Sunday Morning Scene: Churches of the West: Holy Protection Byzantine Catholic Church, Denver, Colorado.

Churches of the West: Holy Protection Byzantine Catholic Church, Denver ...: 

Holy Protection Byzantine Catholic Church, Denver Colorado

This is Holy Protection Byzantine Catholic Church in Denver Colorado.

Many people, when they hear the word "Catholic", immediately have what, in the English speaking world, are frequently referred to as "Roman Catholics" in mind.  In fact, however, "Roman" Catholics are Latin Rite Catholics whose churches use the Roman Rite.  Roman Catholics make up the overwhelming majority of Catholics, and indeed the majority of Catholics, on earth.

They aren't the only Catholics however.   The Roman Rite itself is just one of several Latin, or Western, Rites.  There are also several Eastern Rites, of which the Byzantine Rite is one.

The Byzantine Catholic Church, which is also called the Ruthenian Byzantine Catholic Church, uses the same liturgical rite as the Greek Orthodox Church and shares the same calendar.  It dates back to the conversion of the Rusyn people in the Carpathians to Christianity in the 9th Century.  That work, done by St. Cyril and St. Methodius brought to the Rusyn people the form of worship in the Eastern Rite.  They Rusyn church initially followed the Orthodox Churches following  the schism of 1054, but in 1645 the Ruthenian Church started to return to communion with Rome, resulting in the Rutenian Byzantine Catholic Church, which is normally called the Byzantine Catholic Church in the United States.

Immigration from Eastern Europe brought the Church into the United States. Originally a strongly ethnic church, in recent decades it has become multi ethnic and its strongly traditional character has caused it to obtain new members from both very conservative Latin Rite Catholics as well as very conservative former Protestants.  Indeed, while this church is very small, it has been growing and now has a Byzantine Catholic outreach to Ft. Collins, Colorado, where it holds services in Roman Catholic Churches.

The Royals. M'eh

According to the Canadian news paper the National Post about 60% of Canadians hope that Prince Harry will become the next Governor General of Canada.

The Governor General is the representative of the Queen, and we've discussed the Queen in Canada once before.  Indeed, that topic was once one of the most favorite ones here:

Queen Elizabeth II in Canada

This is a young Queen Elizabeth II in Canada, but what else does it depict?  I frankly don't know.  Its a photo from my mother's collection, and unfortunately, I no longer know the story behind it.

Does anyone stopping in here know?

Anyhow, the National Post had this headline the other day:

'Celebrities': Will Prince Harry take over the post of governor general? Canadians are hopeful, poll says

Here's hoping there isn't a next Governor General at all and that the Windsors simply fold up shop and become private citizens.

Something I don't mention here very often is that I'm a dual citizen of Canada and the United States.  Now, I'm a resident of the US and have been my entire life, but I hold dual citizenship because my late mother was from Quebec and only became a US citizen late in life.  Indeed, my father had already passed at the time.

I guess that gives me somewhat of a right to comment on this as a subject of Queen Elizabeth II, but only somewhat.  While I may hold Canadian citizenship I'm not going to pretend that I'm Canadian in the same way that somebody who really lives in Canada does.  It's a legal oddity, I guess, in my case but I will confess that I do feel a closeness to Canada in a way that most Americans are not likely to.  I have a large collection of Canadian relatives and my mother was always very Canadian.

Indeed, in a sort of way, Canadians like me, who hold citizenship because of an ancestral connection, are remnants and reminders of what Canada is and was perhaps more than current residents are, which is probably both instructive and irritating to current residents of the country.  I don't appreciate it when people whose grandparents once lived in my home state feel free to spout off in the local letters to the editor section about the way the state ought to be and I doubt born and raised Canadians appreciate being treated in the same manner. 

None of which keeps me from occasionally commenting on Canadian affairs. .  . or Commonwealth ones.

Which is what this is.

Canada is of course a fully independent nation but it's also part of the English Commonwealth and the Queen is the sovereign of the country.  The Queen of England, that is.

