voucher advocate, gave $6 million to Abbott in December, but he still falls far behind the cumulative spending of these four and others.) Perry died a decade ago, and Butt has reserved most of his political contributions for his education PAC. Meanwhile, Dunn has sped up.  

We looked up Dunn’s contributions since 2000 and found he had given $14.3 million, a figure that struck me as low. Tackett told me to wait. He plugged in name variations: Tim Dunn, Timothy Dunn, Tim M. Dunn, TIM DUNN, Timothy M. Dunn, and so on. The number kept rising until it topped $24.5 million. He gave nearly $11 million—nearly half his total—just between January 2022 and the end of 2023. 

Under state law, contributions to nonjudicial candidates and PACs aren’t capped but must be disclosed to the Texas Ethics Commission. But there’s another category of expenditure, to “social welfare organizations,” that is called dark money because the donors can remain invisible. These groups cannot give money to a candidate, but they can produce “voter guides” that explicitly point out that only one candidate is, say, a “strong Christian conservative” (however that may be defined). In other words, there are means to push voters’ buttons in ways that are hard to track. As in cosmology, what we can see in the night sky is only part of what’s out there.

Still, what was visible told a story. From 2000 until 2015, the big donors in Texas politics tended to be pro-business. They wanted to make it harder to sue corporations—Texans for Lawsuit Reform was still at the height of its power—and they lobbied to spend taxpayer dollars to attract out-of-state companies. The business of Texas, these donors believed, was business. Dunn and other megadonors shared those views, but they had other priorities. The schism came to a head over the 2017 “bathroom bill,” which would have targeted transgender Texans by requiring them in some instances to use restrooms associated with the gender listed on their birth certificate. Dunn backed the bill, but the business lobby opposed it, fearing a backlash that would’ve harmed their companies’ profits. The old guard prevailed. 

Since then, though, Dunn and his allies have racked up victories, including passing a ban on abortions (before the U.S. Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision) and another bill prohibiting minors from receiving gender-affirming care. Nowadays, the business of Texas is to promote not just business but also a right-wing Christian worldview. “There’s a handful of billionaires trying to pull the strings across the state and pull Texas all the way to the right,” Tackett said.

Dunn has deviated from the pro-business camp in other ways. The previous generation of big donors often supported public schools in the interest of training the future workforce. Dunn has long advocated for drastically cutting property taxes, which are the major source of funding for public schools, police, and other essential services in a state that collects no income tax. He backs private Christian schooling and was involved in a recent failed effort to defeat a $1.4 billion bond for Midland public schools.

The fight over school vouchers became perhaps the most contentious policy issue during the 2023 legislative session, a key reason why Abbott called four special sessions. Dunn recently said he is “basically uninvolved” in the effort to pass voucher legislation, but he’s underplaying his influence. He gave $37,500 to the Texas Federation for Children PAC, a leading proponent of vouchers. Advocates from the Texas Public Policy Foundation and the America First Policy Institute, organizations for which Dunn has served as a board member, testified last year in favor of voucher bills, as did Matt Rinaldi, whom Dunn backed as a state house candidate and leader of the Texas GOP. What’s more, Texans for Fiscal Responsibility, the Dunn-affiliated lawmaker scorecard, has consistently given high marks for votes that allow use of public money to help pay private school tuition. (These grades are not just given after the fact; a lawsuit turned up extensive evidence that longtime Dunn ally Michael Quinn Sullivan communicated to lawmakers before the votes how each would be scored, arguably telling them how to vote if they wished to avoid a well-funded backlash when the score came out.) 

Tackett sees the voucher push as an attempt to undercut public schools and bolster Christian education. “This was all part of this broader agenda that was to inject religion into our government and erode trust in the government,” Tackett said. He and Mendi are six years into this project and have no plans to stop. “There are days we feel burned out,” he said. But then he uncovers more evidence that Dunn is leading an effort to buy public officials, subvert the state’s democracy, and bend it to his ideology, and that energizes him to keep going. “Democracy is much more at risk than I think most people realize,” he said.

Many of Dunn’s convictions can be traced to his childhood. Back when he was playing with that beehive as a boy around the late sixties, his hometown of Big Spring was experiencing a growth spurt. Webb Air Force Base trained military pilots. Regional oil companies were headquartered there. Big Spring was home to the largest oil refinery in the region, a Sears, and a bowling alley that offered babysitting while parents got in ten frames. There were about 45 churches, half of them Baptist, in a city of some 30,000. Thirty of them sent singers to annual summer gospel concerts, held in an outdoor amphitheater, organized by Dunn’s father.

Joe Dunn sold insurance to farmers and ranchers and was active in a local Baptist church. In 1961 he added his name to a resolution asking President John F. Kennedy not to serve alcohol at the White House. His wife, Thelma, was a homemaker. Both grew up on farms near Lubbock and moved to California’s Central Valley in search of work during the Great Depression. They met there and married in 1937. Joe worked as a farm laborer and later at a cotton gin. They had three sons in the span of six years while in California. Ten years passed before they had their fourth and final child, Tim, in 1955. By then, they had returned to Texas and would soon settle in Big Spring.

