When Miriam had finished her work we set out for the Smithsonian, to finish our survey of the National Museum of American History that we started the day before.  It was noticeably more crowded on Saturday than it had been Friday, but we were determined to see it all.

We went straight upstairs when we arrived and toured an exhibit about the military history of the United States.  Every war was represented along with its technology of battle.  They had more guns than I could count, including one used by John Brown’s men at Harper’s Ferry.  I was impressed by George Washington’s sword,  Andrew Jackson’s sword and coat, and William Tecumseh Sherman’s sword and hat.  Most amazing of all were the table and two chairs used by Robert E. Lee and Ulysses S. Grant at Appomattox Court House.  In effect, the Civil War ended on that small oval-shaped table.

I was similarly thrilled to behold three Medals of Honor in a small glass case.  I had never seen one in person before.

Being the Summer of Baseball, I found myself jealous of President Warren Harding’s free pass to all National League ballparks.

There was a great deal of interest in a small exhibit of American pop culture items upstairs, and understandably so.  In separate glass cases near one another were the Ruby Slippers and Kermit the Frog.  The younger visitors seemed less interested in Fonzie’s jacket and Archie Bunker’s chair.

Still, the most memorable artifact in the entire Smithsonian Institution wasn’t the most popular.  Indeed, Julia Child’s kitchen and the exhibit of first ladies’ gowns were far and away more crowded.  In the middle of the museum is a doorway to a dark hallway.  Dim lights on the floor lead you around the corner, where, behind thick glass, spread out across a raked platform, lay the Star Spangled Banner.  The real one.  The one Francis Scott Key saw when he wrote the poem that, when set to music, later became our national anthem.  Miriam and I sat for quite a while staring at the enormous flag.  It was simply awesome.  (Photos were not allowed.  Sorry.)

Satisfied that we’d seen just about everything, we set out.  It was still light outside, so we walked down Constitution Avenue, past the National Archives and the Newseum, to the entrance to the National Gallery of Art.  I really wanted to see the Calder mobile and David’s portrait of Napoleon, but, alas, the museum was closed for the day.  (I reassure myself that the museum will always be there, and we are sure to visit Washington again in our lifetimes.)  We walked briefly along the Mall, then turned north, and enjoyed the amazing architecture of the city as we made our way back to the hotel.  I love old buildings, and Washington has lots of them.  Along our route back we ran across a shop Miriam wanted to explore, so I left her and went on to do more sight-seeing of my own.  The sun was setting, and I took a walk past our hotel and a fancy statue, down to see the White House again.  Though I think the north side is handsomer, the south lawn is impressive.

We rested in our room for a while before heading downstairs where the doorman hailed us a taxi that drove us to the FDR Memorial.  It was night, and some of the inscriptions on the memorial’s walls were difficult to read in the dim light.  But it was a large and suitably noble tribute to the man who led this country through the Depression and Second World War.  Unlike other memorials, this one attempts to place Roosevelt’s presidency in context.  Visitors move through the site–which is expansive–along a chronologically-oriented path.  The president is depicted in a wheelchair.

The night air was cool, and there were plenty of people around, so we elected to walk toward the other monuments along the western portion of the National Mall.  We arrived shortly at the Lincoln Memorial, which I suppose is busy any time of the day or night.  We sat for quite some time at the top of the steps, looking out over the reflecting pool to the Washington Monument and Capitol in the distance.  The moon was full or nearly full, and was just coming up over the line of trees to the southeast.  We walked down through the Korean War Veterans Memorial and the World War II Memorial, then across the Elipse to the northwest.

We had walked approximately six billion miles since the start of our trip, so Miriam was understandably fatigued.  Given my tendency to say things like, “oh, it’s not too far; we can walk”, and her tendency to wear stylish, yet impractical shoes, she had reason to complain.  She joked that I was subjecting her to “tourist torture”.  She felt better, though, when we made a return visit to the Old Ebbitt Grill.  It was late, and we had no reservation, but they still seated us at a lovely table within view of my new favorite painting.  I was still full from eating Five Guys (for the first time) eight hours before, so I just had ice cream and a Sprite.

We got back to our hotel room well after midnight and I slept like a baby.  In the morning we were leaving Washington.

Memorial Day weekend is probably always busy in Washington, D.C., but it was made more so by the presence of tens of thousands of bikers, who rode up and down the city streets–with no apparent single destination, from what I could tell–generating an incessant rumbling noise with their motorcycles.  The major attractions would be doubly crowded because it was a Saturday.  While Miriam got some important work done on the computer in the room, I left the hotel to run some important errands.

My first chore was to check on the car, parked in a garage on G Street.  They had a sign indicating something to the effect that vehicles could not be left over the weekend, or that patrons had to pay every day.  The fellow in the booth told me, however, that it was fine to leave it as long as I like and just pay on my way out.

From the garage I walked a few blocks down to try and get tickets to Ford’s Theater – not for a performance, but for the tour and museum.  The line in front of the building was quite long, but it was full of people who already had tickets.  I asked the National Park Service ranger what to do, and she told me I should see inside if anyone had returned tickets for the day.  Luckily, someone had, and we had a scheduled tour of the theater and museum later that afternoon.

On my way back to the hotel I was walking behind a tourist family with three kids.  Two girls were throwing a superball back and forth to each other.  Not surprisingly, the ball got away from one of the girls and bounced out into the street, which sloped down so that the ball began rolling away.  One of the girls, without even looking, began to run directly into the street.  Her parents caught her, thank God.  Her older brother took off down the sidewalk to grab the ball before it went into a drain, and he came back up with it.  The second of the two girls, who had been watching him, began to cross the street after her parents, also without looking.  I could not believe how foolishly the whole family was behaving.  Though I know it wasn’t what Darwin had in mind, I could not help but think that the concept of natural selection was on display at that moment.

Abraham Lincoln had been on my mind a great deal throughout the summer, and especially on this trip.  I was reading David Herbert Donald’s excellent biography at the time, and my former reverence for the great man was turning nearly to idolatry.  I was desperate to see places and things associated with Lincoln, and that is what took us that afternoon to Ford’s Theater on 10th Street.  Visitors are first led down a narrow staircase to a basement-level museum, which contains many Lincoln-era artifacts, and many items owned and used by the Lincoln family.  A shaving mug, in particular, stood out to me as an object that Lincoln would have used on a daily basis.