This is somewhat of a confusing topic for people who aren't in the Commonwealth but, to reduce it to the point where it's probably deceptive, the British Empire recognized at some point after the American Revolution that not eventually establishing political independence for colonies was a bad idea and made the residents of them very crabby.  It therefore established a dominion status for them at some point which meant that what had been colonies, like Canada, were converted into self governing dominions.  In that system, those dominions governed their internal affairs completely while their external affairs were largely governed by the United Kingdom, the mother country.  The jurisprudential concept was that there were lots of English dominions but only one Empire.

In the late 19th Century this view became highly developed and there was a lot of talk of Empire in sort of a glorified fashion, in which it was imagined that one big happy British Empire would exist with lots of happy smaller British states.  An English Commonwealth of Nations.  Naturally the mother Parliament would continue to govern foreign affairs, as it was the Parliament of the empire.

Well, this started to really fall apart after World War One.  The UK had declared war for the entire Empire in 1914 so countries like Canada and Australia, both dominions, went to war because of that. They didn't do it themselves.  They raised their own armies, to be sure, along with other dominions like New Zealand and South Africa, but after the war the obvious problem of a nation asking its sons to die in a titanic conflict that they had no say about getting into caused the British Parliament to loose that extra national status.  The Commonwealth was still real, but it became more of a cultural union with strong international economic, immigration and emigration benefits for the members.

The Commonwealth took an additional blow when Ireland basically disregarded its dominion status in the Second World War and refused to enter into the conflict.  India showed little interest i dominion status after the war.  Lots of nations joined the Commonwealth after World War Two as they became independent, but the economic advantage evaporated when the UK entered the European Community.  Ironically, it's just left.

Maybe that'll give a boost to the Commonwealth again, which had real economic features to it.

At any rate, because of this history Canada retains the position of Governor General.  That's because the Queen remains the sovereign.

What's that mean?

Well, Queen Elizabeth II has the constitutional right as the sovereign to act much in the same way, indeed beyond the same way, that the President of the United States can. She calls the Canadian Parliament into session and she approves or disallows the legislation it passes.  Therefore, she can veto any Canadian bill.

The Governor General holds the powers of the sovereign in her stead.  Queen Elizabeth, as with all the royals, has no real desire, I'm sure to open the parliaments of all fifteen Commonwealth countries nor to preside in some fashion over the legislative process of all of them.  Indeed, in modern times the Crown has been careful not to really become involved in politics anywhere, including in the United Kingdom, quite wisely.

Indeed, no modern Governor General has ever denied ascent to a bill of the Canadian parliament.  A provincial one (yes, there are provincial ones) last operated to do so in 1961 in Saskatchewan.  It'd be phenomenal if any of them did so now, although the thought of it occurring in the form of an act by Prince Harry is amusing.

It's amusing as royalty itself is sort of amusing.

The current Governor General is Julie Payett, who was appointed to that role by Prime Minister Justin Trudeau.  They serve at the Queen's pleasure, but in practice it tends to be a five year appointment.  So the PM could choose to appoint Prince Harry to the role after Payett runs her course in 2022.  The Queen, for her part, could turn Harry down, but that would be odd and he's in need of a job.

Does any of this make any sense in the modern world?

Well, it makes a little, but none of that does anything to remove the fact that royalty is really odd and the English monarchy is quite odd, as an institution.

People really like to imagine that the English Royal Family and all its impressive majesty and ceremony date back to ancient times.

That's because they haven't studied it.

In reality, the early English monarchs were from different royal lines, although supposedly the current Queen is a distance ancestor of one of the very first monarchs, but that's only because huge numbers of the English now are.  Early on, simply being king didn't mean you'd occupy the position until death, and death tended to come pretty early for them. Some made it into what we'd now regard as old or at least late middle age, but of the early ones, more than a few died in their 30s. 

And more than a few had to constantly fight other claimants, as it was recognized that the heads of strong families had just about as much right to the thrown as any one occupant.  About the time of Ethelred the Unready (which meant "ill advised") the practice started of trying to incorporate sacred oaths into the process of choosing an heir to the thrown so that powerful men, subject to those oaths, wouldn't take a run at the crown, but that was only partially successful. 