Tim Dunn excelled at both academics and athletics at Big Spring High School. The local newspaper listed him as six feet three inches tall, and he started for the varsity basketball team. He was outshone by a classmate named Tom Sorley, who played quarterback for the football team and would go on to play for the University of Nebraska. Both were members of the Fellowship of Christian Athletes. Dunn was second in charge; Sorley was president. Dunn was a “class favorite”; Sorley was “Mr. BSHS” and “School Beast.”

Like Dunn’s colony of bees, Big Spring High operated as an ordered society where students mostly played their assigned roles. Members of the football team’s female booster club, called the Golddiggers, spent a week feeding and pampering the players. “Golddiggers became slaves to the varsity squad for one week,” explained the 1972 yearbook. It ran a photo from an event in which a Golddigger “serves her master” by preparing him a plate of food.

Dunn shared a love of music with his father, Joe, who sang at Baptist revivals and played the fiddle. Years later, retired and living in California, he led a band called Joe Dunn & the Foothill Seniors. While in high school Tim Dunn played guitar in a band called Scrub Brotherhood. The Big Spring Herald reported that it played a combination of rock, country, and “cuddle” music. Ron McKee, the drummer, told me they listened to a lot of Grand Funk Railroad and played covers as well as some original songs written by Dunn. One song McKee recalls was titled “My Prayer.” 

McKee, who attended school with Dunn from elementary school through college, said his friend was religious and straitlaced, and held strong opinions and beliefs. “I don’t believe I ever heard Tim Dunn say a cussword in all my time around him. I don’t ever remember him getting into a fight or taking a drink,” he said. Dunn was nonetheless fun to be around. One time in high school they got bored and took the handlebars off two tricycles and attached upside-down drum stands so they could steer while standing up, as on foot-propelled scooters. They piloted them to the Sonic and back, a roughly five-mile round trip. “We had cars, but we wanted to come up with something silly to do,” McKee said. “No one got arrested or hurt.”

Dunn attended Texas Tech University. He studied chemical engineering and wound down by watching episodes of Laverne & Shirley. He was wed on May 14, 1977, a year before he graduated, to Terri Spannaus, the daughter of an Air Force colonel stationed in Big Spring. They remain married and have six adult children. At least two of the kids inherited the Dunns’ musical talent: David records Christian music in Nashville, and Wally sings and plays guitar at Midland Bible Church.

A month before Tim and Terri married, he wrote a letter to the Texas Tech student newspaper about the Equal Rights Amendment, a proposed change to the U.S. Constitution that would enshrine equal protection for men and women under American law. The letter is remarkable for its certainty, and it appears to be Dunn’s first public airing of his political views. He opposed the ERA, writing that the amendment would give “homosexuals equal protection under the law . . . Public schools and, yes, even private Christian schools will not be able to refuse to hire a teacher because he is a homosexual.” (His desire to keep private Christian schools free of government regulations remains intact, as does his animosity toward LGBTQ rights.)

After graduating from Tech, Dunn worked at Exxon for two years, in Houston. In 1980 he was hired by First City Bancorp, which traced its lineage to 1866 and was one of the largest banks in Texas. In the mid-eighties the bank moved Dunn to Midland, where he served as the head of commercial lending. In December 1984, First City ran a nearly full-page ad in the business section of the Midland Reporter-Telegram. “We Know Oil & Gas,” it read. “We know Midland!” It featured a drawing of several bankers. Prominently positioned in the middle was a confident, smiling Dunn.

Like many Texas banks, First City boomed when strong oil prices buoyed the state economy. But during the final months of 1985 global oil prices began souring. Texas saw massive job losses and a surge in bankruptcies. First City had “aggressively expanded during the early eighties to capitalize on the energy-driven Texas boom and found itself particularly vulnerable,” said Sorin Sorescu, a professor of finance at Texas A&M University who has studied regional banks. In September 1987, First City needed a nearly $1 billion bailout from the federal government. It was, at the time, the second-largest bank rescue ever. Dunn appears to have left the troubled institution right before the bailout; the bank’s financial condition couldn’t have been a surprise to anyone paying attention. 

In July, two months before the bailout, a new oil firm was registered with the Securities and Exchange Commission. Based in Midland, it was focused on drilling in Texas, Oklahoma, and Colorado. It was called Parker & Parsley Development Partners, and Dunn was a general partner. He remained a top executive as the company grew. By 1995, however, it was foundering and announced a series of belt-tightening measures and a shuffling of its management. Dunn stepped down from the board and took on the role of managing operations in two of the company’s most productive regions. Only one executive remained on the board: Scott Sheffield, who would go on to lead the company for years. Parker & Parsley later renamed itself Pioneer Natural Resources and became a top oil company in the Permian. Last year Exxon Mobil agreed to purchase it for $59.5 billion, in one of the largest oil field deals in two decades. 

A year after leaving the board, Dunn cofounded his own Midland-based oil company, which would become one of the largest producers in Texas, although one fourth the size of Pioneer. As he built his company, Dunn inched into politics. In 1996 he served as a delegate to the state Republican convention. By this time he and Terri were beginning to construct a private cocoon around their family. They homeschooled their children, developing a curriculum that emphasized reading great books from the Western canon. The Dunns approached like-minded families, recruiting the parents of fifteen students and founding a new school, Midland Classical Academy, that met behind their church. Students attended classes two days a week and studied at home the other three. 