As you might expect, a great deal of attention is paid at Ford’s Theater to the assassination of President Lincoln, and the exhibits thereto pertaining are both fascinating and disquieting.  The conspirators who joined John Wilkes Booth were armed to the teeth, and only their cowardice and incompetence prevented the government from collapsing altogether.  Lincoln wasn’t their only target: Vice President Johnson and Secretary of State Seward were on the hit list, as well.  Of course, Booth succeeded in killing the only man who mattered, and it is hardly any mystery how he did it.  The presidential box in Ford’s Theater is amazingly accessible.  It’s impossible to imagine this today, but to reach his box that night (and every previous night he had attended), Lincoln had to walk up a flight of very public stairs, across a very public balcony, and through a door visible to half the audience.  He had one guard with him, though having more might not have kept Booth out.  He was a famous actor whose work Lincoln knew.  He would surely have been admitted.  On the other hand, had General and Mrs. Grant accepted the Lincolns’ invitation that night, security would have been much tighter, with army guards stationed inside and outside the box.  Alas, Mary Todd Lincoln’s jealous tirades had appalled Julia Grant, and she wanted nothing more to do with Mrs. Lincoln.  In a glass case in the Ford’s Theater museum, the tiny single-shot pistol that took Abraham Lincoln’s life sits inanimate.  No object so small ever caused more harm.

The most meaningful artifact at Ford’s Theater is not a gun, however.  It’s a long, black Brooks Brothers overcoat.  Abraham Lincoln wore it to Ford’s Theater the night he died, but, more importantly, he wore it a few weeks before, at his second inauguration, where he delivered the greatest address of all time – the speech in which he articulated his hope for “a just and lasting peace”.  Stitched inside the silk lining of the frock coat are two embroidered eagles and the words “One Country, One Destiny”.  It is amazingly poignant.   In the rush to keep up with the museum tour, most visitor’s to Ford’s Theater probably miss seeing that coat in its display case in the lobby.  It’s a shame, too, because it plainly symbolizes the beliefs of the man who single-handedly saved the Union.  Many other men fought and died in the Civil War, but had anyone else on earth been president of the United States between 1861 and 1865, my visit to Washington, D.C. would have required a passport.

Miriam had a great deal of work to do back at the hotel that afternoon, so I took the opportunity to walk by the White House once again.  I had never seen it in daylight.  Pennsylvania Avenue is closed in front of the Executive Mansion now, and it is actually hard to imagine that cars were ever allowed to just drive right on by, since the pedestrian traffic alone makes that a bad idea, and the short distance from the road to the north portico formerly made an Oklahoma City-type bombing distinctly possible.  (Note to Secret Service personnel reading this page because internet-crawling supercomputers flagged it for containing specific word combinations: I love America and am not threatening anything or anyone.  Please don’t come to my house.)

Speaking of maniacs, just across the street from the White House is Blair House, a handsome building with a flag hanging from just above the second floor.  That is where President Truman lived while the Executive Mansion was being renovated in the late-1940s.   One day some crazy Puerto Rican nationalists attacked the house but were repulsed by police, one of whom, Leslie Coffelt, was killed.  There is a plaque out front commemorating his sacrifice.  Next to Blair House is Lee House, built in 1858.  It’s neat to think that when Abraham Lincoln moved to Washington in 1861, he could look across the street from a White House window and see his neighbors’ brand new brick home.

And while standing in front of the White House I couldn’t help but think about the last speech Lincoln ever delivered.  It was on 11 April, 1865, less than a week before he died.  The War had just ended and the streets of Washington were full of revelers.  The president spoke from a second story window to a large crowd assembled out in front of the mansion, which in those days was open to anyone.

He alluded to the presence of the band, and said that our adversary had always claimed one old good tune–”Dixie”–but that he held that on the 8th of April we fairly captured it – in fact, he said, he had submitted the question to the attorney general, who had decided that the tune was our lawful property; and he asked that the band play “Dixie”, which they did.  The President then proposed three cheers for General Grant and the officers and men under him, then three for the navy, all of which were given heartily, and the crowd dispersed.

We see the White House on the news every day of our lives, and it is perhaps inevitable that it has mostly come to represent the idea of power, and even government itself.  So it is easy, then, to forget that the White House is a physical place – a large house in the middle of a busy city where men both corrupt and incorruptible have lived and worked.  Some of these men we think of only as two-dimensional faces on coins and currency; others we forget altogether.  We will never forget Abraham Lincoln.  He is, in a way, immortal – the embodiment of wisdom, virtue, honesty, and honor, and everything we wish America itself could be.  But Lincoln was a living, breathing man who, like all of us, had his own flaws.  We needn’t mythologize him.  On the contrary, Lincoln’s greatness stems not from some inherent perfection, but from his capacity for personal growth.  The man who had once said that he would let slavery be if it would save the Union later came to believe that the War must be about “a new birth of freedom”, and rejected Confederate proposals to rejoin the Union with slavery intact.  He worked diligently to ensure the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment.  “I shall adopt new views so fast as they shall appear to be true views”, he said.  And when his true views made him profoundly unpopular he said, “I desire so to conduct the affairs of this administration that if at the end, when I come to lay down the reins of power, I have lost every other friend on earth, I shall at least have one friend left, and that friend shall be down inside me”.  Abraham Lincoln was a living, breathing man, and his last home was the large white house in the middle of a busy city.

Miriam is obsessively thorough in her research of hotels, so we knew in advance that our room in Richmond contained a small refrigerator.  This was good news, since she always has leftovers from dinner, and getting two meals out of one is a good way to save money on the road.  Alas, we awoke to the disappointment of finding our room’s refrigerator not cold at all.  When we went to the desk to complain the clerk explained that they unplug the appliances when guests check out to save energy.  That’s a fine idea, but I wish they’d told us in advance.  Miriam’s breakfast was lost.  Fortunately, the regretful clerk offered us their buffet for free.  I made my own waffle, and placed it atop a mountain of bacon.  And, in spite of the refrigerator blunder, the hotel was quite nice and a good value.  By the end of the day, however, we’d be sleeping in a hotel so opulent that it would make even the fanciest of hotels seem like a Bangladeshi sewage treatment plant.

