text:
Jim Ryun reflects upon 50th anniversary of breaking four-minute mile
Six hundred yards into the mile race, Jim Ryun was bumped in the tight pack of runners. He stumbled off the track to the infield.
"I wasn't even sure I'd finish the race," he said.
That was 50 years ago Thursday at the Compton Invitational in the Los Angeles area.
Ryun, a Wichita native who later became an Olympian and set world records, recovered and did finish.
His time of 3 minutes, 59 seconds made him the first high school student to run a mile under 4 minutes.
But don't look for any iconic pictures of Ryun finishing that race. Certainly nothing like the dramatic picture of him crossing the finish line nearly a year later when he won the mile at the state track meet in Wichita with a 3:58.3.
When you finish eighth – as Ryun did that night in Compton – no one is waiting to take your picture.
Ryun, however, also was a 17-year-old junior at East High School competing against a world-class field of older runners.
His placing didn't matter. His time of 3:59 did.
On Thursday night, Ryun will be at San Diego's Balboa Stadium when the milestone is honored.
Finding his sport
That Ryun was even there that night on June 5, 1964, is an amazing story in itself.
His early efforts in sports didn't go well.
He was cut by his church's baseball team, cut by the Curtis Junior High basketball squad. He couldn't even make his junior high's track team.
"During my junior high days," Ryun said during a telephone interview this week, "I'd go to bed at night and pray, 'Dear God, if you've got a plan for my life, I'd appreciate it if you'd show up sooner or later, because it's not going very well.
" 'And if you could fit sports into it, I'd really like that.' "
His thinking was that letter jackets help attract girls.
As a sophomore at East High, he found distance running. In less than two years, he would be running the mile under 4 minutes and making the Olympic team for the first time.
Ryun lost his first high school race to a defending state champion, but he never lost again in the mile to prep-only competition.
He had a passion to work hard and didn't flinch at grueling workouts developed by his coach, Bob Timmons, a Marine combat veteran of World War II.
Timmons quickly saw potential in the tall, skinny lad. He set lofty goals for Ryun.
After running a 5:38 mile in the fall of his sophomore year, Ryun quickly progressed and won the Washington Relays in 4:21 in Kansas City, Kan. On the bus ride home, Timmons asked Ryun to sit down beside him.
"Congratulations, Jim," Timmons told Ryun, "but I think you can run faster. I'm thinking you can run under four minutes."
Ryun went to the back of the bus, puzzled and unable to comprehend what that meant.
"But that was the genesis to all this," he said.
The whole East High team began working for the same goal of seeing Ryun break 4 minutes. For instance, if the team was running repeat 440-yard intervals, he would start five or six seconds behind his teammates and try to catch up.
"It was a way to get me to the next level," he said. "They weren't offended by it. They saw it as a chance to do something historical."
At the state meet as a sophomore, Ryun won in a record time of 4:16.2. As a junior, just weeks before going to California for his historic moment, he won the state meet in 4:06.4 – not only breaking his state record but also the national mark of 4:08.7.
Ryun was grabbing the attention of meet organizers across the country. The week before the Compton Invitational, he ran a 4:01.7 at the Modesto Relays in California.
East High students raised $121 to help pay for his and Timmons' trip to Modesto.
"I was running well at the time," Ryun said.
Still, there were doubters who wondered whether this high school kid belonged at Compton.
The race field was impressive during a track era when the 4-minute mile was the gold standard. All were either standout college runners or those who had gone on to the Olympics. Many had broken 4 minutes multiple times.
Dyrol Burleson, 24, competed in the 1960 Olympics. Jim Grelle, 27, was also a 1960 Olympian who had run a dozen miles under 4 minutes. Cary Weisiger was a former American record holder. Tom O'Hara, 21, was coming off an indoor season that saw him run a world-record 3:56.4.
For a taste of home, there was Archie San Romani Jr. He also was an East High product and was running for Oregon at the time.
But Ryun had been invited, so there he was. He and Timmons had a definite goal in mind.
Awakened by bump
Ryun focused on running the race, not on the pedigree of those on the track with him, with 7,800 people watching.
He was tied for second at the end of the first lap, but then came the bump heading into the turn at 600 yards. He stumbled off the track, then quickly regained his balance and was running again.
"It kind of awakened me," Ryun said. "Sometimes when you run a race, you get into a zone. You're so focused on the race that you aren't focused on it.
"When I stumbled, I had to figure out how to get back in the race. It was like a shot of adrenaline to help me refocus."
Or maybe it was just part of the plan.
"God works in mysterious ways," Ryun said. "It could have been I was just floating along. It could have been a moment that helped define the evening."
He was back in the race with 200 yards to go, trailing the leader by 10 yards.
In years to come, when he was running at the University of Kansas under Timmons' coaching, he would be noted for his kick. He was once timed at 10.2 seconds for the 100-yard dash.
But on that night 50 years ago, the 6-foot-2, 165-pound teen wasn't close to that kind of leg strength. The experience and power of the older runners took over.
"I'm just hanging on hoping to finish the race," Ryun said. "I'm so tired. When I crossed the finish line, I was a little discouraged, because I thought I hadn't done it."
But he quickly learned that, for the first time, the top eight finishers all had broken 4 minutes.
Burleson won in 3:57.4. Weisiger was one spot ahead of Ryun at 3:58.9. Only 1.6 seconds separated the eight runners.
And Ryun had his 3:59 – the exact goal he and Timmons had set for the race.
He didn't sleep well that night. He tossed and turned, thinking how quickly he had reached a goal that once seemed so far away.
"It was hard to comprehend it happened," Ryun said. "Then when it did happen, it was a matter of thinking, 'Well, what if I had applied myself a little more?'
"Little things, like taking care of injuries."
Initially, the sub-4:00 was Timmons' goal. Gradually, it also became Ryun's goal.
"For me, that night was greater ownership," Ryun said.
One of five
Only five high school runners have broken 4 minutes, with the most recent coming in 2011 by Lukas Verzbicas with a 3:59.7.
Ryun did it three times, including the 3:58.3 at the state meet as a senior and a national-record 3:55.3 in June in San Diego after his senior year. The latter mark stood for nearly 36 years before Alan Webb's 3:53.43 in 2001.
Ryun also forever changed the way high school runners thought. That was certainly true for Marty Liquori.
Liquori was 15 when Ryun ran that 3:59. Three years later, he would become the third high school runner to break 4 minutes, with a 3:59.8.
"Before Jim Ryun, milers were 27, 28 years old before they hit their peak," Liquori said during a documentary done a number of years ago and now found on YouTube. "Jim told us all we didn't have to wait, that we could be good or even great at a young age."
Ryun's state meet record won't be broken because Kansas abandoned the mile for the 1,600-meter run in 1979. The Kansas Relays is one of the few meets in the country that still has a mile race.
There are movements, such as Bring Back the Mile, to have more mile runs. Ryun also would like to see the mile return.
"I think the general public relates more to a mile," said Ryun, who lives with his wife, Anne, in Washington, D.C.
The mile – and track in general – was good to him, and he was good for the sport.
Ryun was a three-time Olympian, earning a silver medal at the 1968 Games, setting world records in the mile, half-mile and 1,500 meters and becoming a five-term congressman for Kansas' 2nd District.
And while those mile races may seem long ago, his historic moment will be back in the spotlight Thursday night in San Diego.
Just in case people forget what it takes to break 4 minutes, a special race will be held for media at Balboa Stadium.
Everyone will run for 3 minutes, 59 seconds.
"We'll see how far they get," Ryun said.


text:
|Perl-Sensitive Sunglasses
comment on
|( #3333=superdoc: print w/replies, xml )
|Need Help??
Subclass to alter or add behavior.scrottie recently said that delegation was an alternative to subclassing... I would really like some references on why delegation is a viable/better option.
That seems all fine and dandy. Now, imagine that you have that in 20 places in your code, but in the manager class, someone changes name to full_name. Because the code using the office object was forced to walk through the object heirarchy to get at the data it actually needs, you've created fragile code. Now the manager class must support a name method to be backwards compatible (and we get to start on our big ball of mud), or every reference to it must be changed -- but we've created far too many.Not too many for :
also, you might bring up the concept of a Facade: you might not go changing the object's interface: you could keep the hold and delegate of the old to the new method.
PApp::SQL and CGI::Application rock the house
In reply to Re: Often Overlooked OO Programming Guidelines
by princepawn

subset: commoncrawl


text:
Artist to paint a five-story mural in pursuit of ArtPrize
Mike Mayosky needs a little help from his friends
Springfield artist and mural painter Mike Mayosky is always working on and promoting something. Our colorful local artist has something very big that he is promoting right now. He has entered the ArtPrize 2010 competition in Grand Rapids, Mich., and he is hoping to win the grand prize of $250,000. Second or third place would be okay too, at $100,000 and $50,000 respectively.
Mayosky will be painting a mural on the side of a five-story building adjacent to U.S. Rt. 131 in downtown Grand Rapids, and the mural will remain on the building for a year.
Mayosky begins work on the project this week and hopes that local folks who admire his artistry and/or his chutzpah will donate enough money to meet his allocated budget of $5,300. In particular he needs $500 for truck rental, and $1,050 to buy a man-lift by Friday. Other immediate expenses are liability insurance ($680) and a storage pod ($160).
Locally Mayosky is known for the paintings adorning the Penny Lane store on South MacArthur and many other venues. He is a high-energy guy involved in the local art scene, recently organizing the First Thursday art events above Norb Andy's on East Capitol downtown.
ArtPrize began last year in Grand Rapids, the brainchild of Rick DeVos of the DeVos family that started Amway Products. It is billed as "a radically open competition, open to any artist in the world who can find space, open to a vote from anyone who attends."
The event attracted a million people in 2009. "It's a big hoopdela," Mayosky affirmed. "I'm totally stoked." The theme of the event is "Think Big and Work Backward." And it's free. Learn more about it at www.artprize.org.
Artist friend Mike Gritmacker will assist Mayosky during the event, helping with publicity, supplies, and logistics.