Ron Miller, the dean of students, told a reporter in 2001 that Christianity was incorporated into every classroom and lesson. “Here, I’m allowed to speak my mind about Jesus Christ,” he said. “Everything we do is centered around the role God has in our life.” The school eventually moved to a new multimillion-dollar building on the north side of Midland, where the homes give way to scrubland dotted by an occasional pump jack. Parents were encouraged to volunteer. Dunn served as the assistant girls’ basketball coach.

The first substantial campaign check Dunn wrote was in February 2002: ten thousand dollars to Free Enterprise PAC. Its legislative wish list, according to a report it printed at the time, included bills that would “prohibit homosexual marriages and adoptions” and “require a super majority to increase taxes.” The PAC printed a ranking of most-to-least conservative legislators, a strategy later adopted by Dunn-backed groups such as Empower Texans and Texans for Fiscal Responsibility. 

In the period when Dunn contributed, Free Enterprise PAC spent nearly $66,000 supporting Republican candidates for the state House, with most of that going to those it deemed most conservative. The biggest beneficiary was a little-known lawyer running in a five-way contest for an open seat in Collin County. It was his first electoral victory. His name was Ken Paxton. 

Free Enterprise spent even more on mailings attacking six Republican incumbents—half in the House and half in the Senate—each of whom scored low in the group’s rankings. Several days before the primary election, acting lieutenant governor Bill Ratliff, one of the six, denounced Free Enterprise PAC. Its mailings, which featured a photograph of two men kissing and another of two grooms cutting a wedding cake, claimed Ratliff supported a “radical homosexual agenda.” His alleged sin was voting for a hate crimes bill named after James Byrd Jr., a Black man who in 1998 was dragged to his death behind a pickup truck by three white men in the East Texas town of Jasper. The bill allowed heightened penalties for crimes motivated by the victim’s identity, including race or sexual orientation. 

All six of the incumbents targeted by the PAC won reelection, but Ratliff was incensed by the group’s tactics. “This type of hate-mongering is reminiscent of the Nazis. This type of hate-mongering is reminiscent of the Ku Klux Klan,” he said. “This type of hate-mongering is now being practiced by the al Qaeda and the Taliban.” The negative press and attention from prominent Republicans didn’t deter Dunn. In 2006 he gave another $10,000 to the group right before the general election. Since that first check in 2002, he has made more than 225 donations of at least $10,000.

Dunn’s campaign cash washes through multiple political action committees and helps support various bands of right-wing political activists. The Texas Voice reported that shortly after Thanksgiving a little-known group called the Texas Family Project blasted out text messages that attacked select Republican lawmakers. The messages claimed that those legislators voted in favor of funding to help transgender Texans transition from the gender they were assigned at birth. This was hogwash. 

All of the targeted Republicans voted for Senate Bill 14, a law passed last year and signed by Abbott that banned gender-affirming care for transgender youth; further, it required Texas to revoke medical licenses for doctors who didn’t comply. Their apparent transgression was not voting for an anti-transgender amendment on an unrelated bill, creating a gossamer thread of truth to the text message’s claim. In reality, these Republicans were singled out and castigated not for their position on transgender Texans but for having the gall to vote independently. (In late January, the same outfit sent anti-Muslim mailers assailing several Republicans in the Legislature.)

Dunn’s connection to Texas Family Project is labyrinthine and apparent only after some digging. The group was created in 2022 by Brady Gray, a pastor turned political activist from Weatherford, about thirty miles west of Fort Worth. On the same day in April, he founded two groups: Texas Family Project and Texas Family Project Foundation. One is a nonprofit charity and the other is a dark-money “social welfare group.” Both can keep their donors anonymous, making it nearly impossible to determine who is funding the organizations. 

Before running these outfits full time, Gray was chief executive of Pale Horse Strategies, a Fort Worth political-consulting firm run by Stickland, who was simultaneously leading Defend Texas Liberty. Pale Horse, named after the line from the book of Revelation in which Death rides a pale horse, thrived on contracts from Defend Texas Liberty. In 2022 and 2023, Defend Texas Liberty paid Pale Horse $829,260 for consulting services.

Gray also runs a political action committee called the Texas Pastors Coalition, which was created in May 2022 and has so far been inactive, neither raising nor spending any money, according to state campaign-disclosure documents. But it shares a Fort Worth post office box with the Tarrant County Patriots PAC, which is run by Cary Cheshire, a former Pale Horse adviser who has worked for Dunn-supported groups on and off since 2014. This PAC has raised $80,000 in the last couple of years—all of it from Defend Texas Liberty. 

This is a typical pattern in Dunn’s orbit. A new organization emerges that attacks Republicans who are conservative but not sufficiently obedient to Dunn and Defend Texas Liberty. The groups, which spread misinformation and sow division, share the same pool of political operatives and funding. 