We were packed into the car and heading back north on I-95 as soon as we finished breakfast.  Our destination was Washington, D.C., but in the mean time I was excited to be traveling through the real heart of the Civil War.  The names of towns, counties, and rivers that we passed along our route stood out to me as landmarks in some great historical atlas.  I vividly recall the roadsigns for battlefields seeming like a chronicle of the War’s progression: Fredericksburg, Gaines’ Mill, Wilderness, Chancellorsville, Spotsylvania, Cold Harbor, Petersburg, and so on.   I remember looking out the window as we crossed the Rappahannock River.  The highway went from maybe six lanes to at least a dozen as we approached the Beltway encircling the District of Columbia.  In the middle was a lane that can be used for traffic going in either direction, which can be changed depending on the time of day.  We crossed the Potomac and got our first look at Washington.

I have driven a car in Puerto Rico, so almost no amount of traffic or dangerous road conditions can upset me too much anymore.  That said, Washington is a frustrating place to drive, if only because unpredictable road closures render almost any system of navigation, old-fashioned or electronic, useless.  Miriam is fond of using the GPS device on her phone.  In many places that gadget would suffice.  In Washington, however, it will say, “Turn right at Pennsylvania Avenue”, unaware that attempting to turn right at Pennsylvania Avenue would result in a significant Department of Homeland Security incident.  We had a hotel reservation and a car.  But we didn’t want to valet to park our car at the hotel because that would be absurdly expensive.  Finding a reasonably-priced garage near our hotel was challenging.  Meanwhile, Miriam was nervous that the hotel would demand a substantial deposit above and beyond the price of the room, which was already paid.  In Puerto Rico last year, the resort there demanded many hundreds of dollars as a deposit, which significantly depleted our walkin’ around money.  The price of our room in San Juan, however, was a bargain compared to the price of our room in Washington.  If we had to pay a thousand dollars as a deposit in D.C., our time there would be significantly less lavish.  I could not imagine how they would expect guests to front so much money, so I was not nearly as worried as Miriam.  And, thankfully for both of us, no unreasonable deposit was required.

The Willard Hotel is historic.  There is no disputing that fact.  Every important political figure of the past two centuries has either stayed there or visited.  The original building has been replaced by a far more grandiose one, which would look quite at home in Paris, but the new building has a legacy almost as rich.  The lobby is opulent, with the seals of the fifty states painted on the coffered ceiling.  Behind the reception desk are old fashioned slots for room keys.  The Pennsylvania Avenue side of the hotel is one floor lower than the F Street side: to get up to F Street you pass through a long corridor and up some steps, where there is a second small, but still fancy lobby.  Our room, No. 914, was on a high floor facing east.  You can see our room’s window, surrounded by fluted stonework, directly above the very center of this photograph.  When we first got to our room a tuxedo-clad man was exiting, having just left a basket of fruit on a table by the window.  The radio was on, and I took it as a good sign that Schumann’s Konzertstück for For Horns was playing.  The furnishings were elegant, and the bed was comfortable.  The bathroom appeared to be made entirely of marble.

We didn’t stay in the room long.  In fact, we put our bags down and almost immediately took off for the Mall.  On our previous trip to Washington, the National Museum of American History was closed.  We were so disappointed to miss it then, and our return trip was prompted, in large part, by our desire to see the treasures that great museum holds.  We walked briskly down 14th Street and entered the building along Constitution Avenue.  Inside the lobby, long glass display cases hold assorted neat things: fancy jars for leeches, pretty kitty dresses, C-3POs, shirts for Magnum, P.I.s, and so on.  The Smithsonian exhibits are arranged by subject, with a “featured artifact” displayed prominently.  At the transportation exhibit, for example, a historic locomotive sits on rails.  In that area they had an old car from the Chicago L, a D.C. streetcar, old automobiles, a ship’s engine, and several locomotives, including one spectacular early-twentieth century engine with wheels as tall as me.  The first ladies’ gowns were extremely popular, and people pressed their faces against the glass to get a look.  Everyone who passed it stopped and stared at Mrs. Obama’s dress.  Another star attraction at the Smithsonian is Julia Child’s kitchen.  We spent so much time looking at every little thing that the museum closed and we had to leave.  We weren’t willing to rush it and miss things, so we decided we’d come back the next day.

We still had hours of daylight, and I thought we might check out the view from the tower at the Old Post Office, but, alas, it was closed.  So we took a leisurely walk back to the hotel to get ready for our night out.  We were looking sharp.

I had made us reservations at the Old Ebbitt Grill on 15th Street, just a half block from our hotel.  It’s an old place, and remarkably popular.  The bar is legendary.  It had a great atmosphere, and, to my great relief, Mrs. Hill was very pleased with the menu.  She loved her meal; I loved mine.  The service was impeccable.  The prices were not obscene.  Sure, it was more than we usually spend on a meal, but it was special.  They had a painting hanging on the wall there that I loved, and were it not larger than me, I’d have been tempted to snatch it off the wall and abscond with it.   All together, the dinner was an experience we won’t forget.

Though it was after ten o’clock, we weren’t ready to turn in just yet, so we took the short walk around the White House grounds.  The skies were cloudy, but the temperature was comfortable, and the walk back to our hotel was pleasant.  The lobby was quiet at that hour, and we took the time to explore more of the hotel before heading up to our room.  Once there, we found little chocolates on our bed, and the covers had been turned down.

God’s Protecting Providence was published in Philadelphia in 1699.³ Like Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe twenty years later, Jonathan Dickinson’s Journal attracted immediate attention in the American colonies and in Europe.  Interest in the work has been sustained, and since its first publication there have been over “twenty-two reprintings in English, Dutch, and German.”⁴ While the Journal was initially popular for its message of unwavering faith in the midst of peril—and its Quaker publishers emphasized that aspect—it is notable today for its depiction of late seventeenth century Florida, and the sometimes hostile interaction between the peninsula’s indigenous inhabitants and European settlers.

On August 23, 1696, a ship called “Reformation” sailed from Port Royal, near present-day Kingston, Jamaica.  At that time, England, Spain and others were allied against France in the Nine Years’ War, with all parties fighting for their commercial interests in the Americas.⁵ This hostile atmosphere rendered solo voyages impossible, so the Reformation traveled within a convoy, protected by an armed frigate.  “On board [the Reformation] were eight mariners besides the master [Joseph Kirle]; a Quaker missionary, Robert Barrow; a young Quaker merchant, Jonathan Dickinson; his wife and little baby; a relative named Benjamin Allen; and Dickinson’s eleven slaves.”⁶ Dickinson had chartered the vessel to carry cargo to Philadelphia, where he would establish a business.  It is clear from Dickinson’s Journal, however, that the journey was beset by trouble from its very start.

