I tend to overprepare. But when you're going from a freakish 70-ish degree San Francisco to a 20-30 degree Washington, DC, you gotta make sure you're prepped. I just packed my suitcase with thermals, earwarmers, scarves, hats, sweaters, ponchos, energy bars, emergency blanket, and formal wear for the ball I'm attending: the Pearl Gala (the Asian American ball) on Monday the 20th. My carry-ons are packed with laptop, neck pillow, my friend Scott Kurashige's new book that just won the Beveridge award, research materials for my book and a journal article I'm working on (I'm taking writing on the road and will visit the National Archives at College Park for my third visit to Record Group 350, Records of the Bureau of Insular Affairs, aka the Amerian colonial period in the Philippines).
And now I just realized that I totally forgot to buy handwarming stuff from Walgreen's today.
The Slaves who Built the White House
If you didn't think this moment was historic enough, listen to this. Talk of the Nation on NPR today featured a fascinating interview with an archivist from the National Archives at the downtown DC location, who was discussing payroll records recently rediscovered that provide evidence that slaves built the White House (called the President's House in the 1790s). A researcher interested in records of the building of the Capitol, along with NARA (that would be the National Archives and Records Administration to you laypeople), staff found records for the White House construction payroll. On these rolls are the names of free blacks who worked on the White House, and slave names and their places of residence, and the names of their owners. Could those workers even have imagined that a black man would one day live there...and not as a servant or slave, but as President of the United States. Listen here: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=99353053
I leave tomorrow!
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