Among the lawmakers targeted by the Texas Family Project’s text messages was Stephanie Klick, a longtime nurse and Republican who has represented the northeast Fort Worth suburbs since 2013. In the 2022 election, a former military policeman and Republican Party operative named David Lowe ran against her, claiming she was too moderate. He described himself in campaign material as “an army veteran, a constitutional conservative, [and] follower of Christ.” When Lowe made it into a runoff against Klick, Defend Texas Liberty gave him $177,608—the majority of the $269,467 he raised during the head-to-head campaigning.

When I reached Lowe, who is running against Klick again, I asked him what he believes Dunn and Defend Texas Liberty want and why they are supporting him. “I think they’re strong Christians,” he replied. “They’re trying to lay the foundation to make Texas more conservative.” 

What that means, he said, is not yet clear—even to him. “The truth is, you don’t really know what they want until Texas is conservative,” he said. I replied that it was already quite conservative. He ticked off a list of additional legislative goals: increased militarization of the border, preventing abortions that are accomplished through medications received in the mail, punishing anyone who helps a transgender child receive gender-affirming care, and abolishing property taxes.

For Dunn, influencing government is a sacred mission. “When we go into governmental politics, we’re going into the darkest places,” he said in 2022. He was giving a speech in Orlando, to the Convention of States, a Houston-based organization (Dunn has been a board member since its founding) that calls for a constitutional convention to limit the power of the federal government. “And we have the opportunity to make disciples in the places that need it the most. It is a high and holy calling.”

To achieve this mission, Dunn has supported some candidates who are morally repugnant. In 2018 he got involved in an East Texas statehouse race. The incumbent was Dan Flynn, an Army veteran who had served as a brigadier general in the Texas State Guard. He first came to office in 2003, at which point he was considered quite conservative. Yet as the lower chamber moved further to the right, he was increasingly viewed as a centrist. Empower Texans donated nearly half the money raised by his 2018 primary challenger, a former youth pastor named Bryan Slaton.

What did Flynn do to raise the hackles of Dunn and his allies? Mark Owens, an assistant professor of political science at the Citadel who formerly taught at the University of Texas at Tyler, where he studied Texas politics, described Flynn as a principled, independent conservative who believed in limited government spending. Empower Texans’ attempt to create a cohesive, hard-right voting bloc didn’t sit well with Flynn. “He wasn’t on board,” Owens said. 

Flynn still won the 2018 primary and coasted to victory in the general election. Before those votes were cast, Dunn sent a letter on Empower Texans letterhead to Flynn’s constituents, urging them to “hold Flynn accountable” for his votes in the upcoming legislative session. “Why was I involved in Texas elections? What do I want,” Dunn wrote. He claimed he was fighting against corporate lobbyists, with nothing less than American democracy at stake. “If we lose this fight . . . representative government will die, and with it the American dream.” 

The letter was notable for its omissions. He described Empower Texans as a “non-profit service organization” but didn’t mention that he had given $2.63 million to the Empower Texans PAC the previous year. Dunn described himself as a champion of the little guy, helping voters fight back against politicians co-opted by Austin lobbyists. He never mentioned that he’s a whale in the campaign-finance ocean, or that he uses his political clout to promote his own worldview.

Two years later Dunn and Slaton took another shot at Flynn. Dunn personally gave $225,000 to Slaton—nearly two thirds of Slaton’s entire war chest. This time Slaton prevailed. After the election Dunn continued supporting him, giving his campaign another $50,000 in 2021. At the end of the session, Slaton received the highest score, 98 out of 100, on the Texans for Fiscal Responsibility’s index. He was an obedient anti-LGBTQ rabble-rouser, and Texas Monthly gave him the “Cockroach” award, reviving an old legislative term for a lawmaker who annoys members of both parties, makes a lot of noise, and accomplishes little. Despite these dubious accomplishments, Slaton was reelected in 2022, with more than half of his contributions coming from Dunn and Defend Texas Liberty. 

But his time as a lawmaker was cut short. The Texas Voice reported that last year Slaton was enlisted to speak at a networking meeting for “business leaders dedicated . . . to preserving our culture, protecting our children and promoting self-governance over tyranny.” According to the schedule, Slaton took the stage immediately after a talk by Dunn. 

Later that night, at 10 p.m., he invited two nineteen-year-old capitol aides and two of their friends to his Austin apartment. He mixed rum and Coke in a large Yeti thermos cup and drank until the early hours of the morning, by which time all but one of the aides had left. The one who remained was intoxicated, and according to a subsequent investigation, they engaged in sex. The next morning, she went to a drugstore to obtain Plan B pills to avoid getting pregnant. Several weeks later, in May, Slaton was expelled for “inappropriate workplace conduct,” the first member of the Texas Legislature to be removed in nearly a century. 

Texas Right to Life, an antiabortion group, withdrew its endorsement of Slaton, saying it held its endorsees to a high moral standard. Dunn, on the other hand, hasn’t made a public statement about Slaton’s behavior or his own role in electing him.

