March 2, 2013

If it's not one thing...

There is a part of me that is tempted to issue some sort of "sorry for not posting more often" apology thing, but given the fact that I'm not exactly under any obligation to put my writing out there on a regular basis, I do this for myself as much as anything else, I'm not sure there is much point in doing so.

In any case one reason for there not being too many posts recently was that two weeks ago, just after I was done getting all nice and settled into the new apartment and starting to get into a regular schedule with regards to my classes at Wilkes-Barre, I get the news that my grandmother passed away. I of course then went down to Maryland to be with my father on that Sunday. Thus, the last two weekends, which probably would have gone towards catching up on my reading for college, were spent driving around, spending some time with my father, and attending the memorial service.

While I was in Towson the first weekend, my Uncle Bruce and I went for a walk through a nearby federal park/historic site of a former slave plantation, called the Ridgely Plantation. While we were walking towards the site, my uncle gave me a brief lecture about the site. About how the planation had been used to manufacture arms during the Revolutionary war and such.

When we got to the site, there was one thing that stuck out and actually bothered me a little bit. Not something I want to devote a whole blog post to, but still worth pointing out. Around the plantation and various buildings, there were these signs that had information about the history of the site. Now I did not get a chance to look at all the signs, of the few that I did, all but one used the term "worker" rather than "slave". The one exception was the sign outside the slave quarters that actually identified the building as being the slave quarters. What made this really odd, was the fact that other terms like "master" "owner" and "overseers", were still used by whoever wrote the signs up.

Just a minor example of historical erasure I thought I'd bring to people's attention.

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