This whole process went on seemingly forever and even the seizure of the thrown by the Normans in 1066 didn't stop it.

King Henry VIII, the Vandal.

During the Reformation the entire process took on an odder twist when King Henry VIII, not intending to make England a Protestant country, separated from Rome to establish what he naively thought was something like the Catholic Church of England.  Henry, who was constantly distracted by the topic of what babe ought to be in his bed chambers, listened too much to some of his Protestant advisers and the country went into prolonged religious strife during and after his death.  While the Church of England was established and slid around between being quite Protestant and not so much Protestant, while being challenged by the more Protestant and while suppressing the actual Catholics, the Crown itself was worn a couple of times by Catholic monarchs, who had the embarrassing role of also being head of head of the Church of England.  Ultimately the Parliament imported the really Protestant William of Orange from Holland, who had nothing else to do, and made him king.  For this reason the current family occupying the thrown had a really, really German last name (and a pretty good German bloodline) up until World War One, when they changed their last name to Windsor.

By the Great War the powers of the Crown had been reduced to a largely ceremonial role.  Indeed while Americans still like to claim they rebelled against King George in 1774, they really rebelled against the Parliament as by that time the King's role was vague and it was really Parliament that held real power.  Indeed, Parliament held real power by the time of the English Civil War in 1642-1651, as that was the original point of the war, before it began to feature a strong religious element to it.  The Crown reclaimed some  powers during the Restoration in 1660, but by that time it was pretty clear who was really running the country.

King Charles II of England.  He got the crown back his father had lost, but he made the Parliament nervous by his heavy partying, crypto Catholic ways (ironic in light of the former) and deathbed formal conversion to Catholicism.

After World War One the Crown went into a real crisis when King Edward VIII, who was an oddball who also complained about the heavy burdens of being a prince before he was King, abdicated when he became king in order to marry Wallace Simpson. We've dealt with that elsewhere, so we're not going to here.

Okay, with all that, what's going on now?

Well, I don't really know but of all the royal families in Europe the English royal family really gets the attention. There are other royal families. Sweden, Denmark, Norway, and the Netherlands all have them.

But no nation needs one now and frankly the history of royal families is embarrassing.

If you follow reddit you can find the surprising communities of people who are enamored with monarchy.  Indeed, there's more than one blog dedicated to following old royal families and imagining a return to an extremely conservative social order if only they had more of a role in the world.  

But that's baloney.  In truth, monarchs tended to be just as likely to be weird and icky as they did noble and saintly.  In modern royal families its easy to find the history of affairs and scandal.  And some born into it, like Harry, don't like being captive royals.

And why would we imagine otherwise?  This collection of people is born into vast wealth with no real obligations.  Idle if they wish to be, the roles they fill are only filled by the pressure of their own families or by increasingly limited constitutional roles. And some of those roles should have caused eye rolling from the onset, such as the retained English one of being head of the church in England.

So now, Prince Harry, who seemingly has never done well with being a royal, basically wants out.  But in wanting out, because he's a royal, he gets privileges that other people do not.  He may be entitled to a share of the family's vast private wealth.  He and his wife get to move to Canada simply because he's a royal.

Well, let him out, but do away with the whole absurd charade.  Having a royal family hasn't made sense for well over a century, maybe two centuries.  The English aren't defined by their royal family anymore and Canada having one, given its current culture, is flat out odd.  

There's no reason not to make Queen Elizabeth II the last royal.  The Parliament should declare it and start working on sorting out what is really theirs as opposed to Britain's. They'll still be rich.  When she dies, she should be the last one.  Everyone else can go get a job, or not.

And the American Press can focus on something else.  We haven't had a royal since the Declaration of Independence. Why the close attention to them here?

Gluten and the American diet. A blog mirror rambling journey.

Wheat field, Walla Walla Washington, 1941.