Why would Dunn ally himself with someone like Slaton? It’s a question that perplexed Bob Deuell a few years ago. He’s a family physician who served as a state senator from Greenville, northeast of Dallas, for more than a decade. A Republican, he was known as a staunch conservative with an independent streak. In 2014, after receiving a low score on a Dunn-backed scorecard, he drew a primary challenge from Bob Hall, a retired Air Force captain and recent transplant from Florida. During the campaign, Hall suggested that Satan controlled Deuell and bizarrely claimed that the incumbent intended to follow a United Nations imperative by adding bicycle lanes to Texas highways. Deuell shook off these outlandish statements but said he was deeply troubled by court documents in which Hall’s ex-wife claimed she was “physically, sexually and verbally abused for most of our marriage.” (Hall denied these allegations.)

Hall ran a relatively low-budget campaign, spending an average of $52 a day through the primary, mostly on signs, T-shirts, and door hangers. When he made it to a runoff with Deuell, Dunn-connected money rained down. Hall’s spending jumped to more than $2,100 a day, and he began using Facebook advertising and a direct-mail campaign generated by an out-of-state consultant. He attacked Deuell for voting like a “liberal Democrat” even though he had endorsements from the National Rifle Association and some right-to-life groups. “It was a bunch of lies,” Deuell told me. “His whole campaign was a bunch of lies.” 

In the middle of the election, Deuell decided to write Dunn a letter. He told me that its message was simple: “Mr. Dunn, I’m not sure why you’re wanting to have me out of office. Certainly, you don’t want to put somebody like this in office,” referring to Hall. Deuell never got a response.

Hall eked out a victory by three hundred votes and has served in the Texas Senate since 2015. In the past three sessions, he has scored highest among senators in the Texans for Fiscal Responsibility’s index. Deuell told me he learned one lesson from this experience: “As long as they get their puppet, they don’t care what the qualifications are because they know Bob Hall’s going to vote with them.”

For all his talk of Christian piety, Dunn’s tactics and beliefs have put him at odds with many fellow believers. “To see billionaire pastors, which should be an oxymoron, take over our state and turn it into an authoritarian theocracy is terrifying,” said James Talarico, a Democratic state House member representing North Austin and surrounding suburbs. Talarico is a former public school teacher and is studying to become a pastor at the Austin Presbyterian Theological Seminary. “Without this ecosystem built by Tim Dunn, we wouldn’t see the extreme far-right policies coming out of Texas that we’ve seen in the last decade,” he said.

Amanda Tyler, the executive director of the Baptist Joint Committee for Religious Liberty, lives in Dallas. She has observed the rise of Dunn’s dominion. He already wields control over the Texas Senate through his influence over Lieutenant Governor Patrick, and I asked her what Texas would look like if he managed to do the same in the Texas House. “I think it could create a second-class citizenship status for anyone who doesn’t agree with the elected leaders and their religious views,” she said. “And that looks like discriminatory laws and policies if they don’t align with a fundamentalist reading of the Bible. I also find that it would be profoundly undemocratic.”

She said Dunn is an ambassador of Christian nationalism, not Christianity. “I believe the central message of Christianity is the gospel of love,” she told me. “And Christian nationalism is a false idol of power.”

Summer Wise has also watched Dunn’s rise with dismay. She comes from an old Texas family and is distantly related to Angelina Eberly, a bronze likeness of whom presides over Congress Avenue, in downtown Austin. One night in 1842, Eberly famously took it upon herself to ready the town cannon and fire the six-pounder to prevent the records of the nascent Republic of Texas from being taken from the capital. Wise has engaged in a different sort of public service. She sat on the State Republican Executive Committee from 2018 to 2020 and has appeared as a delegate at seven state conventions. She lost her post in 2020 as part of a takeover of the party by Dunn’s allies. She told me she is deeply uncomfortable with the toxicity in some factions of today’s Texas Republican Party.

Many of her friends and former allies have given up their activism or left public office, creating what she told me was an exodus of talent and passion. It’s hard to fight against people who command vast resources and who believe their eternal salvation depends on the outcome, she said. She fears that Texas is moving away from a representative republic. In its place is a system driven “by ideology and the ideologies of a few. That is not how government is intended to function.”

We spoke several times over a few months. In one of her final emails to me, she lamented the state of the state but vowed, like her ancestor, not to surrender. “I cannot think of a time when we have seen the very integrity of our political system so tested,” she wrote. “Dunn has a misguided belief that he is fighting for souls, but I’m fighting for the soul of Texas.

[eddieydewr]

I am the anon who sent you the message about not taking fandoms anger seriously and I am pro Palestine too in that I think Isreal GOVERNMENT is awful just how I think hamas is awful. both have to go. the only ones that suffer are the innocent people of the region (see how easy it is to believe 2 things can be true at the same time!!! israel govt bad! hamas terrorism bad! easy peasy! take notes people)

and the thing is re Israel, I am not one who believes they don’t have a right to be there (in a perfect world they would share the land and coexist peacefully) because they are historically tied to the land, but let’s address the social media users who believes they all should go. Where? From a logical standpoint where do they go to? Where would you suggest they move to? I truly think some people think they have this magic ~real homeland they can all return to and don’t even know why Israel was created in the first place. I sure hope the liberal westerners tweeting away about colonialism keep that same energy and agree to pack up and leave their houses and land and give the entirety of america back to the native tribes and texas back to mexico and… etc etc. If you’re not willing to do that yourself then shut up honestly. If no one has solved this issue in decades then 18 year old Becky from Oregon who runs an Ariana Grande fan account and lives on twitter and just learned the word “apartheid” isn’t going to have anything meaningful to contribute either. People treating the whole thing like a spectator sport or using it to cancel celebrities they don’t like is weird and disgusting.