"It's hard to get Springfield to understand how big this thing is," Mayosky explained recently. You can keep up with the contest on YouTube or you can become the artist's Facebook friend. To make a donation to the effort, contact Deanna Day at firstname.lastname@example.com or call 217-553-6204.
"If I finish in the top 10, donors can have their donations back by Nov. 1," Mayosky said. Even if the artist does not finish in the top 10, donations will be paid back by May 1, 2011, according to Mayosky.
Contact Ginny Lee at firstname.lastname@example.com.


text:
Commando Ad Blurbs (Apple II)
Published by
Developed by
Also For
Critic Score
100 point score based on reviews from various critics.
User Score
5 point score based on user ratings.
Advertising BlurbsBack of Re-release Cassette Inlay - Commodore 16 (UK):
- Frantic Arcade Action.
- Superbly detailed backgrounds.
- Totally Addictive
GAME FEATURESBattling through enemy lines rescuing prisoners as you go make this coin-op conversion one of the most addictive games available.
Contributed by FatherJack (62754) on Aug 04, 2014.
You are Super Joe the cracked combat soldier of the eighties battling against all odds to defeat the advancing rebel forces. Equipped with only an M60 machine gun and six hand-grenades you carry out your lone crusade, forcing your way into hostile territory. Mortars, genades (sic) and dynamite rain from the skies and explode around you. Enemy bullets fly past you in all directions, trenches, cliffs and lakes block your path. Rebel forces appear from caves, strong holds and troop carriers to stop your progress. You must show no mercy. You must not retreat. You must keep pushing yourself further and further into enemy lines, collecting supplies of hand-grenades from defeated outposts, until you reach your final objective, the fortress.
Developed with the aid of Capcom to produce the closest possible home-computer simulation of the original arcade No. 1 hit game. Have you got the skill and stamina to defeat the enemy?
Contributed by Katakis | カタキス (41056) on Apr 21, 2006.
The leaders of the free world have been imprisoned by an evil, warmongering army from an alien empire! Having squandered their own natural resources for the purposes of death and destruction, they now want to dominate the Earth and capture its abundance--to restore life to their barren planet.
GAME PLAY: To save the world, you and Super Joe, the ultimate Commando, must challenge the enemy in fierce guerilla warfare deep within a hostile, unexplored jungle. Armed only with a rifle and limited hand grenades, you must rescue the hostages, defeat the insane alien commander, and destroy his evil army. After a harrowing helicopter landing, you and Super Joe must advance as quickly as possible through four increasingly difficult levels. Hidden bonuses give you some advantages but poisonous snakes lie in wait and the ruthless enemy attacks you with guns, knives and grenade launchers. Can you and Super Joe carry out this mission impossible? Time alone will tell.
Contributed by Joshua J. Slone (4671) on Mar 23, 2004.
by Data East USA
Use your rifle and grenades to blast your way behind enemy lines, rescue POWs and fight your way out. It won't be easy, the enemy's tough. But who said becoming a hero was easy?
Contributed by RKL (5735) on Dec 29, 2003.
Experience the Ultimate in Combat Action...
As the crack shot COMMANDO, you have been given the ultimate. mission. You alone must battle overwhelming odds to defend the free world from being taken over by advancing rebel forces.
To make matters worse, much of the Allies heavy artillery has already been destroyed.You must carry out your solo or crusade through hostile territory armed with only a rifle, hand grenades, and raw courage.
The odds for success seem hopelessly slim as enemy fire flies toward you from all directions and hidden rebel forces appear from caves, trenches, and strongholds to bar your progress. But the Allies are depending on your famous ingenuity, accuracy, and speed to help you break through the enemy lines. You must reach the fortress while collecting supplies from defeated outposts along the way.
There can be no retreat - the fate of the free world is in your hands!
* Four skill levels
* For one or two players
* For use with 7800 controllers
* For Atari 7800 series Systems
Contributed by RKL (5735) on Dec 29, 2003.
Take No Prisoners
As a one man army, you face the impossible. Locate and destroy the enemy stronghold. An entire battalion stands in your way.
Fire off machine gun bursts at point-blank range. Toss grenades as you sprint past hostile trenches. When you reach the target, you'll understand why no one volunteered.
* 1 or 2 players.
* Weaponry includes M16 Assault Rifle and DM 51 hand grenades.
* Pick up ammo packs for extra grenades.
* Battleground landscapes feature enemy convoys, foxholes, bombed-out buildings and more.
Contributed by RKL (5735) on Dec 29, 2003.
Your assignment? Simple. Annihilate the enemy. Diminish their manpower. Destroy their vehicles. And detonate their mega-fortress.
Sounds tough? Well, just wait. It gets worse. Because you have to carry out the entire mission SINGLE-HANDED!
Contributed by RKL (5735) on Dec 29, 2003.
Combat Action!
You are the crack shot Commando, battling overwhelming odds to defeat advancing rebel forces! You carry out your lone crusade through hostile territory, armed with only a rifle and a few hand grenades.
Enemy fire flies past you from every direction. Rebel forces leap from caves, trenches, and strongholds to block your progress.
You need to break through the enemy lines to reach the fortress at the end that serves as enemy headquarters. If you're clever, you can replenish your supplies along the way from defeated outposts.
Once you begin your mission, there is no retreat. The fate of the free world rests in your hands!
Contributed by RKL (5735) on Dec 29, 2003.
More Action Than We've Ever Before Packed Into a Single Game!
You're on foot, alone, armed with a machine gun and hand-grenades. Your goal; advance across deserts and jungles through swarm after swarm of well-armed enemy soldiers! The odds are impossible!
* Bullets fly! Grenades explode! * Run, shoot, keep cool, and maybe, just maybe, you can beat the odds! * Survive one mission, then it's on to the next, harder than before! * All the Fun and Excitement of the Hit Arcade Game!
For one or two players
Contributed by RKL (5735) on Sep 18, 2003.Unknown Source:
"Experience the Ultimate in Combat Action.... COMMANDO!"
Contributed by Old man gamer (389) on Jun 14, 2000.


text:
KABUL, Afghanistan - The Taliban published a video Monday they say shows insurgents preparing for the brazen attack on a major NATO base earlier this month, just as NATO forces released data showing that insurgent attacks decreased in August.
The twin releases are a reminder of the escalating battle for public opinion between the insurgency and the international military as U.S. and allied troops draw down. The Taliban continue to contend that they are fighting at full force while the international alliance says that they have been weakened.
In the Sept. 14 attack on Camp Bastion in Helmand province, 15 insurgents dressed in U.S. Army uniforms breached the base's perimeter fence then used automatic rifles and rocket-propelled grenade launchers to fire on planes and people around the base's airstrip. They managed to kill two Marines and destroy six fighter jets costing tens of millions each before they were stopped. All but one of the assailants were killed in the fighting.
The Taliban video shows men wearing U.S. Army uniforms as they practice cutting through a chain-link fence and charging through the opening. One man indicates targets with a pointer and a whiteboard showing drawings of planes and fortifications. He speaks Pashtun, a major language in southern Afghanistan and parts of Pakistan. Words on the whiteboard are written in Urdu, a language more common in Pakistan.
A Taliban spokesman emailed the link to the video to the media but it was not possible to verify the authenticity of the footage. Nothing in the video indicates when or where it was filmed.
The NATO statistics showed that insurgent attacks decreased 9 percent in August, compared with the same month last year - continuing a falloff that started in July after a spike in attacks in May and June.
NATO said the shortened poppy harvest in the spring meant that the usual summer fighting season started earlier. Regionally, attacks decreased in the east and south, but increased in the west and north, according to the data.
Overall, NATO's figures show insurgent attacks are down 5 percent for the year so far, compared with the same period of 2011.
Australian Army Brig. Gen. Roger Noble, deputy to the deputy chief of staff for operations of the U.S.-led military coalition in Afghanistan, told reporters in Kabul earlier this month that fighting in the south - the Taliban strongholds of Kandahar and Helmand provinces - has moved away from the bigger towns and cities.
"If you think back to 2010, people were talking about central Helmand being the center of fighting, but it's been pushed out and away from most of the major population centers," he said. "But there is still plenty of fighting and it is dangerous and having a direct effect in casualties on the coalition and also, increasingly, on the Afghan security forces."
Nearly two years after President Barack Obama announced that he was sending another 33,000 troops to take on the Taliban, those reinforcements have just completed their return to the United States. That leaves about 68,000 American troops, along with their NATO allies and Afghan partners, to carry out an ambitious plan to put the Afghans fully in the combat lead as early as next year.
Associated Press writer Deb Riechmann contributed to this report from Kabul.


text:
WASHINGTON -- The government is moving toward easing restrictions on airline passengers using electronic devices to listen to music, play games, read books, watch movies and work during takeoffs and landings, but it could take a few months.
An industry-labor advisory committee was supposed to make recommendations next month to the Federal Aviation Administration on easing the restrictions. But the agency said in a statement Friday the deadline has been extended to September because committee members asked for extra time to finish assessing whether it's safe to lift restrictions.
"The FAA recognizes consumers are intensely interested in the use of personal electronics aboard aircraft; that is why we tasked a government-industry group to examine the safety issues and the feasibility of changing the current restrictions," the statement said.
The agency is under public and political pressure to ease the restrictions as more people bring their e-book readers, music and video players, smartphones and laptops with them when they fly.
Technically, the FAA doesn't bar use of electronic devices when aircraft are below 10,000 feet. But under FAA rules, airlines that want to let passengers use the devices are faced with a practical impossibility -- they would have to show that they've tested every type and make of device passengers would use to ensure there is no electromagnetic interference with aircraft radios and electrical and electronic systems.
As a result, U.S. airlines bar all electric device use below 10,000 feet. Airline accidents are most likely to occur during takeoffs, landings and taxiing.
Cellphone calls and Internet use and transmissions are also prohibited, and those restrictions are not expected to be lifted. Using cellphones to make calls on planes is regulated by the Federal Communications Commission. There is concern that making calls from fast-flying planes might strain cellular systems, interfering with service on the ground. -- AP
We're revamping our Comments section. Learn more and share your input.


text:
Please Note: We can only sell & deliver our products to Australian customers.
