In addition to visiting the hallowed battlesite grounds at Vicksburg National Military Park, national parks traveler Mikah Meyer also had the chance to visit several other national park sites in Mississippi, each with its own unique history.

Natchez National Historical Park

Natchez National Historical Park, in the southern part of the state, protects the sites and structures associated with the people of Natchez and its surrounding area — from its earliest inhabitants through the modern era. 

The name is derived from the Natchez American Indians who lived along the Mississippi River at the time of European exploration.

But the area is also known for its pre-Civil War history.

Pre-Civil War South

Mikah, who’s on a mission to visit all of the more than 400 national parks, was able to learn about that history and other aspects of life in the antebellum South through many of the city’s preserved properties.

“It’s a historical park, so it’s kind of like the other historical parks in that it’s basically the old portion of the town of Natchez and a bunch of various sites,” he explained.

William Johnson House

Among those sites is the home of William Johnson, who was a free black barber.

 

 

“It was interesting to learn about his story,” Mikah recounted. “He lived in Natchez before the Civil War as a free black man and had his own house and his own business as a barber.”

According to the National Park Service, Johnson used bricks from buildings destroyed in the infamous tornado of 1840 to construct the State Street estate and commercial business area. The family lived in the upper stories of the house, while the first floor was rented out to merchants. The house allows visitors to learn more about the life of free African Americans in the pre-Civil War South.

After the fall of Vicksburg in 1863, the Union Army occupied the city of Natchez, enforced the Emancipation Proclamation – which freed all slaves in the rebellious states, and put an end to the tragic sale of enslaved people at the Forks of the Road, one of the largest slave markets in the South.

Subsequently, thousands of formerly enslaved men from the Natchez area joined the U.S. Army and Navy.

Driving through history

It would seem unlikely that a modern-looking expressway would be considered a site worth preserving, but that’s exactly what the National Park Service has done with Natchez Trace Parkway. The 715-kilometer roadway once was the main way settlers and travelers reached Natchez from the Tennessee area.

Driving north on that scenic parkway, Mikah said he understood why the Park Service had chosen to preserve it.

“I drove mile zero of that, all the way up to mile 15, just to get a taste of what that was like,” Mikah recounted. “It’s what a highway in America would look like if there were no Dairy Queens or gas stations on it. It’s just the road, grass and trees, so it’s really pretty — a really beautiful driving experience.”

While it was cold and wintry up north, the grass along the parkway was a vibrant green. “The trees were starting to bloom, so I can only imagine it in peak spring,” Mikah added.

Alongside much of the parkway is the Natchez Trace National Scenic Trail, a historic forest trail that roughly follows sections of the paved road through the states of Mississippi, Alabama and Tennessee.

Also known as the “Old Natchez Trace,” the trail was created and used for centuries by Native Americans, and later, in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, by European and American explorers, traders and emigrants.

Today, visitors like Mikah can still walk those trails and experience the area’s natural beauty.

The “Sunken Trace”

Picturesque land and waterscapes near the trail offer visitors recreational opportunities like hiking, biking, horseback riding and camping.

And Mikah said you can literally see history when you walk the trail, worn down by hundreds of thousands, even millions, of footsteps.

“One of the ways that distinguishes this is there are paths that are very clearly beaten down in that you have essentially a wall on either side of you.”

In the space of a few days, Mikah immersed himself in several fascinating aspects of his country’s history. He says he looks forward to exploring more of it when he visits two more national park sites in the northern part of Mississippi sometime in the near future.

In the meantime, he invites you to learn more about his travels across America by visiting his website, Facebook and Instagram.
…

In a bizarre tale straight from the movie Sharknado, a shark was found on an Australian inland road, apparently washed up by a major storm.

Two days after cyclone Debbie slammed into Australia’s northeast coast as a category 4 storm, a nearly 2-meter long bullshark was found on a formerly flooded road.

Residents of Queensland had been warned to stay out of flood waters, apparently for good reason.

Queensland suffered widespread damage from the strong storm.
…

The FBI has recovered a 1919 Norman Rockwell painting stolen more than 40 years ago from a New Jersey home.

The painting, sometimes called “Lazybones” or “Boy Asleep with Hoe,” graced the cover of the Sept. 6, 1919, edition of the Saturday Evening Post. The oil-on-canvas piece was among several items taken during a 1976 break-in in Cherry Hill, a Philadelphia suburb.