TL;DR— you can support palestinian freedom, denounce terrorism AND also shut the fuck up about complex issues you have little understanding of and no solutions to

becky from oregon who runs an ariana grande fan account 😭💀 but yep, agreed. i’m almost convinced that people think the jewish should only exist as a diaspora 😐 i also saw an insta reel (or tiktok?) by a jewish person who thinks jewish people aren’t entitled to their own state. not even the land they have historical and cultural ties to for thousands of years?? the self hatred is sad.

your question re. where do israelis go? i wonder this too. is it only jewish israelis who should leave; are muslim israelis allowed to stay? will they be expected to change their nationality/citizenship? what does this mean for palestinians who are jewish? will they be expected to leave or convert to islam? what about the christians?! so many questions. i reckon there would be an uproar if israelis migrated to the US and the UK/EU.

btw, i need to look this up to see if it’s true, but i’m hearing something about a palestinian child in the US being killed, and what do i see? some dafty on twitter saying something about noah having the audacity to be afraid as an american jewish. well… yes! he’s jewish and gay. antisemitism and homophobia very much exist in the US.

EDIT: looks like it’s sadly true about the little boy. it’s not clear whether he had ties to palestine but he was muslim. absolutely senseless. he was just a little boy and he had nothing to do with hamas but racists/islamophobes are braindead.

[rockislandadultreads]

Juneteenth: Nonfiction Recommendations

On Juneteenth by Annette Gordon-Reed

Weaving together American history, dramatic family chronicle, and searing episodes of memoir, this volume provides a historian’s view of the country’s long road to Juneteenth, recounting both its origins in Texas and the enormous hardships that African-Americans have endured in the century since, from Reconstruction through Jim Crow and beyond. All too aware of the stories of cowboys, ranchers, and oilmen that have long dominated the lore of the Lone Star State, Gordon-Reed - herself a Texas native and the descendant of enslaved people brought to Texas as early as the 1820s - forges a new and profoundly truthful narrative of her home state.

A Slave No More by David W. Blight

Slave narratives are extremely rare, with only 55 post-Civil War narratives surviving. A mere handful are first-person accounts by slaves who ran away and freed themselves. Now two newly uncovered narratives join that exclusive group. Handed down through family and friends, they tell gripping stories of escape: Through a combination of intelligence, daring, and sheer luck, the men reached the protection of occupying Union troops. In the stories of Wallace Turnage and John Washington, we find portals that offer a rich new answer to the question of how four million people moved from slavery to freedom.

A Black Women’s History of the United States by Daina Ramey Berry

This volume reaches far beyond a single narrative to showcase Black women’s lives in all their fraught complexities. Berry and Gross prioritize many voices: enslaved women, freedwomen, religious leaders, artists, queer women, activists, and women who lived outside the law. The result is a starting point for exploring Black women’s history and a testament to the beauty, richness, rhythm, tragedy, heartbreak, rage, and enduring love that abounds in the spirit of Black women in communities throughout the nation.

Four Hundred Souls edited by Ibram X. Kendi & Keisha N. Blain

Curated by Ibram X. Kendi and fellow historian Keisha N. Blain, this volume begins with the arrival of twenty enslaved Ndongo people on the shores of the British colony in mainland America in 1619, the year before the arrival of the Mayflower. In eighty chronological chapters, this book charts the tragic and triumphant four-hundred-year history of Black American experience in a choral work of exceptional power and beauty.

[forthosebefore]

"The black neighborhood in South Beaumont known as Pear Orchard probably developed after 1901, with the Spindletop oil boom. Before then, no single industry was located nearby, although African Americans worked in rice fields and on ranches located to the south and west. After the boom, many oil field workers doubtless made their homes in this part of town." (SFASU article by Judith Linsley, May 2014) According to an interview with Richard Price (June 24, 2016) "I lived in what is still known as Pear Orchard. Pear Orchard it is the area on the North side bounded by Washington Boulevard, on the West side by what was then the Abattoir tour section and on the South side by Cardinal drive and on the East side by the railroad track that separated the Pear Orchard from the West part of the South end of Beaumont. And most of our doings and so forth was bounded by those, those boundaries....we knew the boundaries beyond which we would not try to go. The Northern inside of the Beaumont was off limits to us. The urban streets South end was off limits to us. And so within this compound we mostly developed our relationships with other people in what is known as the Pear Orchard community." He noted later in the interview that he did not know of a single non-Black family living in the neighborhood." Pear Orchard Cemetery is either the same as or adjacent to Blanchette Cemetery. The Texas Historical Commission notes Blanchette and Fleming as possible alternate names for Pear Orchard Cemetery. Churches in the area include West Tabernacle Baptist Church, Jones Memorial Church of God in Christ, a Catholic church, and others.