Our plant range is currently unavailable. Please enjoy browsing our other fine gardening related products.
- You cannot add "Grevillea 'Celia'" to the cart because the product is out of stock.
Anigozanthos 'Landscape Scarlet'
Landscape Scarlet is from the Tall and Tough range of kangaroo paws, and grows well in a good range of soil types and positions. It makes a stunning garden and landscape plant with its tall bright red flower stems from spring to summer, and is attractive to nectar eating birds and insects, and they make great cut flowers. A once a year tidy up after the flowers die down make these easy care plants
Out of stock
Anigozanthos 'Landscape Scarlet' is part of our AFFORDABLE TUBES range.
You can order from any combination in stock in our AFFORDABLE TUBES range. Unfortunately due to quarantine restrictions, we are unable to send plants to Tasmania, South Australia, Western Australia or the Northern Territory.
Delivery will be via Australia Post Express Delivery to ensure your plants arrive in top condition, and dispatch will be on a Monday or Tuesday following your order. Orders for more than 12 plants will get a FREE tub of BUSH TUCKER fertiliser added! Minimum order is 4 plants.
Postage costs are as follows, and will be added to the plant prices at the checkout-
1-5 plants = $15
6-12 plants = $20
13-24 plants = $35
25-48 plants = $65
49 and over = $90


text:
Peggy Winn had every reason to believe freedom meant stability for her family, stability in a new place. Under slavery, she had lived in the southern section of Albemarle County, Virginia, on the Cleveland farm. Winn had been born in the same county and avoided the most devastating effects of the slave trade: the sale away from kin. She married Benjamin Barbour when she was twenty, around 1845. Barbour was born in Greene County, just to the north of Albemarle, too far to see her frequently. Either through the local hiring system, slave trade, or other means, he managed to move—or was moved—close enough to Peggy that they could visit, often enough that Peggy's owner and his felt comfortable assenting to the marriage. When, nearly twenty years later, they registered their marriage with Freedmen's Bureau agents in Augusta County, just to the west of Albemarle, they found more stability for their marriage and their two young girls, Mariah and Corra, than was possible before. Emancipation and state recognition of the family removed the principle geographic threat of slavery: forced separation through the slave trade.1
Yet sustaining a marriage in a new place with this new status brought challenges. By April 1867, a year after Winn and Barbour registered, they found their relationship the focus of a concerted attack. Since Freedom, Winn lived and worked at the home of Urban Poe, an Augusta County merchant and local political operative. Poe had no interest in Winn continuing her marriage to Barbour, so he forbade the freedman from trespassing on his property and shot at him when he did. Poe brought Barbour before the Freedmen's Court, arguing that Barbour had "slandered his character" by representing that Poe was "living with Barber's wife," when in actuality, Poe argued, "he is no count to her or her children & She wants to leave him." Poe lined up neighbors to bolster his case: the wealthy farmer Robert Van Lear was prepared to support Poe's claim against Barbour, as was Mrs. Henry Palmer. Fortunately for Winn and Barbour, other whites were willing to testify to their longstanding relationship. Contacted by Barbour and by Poe to serve as a witness, Winn's former owner wrote to the local Freedmen's Bureau agent, interceding on Barbour's behalf. The agent quickly dismissed Poe's case.2
|Augusta County Cohabitation Register, page 28. Benjamin Barbour and Peggy Winn were two of fifteen hundred men and women in Augusta County who registered their marriage with the Freedmen's Bureau in 1866. Courtesy the Library of Virginia.
Winn and Barbour made a place for their marriage in defiance of the slave trade, under constraints to their mobility, and by taking advantage of the postwar government's intervention into black marriage. They met, married, and against odds sustained their relationship for over fifteen years in a Virginia Piedmont wracked by displacement caused by the slave trade and forced removal. They strained against the distance which slavery imposed and innovated, as many others did, by "living abroad" on different farms. Even after emancipation Winn and Barbour continued to live at a distance, but freedom significantly lowered the barriers to living under the same roof and altered the meaning and experience of the same intervals. The couple used federal, state, and local bureaucracies, which imposed a legal structure for marriage on existing relationships that fit poorly with the diversity of living arrangements men and women had taken on, but provided safeguards for African American families, expansive networks to help freedmen repair relationships, and means for black men and women to defend their families in court.
Emancipation-era marriages were enacted over time and at multiple interrelated scales of action, from the level of the plantation household and neighborhood to that of the interstate slave trade and federal bureaucracy. We need to consider all of these levels together to perceive the connections and describe the reach of human actions and practices. The scales at which women and men acted extend from the private sphere to institutions or networks. Attention to scale can sort out actions of local Bureau officials, state legislators, and radicals in Congress while clarifying more complex relations. Men and women whom we often consider to be household actors also engaged in processes and networks that spanned the US South.3
Formerly enslaved men and women were constantly acting within networks—kinship relations, social hierarchies, labor markets, and bureaucracies—of particular reach, at particular scales, to find whatever stability and autonomy they could for their families. Because these networks often connected local affairs with far-flung places and broad structures of political and economic power, freedwomen and men built marriages both through the quotidian, household practices of love and labor and by leveraging bureaucracies and labor markets. Emancipation-era marriages built intimate bonds and sprawling connections. Marriage muddied the spatial boundaries between fictive emancipation-era private and public spheres.
At the most intimate scale, a wide diversity of living arrangements fell under the single legal framework of emancipation marriage. These arrangements were in part a product of new legal guarantees for marriages of freedpeople, in part the product of relationships given shape under slavery and menaced by the slave market. This market created staggering obstacles: enslaved marriages had endured the large-scale transport of people from the Virginia Piedmont and Tidewater to the antebellum Southwest, as well as significant but more intricate movements, such as those that brought more than one-hundred fifty men and women from Albemarle to Augusta, or movements from north and west that brought hundreds of others to long-settled Hanover County. The legal framework for emancipation-era marriage, which generated the records through which we can know something of those migrations, emerged out of unusual cooperative action between multiple levels of government: conservative state legislatures, local governments controlled by former Confederates, and the United States Bureau for Refugees, Freedmen and Abandoned Lands. This legal framework and the government agents who carried it out had a direct effect on the chances of enslaved men and women to reunite across hundreds of miles.4
Defining Legal Status
Formalization of marriages between enslaved men and women was a cause for concern among those working at the highest governmental levels long before Freedmen's Bureau agents arrived to take down names in Augusta County, Virginia. In early 1864, as black Kentuckians enlisted in the US Army in increasingly large numbers, Sen. Henry Wilson of Massachussetts proposed a bill setting free women held in bondage there by loyal owners, by virtue of their marriage to United States Colored Troops enlistees. The resulting law, as Amy Dru Stanley has pointed out, was problematic for entwining women's freedom with marriage; it was also unavoidably problematic as a document laying out guidelines for determining "who is or was the wife and who are the children" of the enlistees.5
The Senate's resolution "to encourage enlistments and to promote the efficiency of the military forces of the United States" prescribed two tests for determining who was the valid wife of an enlistee: evidence that the two had "lived together, or associated or cohabited as husband and wife" and continued to do so until enlistment; or, evidence provided by the couple that a marriage ceremony, whether recognized by civil authorities or not, had taken place and the couple had lived together until enlistment. For the purposes of emancipation in spring 1865, the Senate defined a valid slave marriage as requiring either cohabitation or "association" until the husband left for war. In each case, according to Sen. Charles Sumner, the evidence would not be the testimony of the master but the "mutual recognition" of the husband and wife of their marriage. The principles outlined in the bill would be carried through into the emancipation era: marriage was a volitional institution, undertaken by the consent of both husband and wife regardless of the sanction of other citizens, and that living together or associating under slavery constituted evidence of a pre-existing marriage.6
The Freedmen's Bureau undertook a program recognizing and registering these marriages by the summer of 1865, a process that proceeded differently in different states. A military order affecting North Carolina, Alabama, and Georgia declared that common law applied to slave relationships but gave little indication how that would be implemented. Other orders went into great detail laying out the calculus of who counted as a freedman's proper wife, particularly in cases where a man claimed multiple wives. In every military district commanders ordered local offices to register freedmen and women's marriages, though in Texas, these orders did not come down until 1867. The resulting records differed from place to place, both in the pieces of information officials thought essential for proper marriage registration, and in how they settled questions about who constituted a couple.7
There was no straightforward hierarchy between federal law and state action in regulating marriage; the scales of bureaucracy did not nest cleanly. While federal initiative may have prompted action, in Virginia, as in a number of other southern states, the cohabitation registrations came about through state law and for reasons shaped by the concerns of whites. In February 1866, the conservative-controlled Virginia House of Delegates passed a bill requiring the registration of all people of African descent as husband and wife who were cohabiting as of the bill's passage. The bill sidestepped much of the complexity involved in formalizing slave marriages, not accounting, for example, for the possibility that many victims of the slave trade might have multiple marriages, none of which ended in divorce. In this legislation, conservative delegates were primarily concerned with two implications of emancipation: the heritability of property and the fear of that freedpeople, especially children, would become wards of the state. In every county registrars kept lists of children born from enslaved relationships along with the names of their father and mother, even if the marriage in question had dissolved. This law gave black Virginians the kind of freedom the General Assembly believed they were owed after emancipation. For Virginia whites, registering black marriages was part of a desperate attempt to restrain and confine African Americans in the wake of slavery, similar in intent and scope to the Black Codes, the series of vagrancy and apprentice laws created in the same state legislative session.8
Despite state law governing these marriages, it fell to local Virginia offices of the Bureau to register them. Bureau officials were far from happy about this turn. The day after the Virginia marriage law passed, an official in Middlesex County conveyed to the Bureau's assistant commissioner for the state, Colonel Orlando Brown, his approval that freedpeople would receive state sanction for marriage; he hoped, however, that the Bureau would be left out of the registration process and that the freedmen and women would appear directly before county clerks. The local official's missive did little to shift the burden. The Bureau's regional headquarters dispatched to local field offices forms for registering freedmen and women, and certificates to be given to registrants validating their marriages. In Augusta County, Bureau officials began registering freedmen in June 1866 and projected the work to be completed by mid-July. In Frederick County, the work had begun by March 1867, but officials halted the process at least temporarily when they ran out of forms. Officials in Warren County did not begin registration until later in 1867. Counties forwarded registrations to district headquarters. By spring 1867, the civilian state government made efforts to gather registrant information from the Bureau and to have those records logged with local county clerks. Even if the state had little appetite for taking on these responsibilities, it closely guarded its prerogative to record marriages for the purposes of determining the legitimacy of children even as it shared with the Bureau the authority of binding out the children of indigent parents.9
In one sense, the bureaucratic transitions in scale worked smoothly: federal law and process intervened, states cooperated. Federal officials working at the local level implemented the legislation quickly and local governments eventually received copies of the registrations. Yet local recording of the marriages demonstrated the vexing transition to state-validated marriage. The problems with legitimizing slave marriages arose because they simply were not the same as marriages in freedom: recognition under the law created new patterns and excluded some old ones. The bureaucratic geography of marriage, descending from the federal government into local counties, intersected with freedmen and women's varying understandings of marriages. For many black Virginians, marriages had not been simple local affairs but relationships between men and women separated far from each other in space and time or living with the constant anxiety that the slave trade would tear them apart.