Within days after the Reformation departed Port Royal, Dickinson noted that calm winds prevented the ship from moving under sail, that the ship had been carried off its intended course by currents, and that his party had “lost sight of the Hampshire frigate.”⁷ They had even lost their ship’s anchor.  On the eighteenth of September, while the Reformation stood stalled north of Havana, a violent storm brought a boom down on the captain, Robert Kirle, breaking his leg – a substantial injury in light of their circumstances.  On September 24, a month after Dickinson’s ship left Jamaica, it ran aground during a violent storm, on the east coast of Florida, near present-day Jupiter Inlet.  In his Journal, Dickinson remarks that he and his companions “rejoiced at this our preservation from the raging seas; but at the same instant feared the sad consequences that followed.”⁸

Dickinson was evidently displeased by the Florida landscape he first observed, describing it as harsh and bleak: “the wilderness country looked very dismal, having no trees, but only sand hills covered with shrubby palmetto, the stalks of which were prickly.”⁹ Having lived for some time in the Caribbean, he was used to the heat, but the flat, treeless coastal terrain bore little resemblance to the lush topography of Jamaica.  Moreover, Dickinson believed that his party had run aground far from civilization, and deep inside territory populated by “barbarous people such as were generally accounted man-eaters.”¹⁰

Dickinson’s party was soon discovered by “the Jobeses, or dwellers of the Rio Jobe, as the Spaniards called what later came to be known first as Jupiter and later as Grenville Inlet.”¹¹ The Indians promptly stripped Dickinson’s party of their clothing and supplies, and ordered them to their village.  Dickinson had refused to allow his companions to use their guns against the Indians they first encountered.  He probably recognized the futility of such an action, but in keeping with his Quaker faith, likely opposed violence on principle.  Believing that he, his wife, child, and other companions were in imminent physical danger, Dickinson nevertheless professes in his Journal to putting his fate before God.

Still, he wasn’t above deceiving the Indians to ensure his party’s safety.  It was clear to Dickinson that the Indians harbored a violent hatred for the English.  With nearly every Indian his party encountered on their trek, a similar introduction took place:

Their Casseekey (for so they call their king) with about thirty more came down to us in a furious manner, having a dismal aspect and foaming at the mouth. … They rushed in upon us and cried Nickaleer Nickaleer.  We understood them not at first: they repeating it over unto us often.  At last they cried Epainia or Spaniard, by which we understood them that at first they meant English.¹²

Sensing the genuine risk for physical violence should the Indians believe them to be English, Dickinson persuaded Solomon Cresson, one of his companions, to address the Indians in Spanish, since only he among them understood that language.  From more than a century of interaction with the Spanish, many of the Indian tribes had acquired a limited degree of Spanish proficiency.  Still, communication between Dickinson’s party and the Indians remained awkward, and often tense.  Dickinson notes that on October 27, in the Indian village of Jece, members of the party were nearly tricked into revealing their English identity, when they were offered berries.  Dickinson’s companions, sensing that they were being tested, called the fruit by its Spanish name “vivaes,” instead of “plums.”¹³

Hoe-Bay, the town in which the Jobeses lived, consisted of “little wigwams made of small poles stuck in the ground, which they bended one to another, making an arch, and covered…with thatch of small palmetto-leaves.”¹⁴ Dickinson’s party remained at Hoe-Bay for three days, and his description of the Indians’ customs borders on condemnation.  He found their diet revolting, their manners greedy, and their singing and dancing “hideous” and “terrible,” and he was startled to hear exclaim, “English Son of a Bitch.”¹⁵¹⁶ But, both at Hoe-Bay and in other Indian villages along their route to St. Augustine, Dickinson found the Indian women to be compassionate, particularly when they nursed his child while his wife could not.  Still, the party was eager to leave Hoe-Bay.

Throughout his Journal, it appears that Dickinson and his companions were afraid to venture north without an escort.  Certainly, they needed canoes to transport the infirm of the party.  Besides Robert Kirle’s broken leg, Dickinson’s wife was weak.  Their journey was terribly dangerous.  Indeed, in mid-November, along the Atlantic coast (between present day Ormond Beach and the Matanzas Inlet), five of the party died, including Dickinson’s kinsman, Benjamin Allen.¹⁷ But soon after, the party reached the southern edge of Spanish Florida, and the sentinel posts south of St. Augustine.

Spain had had a settlement at St. Augustine since 1565, and when Dickinson’s party reached the town, they could see the newly-completed Castillo de San Marcos, finished in 1695.¹⁸ It was the height of the First Spanish Period, and Dickinson observed the power the Spanish appeared to wield in Florida.  When his party had first encountered members of a Spanish outfit sent to aid them at Jece, he observed how “the Indians were like a people amazed an overcome with fear: we perceived the noise of a gun was terrible unto them.”¹⁹ Spain had earned its fearsome reputation during the brutal adelantado period.

By early December 1695, more than two months after the Resolution had run aground, Jonathan Dickinson and the remaining members of his party slipped out of Florida en route to the Carolinas, and thenceforth to Philadelphia.  They had trekked two hundred thirty miles through a dangerous and unforgiving territory, and suffered tremendous loss.  The publication of Dickinson’s Journal in 1699 brought the incidents relayed therein vividly to life.  At a time when “private entrepreneurs and public statesmen” were advertising Florida as a land of riches, few had read “complete accounts of people who actually visited the peninsula.”²⁰ The Journal, then, was a revelation to those who read it.

In the coming decades, many more would read accounts similar to Jonathan Dickinson’s.  In 1766, a Frenchman named Pierre Viaud, sailing from Haiti to New Orleans, was shipwrecked on the Florida coast, and his account, published in 1768—with a French title that, while less overtly religious, was certainly as long as God’s Protecting Providence—was also a sensation.²¹²² The public’s appetite for adventure stories was unquenchable, and whether fiction, like Robinson Crusoe, or fact, like Dickinson’s Journal, enjoyed tremendous success – even when the Spanish and English endeavors in Florida failed.