This interesting item appeared on the always interesting A Hundred Years Ago blog just recently:

1919 Farwell & Rhines Gluten Flour Advertisement

As folks here know, I'll riff off of the excellent blog A Hundred Years Ago from time to time. When I do, I usually have already posted on the thread there and I usually post a link to my item here, if I build one based on one of the many interesting topics there.

In this case, I didn't comment and I'm not going to post a link back, as I want to avoid unintentionally offending, which would be easy to do with this post.

That's because I'm a "Gluten Skeptic", if you will, and somebody there has already noted in a comment to this post that they've had to give up foods with gluten.  I'm frankly of the opinion that most people who give up foods with gluten don't need to, just as I'm of the opinion that about 90% of our modern "must give up" food fads is not only a fad, it's part of the remaining Puritan DNA in our American culture.*  If we're not suffering we're just not living right.

Before we look at this, what the heck is gluten anyway?  Well, here's a snipped from an article in Scientific American:

Gluten is a protein found in many grains, including wheat, rye and barley. It's found in most breads, cereals, pastas and many processed foods, according to WebMD. People who have a condition called celiac disease develop an immune reaction to gluten that damages the intestine, and so they need to avoid the protein. About 1 percent of the population has celiac disease.

Wait a minute. . . not only do we now know what gluten is, but did that say 1% of the population has celiac disease?

Yes it did.

1%.

Now, in a country that is as populated as the United States is, 1% is not a small number.  It'd mean something like 3,600,000 people.  That's a lot.

But if you go through the store and read the articles and talk to people who really follow the latest trends in things, you'd be left with the impression that something like 30% of the population is wheat intolerant now, and that's just flat out bull.

The headline of that article was, by the way, the following:

Most People Shouldn't Eat Gluten-Free

Gluten-free products made with refined grains can be low in fiber, vitamins and minerals

Yup, most people ought to knock that off.

The article further noted:

For most other people, a gluten-free diet won't provide a benefit, said Katherine Tallmadge, a dietitian and the author of "Diet Simple" (LifeLine Press, 2011). What's more, people who unnecessarily shun gluten may do so at the expense of their health, Tallmadge said.

This article, I'd note, is kind.  I've seen others that just flat out state that most of the people who are dead set convinced they have some sort of intolerance to gluten are just flat out wrong.

While I'll not go into it, I'll also note that there's some speculation why we've arrived at a point where this is a concern when it wasn't previously.  If it hasn't always been the case that 1% of the population has been so afflicted, then there's something going on. And nearly anyone over 30 years of age can recall a time when there was no concern in this area whatsoever. That would suggest that this is a disease, for those who actually have it that has come on in very modern times. Why?

The same has been noted for allergies, I'll note.  The percentage of the population that suffers from allergies is higher today than at any time in t he past, and I'm in that group.  Why?

In my case, I'm certain its genetic.  I didn't lead a sheltered life indoors as a kid prior to my developing asthma, and my mother didn't douse the house with more anti biologic agents than are used in a biological weapons lab like most modern mothers seem to do (Americans are insanely germ phobic).  It's in my DNA, darn it.  And so is the case, no doubt for most of those with celiac disease. 

But if more people than the historical norm are developing this condition otherwise. . . something is going on.

Humans have eaten grains, we now know, back to the neolithic age.  For years and years archaeologists and anthropologists used to have the nonsensical idea, which a lot of them still advance, that there were hunters and gathers and then suddenly one day farmers sprang up and everyone moved to the farm.  That never made any sense and we now know that hunters and gatherers, in the regions friendly to grains, started cultivating it.  They did that for an extremely long, long time, before they settled on farms.  While that's another story, one we've already told, what that also tells us is that humans have been eating grains for a really long time, although not necessarily wheat for the whole time, but other grasses in addition to, or in place of, wheat.  Wheat has been cultivated, according to archaeologists from between 9,000 and 8,000 years ago, which means that in reality it's almost certainly been cultivated for 10,000 to 14,000 years.

