Roots

When Alex Haley was a child, his grandmother told him wondrous stories about his family. The stories had been passed down orally from generation to generation for almost 200 years. The “furtherest-back-person” in those stories was Toby, “the African,”, whose real name was “Kin-tay.”

Many years later, Haley began a quest to trace his family’s history back to its African beginnings. Roots, the 1976 book about what he found, was a best-seller. And the following first part of the book made television history. It was watched by more than half of all Americans, many of whom came to understand for the first time the heroic struggle of African-Americans to regain their freedom.

Roots begins in 1750 in Gambia in West Africa. There Haley’s ancestor, Kunta Kinte---Toby, the African, in Haley’s grandmother’s stories---is captured by slave traders and shipped to America in chains. The miniseries then follows seven generations of the Haley family through a century of slavery. It concludes with their emacipation after the Civil War.

Roots won nine Emmy Awards. Its final episode was the highest-rated television program up to that time. And it inspired many Americans of all ethnic backgrounds to search for their own roots.

A second miniseries, Roots, the Next Generation, was aired in 1979. Based on the second half of Haley’s book, it continued the Haley family saga through the 1960s.

Mark Spitz Wins Seven Gold Medals

The starter’s gun fired, and a 22-year-old American dived into the swimming pool. He plunged in and out of the water as he took a commanding lead in the 200-meter butterfly. Mark Spitz was on his way to his first gold medal at the 1972 Olympics in Munich, Germany. Incredibly, he would win six more golds---more than anyone had ever won in a single Olympics.

This wasn’t Spitz’s first success. In 1967, at age 17, he had already set world records in butterfly and freestyle events. His coach predicted that he would win six gold medals at the 1968 Olympics, but he won only two. He continued to compete as a member of Indiana University’s national champion swim team, and was named outstanding amateur athelete in 1971.

At Munich in 1972, Spitz was at his peak. There he won four gold medals in individual races: the 100- and 200-meter freestyle and the 100- and 200-meter butterfly. He also won three other golds in team rely races. All seven events set new world records. Spitz retired from amateur athletics after the Olympics, having set world records 35 times during his sensational career.

During the 1972 Olympics, Palestinian terrorists killed two Isrraeli athletes and took nine others hostage. The tragic incident ended in a gun battle in which 15 people died.

The Founding of Harvard College

Just six years after the Puritans founded Massachusetts Bay Colony, they decided to start a “schoale or colledge” near Boston. When John Harvard, a clergyman dying of tuberculosis, wrote a will leaving his books and half his property to the new school, the college was named in his honor. Today that college is Harvard University, the oldest university in America and one of the most famous in the world.

Why were the Puritans so eager to found a college? They believed that education would help foster religious beliefs, hold the community together, and produce the leaders and ministers the colony needed. In England, many Puritans had attended Oxford and Cambridge universities. They wanted their sons to have a similar opportunity in America. Newtowne, the site of this new Massachusetts college, was renamed Cambridge in honor of the English university.

In 1640, Harvard admitted its first freshman class---four students. Henry Dunster, the college president, was also the only teacher. For almost 100 years, the Harvard teaching staff consisted of three or four tutors. Each took charge of an entering class and guided it for four years, teaching all subjects. Religion, ancient languages, mathematics, and science made up the core of the studies.

In Harvard’s early days, students sometimes paid their tuition by donating livestock to the school.

Education, 1640, Colleges and Universities, Massachusetts

Lemonade Lucy Hayes

The press jokingly called her “Lemonade Lucy,” because no alcoholic beverages were served in the White House while she was First Lady. But Lucy Hayes, wife of the 19th President, was widely respected as a kind and intelligent woman. She was, her husband Rutherford B. Hayes said, “the Golden Rule incarnate.”

A doctor’s daughter, Lucy Ware Webb grew up in Ohio. She graduated from Wesleyan Female Seminary, a college, in 1850. Two years later, she married “Rud” Hayes, who became a congressman and then governor of Ohio. Lucy had a keen interest in politics and helped her husband in his career. She worked to outlaw slavery and alcohol, and raised money for the poor. The Hayeses had seven sons and one daughter.

