Randall G Griffin
Bio
I am Pop-Pop, dad, husband, coffee-addict, and for 25 years a technical writer. My goal is to write something that somebody would want to read.
Stories (12/0)
Jim Crow
The mechanics of repression, both the ritualized and institutionalized subordination demanded of blacks, exacted a psychological and physical toll, shaping to an extraordinary degree day-to-day black life and demeanor. Perhaps the most difficult revelation to absorb was that color marked them as inferior in the eyes of whites, no matter how they behaved and whatever their social class. [1]
By Randall G Griffin5 months ago in History
The Black Codes
In the Summer and Fall of 1865, the former states of the Confederacy held constitutional conventions. Under Presidential Reconstruction, only white men were allowed to vote for delegates. The Southern states took advantage of President Johnson’s lax Reconstruction policies to elect ex-Confederate leaders. By the end of the year, most of the Southern states had Confederate legislatures in place that began to pass laws restricting the rights of the freedmen. “Regardless of how they voted on the [thirteenth] amendment,” notes Michael Bellesiles in Inventing Black Equity: Reconstructing the Constitution in the Aftermath of the South, “every one of the former Confederate states quickly passed Black Codes controlling their freed black population, clearly violating freedom of contract, one of the minimal rights all Republicans felt essential to their formation of equality.”
By Randall G Griffin5 months ago in History
'Oily Cakes'
The doughnut, that delicious breakfast treat millions of Americans enjoy every year, has been around longer than America itself; archaeologists have discovered doughnut remains at prehistoric ruins in the American Southwest. Nobody is quite sure how our doughnut-loving ancestors cooked them, or if they solved the doughnut quandary that has plagued mankind for centuries; how to make a doughnut that doesn’t have an undercooked center. It would take a few hundred years and a 16-year-old boy before the doughnut we know today was born.
By Randall G Griffin5 months ago in History
The Barber of Alexandria
Ctesibius of Alexandria (285–222 BCE) was one of the first great engineers of the ancient world. A Greek mathematician and inventor, he discovered and experimented with the elasticity of air, earning him the title of the ‘father of pneumatics.’
By Randall G Griffin5 months ago in History
'Out of the Trenches by Christmas
At 1:15 p.m. on December 4, 1915, one of the most powerful and popular men in the country arrived at a pier in Hoboken, New Jersey. Waiting for him were thousands of spectators and well-wishers to see him on his journey. Through a circus atmosphere that one paper called “so grotesque as to be beyond belief,” Henry Ford, dressed in a brown overcoat, derby hat, and carrying a walking stick, pushed his way through the crowd to board the cruise liner he commissioned for one specific purpose — to bring peace to a world at war.
By Randall G Griffin5 months ago in History
The Strange Case of Deacon Brodie and Mr. Stevenson
The first of October 1788 dawned bright with expectation as close to 40,000 people began to gather in the streets of Edinburgh, Scotland. They were there to witness the execution of one of its most prominent citizens.
By Randall G Griffin5 months ago in History
The Missouri/Iowa War
On the side of a lonely dirt road a few miles north of Sheridan, Missouri, a monument marks the events of November 1839, when 1,200 Iowans and 2,200 Missouri militiamen faced off over imaginary river rapids, a botched land survey, a jailed sheriff, and three honey bee trees.
By Randall G Griffin5 months ago in History