It's never been grown everywhere, and that's important to note. The reason for this is that it's also fairly clear, but widely ignored, that individual human populations are evolved to eat certain foods more than others, or even where others are not. This is the entire basis of certain people being lactose intolerant. Cultures that have drank cow's milk for a long time are not lactose intolerant, as evolution operated against that condition.  Where cow's milk was not drunk, it wouldn't matter, and when the ancestors of people from those cultures encounter milk it can be unpleasant.

Mediterranean cultures have been growing wheat forever and it spread all over the grain growing regions of Europe in antiquity.  It was grown way out in the steppes, all over North Africa, as far north as Greenland, and into regions of Africa that are deserts and grow nothing today.  But that isn't everywhere.  That alone may explain the rise in gluten, which is in wheat of course, but also in rye and barely.  It isn't in rice, which is the other major grain spread all over the world.

But it isn't in simply everything either, and if its a much bigger problem now than it once was, there's a reason for that. The reason may not be there and it might not be a much bigger problem than it once was.  Or, if it is there, there's an explanation, but what is it?

One of the hypothesis that was advanced is that modern wheat flours had more gluten in them.  Indeed, the item noted above had been blended to triple the amount of gluten in the what in issue.  At least one study, however, has been skeptical of that explanation.

In response to the suggestion that an increase in the incidence of celiac disease might be attributable to an increase in the gluten content of wheat resulting from wheat breeding, a survey of data from the 20th and 21st centuries for the United States was carried out. The results do not support the likelihood that wheat breeding has increased the protein content (proportional to gluten content) of wheat in the United States. Possible roles for changes in the per capita consumption of wheat flour and the use of vital gluten as a food additive are discussed.

None of which gets back to the item originally linked in. . . or does it? 

A century ago, we find an advertisement, amazingly, for something with added gluten.  Why was that?

One thing is that it changed the consistency of bread, improving it.  It also boosted protein, but I don't know that this was the reason.  Indeed, I don't know what the real reason for really adding gluten was.

Quite a change from what we see today, of course, at the grocery store, where there are things you darned well know never had gluten in them, advertised as "gluten free".

________________________________________________________________________________

*The Puritan comment alone is likely to offend some and be cheered by others for the wrong reasons, but its meant sincerely.  One of the real offshoots of the Reformation was that certain strands of Protestant theology that rapidly developed contained a very strong sense of suffering and double predestination which provided no relief from it.  The Puritans, if recalled today positively for their "work ethic" and various virtues, were notable in this regard, although contrary to what people imagine, they weren't opposed to alcohol and they were very much not opposed to marital sex (something nearly completely forgotten about them).

This post doesn't deal with their theology in any meaningful sense, and it's not going to.  There are still those who fairly closely adhere to some variants of it, and this isn't intended to debate them. Rather, what it notes is that their early views and developed ones had a very strong influence on current cultural views, and likewise strains of thought developed during the Reformation continue to have an influence on European secular thought as well, even though those holding them would hardly recognize that and in fact would likely deny it.  A certain irony exists here, however, as the cliches of "Catholic guilt" and "Jewish guilt" are in fact largely wholesale myths, whereas the inherited need for suffering that springs to some degree from the Reformation isn't even really recognized.

The Puritans, whom we used to cite, and did cite up until very recently, as the foundational cultural pioneers of America, were opposed to all other religions and religious tolerance itself, and they were also extremely strictly opposed to a lot of activities that average people enjoyed, including sports, for example.  Activities on Sundays were extremely strictly limited where they held sway.  All this caused them to really be hated by people who had to deal with them who were not Puritans, including outright banning their presence in some areas of Colonial North America, but none the less,  as time developed in the United States, offshoots of their lines of thought continued to be influential and highly opposed to certain things.  Added to this, a very literal reading of certain portions of the New Testament, and the omission of study of others, lead to a sense that everything was foreordained and that most people were going to Hell, which made suffering on Earth the basic norm.  This line of thought, we should note, was by no means limited to the Puritans and it spread to some other Protestant regions during the Reformation, although it did not characterize all of them by any means and it has very much waned even among those Protestant faiths that descend from denominations that were sympathetic to that view.  Of interest to an upcoming post, it spread to Scandinavia late but took hold very strongly there, which has an impact on certain things today.

