Gilbert Keith (G.K.) Chesterton II

PermalinkToday's AMIT
Lead: G.K Chesterton was known as the Prince of Paradox and his opinions defied normal categories. Liberal, conservative, believer, and skeptic: he infuriated and charmed them all.

 Intro.: A Moment in Time with Dan Roberts.

Content: Gilbert Chesterton was a large man, 6’ 4” in his prime and weighing over 300 pounds. Yet it was the prodigious mind of this giant sprite, treating each subject with humor as well as complexity, that stretched across the disciplines of literature, politics and religion. He did so in a way that claimed the appreciative imagination of multiple generations of admirers, including those who absolutely disagreed with everything he believed, such as George Bernard Shaw, H.G. Wells and J.M. Barrie. He debated them and their advocacy of modernism in print and later on the BBC and they loved him for it. All the while he punched at his favorite targets with perhaps the richest sense of humor of his compatriots.

 

 

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Gilbert Keith (G.K.) Chesterton I

PermalinkToday's AMIT
Lead: In turn of twentieth century Britain no star in the literary firmament shone brighter than that of G.K. Chesterton. Author, critic, journalist, and Christian apologist, his influence stretched across four decades.

 Intro.: A Moment in Time with Dan Roberts.

Content: Gilbert Keith Chesterton had London middle-class roots, attended St. Paul’s School, University College, London and the Slade School of Art. As a young man, he abandoned formal education to enter the world of publishing and journalism. For years, his increasingly popular commentary on just about any subject in the universe was inhaled by an adoring readership in periodicals such as The Speaker, London Daily News, Illustrated London News, Eye Witness, and after the beginning of World War I, his own paper, G.K.’s Weekly.

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Charles Dickens in America II

PermalinkToday's AMIT,
Lead: On his first tour of America in 1842, British author Charles Dickens created a firestorm of abuse by criticizing American publishers for pirating his books.

Intro.: A Moment in Time with Dan Roberts.

Content: Americans loved Charles Dickens books, but they didn’t like to pay for them. It was Dickens’ custom to serialize his novels in London newspapers before they were issued in book form. American publishers would obtain the papers, copy the text, and release what amounted to be little more than pirated editions, much to the delight of U.S. citizens who got Dickens on the cheap. The culprit was the lack of any international copyright agreement to which the United States subscribed. When he bitterly complained on his first trip to America, the public accused him of feathering his own nest. The press was especially harsh. It stood to lose much if required to pay for reprints.

 

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Leadership: Wilma Mankiller

PermalinkToday's AMIT
Lead: Leadership often comes from the most unlikely persons. In 1985 Wilma Mankiller became the first female chief of a major Indian tribe. Her leadership style and methods were quiet but very effective.

Intro.: A Moment in Time with Dan Roberts.

Content: Mankiller was one of eleven children born in Tahlequah, Oklahoma in 1945. She was named for a Cherokee ancestor, a high-ranking warrior of ancient lineage. Wilma grew up in rural, impoverished Mankiller Flats on land given to her paternal grandfather in 1907 when Oklahoma achieved statehood. In the mid-1950s drought and the attending failure of their farm forced the family to move to San Francisco as part of the Bureau of Indian Affairs Relocation Program. This program was established to help resettle poor rural Native Americans in an urban setting.

 

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LFM Custer’s Last Stand II

PermalinkToday's AMIT,
Lead: For 400 years, service men and women have fought to carve out and defend freedom and the civilization we know as America. This series on A Moment in Time is devoted to the memory of those warriors, whose devotion gave, in the words of Lincoln at Gettysburg, the last full measure.

Intro: A Moment In Time with Dan Roberts.

Content: George Armstrong Custer, leading the Seventh United States Cavalry Regiment, was participating in a three-army campaign. They were sent by General Philip Sheridan to discipline several warlike Indian tribes who, by the spring of 1876, had drifted off their reservations into the valley of the Little Bighorn River in southern Montana. Custer's regiment was part of the army led by General Alfred Terry that had left Fort Abraham Lincoln on the Missouri River in June. The object of the three armies was to converge, find the wandering Indians, punish them and drag them chastened back to the reservation.

 

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LFM Custer’s Last Stand I

PermalinkToday's AMIT,
Lead: For 400 years service men and women have fought to carve out and defend freedom and the civilization we know as America. This series on A Moment in Time is devoted to the memory of those warriors, whose devotion gave, in the words of Lincoln at Gettysburg, the last full measure.

Intro: A Moment In Time with Dan Roberts.

Content: The deaths of George Armstrong Custer and his men were rooted in a fundamental disagreement about the way people should live. In the early 1800s a youthful United States began to formulate a policy toward its Indian population. Few stopped to consider the opinions of American Indians who had lived on the North American continent for centuries. The solution was to push these aboriginal tribes west, across the Mississippi to mix with their western cousins, leaving white civilization in peace.

 

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The Knights Templar II

PermalinkToday's AMIT,
Lead: Beginning in 1307, jealousy, envy, desire to appropriate its vast assets and the waning purpose for its existence, brought arrest, torture, trial and eventual dissolution to the Knights Templar.

Intro.: A Moment in Time with Dan Roberts.

 Content: Born of crisis in the years following the First Crusade, the Knights Templar was also known as the Temple. It was an order of warrior monks assigned to defend the Holy Land from Muslim forces. To finance its military and charitable mission, the Temple took donations of cash and real estate from all over Catholic Europe and the Mediterranean. The Templars even developed a rudimentary form of banking which permitted east-bound pilgrims to deposit funds in, say, Spain and to carry a letter of credit which they could cash when they reached the Holy Land. All this was making the Templars very very rich.

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Abigail Fillmore

PermalinkToday's AMIT
Lead: Well-read and cultured, Abigail Fillmore maintained a well-tuned political sense in an otherwise lackluster administration.

Intro: A Moment in Time with Dan Roberts.

Content: When Abigail Power’s preacher father died in 1799, her mother migrated to Cayuga County, then on the New York frontier. Mrs. Powers took responsibility for the education of the children and so well did she did do her job that by the time she was nineteen Abigail was teaching in a country school near Sempronius, New York. In the winter of 1818, she looked up from her desk into the bright, inquiring eyes of a big farm boy who had appeared in her classroom with little notice. The eighteen-year-old was ambitious to become a lawyer and Abigail responded to his enthusiasm. His name was Milliard Fillmore and after an eight-year courtship, much of the time spent apart as he was reading for the bar, they began a twenty-seven year marriage.

 

 

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