Susan Murta tells The Philadelphia Inquirer the FBI did a great job. She last saw the painting in her parents’ home in 1976. Her parents are now deceased.

An Inquirer story last year said the owner forked over $75 for it after accidentally damaging the painting with a pool cue in 1954. It’s now believed worth more than $1 million.

It’s unclear how the painting was recovered.

 
…

The Natchez Trace Parkway is a 700 km drive through exceptional scenery and 10,000 years of North American history.
…

Part of music icon Bob Dylan’s once-secret 6,000-piece archive, including thousands of hours of studio sessions, film reels and caches of unpublished lyrics, has opened in Oklahoma.

More than 1,000 pieces of the collection spanning Dylan’s six-decade career are available to scholars at the Gilcrease Museum’s Helmerich Center for American Research in Tulsa.

The opening comes a year after the George Kaiser Family Foundation and the University of Tulsa acquired the collection for an estimated $15 million to $20 million.

The public will get a glimpse of some of the material when the Bob Dylan Center opens in downtown Tulsa’s Brady Arts District in about two years.

The center will occupy the opposite side of a building that houses a center devoted to Woody Guthrie, one of Dylan’s major influences.
…

Universal Pictures is going back to its roots — monsters.

The studio Wednesday debuted footage from its upcoming adventure film The Mummy, which opens a monster universe drawing on Universal’s vault of classic properties like Bride of Frankenstein, Invisible Man and Creature from the Black Lagoon.

Tom Cruise stars in the Alex Kurtzman-directed The Mummy, which is equal parts action and horror as Cruise’s explorer Nick Morton attempts to combat an ancient evil that has been unlocked and threatens to destroy the world.

Sofia Boutella is the Mummy, once an Egyptian princess who turned to the dark side when denied the throne.

Kurtzman and the cast, including Boutella, Annabelle Wallis and Jake Johnson, discussed Cruise’s famous commitment to eye-popping stunts.

“I think I was brought onto this movie to be afraid to do stunts with Tom Cruise,” Johnson said. “Tom does it all and he makes his co-stars do it, too. And I do mean ‘make.”’

Johnson laughed that when he would complain when he got hurt or bruised, Cruise would quip back: “Yeah, we jumped off a building dummy. It hurts!”

Cruise, who is on location for another filming, delivered a video message to the audience.

“My love for this began with universal classic films,” Cruise said. “To usher in a new age of gods and monsters is something that makes me very proud and excited.”

Audiences can meet “the original monster” June 9.
…

A photograph of Harriet Tubman, believed to be the earliest-known image of the anti-slavery crusader and showing her as younger than she is normally depicted, will go up for auction Thursday in New York.

The photograph, previously unseen by scholars, shows Tubman in her late 40s, wearing an intricately decorated blouse and voluminous skirt, and sitting in a chair, leaning one arm on its back.

“It’s quite remarkable: This is what she looked like in her prime Civil War period when she was working as a spy for Lincoln,” Wyatt Day, the specialist organizing the sale at Swann Auction Galleries, said in a telephone interview.

He noted the photograph was taken about three years after the American Civil War ended in 1865. “All of the images show her as an older woman, maybe in her 70s. She looks a bit tired, and here she looks vibrant and strong.”

Kate Clifford Larson, a historian and Tubman biographer, said the photograph, which was brought to Swann last year after being purchased at auction by a collector of vintage photos about 10 years ago, could help the public “reimagine” Tubman.

“There are so many details about it that are thrilling,” she said in a phone interview. “She’s so much younger and she’s dressed so beautifully, so it helps us look at her in a different way.”

Tubman, who escaped from slavery in Maryland when she was in her 20s, later led dozens of black slaves to freedom using the Underground Railroad and became a Union Army spy during the Civil War and women’s suffragist.

The U.S. Treasury Department said last year it planned to put her on the face of the $20 bill, replacing former President Andrew Jackson, making her the first African-American so honored.

The photograph for auction is in the form of a carte de visite, a 19th-century custom in which people would leave photos of themselves as a calling card.

It appears in a carte-de-visite album compiled by the Quaker abolitionist Emily Howland. The album is estimated to sell for $20,000 to $30,000, the gallery said.

Day said research had shown the photographer Benjamin F. Powelson, who made Tubman’s carte de visite, only spent time near Tubman’s home in Auburn in upstate New York from 1868 to 1869, when Tubman was about 48.
…

Vice Media is bringing its edgy style of journalism to the Middle East to tap what it thinks is an underserved market of young, digital-hungry consumers.