Jonathan Dickinson was a success himself.  He reached Philadelphia, established a profitable business, and made repeat voyages to and from Jamaica, with Robert Kirle as captain.²³ Until his death in 1722, he remained convinced that he and his party had been delivered through God’s Protecting Providence.

[2] Defoe’s inspiration for Robinson Crusoe may have come from the marooning of Alexander Selkirk in 1704.

[3] The full title as published in 1699 was God’s Protecting Providence Man’s Surest Help and Defence In the times Of the greatest difficulty and most Imminent danger.

[4] Leonard W. Labaree, foreword and introduction to Jonathan Dickinson’s Journal, or God’s Protecting Providence (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1961), v, xxiv.

[5] Paul Langford, “The Eighteenth Century,” in The Oxford History of Great Britain, ed. Kenneth O. Morgan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 402

[6] Leonard W. Labaree, introduction to Jonathan Dickinson’s Journal, or God’s Protecting Providence (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1961), x.

[7] Jonathan Dickinson, Journal, or God’s Protecting Providence, ed. Evangeline Andrews and Charles Andrews (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1961), 3.

[8] Ibid., 5.

[9] Ibid., 6.

[10] Ibid., 7.

[11] Charles Andrews, “Florida Indians in the Seventeenth Century,” in Jonathan Dickinson’s Journal, or God’s Protecting Providence, ed. Evangeline Andrews and Charles Andrews (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1961), 97.

[12] Jonathan Dickinson, Journal, or God’s Protecting Providence, ed. Evangeline Andrews and Charles Andrews (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1961), 7.

[13] Ibid., 40.

[14] Ibid., 13.

[15] Ibid.

[16] Ibid., 15.

[17] Ibid., 55-56.

[18] Michael Gannon, A Short History of Florida (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1993), 10, 15.

[19] Jonathan Dickinson, Journal, or God’s Protecting Providence, ed. Evangeline Andrews and Charles Andrews (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1961), 40-41.

[20] Daniel Murphree, “Constructing Indians in the Colonial Floridas,” Florida Historical Quarterly, Vol. 81, No. 2 (2002), 136-137.

[21] The full title was Naufrage et Aventures de M. Pierre Viaud, Natif de Bordeaux, Capitaine de Navire, Histoire véritable, vérifiée sur l’Attestation de Mr. Sevettenham, Commandant du Fort St. Marc des Appalache.

[22] Robin Fabel, introduction to Shipwreck and Adventures of Monseur Pierre Viaud (Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 1990), 1.

[23] Leonard W. Labaree, introduction to Jonathan Dickinson’s Journal, or God’s Protecting Providence (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1961), xviii.

Today, the Willard Hotel becomes even more historic:  Mrs. Dana John Hill and I are spending our fifth wedding anniversary here.

Our room is splendid.

Tonight the History Channel is broadcasting a special entitled Stealing Lincoln’s Body.  “Outstanding”, I thought when I saw the listing, since not only is the Rays vs. Red Sox game currently on a rain delay in the ninth inning, but I am a passionate Lincoln fan, and am presently reading David Herbert Donald’s wonderful biography of the greatest of all Americans.  History Channel productions, however, have frequently failed to impress me, commonly employing silly reenactments, and generally lacking the authoritative scholarship associated with PBS efforts.  Stealing Lincoln’s Body has some slightly silly reenactments, sure, but it is much better than average for a History Channel project.  And it has something else that struck me as revolutionary.

Describing Lincoln’s funeral procession through New York City, a famous image of a young Theodore Roosevelt observing Lincoln’s coffin passing beneath his window is shown.  But, like magic, the image appears to come to life, and from the apparent distance at which the photo was taken, the camera zooms in on the two figures in the window, and, lo, there is the boy Roosevelt.  They zoomed and enhanced!  They did it with a couple other historic photos, too, and each time the effect was startling.

I’m sorry I ever doubted you, television detectives.

This jersey, which Miriam sometimes wears, is in the Dana Heritage Project Catalog of Significant Objects.

Though music is a constantly evolving art, change has, by and large, been slow, and radical change has been relatively rare.  By the first decades of the twentieth century, however, classical music was undergoing a swift transformation that even the least astute could discern.  Throughout Europe, composers were breaking with established conventions and seeking new methods of expression, paralleling similar movements in literature and the visual arts.   This era of modernist experimentation reached its zenith in the years of the Weimar Republic.  Continuous radio transmission in Germany began on October 29, 1923, with a concert of classical pieces broadcast from the Vox-Haus at Potsdamer Platz.[1] Bolstered by a burgeoning publishing business, growing recording industry, the availability of music increased substantially.[2] The prevalence of highly-skilled German orchestras and opera companies, attracted not only audiences, but composers from within and without Germany, who premiered an astonishing array of chamber music, orchestral pieces, and works for the stage during the Weimar years.  Among the major compositions debuted in Germany during Weimar’s “Golden Years” were Alban Berg’s Wozzeck (Berlin, 1925), Paul Hindemith’s Cardillac (Dresden, 1926), Bela Bartók’s Miraculous Mandarin (Cologne, 1926), and Serge Prokofiev’s Piano Concerto No. 5, with the composer himself as soloist (Berlin, 1932).  Igor Stravinsky, already an international musical celebrity, saw the Rundfunk-Sinfonieorchester Berlin premiere his Violin Concerto under the direction of Serge Koussevitsky in Berlin in 1931.[3] Founded in 1923 for the purpose of radio broadcasts, that orchestra was notable for its frequent concerts of modern classical music.  Countless other modernist pieces premiered elsewhere were performed in Germany during the years of the Weimar Republic.

