Cabin Fever! How the log cabin shaped American history 🪓
Cabins have long been a symbol of the American frontier spirit, a testament to self-reliance and ingenuity. They played a vital role in the early settlement of the United States and have become an enduring symbol of the nation's pioneering past.
Early Colonial Period
Cabins were an essential form of shelter for European settlers in the 17th and 18th centuries. Built from logs with notched corners, cabins were relatively simple to construct, allowing settlers to establish shelter quickly. This design, known as the log cabin, became synonymous with frontier life.
Abraham Lincoln's Birthplace
One of the most famous cabins in American history is the one where Abraham Lincoln was born on February 12, 1809, in Hardin County, Kentucky. The symbolic importance of Lincoln's log cabin birthplace reflects the "log cabin to White House" narrative that emphasizes his rise from humble beginnings. Though the authenticity of the existing cabin at the Abraham Lincoln Birthplace National Historical Park is disputed, it still stands as a symbol of American perseverance and determination.
Western Expansion
As pioneers moved westward, log cabins continued to play a vital role in American expansion. The log cabin's simplicity made it an ideal choice for settlers needing to build shelter quickly. Many of these cabins became the nucleus of burgeoning communities.
Thoreau's Cabin at Walden Pond
In the 19th century, cabins also began to symbolize a return to nature and simple living. Henry David Thoreau's cabin at Walden Pond, where he lived from 1845 to 1847, became an emblem of deliberate, contemplative living. Thoreau's experiment was not only a personal retreat but also a critique of modern society, and his cabin remains an iconic representation of the American transcendentalist movement.
Presidential Retreats
Cabins have also served as retreats for American presidents. Camp David, officially known as the Naval Support Facility Thurmont, is the country's premier presidential retreat, featuring rustic cabins. It has been used by presidents for rest and diplomatic meetings since Franklin D. Roosevelt's administration.
Cabins in Modern Culture
In modern times, cabins continue to symbolize simplicity and a connection to nature. They are often associated with vacation retreats and are emblematic of a desire to return to a less complicated way of life. Check out the hundreds of photographs of cabins in our Catalog!
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THIS DAY IN GAY HISTORY
based on: The White Crane Institute's 'Gay Wisdom', Gay Birthdays, Gay For Today, Famous GLBT, glbt-Gay Encylopedia, Today in Gay History, Wikipedia, and more … FEBRUARY 24
1836 – Winslow Homer (d.1910) was an American landscape painter and printmaker, best known for his marine subjects. One of the most prolific and important American painters and printmakers of the second half of the nineteenth century, Winslow Homer created a distinctly American, modern classical style.
Homer dealt with many of the same themes that writers such as Henry Thoreau, Herman Melville, and Walt Whitman did, including the heroism displayed by ordinary individuals, when confronted by seemingly insuperable difficulties; the camaraderie and friendships enjoyed by soldiers and working men; and the isolation of the individual in the face of the "Other."
Born in Boston on February 24, 1836, Homer was initially trained as an artist by his mother, Henrietta Benson Winslow, who successfully exhibited watercolors of flowers and other still life subjects throughout her adult life.
Between 1855 and 1857, he was apprenticed to John H. Bufford, a nationally prominent commercial artist, based in Boston; with this training, he began to do free-lance work for Harper's Weekly and other magazines.
In 1861, Homer was commissioned by Harper's Weekly as a special artist/correspondent to record the events of the Civil War. Homer failed to produce the heroic battle scenes that his editors had wanted. Yet his images of the daily lives of ordinary soldiers greatly appealed to the magazine's readers and helped to establish his reputation.
Among other subjects, he represented guard duty (A Sharp-Shooter on Picket Duty, wood engraving, 1867); punishments for minor infractions (A Punishment for Intoxication, painting, 1863); medical care for the wounded (The Surgeon at Work at the Rear During an Engagement, wood engraving, 1862); and recreation (Soldier Dancing, drawing, 1862).
The Empty Sleeve at Newport
As the war ended, Homer revealed the personal "costs" of the conflict in such images as The Empty Sleeve at Newport (wood engraving, 1865), which represents a one-armed man, riding in a carriage with a sad, aloof well-dressed woman.
Very little is known about Homer's "private" life. He consistently refused to answer personal questions from critics and potential biographers, and he left no revealing diaries or other personal papers. His reclusiveness is indicated by the fact that he produced no self-portraits; in contrast, most American and European painters of the nineteenth century eagerly exploited the rapidly growing market for images of artists.