Source: via The Texas Freedom Colonies Facebook

Visit www.attawellsummer.com/forthosebefore to learn more about Black history.

Need a freelance graphic designer or illustrator? Send me an email.

[icarus-suraki]

If you're interested in this idea of the "nations of the United States," I highly recommend American Nations: a History of the Eleven Rival Regional Cultures in North America by Colin Woodard.

n.b.: This book doesn't really discuss Native or Indigenous or First Nations cultures at any length. This book is really about the modern cultures that have arisen out of different colonial cultures in different regions of what is now the United States and, to some degree, Canada and Mexico.

Here's how the author breaks it down:

Of the nations, Woodard explains, "It isn’t that residents of one or another nation all think the same, but rather that they are all embedded within a cultural framework of deep-seated preferences and attitudes – each of which a person may like or hate, but has to deal with nonetheless."

Yankeedom began with the Puritans (Calvinist English settlers) in New England and spread across upper New York, the northern parts of Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, and Iowa, into the eastern Dakotas, Michigan, Wisconsin, Minnesota, and the Canadian Maritime. The area values education, communal decision-making and aims at creating a religious utopian communal society to be spread over other regions.

Deep South was settled by former Anglo-American West Indies plantation owners in Charleston, and spread to encompass South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, Florida, Louisiana, western Tennessee, and the southeastern parts of North Carolina, Arkansas, and Texas. It values old Greco-Roman enlightened, civilized, idle slave society, free-markets and individual freedoms. It has fought centuries with Yankeedom over the dominance of North America, such as in the Civil War and the "culture wars" started by the civil rights movement since the 1960s.

New Netherland, established by Dutch colonists in the 17th century, is now Greater New York City, as well as the lower Hudson Valley, northern New Jersey, western Long Island, and southwestern Connecticut. The area promotes liberal, multicultural values, capitalism and the freedom of the press.

Tidewater was founded by Cavaliers (Royalists during the era of the English Civil War and Stuart Restoration), and consists of Virginia, Maryland, southern Delaware, and northeastern North Carolina. Has cooperated often with Deep South and Greater Appalachia. Together with George Washington, many of the Founding Fathers came from here. Appalachian mountains cut its expansion westwards, and the region is now being overrun by the Midlands.

Greater Appalachia was populated by waves of immigrants that Woodard calls Borderlanders, from the borders of Northern Ireland, northern England, and the Scottish lowlands. Greater Appalachia covers the highlands in the south United States, the southern parts of Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois, the Ozarks of Arkansas and Missouri, most of Oklahoma, and Texas Hill Country. Its fighting spirit is embodied by figures such as Davy Crockett, Andrew Jackson and Douglas MacArthur.

Midlands, founded by English Quakers followed by the Pennsylvania Dutch, consists of southeast Pennsylvania, southern New Jersey, northern Delaware and Maryland, north central Ohio, Indiana and Illinois, northern Missouri, most of Iowa, and the eastern halves of South Dakota, Nebraska, and Kansas, as well has southern Ontario. The border city of Chicago is shared with Yankeedom and St. Louis with Greater Appalachia. Midlands promotes peaceful values and has often been in several elections the great swing-region between Yankeedom and the Southern Nations. According to Woodard it is culturally the most "American" of the nations.

New France began in 1604 with an expedition from France led by Pierre Dugua. It grew to encompass the lower third of Quebec, north and northeast New Brunswick, and southern Louisiana.

El Norte is where the oldest European subculture in the United States is found, from the early Catholic Spanish settlers in the 16th century. Later augmented by Anglo-Americans from Deep South and Greater Appalachia, it includes south and west Texas, southern California and its Imperial Valley, southern Arizona, New Mexico, parts of Colorado, and the Mexican states of Tamaulipas, Nuevo León, Coahuila, Chihuahua, Sonora, and Baja California.

Far West is the interior of the United States and Canada west of the 100th meridian between El Norte and First Nation. It includes the interiors of California, Oregon, and Washington, much of British Columbia, Alberta, Saskatchewan, Manitoba, and Alaska, part of Yukon and Northwest Territories, the west halves of the Dakotas, Nebraska, and Kansas, as well as Idaho, Montana, Colorado, Utah, and Nevada. The region has been "imperialized" by other nations, such as Yankeedom and Deep South with large mining and infrastructure projects. The Mormon Enclave has been its politically most influential group.

Left Coast was predominantly settled by Yankees from New England, with a huge influx from Greater Appalachia and countries around the world when gold was discovered. It encompasses the land between the Pacific Ocean and the Pacific Coast Ranges from Monterey, California to Juneau, Alaska, containing parts of California, Oregon, Washington, British Columbia, and Alaska. It is an ideological ally with Yankeedom and El Norte.

First Nation, founded by the predominant indigenous peoples in Canada south of the Arctic Circle, consists of much of Yukon, Northwest Territories, Labrador, Nunavut, Greenland, the northern tier of Ontario, Manitoba, Saskatchewan, and Alberta, northwestern British Columbia, and the northern two-thirds of Quebec. It has preserved much better its culture and customs than the Native Americans in the United States.

