For some time we have been adding days, weeks, or months of celebration and remembrance to our national calendar, some of them amusing or frivolous, others earnest and important, others profoundly serious. Truly, as you’ll see from these stories, we do need those cultural moments to celebrate and to contemplate.
Listen to the Recess! Clip https://recess.ufl.edu/wp-content/uploads/sites/42/Johnny-Appleseed.mp3 Author John Cech Air Date 3/13/2000 Johnny Appleseed Day Transcript It’s Johnny Appleseed Day today, marking the death, in 1843, of one of our nation’s most intriguing personages. He was born John Chapman, in 1775 in Leominster, Massachusetts, the son of a Minuteman, Nathaniel Chapman, who could well have […]
Listen to the Recess! Clip https://recess.ufl.edu/wp-content/uploads/sites/42/Working-Womens-Day.mp3 Author John Cech Air Date 3/8/2000 Working Women’s Day Transcript It’s International Women’s Day, a holiday in many countries around the world, as it should be in ours, where the events took place, in 1857, that over a century later lead, in 1977, to Unesco’s naming this day in […]
Listen to the Recess! Clip https://recess.ufl.edu/wp-content/uploads/sites/42/Autograph-Books.mp3 Author John Cech Air Date 3/6/2000 Autograph Books Transcript This is National Autograph Collecting Week, and as we know the hunting of celebrity autographs–on every conceivable surface from baseballs to the backs of hands has never been more frenzied. Back in the late 1800s, one of the fads among […]
Here’s Linda Lamme with some books she’d like to recommend for Black History Month.
Listen to the Recess! Clip https://recess.ufl.edu/wp-content/uploads/sites/42/Kids-Valentines-Poems.mp3 Author John Cech Air Date 2/14/2000 Kids’ Valentine’s Poems Transcript Several years ago I gave a talk about writing for the children at an elementary school, just a few days after Valentine’s Day. I happened to have my idea book with me, which I showed to them. In it […]
Listen to the Recess! Clip https://recess.ufl.edu/wp-content/uploads/sites/42/First-Valentines.mp3 Author Rita Smith Air Date 2/7/2000 First Valentines Transcript Valentines came into their own in the United States in the 1840s, but, of course, there were valentines before that–long, long before that. No one is certain when the first valentine was sent. There are several legends. One is that […]
Listen to the Recess! Clip https://recess.ufl.edu/wp-content/uploads/sites/42/Langston-Hughes.mp3 Author John Cech Air Date 2/2/2000 Langston Hughes Transcript What better place to begin Black History Month than with Langston Hughes, who reminds us of the poetry–singing, ringing, soaring, impassioned poetry that is such an essential part of the African American experience. A lesser known aspect of Hughes’s creative […]
Listen to the Recess! Clip https://recess.ufl.edu/wp-content/uploads/sites/42/Willie-Mae.mp3 Author Shelley Fraser Mickle Air Date 2/1/2000 Willie Mae Transcript When I was growing up in Arkansas in the early fifties, my grandmother had a woman who came to work at her house several times a week. She was black, and her name was Willie Mae. You see, my […]
