June 04, 2019 Tuesday
Bedtime Story
The Amistad Committee
Lewis Tappan engaged the best available
lawyers that he could manage and mounted the strongest possible legal defense
that was legally sustainable for the African slaves of La Amistad.
As the trial started he personally attended
the court each day in New Haven, Connecticut following which in the evenings he
would punctually make detailed notes of the court proceedings.
These notes then he would submit to a New
England based abolitionist newspaper ‘The Emancipator’ for which he had by then
become a regular contributor.
The other major challenge for Tappan and
his team of “Amistad Committee” was the language of communication with the
captives as they were illiterate in the English language and he and the other
Americans in the Mende language and even Spanish.
In order to fight the case on the behalf of
the captives he and his advocates would have to be able to hear their version
of the story so that it could be produced before the court.
So how do you think he went about solving
this problem?
This problem and its solution is a very
interesting story in itself.
Among the abolitionists and the “Amistad
Committee” was a professor of sacred literature of Yale University by the name
of Josiah Willard Gibbs Senior who came from a rather scholarly New England
family.
Gibbs Senior would have been a largely
forgotten man and his name tossed into the dustbin of human history but for his
role in the Amistad case.
Well, perhaps that is not entirely true and
there might have been or rather there is through arguably yet another reason
for the world to have remembered him.
Josiah Willard Gibbs Senior had fathered
four daughters and one son from a single marriage.
He gave his son the very name as was his
and this though may come as a surprise to a lot of us is not an unusual
practice in the English speaking world.
When this happens in the United States,
i.e. when a father names his son exactly after him (or namesakes after him), it
is then customary to add “Jr.” or ”II” to the son’s name or the name suffix
“Sr.” to the father’s name.
In this case the son got his father’s name
Josiah Willard Gibbs and the father added the suffix “Sr.” to his own name to
differentiate himself from his son.
Josiah Willard Gibbs followed his family’s
rich scholarly tradition beating everybody in his family in this game and going
on to become the first American doctorate in engineering that was awarded to
him in 1863 by Yale.
You must remember that this was the most
tumultuous period of American history as the nation was going through its
murderous and divisive Civil War (1861-65) and the only reason that Gibbs
escaped from being conscripted was his frail health and poor eyesight (he
suffered from astigmatism, a type of refractive error that was poorly
understood by the oculists of his times).
Stay tuned to the voice of an
average story storytelling chimpanzee or login at http://panarrans.blogspot.com
Good night Mon Ami and my fellow cousin ape.
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Another great educator and a teacher that I am aware of is
Professor Subhashish Chattopadhyay in Bangalore, India.
While I narrate stories, Professor Subhashish an electronic
engineer and a former professor at BARC, does and teaches real mathematics and
physics.
He started the participation of Indian students at the
International Physics Olympiad.
Do visit him here:
All his books can be downloaded for free through this link:
For edutainment and English education of your children, I
recommend this large collection of Halloween Songs for Kids:
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