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I need to write an essay on a great american

  
 
Ender
02:39 / 12.10.04
My prof. is a conservative. I dont want to write anything shocking, or even ground moving. I just need a good historical person, and THE NAME OF A GREAT BIOGRAPHY with the name of the author. Ideally, not very long, no more than 300 pages. Any ideas?
 
 
Solitaire Rose as Tom Servo
03:30 / 12.10.04
The big book on John Adams that was so hot a couple of years ago was a great read. They even have it at Target, so it's not hard to find.

But I would write about James Ellroy, and read "My Dark Places", just because it would be fun to show how he is a great American, when he was such a thug as a kid.
 
 
We're The Great Old Ones Now
07:21 / 12.10.04
How about Rosa Parks? She wrote her own bio, but there's also a 'scholastic biography' you could look for. And she's the 'mother of the civil rights movement' - what could be more American than that?
 
 
Sir Real
11:44 / 12.10.04
How about a great american who left america? Nina Simone or James Baldwin are fine choices, and they might annoy your prof. too.

Hm, considering how my scholastic career went you might wanna ask someone else.
 
 
Mazarine
12:48 / 12.10.04
I'd go with Johnny Cash. You should probably go with Ben Franklin or Thomas Jefferson.
 
 
Alex's Grandma
13:00 / 12.10.04
How about Richard Nixon ? That way, you could skip all reading, and base your essay on the film ?
 
 
8===>Q: alyn
13:05 / 12.10.04
Hey, Sally, I've been less enamored of Mr. Cash since I discovered Kris Kristofferson. You should check him out.

Ben, I think you will find this book ideal for your purposes.

If you want to be less of a weisenheimer (though I never recommend that course of action) you could try this great American, though I can't recommend that particular book.

Have you asked your local librarian?
 
 
8===>Q: alyn
13:16 / 12.10.04
What a dillweed I am: The Autobiography of Martin Luther King, Jr. I've never read this, either.
 
 
We're The Great Old Ones Now
13:37 / 12.10.04
There's always Sy Hersch. If you really want to put the wind up the Prof.
 
 
8===>Q: alyn
13:50 / 12.10.04
This is a surprisingly good book. I don't suppose he qualifies as capital-G Great, but you could always say you understood the assignment to refer to physical size.
 
 
grant
15:55 / 12.10.04
Ambrose Bierce, author, journalist, prospector, revolutionary (or counter-revolutionary, I can never get it straight -- killed by Pancho Villa, anyway). I can't vouch for the book, but the guy did help shape our culture.

I was thinking of him because I've been discovering his near-contemporary Lt. George H. Derby, a.k.a. John Phoenix a.k.a John Squibob recently, who really was a great American. He was a military cartographer in the 1850s whose maps helped open the West, but he was also a pioneering journalist, thus the Bierce connection, and an inveterate prankster.

At least one of Derby's own books is online at the Library of Congress -- it's a historical text in its own right -- and there's plenty of material (scroll down) on him out on the web. (This last link is the funnest. It has pictures.)

Here's one biography I found mentioned yonder:
Stewart, George Rippey, 1895-
John Phoenix, esq., the veritable Squibob, a life of Captain George H. Derby, U. S. A. / New York, H. Holt and company [c1937].


Actually, the same book was reprinted in 1969 and is offered for sale here, so it has to be available via interlibrary loan.

As far as greatness goes, he was said to have inspired Mark Twain to write, and was reputedly the author Lincoln was reading the night of his assassination. Should've stayed home to finish the book, I guess. He's also credited as being the namesake for the city of Phoenix. (Credit goes to research pro bitchiekittie in helping point all this stuff out to me.)
 
 
grant
15:59 / 12.10.04
A Nexis search on Derby reveals the following tale of mayhem:
Los Angeles Times
October 15, 1990, Monday, San Diego County Edition
SECTION: Metro; Part B; Page 1; Column 2; Metro Desk
HEADLINE: SAN DIEGO AT LARGE: VINTAGE ELECTION ADVICE: DRINK UP, AND THEN VOTE FOR THE OPPOSITION

BYLINE: By ANTHONY PERRY

BODY:
The Great State of California is now engaged in a campaign to elect a governor, and newspapers are choosing up sides.

The same was true in 1853 when a scamp from San Diego history named George Horatio Derby, a.k.a. John Phoenix and Squibob, decided to have some sport.

Derby was an Army lieutenant and topographical engineer who had been sent to San Diego to tame the ever-flooding San Diego River. He also wrote satire for the San Diego Herald, whose editor, Judson Ames, was a loyal Democrat.

When Ames left for San Francisco (to hustle advertising) during the gubernatorial campaign, Derby decided to bring some ants to the picnic.

Ames stoutly favored the reelection of his friend and patron, Gov. John Bigler. Derby was a reformist Whig and two-fisted iconoclast.

As soon as Ames set sail, Derby endorsed the entire Whig ticket, headed by William Waldo. Derby called it the Phoenix Independent Ticket and warned of perdition if it lost.

He also provided guidance on how voters should select their candidates, wisdom as good today as then:

"The man who seeks your vote for any office by furnishing you with whiskey, gratis, and credit at his little shop is by no means calculated to be either a good maker or dispenser of the laws.

"Drink his whiskey by all means, if you like it and he invites you, but make him no pledges and on the day of election, vote any other ticket than that he gives you."

Bigler won the election but Waldo carried San Diego County. Derby laughed and moved on.

The tale is told in the just-published "Squibob: An Early California Humorist," edited by Derby descendant Richard Derby Reynolds, himself a onetime San Diego muckraker.

Legend has it that copies of the Herald carrying Derby's political advice were ordered by the state asylum for the insane in Stockton for its patient waiting rooms.

Which sounds like a story that is true whether it happened or not.


And here's another political snippet from another book on Derby:

Union of Words: A History of Presidential Eloquence, by Wayne Fields (Free Press, $ 25). This study of presidential oratory notes that Americans are of two minds about it. Stirring speeches made by presidents and other politicians "offer us collective hope in the face of individual despair." Yet they can leave us feeling uncomfortably vulnerable to seduction. Among our tools of resistance are ridicule, such as this parody of a Fourth of July oration by John Phoenix (the pseudonym of one George H. Derby), which dates from 1865: "For on this day the great American eagle flaps her wings, and soars aloft, until it makes your eyes sore to look at her, and looking down on her myriads of free and enlightened children, with flaming eye, she screams, 'E Pluribus Unum,' which may be freely interpreted, 'Aint I some?' and myriads of freemen answer back with joyous shout: 'You are punkins!'"


I mean, if you want an epigraph for a history paper, there's one that's pure gold.
 
 
Scrambled Password Bogus Email
16:23 / 12.10.04
George Herbert Walker Bush.

Start by pointing out that his name is an anagram of Huge Berserk Rebel Warthog.
 
 
Baz Auckland
23:01 / 12.10.04
Emperor Norton I! The only monarch the USA's ever had! Great American if there ever was one... I tried for years to find some of the biographies with no luck, but they're out there somewhere...
 
  
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