Meanwhile, in Vienna, Arnold Schönberg’s music reflected the expressionist aesthetic of Gustav Klimt and Egon Schiele.  An amateur painter himself, Schönberg had shifted from a lush chromaticism reminiscent of Richard Wagner, to a free atonality, before finally arriving upon his serial twelve-tone system in 1921.  His Neue Wiener Schule counted Alban Berg and Anton Webern among its pupils.  The works of these composers, though powerful and innovative, were dismissed or rejected by some musical and social conservatives, who perceived atonality to be ugly and un-German.  Alfred Rosenberg, the influential editor of the right-wing newspaper Völkischer Beobachter, trumpeted a view held by many conservatives that “the entire atonal movement [is] contrary to the heartbeat and soul of the German people….”[4] One of Germany’s leading composers, the musical reactionary Hans Pfitzner—who had been introduced to Hitler himself in 1923—rejected modernism on its face, and openly criticized Schönberg and his disciples, whom Pfitzner rightly perceived to be ascendant in the late 1920s.  Leaving Vienna in 1925, Schönberg became a professor at the Preussische Akademie der Künste in Berlin—where Pfitzner himself would teach a masterclass until 1929—and for several years was among the most prominent exponents of Weimar modernism active in Germany.  He enjoyed the support of other prominent musicians, including “progressive Radio Frankfurt conductor Hans Rosbaud, who provided [Schönberg] with the opportunity to broadcast his views on music and actually performed his works to his great satisfaction.”[5] But as the 1930s began, Arnold Schönberg certainly perceived a surge in anti-modernist sentiment.

The rising reactionary tide against composers like Arnold Schönberg was attributable in a large degree to their ethnicity.  Schönberg—and his musical allies Kurt Weill, Berthold Goldschmidt, Franz Schreker, Alexander von Zemlinsky, among others—was Jewish, and following the substantial victories by the NSDAP in the Reichstag elections of 1930, Jews holding civil service and academic positions witnessed their job security vanish.[6] In a letter dated 18 September 1930, Schreker cautions Schönberg that his position at the Preussische Akademie der Künste was in jeopardy, and that “Hitler-Berlin” was not a safe place for Jews.[7] Schreker understood the seriousness of the situation from his own experience.  He, too, held a prestigious position in one of Berlin’s important musical institutions, the Musikhochschule.  During his tenure, he had invited the young star Paul Hindemith to teach, but as the Nazi Party rose to prominence, the careers of each of these men came under threat.  Hindemith, who enjoyed the support of renowned conductors like Fritz Busch, was at that time most notable for his Kammermusik (1924-1927), and the sensational Sancta Susana (Frankfurt, 1922).  Schreker, whose works were among the most frequently performed of the Weimar period, saw his reputation—earned through the tremendous success of Die ferne Klang in 1912—sullied by accusations of decadence: “Schreker was branded because he wrote about branded souls – people haunted by their sexuality or deformity or perversity.”[8] A common strategy for the reactionary right was to conflate Judaism with decadence, and vice versa.  In this way, Jewish composers like Schönberg and Schreker could be grouped with non-Jews like Hindemith because their musical idiom was superficially similar.

Adolf Hitler assumed the official title of chancellor on 30 January 1933, and though nearly two months passed before “the so-called enabling law of 23 March…gave the government the power to impose laws without the Reichstag,” the systematic intimidation and ouster of Jewish- and anti-Nazi musicians was already underway.[9] In February, Otto Klemperer had aroused “violent antagonism in the Nazi press” during a new production of Tannhäuser at the Berlin Staatsoper.  Nazi Sturmabteilung (SA) shut down a rehearsal by Fritz Busch at the Semperoper in Dresden on 6 March.  Ten days later, following Nazi threats, Bruno Walter—a towering musical figure who could count among his friends not only the Jewish Gustav Mahler, but the anti-Semite, and early Nazi favorite, Hans Pfitzner—was forced to cancel a concert at the Gewandhaus in Leipzig, then another with the Berliner Philharmoniker, replaced, in the latter instance, by Richard Strauss.  The Städtische Oper Berlin lost its intendant, the noted Marxist Carl Ebert, to Nazi pressure that same month.  He was replaced by Max von Schillings, president of the Preussische Akademie der Künste, who, on 1 March, had begun the process of dismissing Arnold Schönberg from his teaching position at the Akademie – a move that Klemperer had warned his friend Schoernberg was imminent.  Schilling’s explanation for the firing was blunt: “the Jewish influence at the academy must be eliminated.”[10] Schönberg’s ouster was complete on 23 May 1933, and in November “he became an exile in America.”  He was “among the first to recognize the futility of remaining in Nazi Germany.”[11] He would not be the last.

The crackdown on Jewish and modernist composers and musicians in the first half of 1933 was largely an extra-governmental affair.  That is, though the intimidation of Fritz Busch, Otto Klemperer, and Bruno Walter was carried out by members of the Nazi party and in the Nazi press, Adolf Hitler’s government had yet to articulate a specific artistic or musical agenda.  That changed on 30 June when “Hitler declared that the Ministry of Propaganda had the authority to deal with ‘all areas that influenced the mind, including complete control of cultural affairs’.”[12] Almost immediately, a rivalry between two powerfully influential Nazi figures ensued.  On one side, Joseph Goebbels petitioned Hitler to authorize the creation of a culture ministry with comprehensive legal authority over all German intellectual and artistic endeavors.  On the other side was Alfred Rosenberg, a man even more ideologically driven than Goebbels.  Rosenberg’s Kampfbund für deutsche Kultur (KfdK), founded in 1929, had for several years been among Germany’s most reactionary cultural institutions, and maintained close ties to the Nazi party.  Its tens of thousands of members vociferously attacked the perceived excesses of Weimar society.  They even had their own prestigious journal, Die Musik.  Still, however potent the KfdK was as a musical force, “Hitler appeared reluctant to reward Rosenberg by giving him permission to turn…a party organization into one which was run by the state.”[13] That power was handed to Goebbels, whose new Reichskulturkammer (RKK) was established on 22 September, and included—in addition to chambers responsible for fine art, film, literature, the press, radio, and theater—a dedicated Reichsmusikkammer (RMK).  Rosenberg had failed, and his KfdK soon folded, having suffered mass defections of its members to the RMK, which made membership compulsory for professional musicians.[14] But for the RMK to become truly successful, Goebbels—who had never managed an orchestra or an opera house—needed to find men with talent and experience, who could enact its agenda, and “further the advance of German music.”  He chose the most qualified, but, in some ways, least appropriate men for the job.