The cohabitation registers created by Freedmen's Bureau agents did not precisely fit the experiences and intentions of the formerly enslaved. For a variety of reasons, some marriages—in contrast to the requirements of the 1864 congressional act—were registered without the consent of both members. In Smyth County, six men registered marriages listing spouses who had died, presumably to claim their children in as strong terms as they were able. A handful of marriages included one partner as living out of state, where he or she was unlikely to appear for the registration: Dracon Braxton had married Rebecca Scott in October 1840 when they were both twenty-five, but when he appeared before Bureau officers in Hanover, Virginia, he listed her current residence as New Orleans, a testament to marriage vows made under slavery and remembered in emancipation.10
|Smyth County Cohabitation Register, page 2. Registering the lost: Freedmen claimed their family members in the strongest terms possible. In this registry, widowed freedmen in Smyth County recorded their marriages to Maria, Queeny, and Fannie. Adam Brown (line 1) recorded his wife, Sarah's current residence as Texas. Courtesy the Library of Virginia.
Marriages observed in the absence of a partner could not be marriages legitimized through mutual assent. They depended on a single partner speaking on behalf of the other to make vows as permanent in law as with community sanction. Unavoidable as it was for the purpose of legitimizing children through marriage or formalizing relationships torn by the trade, a framework in which one partner spoke for the couple, immediately caused problems. Women were especially vulnerable. Mary Watkins had been living as Willis Stewart's wife near Staunton and evidently trusted her husband to register their marriage. When Stewart appeared before the local agents, however, he claimed a license to marry another woman, leaving Watkins to care for their unborn child. By walking out, some formerly enslaved women contested marriages. Living in Augusta County, Hannah Reed and David Collins registered their marriage in the summer of 1866. In September, Reed visited her mother in Winchester and by the following August had decided not to return, preferring to live there as another man's wife.11
The framework itself could produce short-lived marriages. As Anthony Kaye has noted, enslaved men and women in the lower South not only had highly differentiated forms of intimate relationships, they developed a nuanced vocabulary for describing an ascending hierarchy of relations, from the temporary "sweethearting" and "taking up" to more permanent conditions of "living together" and marriage. The legal rubric only recognized the last of these, but it would not be surprising, given the rapidity with which some registered marriages ended, that men and women under slavery anticipated widely different futures and that the Bureau's codification of married people as "those cohabiting together as husband and wife, 1866 Feb. 27" fit awkwardly on new social conditions. Cohabiting did not accurately describe abroad marriages, and men and women in nuanced but unrecognized relationships might ascribe different meanings to what constituted a married couple. Did Hannah Reed and Willis Stewart consider prior relationships, newly codified, as marriage or permanent unions? 12
In circumstances such as these, Bureau agents expressed confusion over the bureaucratized procedure for ending marriages. Thomas Jackson, Bureau agent in Augusta, asked whether Collins and Reed's marriage might be annulled by erasing their names from the cohabitation register or whether the freedman, with limited resources, would be required to sue for divorce in order to end the marriage. The ninth sub-district headquarters in Winchester replied that the registrations carried out by federal agents had no legal effect on the marital status of the men and women involved, presumably since the marriages had been legalized by the Virginia General Assembly. "The registration," Capt. John A. McDonnell explained, was "only an evidence of marriage. He would be legally married, whether registered or not."13 With no legal authority over the shifting relationships themselves, Bureau officials could only make lists.
The reach of federal, state, and local authority governing marriage was fluid during Reconstruction. Few legal guidelines existed before 1866, when the state instituted laws governing marriage of freedmen and women. Over the next year and a half local Bureau agents recorded marriages whose legitimacy resided with the state.
Marriage and Spatial Arrangements
Under slavery, families had taken many forms and spatial patterns. On a Georgia plantation, for example, historian Erskine Clarke found one couple who lived together as husband and wife with their children under the same roof; others had "abroad" marriages, in which the husband and wife lived on separate farms, meeting only on Saturday nights at the wife's quarters; one couple found a way to remain together even while the husband acknowledged wives and children on other plantations, although other enslaved women counted such practices as infidelity and declared their marriages finished. Marriages in Virginia showed similar diversity. The abroad marriage of Barbour and Winn took a familiar form; in Prince Edward County, enslaved men and women on Richard Randolph's large estate tended to intermarry, as many others on plantations elsewhere continued to do through the Civil War; still other enslaved men and women called each other husband and wife despite their forced separation by hundreds of miles. Each model of marriage reflected a spatial arrangement that held potential benefits in a society whose commitment to the slave trade made it fundamentally opposed to the well-being of enslaved families.14
|James F. Gibson, A Group of "Contrabands," 1862. Emancipation-era families, such as those posing here at the Foller farm in Cumberland County, Virginia, followed a variety of marriage patterns. Courtesy the Library of Congress.
Abroad marriages proved particularly precarious. George Johnson had asked to marry a young woman on a neighboring farm in northwest Virginia. In order to block the relationship, his owner quickly sent Johnson to work on the family's plantation in Alabama. Within two years, the woman he had hoped to marry died and Johnson returned to work the farm near Harper's Ferry. William Keno lived with his mother Becky on the Dickerson farm in Frederick County, Virginia, not far from the farm on which his father Peter stayed. When John Dickerson purchased land in Florida on which to build a plantation, Keno and his mother were forced from Peter and would not see him again. Even as marriage abroad allowed large numbers of enslaved women and men to find partners, especially on the smaller farms common to Virginia and the upper South, the added flexibility ultimately left these marriages more vulnerable, more likely to be torn apart through forced removal. A marriage at the mercy of two slave owners meant twice the number of men with the opportunity of breaking the marriage.15
In spite of the constant threat of sale, slave-owners would occasionally recognize slave marriages with great fanfare. These celebrations carried no civic or legal weight, and did little to threaten the power of slave owners. Far from weakening the regime, what recognition planters gave to slave marriages was calibrated to create a smoothly functioning labor system. Campbell County planter and iron manufacturer David Ross explained early in the nineteenth century that he sought in slave marriage a labor force that avoided quarrels. "I demand moderate labour from the servants," he wrote, "and have left them free only under such control as was most congenial to their happiness. Young people might connect themselves in marriage to their own liking, with consent of their parents who were the best judges." There were very good reasons for Virginia slave-owners to give some social space to their laborers, space that might be obliterated as soon as the price was right.16
Despite some evidence of their observance of slave marriage, white men proved to be the single greatest threat to the institution. The Works Progress Administration interviews with Virginia ex-slaves are full of reports of slave marriages formalized by white ministers or owners. Fannie Berry, who lived in Appomattox and then Petersburg, recalled her wedding, when "Miss Sue Jones and Miss Molley Clark (white) waited on me," and when "we had everything to eat" imaginable. This recognition carried no particular safeguards against sale or violation. In nearly the same breath, Berry related to her interviewer how she fended off a local white man's attempted rape by scratching her attacker.17
|The Resurrection of Henry Box Brown at Philadelphia, who escaped from Richmond Va. in a box 3 feet long 2½ ft. deep and 2 ft. wide. Henry Box Brown's iconic flight North was sparked when he watched his wife and child sold South. Published by A. Donnelly, 1850. Courtesy the Library of Congress.
The slave trade wreaked havoc on relationships. Henry Brown, an enslaved tobacco worker in Richmond, knew first hand that "no slave husband has any certainty whatever of being able to retain his wife a single hour; neither has any wife any more certainty of her husband." In 1848 Brown watched his wife and child travel with three hundred fifty others from the Richmond slave market south to the Carolinas. Brown's request that his master purchase his wife and child to keep them in Richmond left the man unswayed. "He even told me," Brown recalled, "that I could get another wife and so I need not trouble myself about that one; but I told him those that God had joined together let no man put asunder, and that I did not want another wife, but my own whom I had loved so long." Brown's separation from his wife and child led quickly to his own dramatic migration from the state; his conspirators in Richmond shipped Brown on a railcar to abolitionists in Philadelphia. Brown emerged from his hiding place to recount a story of loss that would have been familiar to thousands of other black Virginians.18
Fluctuating spatial arrangements marked enslaved marriages. At times these marriages involved a man and woman living in the same house, but as often, marriages covered great distances and were instead characterized by fragility and flexibility. Enslaved men and women in Virginia had created a system of intimate relations that could withstand many of the constraints of slavery. In light of the lack of marriageable partners residing on small farms, and without the possibility of moving voluntarily, freedmen and women entered into many different kinds of intimate living arrangements. Most common was living abroad, an arrangement that left marriages vulnerable to forced separation of much wider distances, separations that often meant the end of the marriage.
