Monthly Archives: May 2025
What does the Library of Congress do
1856 – U.S. Senator Charles Sumner spoke out against slavery.
- Pro-slavery congressman Preston Brooks attacked antislavery Senator Charles Sumner on floor of Senate
- Violence of attack hinted at Civil War to come
22 May 1856 may have been the worst day in the history of the United States Senate. Late that afternoon, after both houses had recessed for the day, a young South Carolina congressman named Preston Brooks strode forcefully into the Senate chamber looking for Massachusetts Senator Charles Sumner. The Senate floor was nearly deserted, but Brooks saw Sumner sitting alone at his desk, preparing a stack of pamphlets for mailing.
Without warning, Brooks rushed forward and began beating the unsuspecting Sumner savagely with a gold-tipped wooden cane. Even after knocking the older man to the ground, Brooks continued raining down blows upon Sumner’s bleeding head and defenseless body, only stopping when his cane shattered into pieces. Finally, after perhaps the most shocking few minutes in the history of Congress, Brooks turned and walked calmly out of the chamber, leaving Sumner bloodied and unconscious.
Charles Sumner nearly died of the wounds he suffered that day. And though he eventually regained consciousness and returned—following three years spent recovering from his injuries—to the Senate, he suffered for the rest of his life from intense headaches and what we would now call post-traumatic stress disorder.
Preston Brooks resigned from the House but was almost immediately returned to office by his South Carolina constituents, who viewed his actions as those of a hero.
What in the world could cause such an eruption of naked violence right there on the floor of “the world’s greatest deliberative body?”
The answer is slavery. Or, to be more precise, an increasingly destructive debate over the future of slavery—a debate which would soon lead to the Civil War.
Charles Sumner was one of the most outspoken opponents of slavery in all of Congress. Three days before his beating, he delivered a speech on the Senate floor, bitterly attacking other senators who favored allowing slavery to spread into Kansas and other new territories in the West. In the speech, Sumner likened slavery to a “harlot” and described a pro-slavery senator as a “noise-some, squat, and nameless animal.” These were harsh words, obviously, but Sumner felt that he spoke on the side of righteousness against a grave moral evil, and he had no patience for slavery’s defenders in the Senate.
Source: for the complete article … shmoop.com
image from: internet
Share this:
1652 – In Rhode Island, a law was passed that made slavery illegal in North America. It was the first law of its kind.
Mount St. Helens: The eruption killed 57 people and caused millions of dollars in damages. In Memory
Years after the mountain’s eruption, officials struggle to balance research and risk.
by Eric Wagner
The Pumice Plain in southwest Washington’s Mount St. Helens National Volcanic Monument is one of the most closely studied patches of land in the world. Named for the type of volcanic rock that dominates it, it formed during the mountain’s 1980 eruption. Since then, ecologists have scrutinized it, surveying birds, mammals and plants, and in general cataloging the return of life to this unique and fragile landscape.
Now, the depth of that attention is threatened, but not due to the stirrings of the most active volcano in the Pacific Northwest. The problem is a large lake two miles north of the mountain: Spirit Lake. Or, more specifically, the Spirit Lake tunnel, an artificial outlet built out of necessity and completed in 1985.
After nearly four decades, the tunnel is in need of an upgrade. At issue is the road the Forest Service plans to build across the Pumice Plain despite the scientific plots dotting the plain’s expanse. In this, Spirit Lake and its tunnel have become the de facto headwaters of a struggle over how best to manage research and risk on a mountain famous for its destructive capabilities.
THE ENTANGLEMENT OF THE LAND, the lake and the tunnel began 40 years ago, when Mount St. Helens erupted on May 18, 1980. At 8:32 a.m., a strong earthquake caused the mountain’s summit and north flank to collapse in one of the largest landslides in recorded history. Some of the debris slammed into Spirit Lake, but most of it rumbled 14 miles down the North Fork Toutle River Valley. Huge mudflows rushed down the Toutle and Cowlitz rivers, destroying hundreds of bridges, homes and buildings.
The eruption killed 57 people and caused millions of dollars in damages. Mount St. Helens shed more than 1,300 feet of elevation, hundreds of square miles of forest were buried or flattened, and Spirit Lake was left a steaming black broth full of logs, dead animals, pumice and ash. Its surface area nearly doubled to about 2,200 acres, and its sole outlet, to the North Fork Toutle River, was buried under up to 600 feet of debris.
Having no outlet, and with rain and snowmelt still flowing in, Spirit Lake began to rise. The situation was dangerous: If the basin filled, the lake could overtop the debris field and radically destabilize it, unleashing another devastating mudflow that would send millions of tons of sediment toward the towns of Toutle, Castle Rock and Longview, Washington
For the complete article …
hcn.org/issues/52.5/north-scientific-research-the-threat-below-mount-st-helen
images: fs.fed.us/outernet/pnw/mtsthelens
Be a Seed for Change 
You must be logged in to post a comment.