Most historians have adamantly maintained that Homer remained a bachelor because he was extraordinarily "shy" around women. However, it would seem more plausible to suggest that Homer simply may not have been interested in women sexually.
Constructing Homer as a solitary eccentric, who virtually withdrew from human society, most scholars have overlooked evidence of significant, intimate associations with other men.
One of his closest friends was Albert Kelsey, a fellow artist whom he initially met in 1858 in Massachusetts. In 1867, Kelsey traveled with Homer to Paris, where they lived together for the next two years.
A studio photograph, made while they were in Paris, mimics the conventions of marriage portraits, as do so many photographic portraits of male friends of this period. Kelsey inscribed the back of the photograph with the names "Damon and Pythias," famous ancient Greek heroes and lovers.In the 1890s, Homer remembered their friendship in the humorous and erotically suggestive drawing "Albert Kelsey riding a giant turtle in the Bahamas."
Homer's closest companion in the final years of his life was an African-American man, Lewis Wright, who worked as his servant and lived at his Prout's Neck, Maine estate from 1895 to 1910. There are indications that some of Homer's acquaintances were disconcerted by the apparent closeness of his friendship with Wright. While most "negative" reactions involved race, other "unmentionable" factors may also have been involved.
The Herring Net
Throughout his career, Homer created images that celebrated diverse aspects of male friendships. Thus, he depicted soldiers, unified in melancholy longing for peacetime home life (Home, Sweet Home, 1863); wilderness guides enjoying the beauties of nature (Two Guides, 1871); and fishermen laboring together (The Herring Net, 1885) and coping with dangerous storms (The Signal of Distress, 1890).
Homer died on September 29, 1910 in Prout's Neck, Maine.
1852 – The Irish novelist, short-story writer, poet, art critic, memoirist and dramatist, George Moore was born on this date (d.1933). Moore came from a Roman Catholic landed family. He originally wanted to be a painter, and studied art in Paris during the 1870s. There, he befriended many of the leading French artists and writers of the day.
As a naturalistic writer, he was amongst the first English-language authors to absorb the lessons of the French realists, and was particularly influenced by the works of Émile Zola. His writings influenced James Joyce, according to the literary critic and biographer Richard Ellmann, and, although Moore's work is sometimes seen as outside the mainstream of both Irish and British literature, he is as often regarded as the first great modern Irish novelist.
According to Brian Lacey's new book, Queer Creatures: A History of Homosexuality in Ireland, Moore outed his good friend, the artist Edward Martyn, in his three-volume masterpiece Hail and Farewell (published between 1911 and 1914). Moore, who was attracted to the handsome young Yeats, later fell in love with the celebrated French painter Edouard Manet, who painted three portraits of him. Moore was influenced by the homosexual Oxford critic Walter Pater, and Moore's 1879 work, "Flowers of Passion," already contained references to Lesbianism. Moore's 1887 novel, A Mere Accident, also has a homosexual theme and its central character is again based on Martyn.
1868 – The first parade to have floats is staged at Mardi Gras in New Orleans, Louisiana.
1938 – A California appellate court upholds an oral copulation conviction of a man in a hotel after naval investigators listened in and heard his bed squeaking.
1939 – Doric Wilson (d.2011), the American playwright, was born on this date. Some people write for the "alternative" theatre because they aren't good enough for Broadway. Doric Wilson wrote for it because he was too good for the Great White Way.
Wilson was one of the first playwrights at NYC's legendary Caffe Cino, his comedy "And He Made A Her" opening there in 1961. Other Cino productions followed, including "Now She Dances!" (one-act version), "Babel Babel Little Tower " and "Pretty People" .
Street Theater, Wilson's best-known play, is a fictionalization of the Stonewall riots, an event in which Wilson took part. Using satire and exaggeration, Wilson recreates the milieu of street culture in Greenwich Village in the late 1960s, presenting characters variously described as "heavy leather, keys left," "a flower child," and "a street queen." The characters are archetypes representing both the disparate groups involved in the riot and also real people Wilson knew. A complex parody of Wilder's Our Town and Crowley's The Boys in the Band, the play is both deeply literary and deeply rooted in a particular time and place.
A veteran of the anti-war and civil rights demonstrations of the early 1960s-mid 1970s, Wilson was a participant in the Stonewall Riots. An active participant in the early gay liberation movement, Wilson was a member of the Gay Activists Alliance (GAA). He helped support himself as a bartender and manager of several bars and clubs that sprouted up in the wake of Stonewall, including such institutions as Spike, Ty's, and Brothers & Sisters Cabaret. Wilson's activism and his thorough immersion in New York's gay community are reflected significantly in his work.