Marriage and Migration
The migrations freedmen and women experienced over the course of their lives—in many cases spanning a thousand miles or more—shaped their marriages in large and small ways. Emigration from Virginia made up about 45 percent of all interstate migrations of enslaved men and women in the antebellum period. In the 1830s alone, nearly three in ten enslaved people living in the state were forcibly removed from the Tidewater region. In the decade immediately preceding the Civil War, a quarter of the enslaved men, women, and children living in Virginia's Valley were sent away. All told, more than half a million enslaved men and women were taken from the state between 1790 and 1860, about half of these likely removed through the slave trade.19
|Scott Nesbit, Migration and Marriage in Postemancipation Virginia, 2010. Use this interactive map to explore migration and marriage data used in this essay.
Intrastate migration was equally robust. Researchers at the Library of Virginia have shared with the public scanned and transcribed versions of the cohabitation records—which the General Assembly instructed be kept at local county courthouses—from all parts of the state. These registers record the names of ten thousand husbands and wives, how long they had been married, their place of residence in 1866, their birthplaces, husband's occupation, and often the names of their children and former owners. Nathan Altice, a programmer at the University of Richmond's Digital Scholarship Lab, has developed an interactive map that allows exploration of the distinct patterns of migration and marriage that emerge from these records. These patterns hold significance for nearly every aspect of emancipation-era life, giving shape to freedmen and women's experience of and possibilities for marriage, child-rearing, work, and politics.
Husbands and wives experienced slavery in such different ways that it is not surprising that their migration patterns differ. In nearly every marriage register, more men than women underwent migrations to a new county. The differences were often dramatic.For example, nearly two out of three migrants to Warren County, in the northern Shenandoah Valley, were men. A number of factors intersected to bring about lower mobility rates among women whose marriages were registered, including the more fluid labor markets for male than female labor. Perhaps the responsibility of caring for children made women slightly less likely to move in their lifetime, either voluntarily or by force.20
Whether husbands and wives experienced migration to a different county depended largely on whether they lived east or west of the Blue Ridge Mountains. Those still living in long settled counties in eastern Virginia, which had seen a steady flow of men and women forced to other places, were relatively unlikely to have been born elsewhere. In every Piedmont and Tidewater county more than half of all married people were living in the county of their birth in 1866. Those who had not migrated made up nearly three quarters of those married in the overwhelmingly rural and tobacco-growing Lunenburg County. Maria and William Bagley were similar to most couples still living in Lunenburg: both were born and continued to live there. Since the Bagleys did not share an owner, they likely lived abroad, though this did not keep them from raising eight children in their eighteen years of marriage.21
|Scott Nesbit, Percent of Married Men and Women who had Migrated from their Birth Counties, 2010. The Blue Ridge Mountains separated the Valley and Appalachia sections of Virginia from the Piedmont and Tidewater. They also divided counties in which most men and women had experienced migration from those in which most had not. Interactive Map
The Great Valley and Appalachian counties suffered tremendous outmigration, but had experienced significant in-migration as well. Of counties west of the Blue Ridge, only in Augusta (52 percent) and Wythe (53 percent) were most freedmenfre and women born where they were married. Only about one in four of those who registered to be married in Floyd County, for example, were born there. More couples in western counties shared migration trajectories similar to those of Madison Hampton, who had moved to Floyd from Rye Valley Virginia in nearby Wythe County, and his wife Edie, who was originally from Suffolk. Like the Hamptons, the many men and women who had been born elsewhere most often had come from other counties in Virginia. In none of the twelve counties included in our database did those born outside the state comprise more than a handful of those registering to be married.22
Most black Virginians, particularly those marrying in the eastern counties, chose a wife or husband from the county where they were born. In Caroline County, a tobacco-growing county north of the state capitol in Richmond, nearly three quarters of married men and women shared a birthplace with their partner. In most instances, this meant that both husband and wife were born in Caroline and continued to live there after the end of slavery. Far more couples in the southwest Virginia counties of Roanoke, Smyth, Wythe, and Floyd were like Clara Anderson and Robert Preston. They were born in Tazewell and Bedford Counties, respectively, and were living together in Wytheville when they registered their relationship in 1866. In Appalachia, even those who married spouses from their home counties, such as Martha and Cornelius Harrison, both from Campbell County, migrated together elsewhere disproportionately as the Harrisons did when they ended up in Smyth County.23
Men and women formed long-term relationships in eastern and western corners of the state alike. In spite of the obstacles to stable relationships, long marriages were not uncommon among black Virginians who registered their marriages in the immediate postwar era—the median length of relationship legitimized in the cohabitation registers was ten years. As one might suspect, a number of the long-term marriages occurred among slaves claimed by the same owner. G. W. and Lucinda Allman had been husband and wife for more than forty years and listed seven adult children; both were born in Lunenburg County, continued to live there in 1866, and listed William Allman as their last owner. Others, however, seem to have traveled a considerable distance to reunite. Brock Wells married Martha Sheler when he was nineteen years old, in 1837, and they probably lived near each other for a number of years, until at least 1846 when their youngest daughter Rosa was born. When asked the residence of their last owner, however, Martha indicated that she had lived at the Epperly farm in Floyd County. Wells had been moved far from southwest Virginia, at the plantation of an "R. Wells," in Missouri. Wells was able to return to his home after the war, however, to rejoin Sheler in Floyd County and live there long afterward.24
The likelihood that former slaves would report long-term marriages varied neither by the setting in which they took place nor by the migration profile of the county in which they were recorded. Herbert Gutman found that in North Carolina, the percentage of freedpeople reporting long marriages in 1866 was the same in farm and urban settings as in plantation settings. The median length of marriages among freedmen and women in Virginia varied from county to county, but not in a way that maps neatly to the patterns of migration. Floyd County, where men and women were most likely to have experienced migration, had the shortest median marriage, seven and a half years. But Warren County, which also had a relatively high level of migration, was among the counties with the longest median length of marriage, twelve years.25
Men and women who moved, voluntarily or by force, to counties in the Tidewater often moved only a short distance, from other Tidewater counties or from the Piedmont. Very few men and women born in the western parts of the state ended up in the east. James Brooks, a thirty-five-year-old house servant born in Frederick County in the far northwest corner of the state, who married Lucy Oldon, from the closer county of King George, was the exception that proved the rule. Brooks was one of eight registrants in Hanover County, born outside the Piedmont and Tidewater areas out of more than one thousand; of these eight migrants across regional boundaries, four were from western Virginia, and the others were born in other states.26
|Scott Nesbit, Migration to Richmond County, 2010. Tidewater counties saw few migrants, forced or not, from the western part of the state. None of the men and women who registered their marriage in Richmond County were born west of the Blue Ridge Mountains. Interactive Map
Those married in western counties not only were more likely to have migrated, but often moved greater distances and across more varied terrain as well. In Smyth County, in the southwest of the state, fewer than one hundred couples registered their marriages yet men and women from all parts of the state made their homes there. Migrants from eighteen eastern counties had moved to Smyth, along with natives of five other states.27
In all counties the majority of migrants came from nearby, though the networks in which black men and women were involved tied counties unevenly. Far more men and women married in Augusta were from Albemarle than any other neighboring county. This was in part true because Albemarle had a much higher black population than did any other neighboring county. The train running west from Charlottesville to Staunton surely played a role as well, as did the relative ease with which men could find work in Augusta and much of the Valley. Far more men and women born in Pulaski County ended up living in Wythe, the adjoining county to the west, than any other county for which we have records. No one from Pulaski registered a marriage in Floyd County, to the immediate southeast. Few men and women from Henrico, the most populous county in the area, seem to have moved to the adjacent county of Hanover. Distance between places could be measured in units other than miles. Henrico and Hanover, sharing a border of over thirty miles, were far more distant from each other than Augusta and Albemarle, whose boundary extended less than half that length. The ties that bound communities together did not depend on abstract measurements but on labor flows and consequent journeys of men and women across political borders.28
Virginia's emancipation-era marriages formed a relational geography tying diverse places together in patterns that would be invisible on a political or topographical map. Men and women from Halifax County Virginia, in the heart of the Southside tobacco belt, had more ties to Roanoke County, several days' walk to the west, than they did to the seemingly much closer, Piedmont county of Lunenburg. Men and women experienced their marriages and the journeys they took in two ways. In one way, these scales of action are measurable, covering defined spaces and quantifiable distances in feet above sea level or the number of miles between points on a map. But they were also constructed through experience, stretching and bending mapped spaces, connecting places, shrinking the distance between some locales and neighborhoods while making others seem much greater than a comparison of latitudes and longitudes would indicate.
The ties between counties seemed to depend on the migrants' occupations. Caroline and Louisa Counties were each adjacent to Hanover County; some fifty men from each county migrated to Hanover. These migrations, from equally rural districts, were heavily patterned by occupation. A large majority (85 percent) of married freedmen in Hanover County were agricultural labors. Twenty-five percent of migrants from Caroline County to Hanover County listed non-agricultural occupations; only three migrants from Louisa were non-agricultural laborers. The discrepancy does not arise from an abundance of artisans trained in Caroline; only four percent of registrants married in Caroline County listed non-agricultural occupations. Skilled workers and those who sought non-agricultural work were overwhelmingly drawn, whether voluntarily or by force, from Caroline County to the neighboring county of Hanover.29
The creation of households, in other words, occurred across space, was marked by patterns of forced and voluntary migration, and laid the groundwork for potentially useful networks of kinship. Artisans in places like Caroline, seemed to leave the county disproportionately for its neighboring county to the south; one can imagine that farmers participating in volatile produce markets could benefit from knowledge of commercial networks—even knowledge based on painful experience—in other, far-flung communities. In a number of circumstances, we might imagine such connections doing little good. Fewer than a third of African Americans elected to Virginia state office in Reconstruction, for example, were migrants from another county. Political leadership for Virginia blacks in Reconstruction seemed to depend not on statewide kinship networks or national connections but on deep roots and dense networks within a single locale.30
Emancipation transformed the spaces enslaved men and women created through their marriages. A legal framework that guaranteed the end of forced, long-distance removal and the slave trade bolstered black marriages of all sorts. As black women increasingly found ways to avoid close contact with white men, living arrangements began to shift. Legal marriages defensible in court made white attempts to break up black families far less likely to succeed. Yet for all the benefits of emancipation felt immediately by families, repair took time.