Richard Strauss and Wilhelm Furtwängler were undisputed musical titans – Germany’s greatest living composer and conductor, respectively.[15] Strauss earned his reputation with a string of concertante works and tone poems, including Don Juan (Weimar, 1888), Tod und Verklärung (Eisenach, 1890), Also sprach Zarathustra (Frankfurt, 1896), and Ein Heldenleben (Frankfurt, 1899), before turning largely to opera.  But his early works for the stage contain much music and action that audiences found shocking.  In Dresden, Strauss premiered Salome (1905), then Elektra (1909)—two stridently dissonant works with often ambiguous tonality—before eventually retreating to a safer, more traditionally Romantic aesthetic with Der Rosenkavalier (1911).[16] Furtwängler was among the most famous conductors on Earth, whose only true rival was Arturo Toscanini.  He had conducted the premieres of Bela Bartók’s Piano Concerto No. 1 (Frankfurt, 1927), and Schönberg’s twelve-tone Variations for Orchestra (Berlin, 1928), but was a musical conservative, vehemently pro-German, and considered himself an ambassador of his country’s musical heritage.[17] He was the principal conductor of the Berliner Philharmoniker, the Kapellmeister of the Leipzig Gewandhausorchester, and an Abonnementdirigenten of the Wiener Philharmoniker.   Strauss and Furtwängler were considered national treasures, but neither man was especially ideological politically, or was eager to see politics dictate artistic policy.  Indeed, as a creative artist, Strauss would be reluctant to relinquish his freedom of creative expression, and in spite of Furtwängler’s own personal distaste for the avant-garde, he believed that the audience alone should judge a work’s artistic merit.  Nevertheless, Goebbels selected these men to be the president and vice president of the Reichsmusikkammer.

“According to his own contemporary utterances and postwar testimony, conductor Wilhelm Furtwängler consciously attempted to oppose Nazi rule from the first time he decided to remain in Germany early in 1933.”[18] He was also open and unapologetic in his advocacy for Jewish musicians in his own Berliner Philharmoniker, “notably the concertmaster Simon Goldberg.”  Indeed, the evidence clearly shows that, “because of [Furtwängler], several musicians were able to stay and work in Germany longer than would have otherwise been possible.”[19] Among the most famous examples of the conductor’s breech of Nazi policy was an op-ed he published in the 25 November 1934 edition of the Deutsche Allgemeine Zeitung.  Entitled “Der Fall Hindemith,” Furtwängler’s essay was written in support of the composer, who was still the subject of protests by Alfred Rosenberg’s sycophants.  Furtwängler was eager to receive permission to stage Hindemith’s opera Mathis der Maler in Berlin, and hoped his article might persuade Adolf Hitler that Hindemith’s early atonal pieces were merely “Jugendwerk,”  and that the composer, indeed, represented true German musical ideals.[20] The conductor also cautioned against further political meddling in artistic matters.  But Furtwängler’s efforts backfired:

When [Joseph] Goebbels and [Hermann] Goering, sitting in their respective boxes in the Berlin Staatsoper, witnessed the public demonstrations in support of Furtwängler during a performance of Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde, they quickly realized that the applause signaled approval of the conductor’s defence of artistic freedom, and an implied rejection of the regime’s policies.  As a result, Furtwängler was denied a meeting with Hitler, in which the proposed performance of Mathis der Maler would have been discussed.[21]

Two weeks later, Furtwängler resigned his position as vice president of the RMK, director of the Berliner Philharmoniker, and the Staatsoper.[22]

Richard Strauss had been “active in support of the new order beginning in March 1933,” and he initially considered the presidency of the RMK “an honor, and possibly the crowning achievement of his career.”  And yet, “Strauss was no Nazi, and he believed himself capable of affecting politics on the strength of his international reputation, artistic achievement and professional authority.”[23] Strauss’s own daughter-in-law was Jewish, and he had many Jewish friends and associates, including librettist Stefan Zweig, with whom he collaborated on Die Schweigsame Frau.  While Adolf Hitler had initially approved its Dresden production—because, in Zweig’s estimation, banning it would have cost Strauss, and Germany, prestige—the Führer changed his mind on 6 July 1935, after the Gestapo intercepted a letter from Strauss to Zweig in which the composer “denied belief in Nazi principle…and made light of the RMK by claiming to ‘playact’ the role of its president ‘in order to prevent worse’.”  From Berchtesgaden, Hitler requested Strauss’s resignation, and received it one week later.[24] Strauss spent the rest of the war years writing music, and remained Germany’s most-performed—and richest—composer, premiering four new operas between 1937 and 1944, but his relationship with Goebbels and Hitler remained strained.

Though his involvement in the Richard Strauss matter was apparently direct, Adolf Hitler was largely uninterested “in the finer details of music policy.”  He stepped in to resolve conflicts between Goebbels’s RKK and the myriad German cultural institutions that attempted to maintain some degree of autonomy – notably the opera houses in Munich and Dresden.  Hitler also was directly involved in the promotion of “conductors, instrumentalists, and singers to the titles of Professor, General Music Director, State Kapellmeister, Chamber Singer, and Virtuoso,” and often made such announcements at celebrations marking his birthday.[25] He also personally guaranteed the Bayreuth Festival’s solvency, funded Wagner research, and subsidized performances of the music of fellow Linz native Anton Bruckner.  Most directly, Hitler prescribed exact metronome markings for the “Horst-Wessel-Lied” and the “Deutschlandlied.”  These specific and seemingly random acts suggest that his “intervention in musical matters remained rather unpredictable and even capricious.”[26]

“Unpredictable and capricious” aptly describes much of the Third Reich’s approach to music policy.  Although it would have appeared to some as though the government had adopted rigid standards as to what it considered acceptable music (and for composers like Arnold Schönberg and Paul Hindemith the standards were, indeed, unduly rigid), the application of those standards in other cases was surprisingly lax, or even waived altogether.  Robert Schumann’s masterpiece Dichterliebe raised an interesting issue:  what should be done about works with Aryan and Jewish authorship?  No one questioned Schumann’s racial purity, but the Jewish poet Heinrich Heine’s books were being burned in German streets.  Losing one of the great Lieder cycles was inconceivable, and Dichterliebe was only the tip of the iceberg.  Nearly every composer of German art song set Heine’s poetry to music.  Rejecting him would mean losing Franz Schubert’s Schwanengesang, and beloved songs by Johannes Brahms, Hugo Wolf, and many others.  The novel solution proposed by musicologist and Nazi Karl Blessinger was to, in essence, deny the contribution of the Jewish poet, rationalizing that when audiences hear those Lieder, “it is not Heine who speaks to us, but Schubert and Schumann.”[27] Thus, Germans could continue to enjoy those songs in their own language.  Paradoxically, the immortal operas of Mozart were not granted the same latitude.  Cosi fan tutte, Don Giovanni, and Le Nozze di Figaro had libretti by Lorenzo da Ponte, a Christian with Jewish heritage.  Originally set in Italian, in Germany the works were known almost exclusively in translation.  That German translation, however, had been made by a Jew, Herman Levi, nearly a hundred and forty years earlier, and in the pages of Alfred Rosenberg’s Die Musik, critics on the far-right demanded new translations.  By 1938, Mozart’s operas were performed in new Aryanised translations.[28] Inversely, with the music of the unwaveringly German, but intolerably Jewish Felix Mendelssohn banned, Edmund Nick went so far as to compose new incidental music to replace Mendelssohn’s Ein Sommernachtstraum for a performance in 1934.  That the Third Reich preferred to reset the text of an English playwright than use Mendelssohn’s famous score demonstrates the lengths to which they were willing to go to recast German culture to fit a new, invented mould.[29]

