From: Paulette Sunal
Question: I've read that slave boats were outlawed
in 1808. I've also recently read about a woman's grandmother
being born on a slave ship in the 1840's. Is it possible
that some slave ships were still importing Africans after
the ban?
Answer: Here's a good timeline on the
history of the slave trade in the Atlantic. As you'll
see, the trade continued even when it was illegal:
http://amistad.mysticseaport.org/timeline/atlantic.slave.trade.html
From:
Kathy Reimer
Question: I'm not sure you would have the answer
to my question, but perhaps you would be able to tell
me who would. I have acquired an old iron dinner bell
that would have sat atop a house to call the men to
the table. It has U.S. Bell Co---Hillsborough on it.
I did a search but nothing conclusive. How would I go
about getting any historical information on this company?
Thank you so much.
Answer: There sure isn’t a
lot of material out there on the history of bell-manufacturing
in the United States, is there? And there are towns
named Hillsborouogh all over the map. This
book seems to be a fairly general history—don’t
know if it will be of any help:
Price, Percival. Bells and Man (New York :
Oxford University Press, 1983).
I think your best bet will be to get in touch with
the American Bell Association, an international group
of collectors and dealers in bells. This page gives
a list of their local and regional chapters –
there isn’t an Iowa chapter yet, but you might
want to try some of those in nearby Midwestern states:
http://www.americanbell.org/chapters.htm
From: Dominic A. Day
Question: I am doing a paper on the two-party
system, and would like to include a quote I once heard
by George Washington. In the quote he basically said that
the two-party system is a bad choice for America. I was
wondering if you could tell me where I could find this
quote, or if you know the quote?
Answer: George Washington, like most
of the Founding Fathers, hoped that American government
under the Constitution would exist without formal political
parties. Washington expressed this hope often. Probably
his most famous warning on the subject of parties came
in his 1796 Farewell Address. Here’s the URL for
the full text of this famous document:
http://www.yale.edu/lawweb/avalon/washing.htm
From: Darlene Berry Lauth
Question: Did the Irish immigrants into early
America anglicize their names much like other Europeans
(German, Italian, French), and if they did, where would
be the best place to explore Irish root names/meanings
of the time?
Answer: The earliest immgirants from
Ireland were "Scotch-Irish" – Presbyterians
of Scottish background who’d settled in northern
Ireland in the 17th century. Their resettlement was
sponsored by the English government, so any need to
make the spelling of their Scotch names easier for English-speakers
was done before they came to America. On the whole,
Irish family names had been "anglicized" in
spelling fairly well before the 1840s when you see the
first large groups of Catholic immigrants from Ireland
(and these are family of Irish, not Scotch, background).
Here’s a nice (and serious) website on Irish family
names:
http://www.last-names.net/Articles/Irish-Names.asp
And I think you’ll enjoy this one – 100
of the most common Irish family names with their Gaelic
roots, meanings, and (when applicable) coats of arms:
http://www.ireland-information.com/heraldichall/irishsurnames.htm
|
