American Realities with Bill Youngs
  • Home Page
  • About Me
    • Brief Résumé
    • Illustrative Films
  • Summary
  • Workshop
    • Jobs for Historians
    • Maps
    • Slideshows
  • Images
    • A Walk Through Turnbull
  • Fireside Talks
    • American History >
      • Indigenous Alaska: The Baidarka
    • National Parks
  • Spoken Word
  • Books
    • Gods Messengers: Religious Leadership in Colonial New England, 1700-1750 >
      • Table of Contents
      • Preface
      • Chapter 1: The Ministers and Their Times
      • Chapter 2: The Minister's Calling
      • Epilogue
      • Appendix: Length of Ministerial Settlement
      • Abbreviations
    • The Congregationalists >
      • Timeline
      • Bibliographic Dictionary of Leaders
    • Eleanor Roosevelt: A Personal and Public Life >
      • Prologue: The South Pacific, 1943 >
        • Eleanor Roosevelt South Pacific
      • A Victorian Family
      • The Legacy
      • Growing Up
      • Eleanor and Franklin
      • A Politician's Wife
      • Grief
      • Public Service
      • First Lady
      • The Democratic Crusade
      • On Her Own
    • American Realities (Book) >
      • History as a Story
      • A Note on Wikipedia as a Source
      • Volume One >
        • The Native Americans
        • The English Background
        • The British American
        • Reform in Colonial America
        • Divided Loyalties
        • The American Revolution
        • Testing the Constitution
        • Republican Nationalism
        • The Limits of Jacksonian Democracy
        • Abolitionists and Anti-abolitionists
        • Texas Revolution
        • Reform in the Early Republic
        • Manifest Destiny
        • A Slave's Story
        • The Civil War >
          • Two Soldiers
      • Volume Two >
        • The “Taming” of the West
        • Beyond Emancipation
        • The New Industrial Era
        • The Birth of Environmentalism
        • New Immigrants
        • Expanding American Democracy
        • World War I
        • Modernity versus Tradition
        • The New Deal
        • Total War
        • The Cold War
        • The Civil Rights Movement
        • Turmoil on the Campuses
        • The New Computer Age
        • America, the Cold War, and Beyond
      • Additional Essays >
        • Norsemen in the New World
    • The Fair and the Falls >
      • Part I: Possessing the Falls >
        • Chapter One: James Glover: Purchasing the Falls
        • Chapter Two: Waiting for the Indians
        • Chapter Three: Harnessing the Falls
        • Chapter Four: "The World's Fair of the Northwest"
        • Chapter Five: The City Beside the Falls
      • Part II: Rediscovering the Falls >
        • Chapter Six: The Twilight of Old Spokane
        • Chapter Seven: Urban Blight and Urban Renewal
        • Chapter Eight: King Cole and The Heart of a City
        • Chapter Nine: Visualizing a World's Fair
      • Part III Redesigning the Falls >
        • Chapter Ten: From Spokane to Paris >
          • Tom Foley's Turn
        • Chapter Eleven: Wooing the Foreign Exhibitors
        • Chapter Twelve: Wooing the Domestic Exhibitors
        • Chapter Thirteen: The Environmental Debate
        • Chapter Fourteen: Building the Fair
        • Chapter Fifteen: Marketing, Money, and Management
      • Part IV: The Fair by the Falls >
        • Chapter Sixteen: Opening Day
        • Chapter Seventeen: A Mingling of Peoples
        • Chapter Eighteen: Days at the Fair
        • Chapter Nineteen: The Press of New Ideas
        • Chapter Twenty: The Final Tally
      • Part V: An American Environment >
        • Chapter Twenty-One: Spokane Falls, An American Environment
      • The Fair and the Falls Map

"Sublime Moments" in American History -- and Beyond

10/31/2013

1 Comment

 
Amira Willighagen, "Holland's Got Talent," and Life's Wondrous Surprises

A few weeks ago I posted a blog on "Oh, the Joy!" or "sublime moments" in American history, in which I offered up the arrival of Lewis and Clark at the Pacific Ocean as an example of such events, and wrestled with the wider meaning of sublime moments. This evening a nine-year-old girl on a talent show in Holland led me deeper into this subject.  And yes, Holland today, is a long way from my central topic in my blog, American history. But sometimes we learn about past feelings and events through contemporary examples. So, bear with, watch the video, and then please do return to this post....