Lucy Hayes was a thoroughly modern First Lady. She was the first one to hold a college degree. And during her time in the White House, a host of new inventions were introduced there. These included indoor plumbing, telephones, typewriters, and record players. But Lucy Hayes also had traditional values. She held family prayers each morning, as well as frequent songfests around the sitting-room piano. And she introduced the Easter egg roll on the White House lawn, an event that has been held ever since.

Because the Hayeses came from Ohio, the rule that no liquor could be served at the White House was called “the Ohio Idea.”

Patrick Henry

“Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery?...I know not what course others may take, but as for me, give me liberty or give me death!”
Those famous words were spoken in March, 1775, by Patrick Henry, the great orator of the Revolution. Relations between England and the colonies were at the breaking point, but some members of the Virginia legislature were reluctant to take up arms. Urging action, Henry spoke the words that became a rallying cry for patriots throughout the colonies.

This was not the first time that a speech by Henry had stirred up his countrymen. In 1774, at the First Continental Congress, the lawyer from Virginia spoke these words to inspire the delegates to work together: “The distinctions between Virginians, Pennsylvanians, New Yorkers, New Englanders, are no more…I am not a Virginian, but an American.”
Henry was elected governor of Virginia in 1776 and served for five terms. After indepdence, he worried that a strong federal government would limit the rights of the people and the states. His opposition to ratification of the Constitution in 1788 helped bring about the swift passage of the Bill of Rights, guaranteeing Americans’ basic freedoms.

Patrick Henry was brilliant, but he was not well educated. Thomas Jefferson said he was the “laziest man in reading I ever knew.”

The Log Cabin

When settlers arrived on the wild American frontier, their first task was to build a home. More often than not, they built a log cabin. These simple homes were common on the frontier because they were sturdy and easy to build. One person, using just an ax and a knife, could do the job. No nails were needed.

The first log cabins in America were built near the mouth of the Delaware River in the late 1630s. They were erected by settlers from Sweden and Finland, where log cabins had been built for hundreds of years. The cabins caught on quickly with other New World settlers. The typical log cabin had just one or two rooms. The walls were made of logs laid horizontally and notched at the ends, so that they interlocked where they met at the corners.

Mud, clay, stones, and chips of wood filled gaps between the logs. Rough-cut boards or tree bark served as roofs.

As the U.S. became industrialized, the log cabin came to symbolize all the hardships and virtues of pioneer life. Politicians boasted that they had grown up in log cabins on the frontier. Three presidents really did: James Buchanan, Abraham Lincoln, and James Garfield.

President William Henry Harrison, elected in 1840, was called “the Ohio farmer” and used the log cabin as a symbol in his campaign. But he was actually born in a mansion in Virginia.

Irving Berlin

In an amazing life that stretched for 101 years, Irving Berlin wrote some 1,500 songs. His melodies, sometimes simple and sentimental, other times stirring and swinging, had a profound effect on 20th-century American music. Many of his songs---White Christmas, and God Bless America to name just two---have become American standards.

Born Israel Balin, Berlin was the youngest of eight children. He and his family moved to New York City from Russia when he was five years old. Not long after the move, young Irving left school to earn money by singing on street corners and in saloons. As a teenager, Irving Berlin earned a dollar a day as a singing waiter. At the age of 20, he was hired as a songwriter in a vaudeville theater. Three days later, he wrote his first hit, Alexander’s Ragtime Band.
During World War I, while serving as an infantryman, Berlin wrote the rousing God Bless America. During World War II his armed-services show, This Is the Army, became a hit movie, earned him the Medal of Merit, and forever associated him with patriotic music.

Berlin also made an everlasting mark on America’s holiday traditions with songs like White Christmas, Happy Holidays, and Easter Parade. His numerous stage musicals include the Broadway hit Annie Get Your Gun.