Be all that as it may, and without intending to offend anyone, in the modern United States the Puritan heritage in particular, and certain reformation strains elsewhere in Europe in general, while very much cast off by the population in religious terms continues to express itself in the idea that we must suffer, and suffering in diet is a good way to do that.  It also expresses itself in a certain desire to spread the suffering in a puritanical cultural way.  A person can hardly go to a restaurant, for example, in a group without somebody who has chosen to endure food deprivation of some sort making it public in the group and basically casting implied aspersions on those who don't join in the culinary grief.  We like to imagine that all of this is very much past us, but it isn't.  A person ordering a steak with a big side of wheat rolls is just as welcome at a lot of dinner tables in 2019 as a person ordering a bucket of beer would have been in 1919, or a person suggesting in a that everyone go enjoy a football game in England in 1645.

Again, this isn't intended to be a religious comment.  There remain those who hold views very close to those held by the Puritans, the Congregationalist is a direct descendant of them, and there are those who hold views that are close to theirs on most things or even stricter in regard to some.  The theological points that could be debated regarding those views aren't going to be debated here now or at any time. Rather, what's interesting about this is that the United States, culturally, is a very Protestant country, as are some European countries, even among those who don't recognize that or who are not Protestants of any kind.  It gets back to our Third Law of History.

August 10, 1919. The Motor Transport Convoy rests in Laramie. Troop A, New Jersey State Militia Reserve trains at Denville.

The Motor Transport Convoy spent their Sunday in Laramie on this day in 1919.

The weather was "fair and cool", which would be a good description of most summer days in high altitude Laramie, which has some of the nicest summer weather in Wyoming.  Wind and rain in the late afternoon is a typical feature of the summer weather there.

In New Jersey, where the weather probably wasn't fair and cool, Troop A of the New Jersey State Militia Reserve was training.

Troop A, New Jersey State Militia Reserve, at Denville, New Jersey.

State units during World War One and World War Two are a really confusing topic.  All states have the ability to raise state militia units that are separate and part from the National Guard, but not all do. Generally, however, during the Great War and even more during the Second World War, they did.

State units of this type are purely state units, not subject to Federal induction, en masse. Their history is as old as the nation, but they really took a different direction starting in the Spanish American War.

Early on, all of the proto United State's native military power was in militia units. There was no national army, so to speak, in Colonial America. The national army was the English Army, which is to say that at first, prior to the English Civil War, it was the Crown's army.  That army was withdrawn from North American during the English Civil War of the 1640s and 1650s, in which it was defeated.  During that decade long struggle British North America was defended by local militias.  When British forces returned, which they did not in any numbers until the French and Indian War, it was the victorious parliamentary army, famously clad in red coats, which came back.

Not that this was novel.  Early on all early British colonies were also defended only by militias. The Crown didn't bother to send over troops to defend colonies, which were by and large private affairs rather than public ones anyhow.  At first, individual colonies were actually town sized settlements, with associated farmland, and they had their own militias.  Indeed, as late as King Philip's War this was still the case and various towns could and did refuse to help other ones and they had no obligation to do so.

Later, when colonies were organized on a larger basis, the proto states if you will, militia units were organized on that basis, although they were still local units.  I.e., towns and regions had militias, but the Governor of the Colony could call any of them out. That gave us the basic structure of today's  National Guard, in a very early fashion, and in fact that's why the National Guard claims to be the nation's oldest military body with a founding date of December 13, 1636.

Colonial militia's fought on both sides of the American Revolution, depending in part upon the loyalty of the Colonial governor at the time they were mustered as well as the views of the independent militiamen.  They formed, however, the early backbone of the Rebel effort and indeed the war commenced when British troops and militiamen engaged in combat at Lexington and Concord on April 19, 1775.