Did you experience as did the judges something completely unexpected and beautiful in this performance? I surely did, and I am as astonished as they were. Apparently young Amira Willghagen never had formal training as a singer and just learned on her own by watching YouTube instructional videos. This evening I've watched her sing again and again, and each time I listen and watch, the experience resonates with "sublime moments" in American history. In Amira's singing and in each of these historic moments, life yields something unanticipated -- impossible even, and yet real and astonishingly beautiful.

Here are some of those resonant, sublime moments, posted here in the past or the subject of future posts.

1. Lewis and Clark reach the Pacific and embrace a more inclusive democracy:

(from an earlier blog post on americanrealities.com)

"One of my favorite moments in American history is embodied in a simple phrase recorded by William Clark in 1805 shortly after he and the Corps of Discovery reached the Pacific: 'Ocean in view! Oh! The joy!' After two years of hard travel across inland America, Lewis and Clark had reached salt water. There were many reasons to rejoice at that moment. They were the first to cross the continent through American territory. They accomplished the task without hostilities with any Native American peoples. They lost only one man during the crossing.  And then in a single moment their success was assured. Making the event even more wondrous, as if in confirmation of the kinship they had experienced on the crossing, the expedition members voted together on November 24, 1805, in deciding where to locate their winter camp. In this case the “they” was not only free white males, as was the customary electorate in the United States at that time, but it included the Indian woman Sacajawea and William Clark’s slave, York. In their moment of triumph, they set an example in democracy not known to the nation as a whole until more than a century later."

2. In a refugee camp, after World War II, a Jewish orphan sings a song for Eleanor Roosevelt

In this passage from Eleanor Roosevelt: a Personal and Public Life, the great lady has just finished work in London at a session of the newly founded United Nations. Her assignment had been refugees, and typical of her approach to life, she was not content to study the problem from afar. She must visit actual camps across the channel:

Of the several refugee camps that Eleanor toured the most memorable was Zilcheim, a Jewish camp outside Frankfurt, where the refugees had built an earthen hill on top of which they placed a stone monument "To the Memory of All Jews Who Died in Germany." As a young woman Eleanor had disdained Jews, but her attitude had changed with her personal growth. Her journey into humanity made her more sensitive to the needs of women and blacks and taught her to recognize the dignity and the suffering of Jews in America and abroad. At the beginning of the war, she had urged Franklin to receive more Jewish refugees into the United States. Now she was standing among the survivors of the holocaust.

Eleanor could see grief in the faces of the men and women in the Jewish camp; each "seemed to represent a story more tragic than the last." An old woman who had lost her family knelt in the mud before Eleanor and threw her arms around her legs. "Israel," she murmured, "Israel, Israel." A boy of twelve approached Eleanor. He had wandered into the camp holding his younger brother, about six, firmly by the hand. He did not know his own name, or where he lived, or what had happened to his parents. "He was just there," Eleanor wrote, "taking care of his younger brother." He wanted to sing for her, and so she and her guides stopped to listen. Then standing in the mud of the dirty refugee camp the orphan raised his small head and sang" A Song of Freedom." For a moment all the world was that small boy, and "no one listening could speak." Eleanor, who had been an orphan when she was twelve, with a younger brother, in a place that was not home, listened intently to the song that was sung for her.... 

3. Well, come to think of it, there is no third example, not now.

Instead I'll leave this rumination about a nine-year-old Dutch girl in Holland and a twelve-year-old Jewish boy in Germany, separated by more than 60 years, known to us in entirely different circumstances, but alike in their surprising appeal to our hearts. There are many moments like these in American history and beyond. We only need to look for them.

View more entries on the American Realities blog...
(You know you want to!)


              This current post is one of a growing number of historically-themed entries on americanrealities.com. To see a complete list of other entries, click here
1 Comment
Gabriel Rose
11/6/2013 03:16:50 pm

I throughly enjoy watching this develop more and more. Keep up the great work

Reply



Leave a Reply.

    Summary of Blog Posts

    Welcome

       Some years ago, while writing a biography of Eleanor Roosevelt I jotted this note in my journal: "I want to tell the stories of American History as though I were among friends, sitting beside a fire." In this web site and blog I aim to tell some of those stories in words, images, films -- and with other media marvels.

    Archives

    December 2020
    September 2019
    October 2018
    November 2017
    January 2017
    August 2016
    July 2016
    January 2016
    December 2015
    October 2015
    September 2015
    June 2015
    December 2014
    October 2014
    September 2014
    August 2014
    July 2014
    June 2014
    May 2014
    March 2014
    January 2014
    December 2013
    November 2013
    October 2013
    September 2013
    August 2013
    July 2013
    June 2013

    Categories

    All

    RSS Feed