The diversity of living arrangements that marked fragile, intimate relationships under slavery continued in freedom. William and Isabella Gibbons, who had married in the 1850s, each followed promising livelihoods soon after emancipation. She remained in Charlottesville teaching in the local freedmen's school and for a few years he secured a position as minister at the African Baptist Church there. By 1867, however, he had taken a position a half day's travel away via the Orange and Alexandria Railroad, in Washington, DC, serving as the minister of a thriving church while returning, when his duties permitted, to his wife and children. Mary Blackburn had lived apart from her free husband, John Patrick, before he bought her in 1860 and they began living together in Middlebrook, a small farming town in the Shenandoah Valley. This relative distance from their neighbor and her former master, Henry Mish, did not protect their three young children from sale, nor did it enable them to find the children in the years immediately after the war.31
Black men and women spent considerable time and energy repairing what the slave trade had broken, at times using the newly invigorated federal bureaucracy to accomplish this task. Reuben Skelter registered his marriage to Sally Fitzhugh based on his residence in Caroline County, Virginia, listing her current place of residence as Georgia. Adam Brown testified in the Smyth County register to his twenty-five year marriage to his wife Sarah and made sure agents recorded the names of their five children, but believed that his wife lived in Texas. Ann, who had lived at the Crabtree farm with her four children, documented her marriage to Alfred Crabtree but had no idea where he was living. At the end of the war Violet Ward sought assistance from the network created by Freedmen's Bureau agents to reunite her scattered family. She lived with one of her children in Staunton, Virginia; another child lived in Richmond; her husband and their second child were living in Holmes County, Mississippi. Lost kin notices flooded the Christian Recorder and other black periodicals, documenting the process of family reunion in midstream while giving little indication whether the reunions eventually were accomplished.32
Forced migration made some potential reunions painful. Laura Spicer had been sold away from her home to Gordonsville and never remarried. With emancipation, the opportunity came when she and her husband might reunite. Her husband, however, was torn between his former marriage to Spicer and his current family. "The reason why I have not written you before, in a long time," he wrote, "is because your letters disturbed me so very much….I want to see you and I don't want to see you. I love you just as well as I did the last day I saw you," though, he admitted, there were troubling reasons he could not see his wife Laura and their children. "I am married, and my wife have two children, and if you and I meet it would make a very dissatisfied family. " For Spicer and her former husband, there was no straightforward way to translate the marriage that had existed into the emancipation era.33
Bureau agents and black ministers attempted to bring structure to relationships such as these, fitting them neatly into categories of marriage that might form the basis for property relations and for determining dependency of the infirm and young alike. Peter Randolph, who had spent his childhood enslaved in Prince George County, recalled the difficulty of his role as pastor in circumstances in which "hundreds of those who had been separated" returned home and "found their former companions married again" because they had expected never to see their spouses again. The "perplexing part" for Randolph was "to determine which were the right ones to marry," particularly when at the time of the marriage formalization law he was marrying "seven and eight couples a night." The forced migrations men and women experienced over the course of their lives created the emotional strains, difficult religious judgments, and chaotic bureaucratic processes that accompanied marriage formalization.34
Accounting for the migrations men and women had been forced to endure was, as Randolph wrote, the most perplexing part of postemancipation marriage. It was a problem of scale. Marriage seemed, to those formalizing relationships of freedmen and women, to imply fixed temporal and spatial bounds; it had a beginning and end date, required cohabitation, and was by definition monogamous. Marriage required such boundaries if it were to serve as the basis for judgments about property and dependence and if it were to serve as an institution that could anchor the private sphere. The scale at which many freedmen and women had experienced marriage defied all those hallmarks.
Emancipation-era marriages endured multiple transitions in a few short years. Some of these transitions involved movement through space, reuniting couples and families that had been pulled apart in slavery and through the Civil War. Other transitions were legal and contextual, as the meaning of marriage for black men and women shifted dramatically under their feet. In the words of Ira Berlin, Steven F. Miller, and Leslie Rowland, "the personnel was familiar, but the circumstances entirely different." For freedmen and women, managing both transitions involved sophisticated navigation across multiple scales of action. They leveraged bureaucracies, kinship networks, and social hierarchies at the local level and across hundreds of miles to reestablish the most intimate bonds.35
Thinking about marriage at multiple scales allows us to draw new connections between some of the most important writing on emancipation and the family. Thavolia Glymph's powerful account of one particular scale, the plantation household, has shown how the divisions between public and private space in the plantation South were at their heart ideological, violent, and obfuscatory. Anthony Kaye has revealed that enslaved communities in the Mississippi Valley organized themselves at the level of the neighborhood as a coherent, if porous, unit. Laura Edwards has shown how political debate at the state level depended crucially on legal ideas about household economy. Black men and women worked across each of these scales and others to bring about the seemingly most self-contained relationships. The assignation of "public" to state-level action and "private" to household institutions was a fiction. Even the designation of marriage as an institution that existed at a single scale, the household, was a distortion of how intimate ties existed in relation to wider networks.
The notion that the household was a private space coextensive with marriage, the quintessential private institution, was a spatial fiction foundational for the dichotomies of public and private life about which Glymph, Edwards, and others have written so eloquently. Marriage did not function solely within the bounds of the private residence or yard, nor did it exist at a single scale. Black women and men were constantly acting at multiple scales, using governmental agents, employers, and even former slaveholders to buttress their claims to their families. Freedmen and women shaped the physical, social, and cultural space necessary to make their marriages work. Their relationships emerged from an antebellum system that at times constrained their movement to a single farm and at others forced migration far away from kin. Their marriages were bolstered by the seemingly incongruous bureaucratic cooperation between radicals in Congress and conservatives in the Virginia state legislature. And they were built by men and women who had, in all likelihood, either been forced to move or who had been separated from loved ones on account of the intricate, devastating patterns of the slave trade. The men and women entering into these marriages created new geographies suited for freedom. In those geographies, living abroad could create opportunities, husbands and wives found intimate spaces away from those who most threatened them, and families had a chance to retrace the long lines of the slave trade to find loved ones.
About the Author
Scott Nesbit is the Associate Director of the Digital Scholarship Lab at the University of Richmond, where he works on projects involving geographic information systems and the humanities. He is completing a dissertation on spatial changes attending emancipation at the University of Virginia.
About the Interactive Mapmaker
Nathan Altice is the Tocqueville web developer at the University of Richmond's Digital Scholarship Lab. He is currently pursuing his PhD in Media, Art + Text at Virginia Commonwealth University.
- 1. Register of Colored Persons of Augusta County, State of Virginia, Cohabiting Together as Husband and Wife, 1866 Feb. 27 (hereafter Cohabitation Register, Augusta County), 28. Cohabitation Registers Digital Collection, Library of Virginia, Richmond, VA, http://digitool1.lva.lib.va.us:8881/R?func=collections-result&collection_id=1522; U.S. Bureau of the Census, Eighth Census of the United States, 1860. Washington, DC: National Archives and Records Administration, 1860, M653, 1,438 rolls, source consulted: s.v. P. Cleveland, 1860 United States Federal Census, Slave Schedules, Albemarle County, Virginia, http://www.ancestry.com/; P. Cleveland to [Thomas P. Jackson], May 6, 1867, Valley of the Shadow: Two Communities in the American Civil War online, http://valley.lib.virginia.edu/papers/B0193, source copy available as National Archives and Records Administration, Records of the Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands (hereafter hereafter NARA BRFAL), Record Group 105, Box E4269; 1870 U.S. Federal Census, http://ancestry.com/ s.v. Benjamin Barbourn [Barbour], District 3, Augusta, Virginia, M593_1634, page 370B.
- 2. Valley Virginian, February 21, 1866, p. 3 col. 2, Valley of the Shadow online, http://valley.lib.virginia.edu/news/vv1866/va.au.vv.1866.02.21.xml#03; U.D. Poe to P.P. Cleveland, April 30, 1867, Valley of the Shadow online, http://valley.lib.virginia.edu/papers/B0192 source available NARA BRFAL, RG 105; P. Cleveland to [Thomas P. Jackson], May 6, 1867, Valley of the Shadow online; 1860 U.S. Federal Census, Agriculture Schedule, http://www.ancestry.com/ s.v. Robt Van Lear, Augusta County, Virginia, roll 5, p. 273; Augusta County: Freedmen's Bureau Register of Complaints, May 8, 1866, Valley of the Shadow online, http://valley.lib.virginia.edu/papers/BD4000, source available, NARA BRFAL, RG 105, Box E4237.
- 3. Geographers have disagreed about many aspects of the definition of scale. See Peter Taylor, "A Materialist Framework for Political Geography," Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, n.s., 7, no. 1 (1982): 15-34; Neil Smith, Uneven Development: Nature, Capital, and the Production of Space (Cambridge, Mass.: Blackwell, 1984); Sallie A. Marston, "The Social Construction of Scale" Progress in Human Geography 24, no. 2 (2000): 219-242; Andrew E. G. Jonas, "Pro Scale: Further Reflections on the 'Scale Debate' in Human Geography," Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, n.s., 31, no. 3 (2006): 399-406; and Edward L. Ayers and Scott Nesbit, "Seeing Emancipation: Scale and Freedom in the American South," Journal of the Civil War Era 1, no. 1 (2011): 3-22.
- 4. For scholarship on African American families at these and other scales, see Thavolia Glymph, Out of the House of Bondage: The Transformation of the Plantation Household (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008); Anthony Kaye, Joining Places: Slave Neighborhoods in the Old South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007); Brenda Stevenson, Life in Black and White: Family and Community in the Slave South (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997); Laura Edwards, Gendered Strife and Confusion: The Political Culture of Reconstruction (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1997); Wilma A. Dunaway, The African American Family in Slavery and Emancipation (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003); Jacqueline Jones, Labor of Love, Labor of Sorrow: Black Women, Work, and the Family from Slavery to the Present (New York: Basic Books, 1985); Amy Dru Stanley, From Bondage to Contract: Wage Labor, Marriage, and the Marketplace in the Age of Slave Emancipation (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998); Peter Bardaglio, Reconstructing the Household: Families, Sex, and Law in the Nineteenth-Century South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995); Mary Farmer-Kaiser, Freedwomen and the Freedmen's Bureau: Race, Gender, and Public Policy in the Age of Emancipation (New York: Fordham University Press, 2010); recent investigations of families' transition to emancipation build on an earlier historiographical debate: E. Franklin Frazier, The Negro Family in the United States (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1939); Daniel P. Moynihan, The Negro Family: The Case for National Action (Washington, DC: Office of Policy Planning and Research, U.S. Department of Labor, 1965); John W. Blassingame, The Slave Community: Plantation Life in the Antebellum South (New York: Oxford University Press, 1972); and Herbert G. Gutman, The Black Family in Slavery and Freedom, 1750-1925 (New York: Pantheon, 1976).