In 1974, Wilson (with Billy Blackwell, Peter del Valle and John McSpadden) formed TOSOS (The Other Side of Silence), the first professional theatre company to deal openly and honestly with the gay experience. The company featured new plays and revivals by such writers as Brendan Behan, Noël Coward, Christopher Hampton, Charles Jurrist, Joe Orton, Terrence McNally, Robert Patrick, Sandra Scoppettone, Martin Sherman and Lanford Wilson. In June, 2001, Wilson, and directors Mark Finley and Barry Childs resurrected the company as TOSOS II. The original TOSOS and its production of Doric Wilson's play The West Street Gang are featured in "Perform", the new permanent exhibit on theatre at The Museum of New York City.
A pioneer in the Off-Off-Broadway movement, he was completely committed to alternative theater and over the past 25 years has written, directed and produced more than a hundred productions. Such plays as Forever After, A Perfect Relationship , and The West Side Gang made him not only "one of a handful of leading contemporary playwrights who deal frankly with the Gay experience," but a satirist of the first water whose targets - hypocrisy, cant, and simply human foibles - are universal.
1975 – Gary Lane and Larry Lane, born in Goldsboro, N.C., are identical twin actors, models, film producers and screenwriters. They are both gay. The twins have appeared in feature films and national TV ads and are three-time grand prize champions of reality TV competitions. They are best known for a film they co-produced and appeared in, Hollywood to Dollywood, a feature-length documentary released theatrically in 2012. The film, about their quest to personally deliver a screenplay they've written to singer-actress Dolly Parton, played at 60 film festivals and won 24 festival awards.
Since the early 2000s, the Lane twins have appeared in feature films, TV programs, reality TV shows and TV commercials. As teenagers, they appeared on several episodes of Dawson's Creek and played twin colonial flag bearers in the Mel Gibson film The Patriot (2000). Other film appearances include Zoolander (2001), New Best Friend (2002), Spider-Man (2002), The Girl Next Door (2004), Eating Out 3: All You Can Eat (2009), and Jack and Jill (2011)
The Lane Twins talk of their life
The twins have competed on and won $50,000 on NBC's Fear Factor; beat out 24 other contestants for the grand prize of $50,000 on ABC's Winter Wipeout; and won $125,000 on the reality TV competition Set For Life. Gary Lane said their goal for appearing on these shows was to win money to pay for music rights and production costs associated with their documentary Hollywood to Dollywood. "For every wipeout, I would say, 'that was for Jolene, and for every ouch, 'that was for Coat of Many Colors!,'" Gary Lane said, referring to the need to raise money for licensing rights to hit Parton songs.
The Lane twins wrote a screenplay, Full Circle, which includes a role tailored for Dolly Parton. They submitted the script to Parton's management, but Parton's managers returned it as "unsolicited material." The twins decided to drive from Los Angeles, where they live, to Parton's theme park in Tennessee, Dollywood. The goal was to try and hand their script to Parton during one of her appearances at Dollywood's 25th anniversary celebration. In addition, the documentary explores the Lane twins' concerns about their Southern hometown's potential reaction to the film (and to the brothers' homosexuality) and their desire for acceptance from their Southern Baptist mother. Also on the journey is Gary's partner, Michael Bowen, who has crafted a birdhouse for Ms. Parton. The journey to deliver their screenplay is the focus of their documentary feature, Hollywood to Dollywood, which played at 60 film festivals throughout 2011 and 2012, winning 24 awards.
Parton makes an appearance in the film. After viewing the documentary, she gave the twins rights to use her music and likeness in its promotions. The Lane twins donate 10 percent of each Hollywood to Dollywood DVD sold to Parton's Imagination Library, an organization that provides free books to young children and is part of the Dollywood Foundation.
Today's Gay Wisdom:
George Moore
Faith goes out of the window when beauty comes in at the door. - George Moore
The mind petrifies if a circle be drawn around it, and it can hardly be denied that dogma draws a circle round the mind. - George Moore
A man travels the world over in search of what he needs and returns home to find it. - George Moore
A great artist is always before his time or behind it. - George Moore
I am filled with pride when I think of the noble and exalted world that must have existed before Christian doctrine caused men to look upon women with suspicion and bade them to think of angels instead. - George Moore
The world is dying of machinery; that is the great disease, that is the plague that will sweep away and destroy civilization; man will have to rise against it sooner or later. - George Moore
The difficulty in life is the choice.
- George Moore
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