“The arts occupied a central position in the ideology and propaganda of National Socialism.”[30] The Nazis considered the arts to be a reflection of the German spirit.  To the extent that that reflection appeared to contradict their own self-image, it was eradicated.  But music, the most abstract of the arts, often presented contradictions: although National Socialism could claim to be both traditional and revolutionary, music could not.  For anyone who had not yet come to that realization, the point was made clear on 24 May 1938, with the opening of the “Entartete Musik” exhibition in Düsseldorf.  That exhibit, which later traveled across Germany, expressly branded the works of Berg, Hindemith, Korngold, Krenek, Schönberg, Schreker, Webern, and Weil “degenerate” – conferring the stigma of sub-humanness.  By the beginning of the Second World War, the National Socialists had already undermined their musical institutions to an almost irreversible degree, prompting a mass exodus of creative talent that, for the most part, would never return.  By the conclusion of the Second World War, those musical institutions lay in ruins, destroyed not only by allied bombs, but by the Nazis themselves.

[2] Emile Berliner had founded the Deutsche Grammophon Gesellschaft in Hanover in 1898, and Universal Edition debuted in Vienna in 1901, eventually becoming one of the leading publishers of modern music, issuing scores by Bartok, Berg, Mahler, Schoenberg, and Webern.

[3] Kendall, Alan. The Chronicle of Classical Music.  (London: Thames & Hudson, 2000), 218-226.

[4] Alfred Rosenberg, Gestaltung der Idee. (Munich: Zentralverlag der NSDAP, 1939), 337.  “Die ganze atonale Bewegung widerstrebte dem Rhythmus des Bluts und der Seele des deutschen Volks, wurde gerade deshalb von den politischen Machthabern von früher gefördert, und eine ganze Anzahl, zum Teil begabter, zum Teil sehr Minderbegabter Musiker hat sich hier in den Dienst dieser Pläne gestellt.”

[5] Kater, Michael H. Composers of the Nazi Era: Eight Portraits. (New York: Oxford University Press, USA, 1999), 184.

[6] In the German federal election that took place on 14 September 1930, the NSDAP gained ninety-five seats, becoming the country’s second largest party behind the SPD.

[7] Kater, Michael H. Composers of the Nazi Era: Eight Portraits. (New York: Oxford University Press, USA, 1999), 184.

[8] Tambling, Jeremy. Opera and the Culture of Fascism. (Oxford: Clarendon, Oxford UP, 1996), 209.

[9] Bell, P. M. H. Origins of the Second World War in Europe. (London: Longman, 1997), 80.

[10] Kater, Michael H. Composers of the Nazi Era: Eight Portraits. (New York: Oxford University Press, USA, 1999), 185.

[11] Brand, Juliane. Constructive Dissonance: Arnold Schoenberg and the Transformations of Twentieth-Century Culture. (Berkeley: University of California, 1997), xiii.

[12] Levi, Erik. Music in the Third Reich. (New York: St. Martin’s, 1994), 20.

[13] Ibid., 16.

[14] Kater, Michael H. The Twisted Muse: Musicians and Their Music in the Third Reich. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 17.

[15] Meyer, Michael. The Politics of Music in the Third Reich. (New York: Peter Lang, 1991), 193.

[16] Kobbe?, Gustav. The New Kobbe?’s Complete Opera Book. (New York: Putnam, 1976), 997-1018.

[17] Kendall, Alan. The Chronicle of Classical Music.  (London: Thames & Hudson, 2000), 218-226.

[18] Kater, Michael H. The Twisted Muse: Musicians and Their Music in the Third Reich. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 195.

[19] Ibid., 196.

[20] Luttmann, Stephen. Paul Hindemith: A Guide to Research. (New York: Routledge, 2005), 60. Google Books. Web. 1 Dec. 2009. <http://books.google.com/books?id=dxmBUdnQy0AC>.

[21] Levi, 113.

[22] Monod, David. Settling Scores: German Music, Denazification, and the Americans, 1945-1953. (New York: The University of North Carolina Press, 2005), 128-141.

[23] Meyer, 194.

[24] Meyer, 195.

[25] Levi, 35.

[26] Ibid.

[27] Ibid., 74.

[28] Kater, Michael H. The Twisted Muse: Musicians and Their Music in the Third Reich. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 86-87.

[29] Some forty different settings of Shakespeare’s Midsummer Night’s Dream were composed during the Nazi era to replace Mendelssohn’s.  By the end of 1936, his statue in Leipzig was removed.

[30] Steinweis, Alan E. Art, Ideology, and Economics in Nazi Germany. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina, 1993), 1.

On the south bank of the Chicago River there is a plaque describing the 1915 Eastland disaster.  More than eight hundred people drowned right in the heart of the country’s second largest city, while people in skycrapers watched out their windows.  But when I was watching a show at the Oriental Theater, which lies only a few blocks from the Chicago River, I saw no plaque commemorating the Iroquois Theater Fire.  I had never heard of it.  On this date in 1903, more than six hundred people burned to death in a terrible fire at 24 Randolf Street.  The Oriental Theater now occupies that very spot.  I suppose modern theatergoers would find it unsettling to imagine heaps of charred corpses while they tried to enjoy Wicked.  Had I known that address’s tragic history, I would certainly have searched out all the emergency exits and fire extinguishers before the house lights dimmed.

We can visit Dealey Plaza or Whitechapel, understand their histories, and still not be too disturbed.  But something about the Iroquois Theater Fire troubles me deeply.