- 5. Amy Dru Stanley, "Instead of Waiting for the Thirteenth Amendment: The War Power, Slave Marriage, and Inviolate Human Rights," American Historical Review 115.3 (June 2010): 733-765; "A Resolution to encourage Enlistments and to promote the Efficiency of the military Forces of the United States," Bills and Resolutions, U.S. Senate, S.R. 82, 38th Congress, 2nd Session.
- 6. Bills and Resolutions, U.S. Senate, S.R. 82, 38th Congress, 2nd Session; U.S. Congress, Congressional Globe, Senate, 38th Congress, 2nd Session, 114; Sumner also quoted in Stanley, "Instead of Waiting," 751.
- 7. Farmer-Kaiser, Freedwomen, 26-30; Barry A. Crouch, "The 'Chords of Love': Legalizing Black Marital and Family Rights in Postwar Texas," Journal of Negro History 79.4 (Autumn 1994): 334-351; Gutman, Black Family, 18-25, 419.
- 8. Third Edition of the Code of Virginia: Including Legislation to January 1, 1874, George W. Munford (Richmond, 1873), Chapter 104, Section 13; J. Tivis Wicker, "Virginia's Legitimization Act of 1866," The Virginia Magazine of History and Biography, 86.3 (Jul. 1978): 339-344; Jack P. Maddex, The Virginia Conservatives, 1867-1879: A Study in Reconstruction Politics (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1970), 39-41; Laura F. Edwards, "The Marriage Covenant is at the Foundation of All Our Rights" Law and History Review 14.1 (Spring 1996): 81-124; Catherine Jones writes of the consensus postwar Virginians held on the care of children: "The familial household's capacity to harness kinship's obligations to productive units made it prominent in Virginians' visions for the postemancipation future. This understanding of kinship informed the expectations of Virginians who looked to kin obligations to provide for dependent Virginians, notably children," in "Ties that Bind, Bonds that Break: Children in the Reorganization of Households in Postemancipation Virginia" Journal of Southern History 76.1 (February 2010): 78.
- 9. Elizabeth Regosin, Freedom's Promise: Ex-Slave Families and Citizenship in the Age of Emancipation (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2002), 82; J. H. Remington to Orlando Brown, June 18, 1866, Valley of the Shadow online http://valley.lib.virginia.edu/papers/B1248, source available NARA, Records of the Assistant Commissioner for the State of Virginia, BRFAL, RG105, M1048, roll 18; Garrick Mallery to Orlando Brown, April 30, 1867, Valley of the Shadow online, http://valley.lib.virginia.edu/papers/B1066, source available NARA Records of the Assistant Commissioner for the State of Virginia, BRFAL, RG105, M1048, roll 26; John Thomas O'Brien, Jr., From Bondage to Citizenship: The Richmond Black Community, 1865-1867 (New York: Garland, 1990), 305-308; John Preston McConnell, Negroes and their Treatment in Virginia from 1865 to 1867 (Pulaski: B.D. Smith and Brothers, 1910), 103; Acts of General Assembly, 1866-67, 951; Mary J. Farmer, "'Because they are Women': Gender and the Virginia Freedmen's Bureau's 'War on Dependency'" in The Freedmen's Bureau and Reconstruction: Reconsiderations, ed. Paul A. Cimbala and Randall M. Miller (New York: Fordham University Press, 1999), 177.
- 10. Cohabitation Register, Smyth County; Dylan Penningroth, The Claims of Kinfolk: African American Property and Community in the Nineteenth-Century South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003), 163-186; Cohabitation Register, Hanover County, 17.
- 11. Thomas P. Jackson to Mary A. Watkins, May 27, 1867, Valley of the Shadow online, http://valley.lib.virginia.edu/papers/B0793, NARA BRFAL, RG 105, Box E4265; Cohabitation Register, Augusta County, 26; Thomas P. Jackson to John A. McDonnell, August 28, 1867, Valley of the Shadow online, http://valley.lib.virginia.edu/papers/B0123, NARA BRFAL, RG 105, Box E4269.
- 12. Kaye, Joining Places, 52-62; the Bureau form for registering marriages in Virginia came with the printed heading, "Register of Colored Persons of ______ County, State of Virginia, cohabiting together as Husband and Wife on 27th February, 1866."
- 13. Thomas P. Jackson to John A. McDonnell, August 28, 1867, Valley of the Shadow; Freedmen's Bureau Records: Thomas P. Jackson to John A. McDonnell, September 9, 1867, Valley of the Shadow.
- 14. Erskine Clarke, Dwelling Place: A Plantation Epic (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007), 210-11; Melvin Patrick Ely, Israel on the Appomattox: A Southern Experiment in Black Freedom from the 1790s through the Civil War (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2004), 66-67; see also Leon Litwack, Been in the Storm So Long: The Aftermath of Slavery (New York: Random House, 1979), 239-247; and Jacqueline Jones, Labor of Love, 32-39.
- 15. Benjamin Drew, A North-Side View of Slavery. The Refugee: or the Narratives of Fugitive Slaves in Canada. Related by Themselves, with an Account of the History and Condition of the Colored Population of Upper Canada (Boston: John P. Jewett, 1856), 53, consulted in Documenting the American South online, http://docsouth.unc.edu/neh/drew/drew.html; also cited in Marie Schwartz, Born in Bondage, 197; Edward E. Baptist, Creating an Old South: Middle Florida's Plantation Frontier before the Civil War (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002), 66-67.
- 16. Quoted in Gutman, 159; see also Glymph, 219-220, Schwartz, 193-4, and Tadman, 133-178. Calvin Schermerhorn has argued convincingly that when faced with the conundrum of seeking "mastery" through control of labor or "money" by selling enslaved people in their prime years, Tidewater slave-owners chose to sell men and women away with little hesitation. Calvin Schermerhorn, Money over Mastery, Family over Freedom: Slavery in the Antebellum Upper South (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2011).
- 17. Weevils in the Wheat: Interviews with Virginia Ex-Slaves, ed. Charles L. Perdue, Jr. et al. (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1976), 36.
- 18. Henry Box Brown, Narrative of the life of Henry Box Brown, Written by Himself (Manchester: Lee and Glynn, 1851), Documenting the American South, http://docsouth.unc.edu/neh/brownbox/brownbox.html, 9, 44.
- 19. Philip Troutman, "Slave Trade and Sentiment in Antebellum Virginia," PhD Dissertation, University of Virginia, 419; Jonathan B. Pritchett, "Quantitative Estimates of the United States Interregional Slave Trade, 1820-1860," Journal of Economic History 61.2 (Jun. 2001): 468; Tadman, Speculators and Slaves, 12.
- 20. An equal number of men and women were migrants in Lunenburg Co., the only outlier. Michael Tadman's analysis of the interregional slave trade in the 1850s uses different evidence but similarly indicates that for all age cohorts except slaves between the ages of ten and twenty, more men than women had been sold away from their homes. Tadman, Speculators and Slaves, 29-31. On the different experiences of men and women under slavery, see Glymph, House of Bondage; Jacqueline Jones, Labor of Love; Brenda Stevenson, Life in Black and White.
- 21. Register, Lunenberg Co.
- 22. Dunaway, African-American Family, 18-36; Register, Augusta Co.; Register, Wythe Co.; Register, Floyd Co.
- 23. Register, Caroline Co. Only 28 percent of couples married in Caroline Co. were born in different counties from each other. Six percent moved together from another county. Two thirds of marriages were comprised of men and women born in Caroline. In Floyd County, 59 percent of couples did not share a birth county. Only nine percent of couples who registered there shared Floyd as their birthplace. Nearly one third of registering couples were migrants to Floyd from the same county; for more, see "Joint Migration" in the accompanying application, "Migration and Marriage in Postemancipation Virginia".
- 24. Cohabitation Register, Lunenburg County, 1; Cohabitation Register, Floyd County, 1; 1880 United States Federal Census [database on-line], Little River, Floyd, Virginia, Roll 1365, Page 354C, Enumeration District 29, http://ancestry.com.
- 25. Gutman, Black Family, 102; Cohabitation Registers, Floyd County, Warren County.
- 26. Cohabitation Register, Hanover County, 1.
- 27. 176 men and women registered their marriages in Smyth County. This represented about one seventh of the black population in Smyth if the black population in 1866 matches that recorded in the 1870 census. The cohabitation registers for most counties listed between 10 percent and 23 percent of the black population of the county; Warren County was an outlier, with records for about 42 percent of the black population recorded in 1870. Some of this discrepancy for Warren can be ascribed to an unusually large number of registrants who listed their current residence as a county other than Warren. Cohabitation Register, Smyth County.
- 28. Cohabitation Register, Augusta County; on labor supply in the Valley, see John A. McDonnell to Orlando Brown, February 3, 1868, NARA, Records of the Assistant Commissioner for the State of Virginia, BRFAL, RG105, M1048, roll 58, Valley of the Shadow, http://valley.lib.virginia.edu/papers/B1206; Cohabitation Registers, Wythe County and Hanover County.
- 29. Cohabitation registers, Caroline County, Hanover County.
- 30. Luther P. Jackson, Negro Office Holders in Virginia, 1865-1895 (Norfolk: Guide Quality Press, 1945). The number includes those born in other states. Twenty-eight office holders were born in places other than the counties they represented. Of these, twelve were born in adjacent counties. Fifty-seven delegates were born in the county they represented. We lack birthplace information for fifteen delegates.
