Comments on: In the Archives: August Emancipation

By: Laura Bien

Laura Bien — Mon, 01 Aug 2011 14:45:02 +0000

Incidentally, for anyone who'd like to see the unedited ad for the railroad snow plow, I've parked it over on my blog.

By: Laura Bien

Laura Bien — Mon, 01 Aug 2011 13:20:40 +0000

Jim: It does look like a feeler gauge; I've seen those as wads of metal strips, each one of slightly different thickness, linked together on a ring. You'd definitely want to choose the larger-graded acorns in order to make an optimal acorn whistle.

By: Jim Rees

Jim Rees — Mon, 01 Aug 2011 13:17:06 +0000

The artifact reminds me of a feeler gauge, used for example to set the gap on a spark plug. I could go with acorn grader, as Cosmo suggests. Maybe the ones with smaller gaps between the acorn and hat fetch a higher price at the Farmer’s Market.

By: Laura Bien

Laura Bien — Sun, 31 Jul 2011 23:45:48 +0000

Cosmonican: Today I visited Makers’ Faire at the Henry Ford Museum/Greenfield Village and later reverentially pilgrimaged to the onetime office of one of my favorite historical people, Luther Burbank. The office, tucked away in Greenfield Village, is small, graceful, and tasteful and says a lot about this modest yet extraordinarily gifted gardener and botanist. So much could be said about this gentleman but as I am still enjoying a residual fangirl glow from having touched the selfsame brass doorknob he may have touched, let’s just say that the importance of grading acorns doesn’t seem silly at all. AT ALL.

By: Laura Bien

Laura Bien — Sun, 31 Jul 2011 23:38:30 +0000

SCRATCJINGMYHEAD: Thanks for your kind comment. The event was pretty significant locally for the latter part of the 19th century especially but seems to have been obscured in the mists of time.

By: Laura Bien

Laura Bien — Sun, 31 Jul 2011 23:36:45 +0000

Jared: Thank you, that is a valuable correction and I appreciate your pointing it out. That is my fault (not Dave’s; his edits always improve my articles) and simply a result of my ignorance about that event granting voting rights to Native Americans in 1924. I appreciated learning about it (and will probably spend a good deal of the evening Googling it up to learn more), and it’s definitely a detail that I’ll include in any future iterations of this story. Thank you.

By: cosmonıcan

cosmonıcan — Sun, 31 Jul 2011 22:59:10 +0000

Politics aside, I’ll take a wild guess that the oval, veined, pieces on this jackknife thingy are of different sizes for comparing stuff. So, I will propose that it is an acorn grader, and leave it at that.

By: Jared Collins

Jared Collins — Sun, 31 Jul 2011 22:47:52 +0000

Re:[3] I understand, and the article was well written and well received. I think your assumption would be the one that most Americans would make, women’s suffrage after all is part of not just our history, but of our American myth.

Sometimes our myths gets so ingrained into our culture and education that we neglect the actual history. My only point was that women were not the last people to be denied the most basic of freedoms.

By: Eric

Eric — Sun, 31 Jul 2011 20:55:50 +0000

The so-called Juneteenth event disrupts an important Saturday for the Farmers’ Market. The Market is all ready in serious decline from inadequate parking, extortionate stall fees from the City of Ann Arbor, and rampant reselling. The so-called Black Business Day ruins another Saturday in June.

By: Dave Askins

Dave Askins — Sun, 31 Jul 2011 20:19:38 +0000

Re: [1] “I would like to point out that it was not until 1924 that the Indian (Native American) Citizenship Act was passed giving them the right to vote en mass.”

The sentence in Bien’s original piece ended with ” … for another half century.” That left the allusion non-specific, and I supplied what I assumed was the intended implicit reference on editing: ” … when women achieved the franchise.” Ordinarily, Bien will review any edits before final publication, but this week, exceptionally, circumstances conspired against that. In any case, the unintended slight was introduced by the editor.