A Presidential Visit… Sort of
When I visited Little Rock in 2016, I had to settle for a drive-by of the Clinton Presidential Library. So, when Gerry told me he planned to drive to Little Rock to visit the library, I jumped at the opportunity to finally see it. We got an early start on Tuesday morning with the thought of reaching town after its morning rush hour and with the hope that the library wouldn’t be crowded. Our timing was excellent. Other than a busload of seniors, the attendance seemed light. We saw the replica of the Oval Office and the limo on loan from the Secret Service. The library had also just opened an exhibition of American crafts the Clintons had commissioned back in 1993. We also saw a series of displays profiling many of the programs developed or continued by the Clinton administration, celebrities and leaders of the era, the replica of…
The Home Stretch
I got the early start I’d hoped for that Sunday morning. There were only two stops in Little Rock: the historic Central High School, site of the first effort by nine African American students to attend the all-white school 59 years ago, and the President William Clinton Library. I still had a ten-hour drive home and had some hope of getting there with enough time to get some sleep before going to work the next day. Little Rock Central High School was situated in a quiet neighborhood that seemed at least predominately African American, quite different than it must have been in 1957. Its size surprised me as the primary building took up the entire block alone. I hadn’t arranged to get a tour of the school in advance, so I had to content myself with pictures of the exterior. I did, however, go across the street to the visitor…
Ghosts of Oak Alley Plantation
During my short drive through Vacherie, Louisiana, on Saturday morning, I wasn’t paying much attention to the green stalks rising from the roadside fields at first because I see so much corn growing in Iowa, I’d assumed this was more of the same. Then I noticed that their appearance was all wrong and guessed that this was, instead, a sugar cane field. If you know for sure from the pictures below, please let me know. Oak Alley Plantation was one of at least three plantations in the area. I chose it because they had advertised their focus on the role of slavery in the life of the Antebellum Era community. I wanted to see how this was exhibited and discover how I reacted to it and what I could learn from it. Even with my studies and museum visits with their historical displays of the American South’s “particular institution,” I…