Spelling on the Blackboard - 98 Years Later

Old 1917 Blackboard Treasures Discovered in Oklahoma

When contractors began work on four classrooms of Emerson High School in Oklahoma, they knew their remodel would improve education - but they never expected it would impact local history.

Looking to upgrade the rooms with new whiteboards and smart boards, the workers had to to first remove the outdated chalkboards. But when they began to pull away the old boards, they made a startling discovery.....  

Beneath the current boards rested another set of chalkboards - untouched for nearly 100 years. Protected and totally undisturbed, the century-old writings and drawings looked like they were made just yesterday. Here, a November calendar rolls into December. A turkey marks the celebration of Thanksgiving.  

A multiplication table gives us a glimpse into the curriculum and methods taught in 1917, techniques perhaps lost in the passage of time. When regarding a wheel of multiplication, Principal Sherry Kishore told The Oklahoman, “I have never seen that technique in my life.” 

But Oklahoma City school officials aren’t just shocked by what is written, but how it is written. Penmanship like this is clearly a lost art. This board reads, “I give my head, my heart, and my life to my God and One nation indivisible with justice for all.”

Within each of the four rooms, the subject matter and lessons mirrored one another - indicating, as an Oklahoma Public School Twitter caption reads, “aligned curriculum in 1917.” 

And though the boards’ style and subject matter might be unfamiliar to younger folks,  they certainly resonate with older generations.  Principal Kishore told The Oklahoman what it was like to show her 85-year-old mother the boards:  “She just stood there and cried. She said it was exactly like her classroom was when she was going to school.”

But these boards actually predate Principal Kishore’s mother by 13 years. Two dates were found on the boards: November 30, 1917, and December 4, 1917. 

Some of the writings and drawings were done by students, while others were made by teachers - but it’s not always clear whose is whose.

Regardless, the work is a striking look into days long gone. While reading the boards - like this one listing “My Rules To Keep Clean” - the past comes alive in a very personal way. 

English teacher Cinthea Comer told The Oklahoman, “It was so eerie because the colors were so vibrant it looked like it was drawn the same day. To know that it was drawn 100 years ago…..it’s like you’re going into a looking glass into the past.”

Built in 1895, Emerson High School has seen many renovations and improvements throughout the years - but nothing like this has ever been discovered. 

When removing old chalkboards in the past, contractors have only found broken pipes and wires, so this is a shocking surprise. Oklahoma City and the school district are now working to preserve these beautiful boards. 

Hopefully, the spirit of these teachers and their students will be enjoyed for many years to come. Who knew that scribbles on a chalkboard could become such a precious piece of history.

Do you remember the “blackboards”?

The Zinn Whine

Zin Wine - A little too light weight?This vin is not about "Zin", zinfandel wine, but instead Boston University's liberal Professor Howard Zinn, a card-carrying Communist Party member since 1949. The "Zinn Whine" is his constant grating critique of the American civilization to the exclusion of our Nation's exceptionalism to champion freedom as his revisionist history lesson. Instead, America is synonymous with brute domination that goes back to Christopher Columbus and to the founding fathers who were self-serving elitists defined by "guns and greed". Is it a wonder recently that some people were pushing to drop "Columbus Day" and rename it "Explorers' Day" to remove this human stain that historically killed the Indigenous Indians?

Unfairly too, Columbus detractors blame Christopher for also bringing genocidal microbes to kill native Americans. In a 2006 radio show interview with conservative host Dennis Prager while promoting his book, "Original Zinn", Howard Zinn conceded that there was a natural transmission of European borne disease and death phenomena that paralleled the event of Columbus landing in America which was unintentional during the 17th century expansion of exploration and discovery. Interestingly, had an Indian built a boat and traveled to Europe and back, he would have contaminated the Indians too. Transcontinental contamination was going to happen at some point, making the first carriers irrelevant.

Factoid: Europeans didn’t know anything about germs. Not until 40 years after Columbus died that Italian physicist Girolamo Fracastoro proposed the theory. 

Another event was about Francisco de Bobadilla, a man who coveted Columbus's job as governor of Hispanola who was a liar and Columbus usurper. In 1500 the King and Queen of Spain sent him to North America to investigate claims that Columbus wasn’t being fair to the European settlers, which meant Columbus was protecting the Indians. de Bobadilla promptly arrested Columbus and his brothers on bogus charges of Indian mistreatment and sent them back to Spain and appointed himself governor. Records show Columbus malfeasance comes from a defrocked liar, de Bobadilla, and two years later Columbus was reinstated as admiral.

Factoid: Columbus was not involved in the slave trade, as critics like Howard Zinn and Noam Chomsky have asserted. One of his boats crashed in Haiti. He had no room for 39 men, so he started a colony there. Columbus came back a year later to find that the Taino Indians killed all of them and left them where they fell. Columbus went to war with the Tainos and took 500 of them as prisoners of war, not slaves. They were released after the war. 

After the colonies defeated the British, in 1803, the Westward expansion started that lead to the decimation of some Indians, which Professor Zinn agreed it had amounted to 10% of the entire Indian nations, a surprising and startling admission by Zinn that the Americans didn't kill more as so often is reported as "mass annihilation", utter destruction, by liberal revisionists.

Matt Damon & Howard Zinn at NY "The People Speak" Movie premiere in 2009.Zinn's red colors were blazing as he embraced the Hollywood liberal elite to push his Marxist history lessons in 2009 under the banner of the "History" Channel, an educational series that promoted and taught ideas to our children's young minds in public schools. This proven method of a slow drip, drip, drips of neo-liberalism ideals and anti-Americanism have surreptitiously steeped into our national psyche under the guise of "social-justice instruction" which has been attacking American patriots and Judeo-Christian ideals to replace them with collective thinkers and secular values, just the opposite of our core beliefs. Zinn also calls for "actions to redistribute wealth" so that all material goods will be free to everyone - sure sounds like some Obama's progressive lexicon too.   

Upon Howard Zinn's death in 2010, the bells pealed a death knell as his corpse was lowered into the grave just when simultaneously the liberals bastions around the country raised his body of work up out of the grave to extol him as the hero and champion of the "unsung masses" - hardly true historically or metaphorically speaking, but a worthy empty moniker to drape his effigy over those books devoted to "history as a political act" which are being force-fed to our school children. 

History serving “a social aim,” rather than chronicling the past in a detached manner, is what readers get in "A People’s History of the United States". Readers learn very little about history. They learn quite a bit about Howard Zinn. In fact, the book is perhaps best thought of as a massive Rorschach Ink Blot Test, with the author’s familiar reaction to every major event in American history proving that his is a captive mind long closed by his left-wing ideology. So, in spite of the lack of hard evidence after three decades in positive classroom results using "A People’s History of the United States", a well-coordinated group of 20,000 teachers has been organized to train teachers in the art of Zinn" anyway to further indoctrinate students in progressive ideologies.

Through Zinn’s looking-glass, Maoist China, site of history’s bloodiest state-sponsored killings, transforms into “the closest thing, in the long history of that ancient country, to a people’s government, independent of outside control.” Well, not exactly true, in fact the people's government was in control independent of the people by Mao who murdered any opposition. Oops! There Zinn goes again, just trying his best, with a little help from the left-wing elites to unrelentingly condemn America for its barbarity during its entire history, over three hundred years, and relegate it into the ash can of downed empires and dynasties.