Playing the Lottery
Winter 1969, Boston. I was driving a cab at night, while attending Harvard Divinity School. I had run through some scholarship and 
loan money, and needed cash; Christmas and all that. But I also thought it would be a “good experience” for a wannabe writer.
When I turned my cab onto St. James Street downtown and saw the kid in front of the Greyhound Bus depot signaling for a taxi, I knew my time had come. Continue reading Another Quaker Holiday Story: Playing the Lottery
[NOTE: This review does not mention that amid the spreading devastation of the English Civil War, which in 1649 led to the execution of the defeated Charles I, a new radical religious group, derisively called Quakers, was coming into being. The earliest Friends were at least in sympathy with Cromwell’s anti-monarchical “Commonwealth,” and not a few had fought for it. When the Commonwealth collapsed a decade later, the monarchy was restored and the beheaded Charles’s refugee son became king Charles II.
Behind the new king was the Anglican church, and many others turned loose in his realm — losers turned winners, with lots of scores to settle.
Quakers were among those targeted, persecuted for the next thirty years. That’s another story, except to note that they survived.
I mention Quakers because as one of the spiritual descendants, this writer is living in times when forecasts of a new civil war are frequently heard. And this review indirectly but forcefully raises two questions: would Quakers survive another such ordeal? How could they/we prepare?]
From The Guardian: The Siege of Loyalty House by Jessie Childs review – the English civil war in all its fog and mess
The story of the clergymen, soldiers, architects, actors and apothecaries forced to rub shoulders during desperate times
Kathryn Hughes — 04 June 2022
In the centuries following the burning down of Basing House by Oliver Cromwell in 1645, all sorts of odd things kept turning up in the ruins. There was fine glass from Venice, an ivory cup from west Africa, apothecary jars from Delft and fragments of a Chinese bowl.
Random though these remnants were, they were nothing compared with the assorted jumble of house guests who had left them behind. For three years at the height of England’s civil war, 500 or so mostly strangers had been obliged to cram hugger-mugger into the Tudor castle, which lay two miles east of Basingstoke.
Sheltered within the massive earthwork fortifications were Roman Catholics and Anglicans, soldiers and architects, actors and apothecaries, people who burned with righteous anger at what was happening to their beloved country, and those who couldn’t wait for the whole thing to be over. The one thing they all had in common was that they were nominally king’s men, on the side of Charles I in his bloody and seemingly endless struggle against his own parliament. Continue reading Quakerism was born in a terrible civil war. Could it survive another one?
[Note: It’s rare that blog material turns up in the real estate section, especially the mainly rather upscale version in the Washington Post, and particularly in the rather very upscale horsey parts of Loudoun County, Virginia, out near where the Shenandoah Valley begins. But for many decades once upon a time, much of Loudoun was Quaker country, and there are still active meetings in the region. There’s also lots of Quaker history to see and explore; and here’s a glimpse at a special piece of it.]
Historical Quaker Farm in Loudoun County for sale
Stone Eden Farm is typical of the small farms owned by Quakers in the 18th century
The stone house was built in 1765. An addition was made in 1817. (Mario Mineros Photography)
By Kathy Orton — June 3, 2022
Stone Eden Farm, a historical Quaker farm in Hamilton, Va., with roots that go back more than 250 years, is on the market for just under $1.4 million.
When Lord Fairfax owned what would become Loudoun County, he granted land there to William Hatcher, a Quaker who moved to the area from Pennsylvania. By 1765, Hatcher had built a house on the land as required by Fairfax as a condition of the deed, or patent. That stone patent house has been home to generations of farmers.
Like most Quakers who came to Loudoun County, Hatcher was drawn to its fertile pastureland. Stone Eden Farm was typical of the small farms owned by Quakers in the 18th century. Because of their religious beliefs, Quakers did not rely on enslaved labor, and their farms tended to be smaller than the plantations in eastern and southern Loudoun. Continue reading Here’s a Great Look at the Quaker “Good Old Days.” Beautiful — But a Lot of Work
I don’t believe in reincarnation.
But if I did, I’d be pretty sure that in a previous life, I shambled through the American 1850s. That might help explain why lately I’ve been having vivid dreamlike flashbacks about them. A few acquaintances would nod knowingly at this admission, and murmur something about “past lives.”
What I think explains it is that in this current, 20th/21st century life, I spent several months studying the 1850s, from the perspective of Quakers who really did live through them.Sometimes, the wrinkled vintage letters and sepia-stained books I was working with seemed to meld into scenes from an extended private mini- or rather maxi-series; I often had a sense of spying on the Friends through some special binoculars that saw through time rather than distance.
Outwardly I was like a monk, an absent-minded antisocial drudge, mostly closeted in my small room at Pendle hill, poring through long-forgotten documents, pecking at the keyboard day and night.
But for me the work was gripping, not least because I knew what the characters in my scholarly maxi-series didn’t — that their idealistic dedication, their years of risky activism and pious devotion to achieving a nonviolent end to slavery — all were doomed. Continue reading Seeing Our Future in the Past? Flashbacks from the 1850s
Reported Covid Deaths by U. S. Region:
Northeast – 211,923 deaths
Midwest – 211,648 deaths
West – 189,805 deaths
South – 378,472 deaths
RANDOLPH SEALS, 39, WAS elected the coroner for Bolivar County, in rural western Mississippi, in 2015. But the relentlessness of the deaths linked to Covid, and his personal ties to so many who were dying, brought him to the brink of quitting in the fall of 2020.
By early 2021, when the South’s death rate spiked again, he wished he had. Then came the Delta variant, and the Omicron wave, and it just got worse.
“It was a disaster that was coming back and back and back,” Mr. Seals said.
As hospitals overflowed, many residents died in their homes. The ripple effect of the pandemic was evident, too, as Mr. Seals began recording the deaths of people with heart or kidney disease for whom there were no hospital beds. Now, he said, he is handling the deaths of people who had Covid and never quite recovered. Continue reading Covid at 1 Million U.S. Deaths: A Special Scourge in the South