The Revolution proved the need for a national army to contest the British Army and hence the Continental Army was formed during the war and did the heavy lifting thereafter.   Militia, however, remained vital throughout the war.  Following the British surrender, there was no thought at all given to keeping a standing national army and it was demobilized and, for a time, the nation's defenses were entirely dependent upon militias, with any national crisis simply relying upon the unquestioned, at that time, ability of the President to call them into national service if needed.

The lack of a national army soon proved to be a major problem and a small one was formed, but all throughout the 18th and the first half of the 19th Centuries the nation's primary defense was really based on militias, with all males having a militia obligation. The quality of militia units varied very widely, but by and large they rose to the occasion and did well.  Interestingly enough, immediately to our north, Canada, a British Colony, also relied principally on militias for defense and its militias notably bested ours during the War of 1812.

The system began to demonstrate some stresses during the Mexican War during which New England's states refused, in varying degrees, to contribute to the nation's war effort against Mexico.  A person can look at this in varying ways, of course.  While we've taken the position here that the Mexican War was inevitable and inaccurately remembered, the fact that the Federal government had to rely upon state troops did give states an added voice on their whether or not they approved of a war.  The New England states did not.  The Southern states very much did, which gave the Mexican War in its later stages an oddly southern character.

The swan song of the militia system in its original form came with the Civil War.  Huge numbers of state troops were used on both sides, varying from mustered militia units that served for terms, to local units mustered only in time of a local crisis, to state units raised just for the war.  But the war was so big that the Federal Army took on a new larger role it had not had before, and with the increase in Western expansion after the war, it was reluctant to give it up.  Militia's never again became the predominate combat force of the United States.  Indeed, there was long period thereafter where the militia struggled with the Army for its existence, with career Army officers being hugely crabby about it.

That saw state militias become increasingly organized as they fought to retain a military role, and  by the Spanish American War they were well on their way to being the modern National Guard.  The Dick Act thereafter formalized that.  But the Spanish American War, which was also very unpopular in New England, saw some states separate their militias into National Guard and State Guard units, with State Guard units being specifically formed only to be liable for state service.  Ironically, some of the State Guard units that were formed in that period had long histories including proud service in the nation's prior wars.  This split continued on into World War One which saw some states, such as New Jersey, muster its National Guard for Federal induction but its State Guard just for wartime state service.

That pattern became very common during the Great War during which various states formed State Guard units that were only to serve during the war for state purposes.  Naturally, the men who served in them were men who were otherwise ineligible for Federal service for one reason or another, something that has crated a sort of lingering atmosphere over those units.  When the war ended a lot of states that had formed them, dropped them, after the National Guard had been reconstituted.  

This patter repeated itself in World War Two during which, I believe, every state had a State Guard.  After the Second World War very few have retained them, and most of the states that have, have a long history of separated militia units.  Today those units tend to provide service for state emergencies, but they also often serve ceremonial functions.  An exception exists in the form of the Texas State Guard, which was highly active on the border during the Border War period, and which was retained after World War Two even after the Federal Government terminated funding for State Guard units in 1947.  They've continued to be occasionally used in Texas for security roles.

In New Jersey, we'd note, the situation during the Great War was really confusing, as there were militia units organized for the war, as well as separate ones that preexisted it.  A lot of those units would soon disappear as the National Guard came back into being, although New Jersey is one of the few states that has always had a State Guard since first forming one.

Saturday, July 10, 1909. An agreement on Chinese students.

Two years before the fateful revolution of 1911, the United States and Qing China entered into an agreement which allowed select Chinese students to enroll at American universities. 

Flag of the Qing Dynasty.

The Qing Dynasty had been in existence since 1644.  That would come to an end in 1912.  China has pretty much been in some sort of political mess since then, although it certainly had plenty of problems before that.

A wreck on Long Island, July 10, 1909.

Last edition:

Thursday, July 8, 1909. Night game.

Labels: 1900s, 1909, Agriculture, baseball, children, Maryland, Sports, United Kingdom, Women