American Myths: Popular Music
Match the song title with the story of its composition or use.
Options:
Battle Hymn of the Republic
Taps
Home Sweet Home
Dixie
Star Spangled Banner
Take Me Out to the Ball Game
1. This was a popular Civil War song sung by Union and Confederate soldiers. Regimental bands typically ended evening camp concerts by playing this song and bands of opposing armies sometimes performed the song together across battle lines:
Home Sweet Home. John Howard Payne, a traveling actor who wrote the lyrics, lived his entire life in hotel rooms and boarding houses, never having an actual home.
2. After battle, while preparing casualties from the opposing army for burial, a captain discovered his own son among the dead soldiers. On his son’s body, he found the music for this song written on a scrap of paper:
Taps. Captain Robert Ellicombe asked his company bugler to play the music at his son's burial. The next day, Division Commander Gen. Daniel Butterfield, asked his bugler, Oliver Morton, to arrange the piece for a new bugle call, which was soon played throughout the entire Union Army.
3. The melody to this song was originally a popular drinking tune:
Star Spangled Banner. John Stafford Smith composed the melody for a London social club in the late 1700s, and the music was used for a religious hymn and later for a popular drinking song in London and America.
4. Originally a religious song, this music, with new lyrics, became a famous marching song:
Battle Hymn of the Republic. Southerner William Steffe composed the music for a religious hymn, and Union soldiers marched to the song, singing the words of "John Brown's Body." When Julia Ward Howe saw troops marching to the tune, she was so inspired by its pageantry that the words to "Battle Hymn" came to her in the middle of the night.
5. A man from Ohio wrote this song while sitting in a New York City hotel room:
Dixie. Northerner Dan D. Emett did not write the song with personal memories of old cotton fields back home. The song became a popular tune before the Civil War, and Confederate soldiers soon adopted it as their own. Ironically, the song was a favorite of Abraham Lincoln.
6. The author of this song never witnessed a battle or a baseball game before writing this piece:
Take Me Out to the Ball Game. Albert von Tilzer performed this song on vaudeville stages twenty years before he actually saw his first baseball game.
- Thomas Ayres, That's Not in My American History Book: A Compilation of Little-Known Events and Forgotten Heroes (New York: Taylor Trade Publishing, 2000).
1. Frederick Douglass: "The existence of slavery in this country brands your republicanism as a sham, your humanity as a base pretence, and your Christianity as a lie. It destroys your moral power abroad; it corrupts your politicians at home. It saps the foundation of religion; it makes your name a hissing, and a byword to a mocking earth. It is the antagonistic force in your government, the only thing that seriously disturbs and endangers your Union. It fetters your progress; it is the enemy of improvement, the deadly foe of education; it fosters pride; it breeds insolence; it promotes vice; it shelters crime; it is a curse to the earth that supports it; and yet, you cling to it, as if it were the sheet anchor of all your hopes. Oh! be warned! be warned! a horrible reptile is coiled up in your nation's bosom; the venomous creature is nursing at the tender breast of your youthful republic; for the love of God, tear away, and fling from you the hideous monster, and let the weight of twenty millions crush and destroy it forever!"
2. Ida B. Wells: "The race problem or negro question, as it has been called, has been omnipresent and all-pervading since long before the Afro-American was raised from the degradation of the slave to the dignity of the citizen. It has never been settled because the right methods have not been employed in the solution. It is the Banquo's ghost of politics, religion, and sociology which will not down at the bidding of those who are tormented with its ubiquitous appearance on every occasion. Times without number, since invested with citizenship, the race has been indicted for ignorance, immorality and general worthlessness--declared guilty and executed by its self-constituted judges. The operations of law do not dispose of negroes fast enough, and lynching bees have become the favorite pastime of the South."
3. Booker T. Washington: "The wisest among my race understand that the agitation of questions of social equality is the extremest folly, and that progress in the enjoyment of all the privileges that will come to us must be the result of severe and constant struggle rather than of artificial forcing. No race that has anything to contribute to the markets of the world is long in any degree ostracized. It is important and right that all privileges of the law be ours, but it is vastly more important that we be prepared for the exercise of these privileges. The opportunity to earn a dollar in a factory just now is worth infinitely more than the opportunity to spend a dollar in an opera-house."