Vice announced its arrival with a party Wednesday at the glitzy Armani Hotel in the world’s tallest tower, the Burj Khalifa, in Dubai, the global trade hub where the New York-based company will set up its regional headquarters.

Vice reckons the region’s youthful population coupled with some of the highest smartphone penetration rates in the world in countries such as Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates make it an ideal market to expand into.

“We think that this is the time that we come in and steal a lot of market share,” Vice Chief Executive Shane Smith told Reuters in an interview Wednesday.

Vice, which is aiming for 50 staff members in Dubai by the end of the year, will launch a website and digital channel this summer and is discussing a 24-hour regional cable channel to be broadcast from the emirate. The company will produce news and lifestyle content in multiple languages including Arabic, English, Farsi, Turkish and Urdu.

Vice has documented migrant worker abuses in Dubai, won acclaim for a documentary while embedded with Islamic State and garnered widespread attention when it took former National Basketball Association star Dennis Rodman to North Korea.

‘Right side of history’

“We’re always going to be looking at social justice, we’re always going to be looking at environmental justice, we’re always going to be looking at being on the right side of history, especially with millennials and our audience,” Smith said.

Vice is likely to run into the same obstacles it has faced elsewhere in the Middle East and North Africa, “where journalists are most subjected to constraints of every kind,” according to global media watchdog Reporters Without Borders.

Worth $4.2 billion at its last valuation, Vice has transformed in 23 years from a punk magazine in Montreal, Quebec, into a global multimedia brand.

Its regional partner is Afghan media company Moby Group, whose Dubai offices are a few kilometres from the Trump International Golf Club, which was featured in a 2016 Vice episode on U.S. cable channel HBO about migrant worker exploitation.

Vice and Moby share a common shareholder in 21st Century Fox, and the Afghan company holds a license from the U.S. Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control, allowing it to expand into Iran — a market Vice wants to tap.
…

Singer-songwriter Bob Dylan will receive his Nobel Literature Prize diploma and medal in the next few days in Stockholm, where is he due to perform this weekend, the secretary of the Swedish Academy said on Wednesday.

The Academy’s decision to give the bard of “Blowin’ in the Wind” the literature prize caused controversy, only deepened by Dylan’s silence about the award for weeks afterwards and his no-show at the annual banquet in December.

“The good news is that the Swedish Academy and Bob Dylan have decided to meet this weekend,” Sara Danius said in a blog post. “The Academy will then hand over Dylan’s Nobel diploma and the Nobel medal, and congratulate him on the Nobel Prize in Literature.”

The 75-year-old Dylan is due to give concerts in Stockholm on April 1 and the following day and then another in the southern Swedish city of Lund on April 9.

Danius said that the notoriously media-shy Dylan would not hold the traditional Nobel lecture at this point.

“The Swedish Academy is very much looking forward to the weekend and will show up at one of the performances. Please note that no Nobel Lecture will be held,” Danius wrote.

“The Academy has reason to believe that a taped version will be sent at a later point,” she added.

In order to receive 8 million Swedish crown ($903,000) prize, Dylan needs to give a lecture within six months from December 10. It does not necessarily need not be delivered in Stockholm.

The decision to award the prize to Dylan, whom the Academy said had “created new poetic expressions within the great American song tradition,” was seen by some as slap in the face to mainstream writers of poetry and prose.

But the Academy has a tradition of stepping outside the traditional boundaries of literary form, awarding the 1953 prize to British Prime Minister Winston Churchill in part for his “brilliant oratory in defending exalted human values.”
…

Twitter Inc, trying to boost its sagging advertising revenue, will allow brands to buy commercials on its video streams for Periscope, signaling a major push to make money off the live-streaming platform, the company announced on Tuesday morning.

With sponsors growing more wary of exactly what kind of online videos their ads are being placed against, Twitter is allowing a select group of advertisers to purchase pre-roll videos, meaning those that run prior to the publishers’ content, on Periscope streams.

Twitter acquired Periscope in 2015.

Google’s YouTube, long the dominant force for online video ad dollars, has seen an exodus from brands upset to find their ads running alongside anti-Semitic and other videos that shocked customers. Companies that left included Verizon Communications Inc, AT&T Inc and Johnson & Johnson.