- 31. "Reminiscences of Philena Carkin," 50-53, unpublished manuscript, Philena Carkin Papers, 1866-1875, Accession #11123, Special Collections Dept., University of Virginia Library, Charlottesville, Va.; Gayle Schulman, "The Gibbons Family: Freedmen" Magazine of Albemarle County History 55 (1997): 60-93; Southern Claims Commission: Claim of Mary Blackburn, 1875, Claim no. 1378, Valley of the Shadow online, http://valley.lib.virginia.edu/claims/SCC0518, also available as National Archives, College Park, RG 217, claim #1378.
- 32. Amy Murrell Taylor, The Divided Family in Civil War America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009), 196-198; Cohabitation Register, Caroline County, 19; Cohabitation Register, Smyth County; W. Storer How to Orlando Brown, September 16, 1865, Valley of the Shadow online; Michael P. Johnson, "Looking for Lost Kin: Efforts to Reunite Freed Families after Emancipation," in Catherine Clinton, ed., Southern Families at War: Loyalty and Conflict in the Civil War South (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 15-34.
- 33. Henry L. Swint, ed. Dear Ones at Home: Letters from Contraband Camps (Nashville, TN: Vanderbilt University Press, 1966), 241-2.
- 34. Peter Randolph, From Slave Cabin to the Pulpit, the Autobiography of Rev. Peter Randolph: The Southern Question Illustrated and Sketches of Slave Life (Boston: James H. Earle, 1893), 89-90.
- 35. Ira Berlin, Steven F. Miller, and Leslie Rowland, "Afro-American Families and the Transition from Slavery to Freedom" Radical History Review (1988): 89-121.


text:
by Magistra Nicolaa de Bracton
For the past seven years, the A&S Display has been the "place to be" for those wishing to share their projects with the Known World, as well as those seeking inspiration. This year was no exception.
This year, over 250 displays were featured from thirteen kingdoms. Unlike last year, the displays were not grouped by kingdom. According to Ygraine of Preston, the display's organizer, some kingdoms had many entries while others had relatively few, and "if you wanted to see just your kingdom's artisans, you could do that at home." It was hoped that mixing up the entries would encourage artisans to "mix it up."
There were a wide variety of objects on display, from artisans attending their first event or first projects to Laurels with 30+ years of experience. There were a number of entries where a number of artisans had collaborated as well. "It was a lovely mix—everyone has been very encouraging and enthusiastic." Indeed, some who viewed the exhibits, including Royalty, left comments and tokens for the entries that inspired them most. As usual with this display, there were many astounding projects; the photos that appear with this story are only a tiny sampling of the many items on display yesterday.
The event could not have happened without the help of many people who showed up when the display opened for setup at 7 am, and Ygraine wished to express her thanks to all those who pitched in.
Photo by Magistra Nicolaa de Bracton
One of the group projects was contributed by the Royal City of Eoforwic in Ealdormere. The Baron and Baroness of Septentria asked all groups to contribute at least one entry in this year's display, and Eoforwic decided on a group project, this processional canopy based on a 16th century Italian example. It was handsewn from red linen, with the embroidered arms of each canton and hand-turned wooden poles.


text:
MELBOURNE, FL — The Health First Holmes Regional Medical Center and Palm Bay Hospital Auxiliary are in need of volunteers to help support important hospital duties. Volunteers are needed to help with the information desk, admitting and discharge areas, gift shop, cheer cart, Emergency Department lobby, greeting services, in-hospital courier services, waiting rooms, and golf-cart external transportation to/from hospital.
"Our Auxiliary would like to attract 200 to 300 people to serve as volunteers," said Marcia Phillips, director of volunteer services for Health First Holmes Regional Medical Center and Palm Bay Community Hospital. "We have a great need for volunteers right now due to seasonal fluctuation and growing demand in our community. Volunteering at the hospital is a truly rewarding experience because you can really see first-hand how you're making a difference in the lives of people."
After completing a special training class, volunteers are able to choose their hours and areas of interest. To find out how to become a volunteer at one of these Health First Hospitals, please call 434-8519.
About Health First
Health First is Central Florida's only fully integrated health system. With a Mission to positively change the health and wellness of the communities we serve, Health First offers the latest technological advances and quality care at our four hospitals and through our many Outpatient & Wellness Services, as well as the area's only Trauma and Heart Centers. Health First also offers multiple commercial and Medicare health plans, a multi-specialty physician group, and four fitness centers to help members of our community stay healthy.


text:
Connecting Judicial Leaders at the International Peace Palace: Day 3
Another very interesting day at IACA 2012 at the Peace Palace at the Hague, Netherlands with workshops on social media, innovative communications technologies in the courts.
Mr. Norman Meyer, Clerk, U.S. Bankruptcy Court for the District of New
Mexico moderated a workshop panel focused on innovative uses in court systems of social media with
- Honorable Rune Lium, Judge, Sør-Trøndelag District Court, Norway
- Honorable Ian L. Gray, Chief Magistrate, State of Victoria, Australia
- Dr. Pamela Schulz, Lecturer, Graduate Communications Programs, University of South Australia, and Chair, Defence Reserves Support Council, South Australia
The Honorable Dory Reiling, Judge, First Instance Court, Amsterdam, The Netherlands shared her thoughts from the workshop deploying innovating automation and communications technologies to address court administration and management.
- Moderator: Mr. Tony Lansdell, Court Technology Specialist, Melbourne, Australia
- Honorable Dory Reiling, Judge, First Instance Court, Amsterdam, The Netherlands
- Honorable Muhammet Polat, Judge, Ministry of Justice Department of İnformation Technologies, Ankara, Turkey
- Mr. Abdulrahim Ahmad Almudhareb, Director of IT Department, Dubai Courts, Emirate of Dubai, United Arab Emirates
- Mr. Mark Beer, IACA Regional Vice-President, Middle East, Dubai, UAE
Gerhard Fischer, Cisco Connected Justice (EMEAR) shared his thoughts about the conference and the IACA community.
Overall, the IACA 2012 keynotes and panel workshops have been very impressive with a range of challenging topics.
- Building and Sustaining Global Confidence in International Justice Tribunals
- Building and Maintaining a Framework for Court Services in a Global Economic Malaise
- International Framework for Court Excellence
- Ensuring the Security and Protection of High-Profile Witnesses
- Deploying Innovative Automation and Communications Technologies to Address Court Administration and Management
- The Judicial Council Role in Preserving and Promoting Judicial System Institutional Independence and Self-Government
- Innovative Uses in Court Systems of Social Media
- Research Program Proposal on Courts and Conflict Resolution
- Maintaining Functional Court Systems and the Rule of Law in States Disrupted by Civil Conflict
- Transnational Judicial Cooperation in Europe: Trends and Developments in Building Mutual Trust
- From Management to Leadership-Innovations in Court System Management and Administration
- Public Involvement in Court Hearings and Trials
- Challenge of Developing a Sustainable Records Management Program in an Era of Paper and Multiple Electronic Formats
You can also learn more about Cisco Connected Justice and please join our 21st Century Government community.
In an effort to keep conversations fresh, Cisco Blogs closes comments after 60 days. Please visit the Cisco Blogs hub page for the latest content.


text:
Gary Ballance boosts England hopes with unbeaten century for county Yorkshire
England hopeful Gary Ballance smashed an unbeaten century as Yorkshire took control of their LV= County Championship clash with Northamptonshire.
Balance finished the opening day at Headingley on 117 not out as the home side reached 328-7 off 92 overs.
Opener Alex Lees fell just 10 runs short of a hundred when he was trapped in front by Andrew Hall, who took 3-72.
Ton up: Gary Ballance hit an unbeaten century for Yorkshire against Northamptonshire at Headingley
Howzat? Azharullah of Northampshire unsuccessfully appeals for the wicket of Alex Lees
Keaton Jennings hit a half-century as champions Durham edged the opening day of their match against Somerset.
The South African opener top scored with 80 with support from Paul Collingwood (36), Gareth Breese (45) and 37 not out from Jamie Harrison as Durham posted 308 all out having been put in at Chester-le-Street.
Lewis Gregory was the pick of the Somerset bowlers with 4-59 as the visitors finished the day on 7-0 after six overs.
Lancashire's decision to bat after winning the toss at Old Trafford proved ill-founded as Warwickshire skittled them out for 247 in the space of 75 overs.
Grim: The scene at The Oval where day one of Surrey's game with Essex was washed out
Chill: Not a ball was bowled on day one at The Oval after persistent rain in south London
England paceman Chris Woakes did much of the damage with a return of 5-63 off 16 overs with support from Keith Barker, whose 3-52 included openers Paul Horton and Luis Reece with Horton's 83 the major contribution for the batting side.
Varun Chopra and Will Porterfield steered Warwickshire to 63 without loss at stumps.
In Division Two, Will Smith's 70 helped Hampshire reach 231-5 against Derbyshire after England opener Michael Carberry had got them off to a solid start with 45 before falling leg before to Tony Palladino.
Gloucestershire won the toss at Cardiff and put Glamorgan in, but rain limited play to just 19.4 overs.
The home side struggled to 47-6 as David Payne took 3-14 with Will Bragg (25) the only batsman to reach double figures.
There was no play at either Canterbury or the Oval as Kent and Leicestershire and Surrey and Essex were frustrated by the weather.
Most watched Sport videos
- Centre back Carlos Cuellar announces his retirement from football
- Lampard criticises France over their handling of Kante's injury
- 'The world is a circus and we are at the centre' says Jurgen Klopp
- England 40-16 Australia: Jones and Farrell press conference
- Fans gather for Rugby World Cup quarter-final in Tokyo
- England 40-16 Australia: Cheika and Hooper press conference
- How Qatar plans to air condition their World Cup stadiums
- Premier League releases #NoRoomForRacism campaign with 20 top players
- England fans in fancy dress ahead of World Cup quarter final game
- Astros and Yankees react to game performance after Game 5 of ALCS
- England hammer Australia to reach Rugby World Cup semi-final
- Premier League match preview: Manchester United v Liverpool