4. Malcolm X: "If you don't take this kind of stand, your little children will grow up and look at you and think "shame." If you don't take an uncompromising stand--I don't mean go out and get violent; but at the same time you should never be nonviolent unless you run into some nonviolence. I'm nonviolent with those who are nonviolent with me. But when you drop that violence on me, then you've made me go insane, and I'm not responsible for what I do. And that's the way every Negro should get. Any time you know you're within the law, within your legal rights, within your moral rights, in accord with justice, then die for what you believe in. But don't die alone. Let your dying be reciprocal. This is what is meant by equality. What's good for the goose is good for the gander."
6. Martin Luther King, Jr.: "There are those who still feel that if the Negro is to rise out of poverty, if the Negro is to rise out of the slum conditions, if he is to rise out of discrimination and segregation, he must do it all by himself. And so they say the Negro must lift himself by his own bootstraps. They never stop to realize that no other ethnic group has been a slave on American soil. The people who say this never stop to realize that the nation made the black man's color a stigma. But beyond this they never stop to realize the debt that they owe a people who were kept in slavery two hundred and forty-four years."
7. W. E. B. Du Bois: "A saving remnant continually survives and persists, continually aspires, continually shows itself in thrift and ability and character. Exceptional it is to be sure, but this is its chiefest promise; it shows the capability of Negro blood, the promise of black men. Do Americans ever stop to reflect that there are in this land a million men of Negro blood, well-educated, owners of homes, against the honor of whose womanhood no breath was ever raised, whose men occupy positions of trust and usefulness, and who, judged by any standard, have reached the full measure of the best type of modern European culture? Is it fair, is it decent, is it Christian to ignore these facts of the Negro problem, to belittle such aspiration, to nullify such leadership and seek to crush these people back into the mass out of which by toil and travail, they and their fathers have raised themselves?"
7. Marcus Garvey: "Men and women of the white race, do you know what is going to happen if you do not think and act now? One of two things. You are either going to deceive and keep the Negro in your midst until you have perfectly completed your wonderful American civilization with its progress of art, science, industry and politics, and then, jealous of your own success and achievements in those directions, and with the greater jealousy of seeing your race pure and unmixed, cast him off to die in the whirlpool of economic starvation, thus, getting rid of another race that was not intelligent enough to live, or, you simply mean by the largeness of your hearts to assimilate fifteen million Negroes into the social fraternity of an American race that will neither be white nor black. Don't be alarmed! We must prevent both consequences. No real race loving white man wants to destroy the purity of his race, and no real Negro conscious of himself wants to die, hence there is room for an understanding and an adjustment, and that is just."
3. The first rapid transit railway in the U.S. was the elevated train built in New York City starting in 1868. New York's subway opened in 1904. This allowed easy access to downtown locations for potential customers.
From about the mid-19th century to the mid-20th century, the urban department store embodied America's highest ideal of retail shopping. It offered a variety of durable goods at various price levels in a single store.
a pushcart ice cream vendor in New York, in 1896, who also, perhaps, invented the ice cream sandwich by putting a slice of ice cream between waffle squares cut from a sheet. Other sources say the ice cream cone has its origins in the mists of history, but was first described in Mrs. Marshall's Cookery Book, whose author, Agnes Marshall, published it in London in 1888. Still others discern a woman licking an ice cream cone in an 1807 picturing fashionable customers eating at the Frascati café in Paris, although this is uncertain because cone-shaped ice cream bowls were not unknown at the time.
False. Moses Fleetwood Walker, an Oberlin College star, played for one season, in 1884, with the Toledo team of the American Association, before he was forced out the following year because of racism.
False. Robinson, although generally regarded as an excellent player, was not seen as even the best player on his team, the Kansas City Monarchs. Rickey signed him because of a combination of qualities--not only his proven and potential talent and skill at the game, but also his personal integrity and his likely strength (as Rickey saw it) at withstanding the abuse that Rickey thought Robinson would face on and off the field for breaking the color barrier in major league baseball.
