After a year experimenting with Bluesky, I’m signing off!

Please follow my Instagram account for more @ sdogood2025

It’s time for a spring hiatus! Here’s to hoping for warmer days ahead 🏝️

Source (info): Hollywood Victory by Christian Blauvelt
Source (images): Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences, The Independent

#Oscars #AcademyAwards #EmilJannings #WWII #Movies

Jannings biographer, Frank Noack, says: “The U.S. officers who came to take residence at Emil Jannings’s estate couldn’t believe their eyes… Such a man, they decided, had to be treated royally….” On his time with the troops, Jannings said “The Americans have behaved extraordinarily fair and decent.”

But years later, he’d go to work making films for the Nazi regime. He was named “Artist of the State” by Joseph Goebbels. As American troops marched through Germany, Jannings saw an opening for a peaceful surrender. He approached the troops, clutching his Academy Award, saying, “I have Oscar!”

TIDBITS: Movies have always had great cultural influence at home and abroad, and are often considered America’s greatest export.

Emil Jannings was the first man ever to win Best Actor at the Academy Awards in 1929. As a matter of fact, his Oscar statuette was the first ever awarded.

Source (info): Town of Nantucket
Source (image): The Boston Globe

#FrederickDouglass #Nantucket #Massachusetts #WilliamLloydGarrison #BlackHistory

Douglass visited the Massachusetts island a few more times over the years, a free man by the time of his last visit in 1885. On this final occasion, he confessed his admiration of Nantucket, saying he “had not come to ask a hearing, but to stand once more on the island.”

Still a fugitive slave at the time, Douglass was invited to speak at Nantucket’s first anti-slavery convention. While there, famed abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison urged him to speak, which would be Douglass’ first before an integrated audience.

But his career as an abolitionist orator seemed to take off after a visit to the Massachusetts island of Nantucket in 1841.

TIDBITS: Frederick Douglass escaped slavery in 1838 and settled in New Bedford, Massachusetts. In the years that followed, he would become renowned for his riveting speeches in defense of equality and against slavery.

Source (info): PBS, Smithsonian Magazine
Source (clip): The American Revolution by Ken Burns, Sarah Botstein, and David Schmidt on PBS

#GeorgeWashington #Washington #AmericanRevolution #MountVernon #BlackHistory

The community had been called “Freetown,” and what happened to Harry after his banishment remains a mystery.

In 1791, Harry and a number of other black settlers in Canada were relocated to Sierra Leone after protesting their living conditions. But after protesting the conditions in Sierra Leone, controlled by the British Sierra Leone Company, Harry was banished.

Serving in Dunmore’s all-black Loyalist regiment, Harry rose through the ranks to become a corporal. At war’s end, the British kept their promise of freedom, and in 1783, Harry set sail for Nova Scotia.

Harry fled Mount Vernon in 1776 and would not be the last to do so; 18 slaves had fled George Washington’s plantation by 1781. The general hired a slave catcher to retrieve the slaves he thought of as property, and while some were returned, Harry was not among them.

Among the tens of thousands of slaves who escaped to fight alongside the British, was Harry Washington, a slave at George Washington’s Mount Vernon.

TIDBITS: In 1775, during the earliest days of the American Revolution, John Murray, the fourth Earl of Dunmore and the Royal Governor of the Colony of Virginia, issued a proclamation freeing any slave willing to join the cause of the British Crown.

Source (info): Dinner with the President by Alex Prud’homme, Theodore Roosevelt Center
Source (image): Theodore Roosevelt Center, PBS

#TheodoreRoosevelt #TeddyRoosevelt #Roosevelt #NewYorkCity #ValentinesDay

The infant daughter of Alice and Teddy was named Alice Lee Roosevelt and was christened the day after her mother and grandmother’s double funeral.

On February 12, 1884, Alice gave birth to their daughter in New York City. 2 days later, Alice died, afflicted with Bright’s Disease (kidney failure). Teddy’s mother Martha died 11 hours earlier of typhoid fever in the very same house. He scrawled an X on his calendar over the date of their deaths.

Teddy met his first wife, Alice Hathaway Lee, while he was attending Harvard College. They married in Brookline, Massachusetts in 1880, then moved to New York City. As Teddy became more involved in New York State politics, he and his wife began planning to have a family.

TIDBITS: “The light has gone out of my life,” wrote Theodore Roosevelt on Valentine’s Day 1884.

LC Performance. Interview. Conversation With Rod Serling YouTube video by Library of Congress

Here, you can watch the full 1968 Serling interview: www.youtube.com/watch?v=LFVJ...

Source (video): Library of Congress
Source (info): IMDB, PBS SoCal, Justia, Ronald Reagan Presidential Library & Museum

#RodSerling #TwilightZone #RonaldReagan #SCOTUS #BlackHistory

In 1988, as President of the United States, Reagan signed fair housing amendments into law, saying “Discrimination is particularly tragic when it means a family is refused housing near good schools, a good job, or simply in a better neighborhood to raise children.”

California’s fair housing laws would be repealed, but the law which repealed them was struck down when the U.S. Supreme Court declared the state was unconstitutionally involved in discrimination (Reitman v. Mulkey, 387 U.S. 369 (1967)).

When Serling lambastes the “tutelage of our Governor” in California, he’s referring to Ronald Reagan. Reagan criticized the state’s fair housing laws, saying, “If an individual wants to discriminate against Negroes or others in selling or renting his house, he has the right to do so.”

Here, Serling advocates for more pointed criticisms of race relations in America, particularly in television documentaries. He praises, but also critiques “Same Mud, Same Blood,” a 1967 NBC documentary about black and white soldiers serving in Vietnam.

TIDBITS: From “A Conversation with Rod Serling,” a 1968 television interview featuring Rod Serling, the creator of The Twilight Zone; James Dickey, poet; and Bernie Harrison, journalist for the Washington Star.

Source (info): Library of Congress, National Archives
Source (image): Massachusetts Historical Society

#AbigailAdams #JohnAdams #Adams #Massachusetts #ContinentalCongress #Congress #19thAmendment #USA #America250