Winters in New England are lengthy and bitter, and the college-age students at the Young Men's Christian Association (YMCA) Training School (Springfield College today) in Springfield, Massachusetts in the early 1890s could become somewhat boisterous when weather conditions prohibited their going outside to participate in sports.
Linda Witmer's chronicle of the Carlisle Indian School makes one feel that he was really there and knew some of the students personally. The story begins with the journey of seventy-two shackled Indian prisoners to St. Augustine, Florida in 1875 under Richard Henry Pratt, the transfer of most of them three years later to Hampton, Virginia, and the establishment of the Indian Industrial School at Carlisle in 1879.
The Real All Americans: The Team That Changed a Game, a People, a Nation . By Sally Jenkins. Photos, 343pp. New York, NY, Doubleday Publishers, 2007. $24.95.
John Bloom. To Show What an Indian Can Do: Sports at Native American Boarding Schools, Sports and Culture Series, vol. 2. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000) 151 pp. Illustrated. $24.95 . Hardcover.
WHITE MAN'S CLUB: Schools, Race, and the Struggle of Indian Acculturation, by Jacqueline Fear-Segal (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2007), 422 pp., $55.00 hb.
Oral History project by Alan Schulze, Monica Wilson, Troy Ehrensberger, and James Cowden of Shippensburg University. Edited by Troy Ehrensberger and narrated by Alan Schulze.
At an academic conference on Marianne Moore, I needled one of the editors of Moore's letters for writing assertively that in 1896 the Moore family moved from Pittsburgh to "nearby Carlisle." Even a century later, with a turnpike, the trip is four and a half hours by a fast car; at the end of the nineteenth century, it must have been akin to burning your bridges behind you. "Oh, that's all right," said this professor from Pomona College, "from California every place in Pennsylvania is nearby." If unguarded, perspective can trump historical reality every time.
Nellie Robertson Denny, born in 1871 on the Sisseton Wahpeton Sioux reservation in South Dakota, came to the Carlisle Indian Industrial School (CIIS) in 1880 as a nine-year-old child. After 10 years of schooling, she became a member of the second graduating class in 1890, where she was then hire
My father was District Attorney from 1904 to 1907 and built a house on South College Street in Carlisle, at the corner of Graham Street, in 1910. The way it happened was this. Wilbur F. Sadler was judge of Cumberland County at the time. He had been elected, for the second time, in 1904 in a bloody battle with John Wetzel in which each side was reputed to have spent $100,000, a huge sum in those days.
Katharine Mary Drexel (26 November, 1858-3 March, 1955) was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. She enjoyed a life of comfort and privilege before deciding to use her inherited wealth to establish a new religious order within the Roman Catholic Church. For her life and work, she has been formally recognized by her Church as one of its saints.