As a North Carolinian myself, I've found that Woodard's "borders" make more sense of the local culture here than throwing NC in with the "deep south" because NC both does and doesn't fit. So I can so, for my part, the Tidewater designation makes sense. YMMV.

Map of broad U.S regions

[dankusner]

Celebrate Dallas’ deep French heritage

Publication of book about La Réunion settlement gives fresh look at early settlers

People identify Dallas with its impressive skyline, vibrant arts scene and rich cultural tapestry.

However, buried within the layers of this dynamic city is a significant, yet often overlooked, chapter of its history: the French influence that has shaped its identity.

From the early settlers of La Réunion to the modern-day cultural initiatives led by the Alliance Française de Dallas, the French legacy is an integral part of the narrative that defines this city.

In 1855, a group of French, Belgian and Swiss immigrants arrived in Texas with dreams of creating a utopian society.

Led by Victor Considerant, a disciple of socialist philosopher Charles Fourier, these settlers founded a colony called La Réunion just west of present-day downtown.

Their vision was ambitious: to establish a community rooted in equality, intellectual freedom and cooperative living.

Despite their noble aspirations, the commune faced numerous challenges, including harsh environmental conditions and internal conflicts.

By 1857, La Réunion had dissolved, but the settlers’ contributions to the area were far from over.

Many chose to stay in Dallas, bringing with them a wealth of skills and knowledge that would help shape the city’s future.

The impact of the La Réunion settlers on Dallas was profound, particularly in the economic realm.

Their expertise in various trades such as brickmaking, agriculture and winemaking contributed to the area’s burgeoning commercial scene.

One of the first brick factories in Dallas was established by these settlers, and many of the early buildings were constructed using their craftsmanship.

Furthermore, the settlers introduced modern agricultural practices, significantly enhancing local farming and viticulture.

Their influence can still be seen today in Dallas’ thriving food and wine industries, which reflect the city’s diverse culinary landscape.

Beyond their economic contributions, the French settlers played a crucial role in enriching the cultural fabric of Dallas.

Their arrival marked the beginning of a rich tradition of arts, education and social ideals that would shape the city’s character.

The settlers emphasized the importance of education and community, laying the groundwork for some of the first schools in the region.

French cultural traditions have persisted in Dallas, seen in everything from culinary influences to the arts.

The annual Bastille Day celebrations and French festivals like Francophonie Festival and Fête de la Musique highlight this enduring connection.

For example:

Frenchman Jean Monuel created the first brewery.

John Louckx helped create the first system of public schools.

Julien Reverchon was an early and influential botanist in the city.

The first piano in Dallas was brought by the French settlers.

The first Dallas art studio was opened by François Ignace “Adolphe” Gouhenant.

One of the most recognizable landmarks in Dallas, Reunion Tower, serves as a reminder of the city’s French roots. While many admire the tower for its stunning views and modern architecture, few understand the historical significance of its name. The tower pays homage to the utopian dream of La Réunion, symbolizing the connection between Dallas’ past and present. This landmark not only stands as a tribute to the early settlers but also encapsulates the ideals of hope, ambition and resilience. It invites residents and visitors alike to reflect on the city’s history and the diverse cultures that have contributed to its growth. On Saturday, the Alliance Française de Dallas will bring the often-forgotten history of La Réunion back into the spotlight with the La Réunion Symposium, following the recent publication of Considerant’s The Road to Texas , translated by Paola Tettamanzi Buckley and published by Deep Vellum. This book, which chronicles the journey of European settlers to Texas, offers fresh insights into the motivations and experiences of those who joined La Réunion. As we celebrate Dallas’ dynamic identity, let us honor the contributions of its French settlers and recognize their role in shaping the city we know today. By embracing our diverse history, we not only enrich our understanding of the past but also pave the way for a more inclusive and vibrant future. Emeline Colson is executive director of Alliance Francaise de Dallas.

[lboogie1906]

William Henry Ellis (June 15, 1864 - September 24, 1923) was a businessman who challenged racial constructs in the US by “passing” as Hispanic and was born enslaved. His parents had gained their freedom and relocated to Victoria, Texas. He learned to speak fluent Spanish.

He gave a speech in support of Norris Wright Cuney that landed him an appointment to the Texas Republican Party’s Committee on Resolutions. He was nominated to represent the 83rd District in the Texas Legislature but lost the election.

He began embracing ideas of African American colonization abroad, especially in Mexico. He was once quoted as saying, “Mexico has no race prejudice from a social standpoint.” Twice during the 1890s, he attempted to create a colony for African Americans in Mexico from the southern US. Both attempts would fail. The first started in 1889 and fell through by 1891 due to a lack of financial support and backing from the Mexican government. The second, in 1895, was an exodus of nearly eight hundred people from Tuscaloosa, Alabama, that failed when several cases of smallpox broke out after settlement near Tlahualilo in northern Mexico, forcing almost all to return to the US.

He moved to New York City where he was the president of a series of mining and rubber companies, all heavily invested in Mexico. After starting a family he traveled to Ethiopia and established unofficial economic ties during a visit with King Menilik. He bought a seat on Wall Street, sold his seat, and moved his family to Mexico, where he would spend the rest of his days. #africanhistory365 #africanexcellence