YouTube’s selling process automatically places ads next to videos that meet the criteria for the audience advertisers want to reach, but the Alphabet unit has had difficulty policing the vast array of videos that are uploaded.

Twitter is only offering up a select group of publishers for brands to buy ads against, which will let advertisers know exactly where their ads are showing up. “This is the solution to that problem,” Matthew Derella, Twitter’s vice president of global revenue and operations, told Reuters. “We believe the advertiser should have control.”

The video ads will only be seen when viewed within Twitter’s platform. Twitter allowed for Periscope streams to be integrated within Twitter last year. The advertisers will be able to purchase ads on Periscope videos through Twitter’s Amplify program.

Until now, Twitter has monetized Periscope by relying on brands to purchase Promoted Tweets, which are placed in user feeds, even for those who do not follow the company on Twitter. The goal is to draw more attention whenever the company is live-streaming something on Periscope.

Twitter is looking to turn around its sagging fortunes. Its stock has slumped 8 percent so far this year as investors have worried about slowed user and advertising revenue growth, along with mounting competition from Facebook Inc’s Instagram, and Snap Inc’s Snapchat.

In the fourth quarter of 2016, Twitter posted the slowest revenue growth since it went public four years earlier, and revenue from advertising fell from a year earlier. The company warned that advertising revenue growth would continue to lag user growth during 2017. The company is also considering a paid subscription offering.

 
…

Leonardo da Vinci is, simply put, one of the greatest artists of all time. The world still marvels at his genius and some of his most famous works, such as the Mona Lisa. One of his uncompleted works, Adoration of the Magi, had fallen on hard times, but thanks to more than five years of restoration, the painting is back on display. VOA’S Kevin Enochs reports.
…

“Migration Blues”, a new album from veteran bluesman Eric Bibb, uses the sounds of the American South to tell the tale of everyone from 1920s farmers fleeing the Dust Bowl for California to refugees crossing the Mediterranean to Europe in the 2010s.

Along the way are Mexicans seeking a future in the United States, families moving from land the government has just seized for corporate expansion, and a Cajun jig reminding listeners of the expulsion of French Canadians south down the Mississippi.

“We are all linked by one migration or another. We are all connected to migrants,” Bibb told Reuters ahead of the album’s release on March 31.

“The hysterical reaction against migrants is really hard to understand. Have we really forgotten our history?”

The album’s most contemporary subject is to be found in “Prayin’ For Shore”, a blues about the plight of millions of Syrians and others who have fled civil wars in the Middle East on sometimes fatal journeys to Europe across the Mediterranean.

“In an old leaky boat, somewhere on the sea/trying to get away from the war/Welcome or not, got to land soon/Oh lord, prayin’ for shore,” run the lyrics.

The song, Bibb writes in an accompanying booklet, is about remembering the drowned.

But the fleeing migrants of today are nothing new.

For Bibb, an African American, another key moment in history was “The Great Migration” of millions of southern blacks away from America’s segregated South.

By some estimates, more than 6 million left the rural areas for industrial places like Detroit, New York and Chicago between 1910 and 1970.

“(They were) not just looking for jobs but fleeing racial terror,” Bibb said.

Such a point is made in his mellifluous rendition of “Delta Getaway” about a man fleeing a lynch mob to Chicago.

“Saw a man hanging from a cypress tree/I seen the ones who done it/now they coming after me”.

The album is being released as anti-immigrant politics is on the rise across much of the world, including the United States where U.S. President Donald Trump wants to build a wall on the Mexican border to keep out immigrants.

Bibb said it was all laid down and finished before Trump’s election, but that he was nonetheless “astounded by the synchronicity of it”.

Most of the songs on the album are Bibb’s, although he offers covers of Woody Guthrie’s “This Land Is Your Land”, originally an angry riposte from the dispossessed, and Bob Dylan’s “Masters of War”, about the merchants of destruction.

Bibb said that apart from “Prayin’ For Shore”, his favorite composition on “Migration Blues” is “Brotherly Love”.

He said it reflected his personal belief.

It offers more hope for the future, one in which people can live in peace.

 
…

Political satire dates back to the ancient Greeks, 2,400 years ago when Aristophanes made fun of the Peloponnesian War. It’s a staple of late-night American television talk shows and the editorial pages of most newspapers. Successful political cartoonists are able to draw biting commentary with the stroke of a crayon. VOA’s Anush Avetisyan profiles an award-winning cartoonist.
…