E Pluribus Unum

Well, dad asked for some updates on school and such, so here you have it.

Ever since that lecture Dr. McRae had about the Civil Rights Movement, I've started to feel like her class is a nightmare in which I am on the show Jeopardy and the category is stuck on United States history. She has always asks me if she is saying something right or has her history correct. I usually just nod in agreement because history was never my strong subject. I did well at history, but I never enjoyed studying it. I struggled to remember names and dates and facts about wars that at the time seemed so far away and unimportant to me. Of course as I get older I would like to learn more for myself just to be educated and knowledgeable, but that is a different story.
The other day in class Dr. McRae pulls out a paper she wrote while she was at Harvard, A Woman's Story: E Pluribus Unum.
We read a bit of it in class and when she came to the part about e pluribus unum she asked me to define what it meant. Well, either I forgot learning about it or maybe I never properly learned the meaning behind it because I was not sure of what to say. I responded by saying that it is written on all of our currency and a motto like we now have In God We Trust, but that was the extent of what I knew. She made a fuss about how this phrase lies at the foundation of America and called me a disgrace to society for not knowing that the founding fathers' of America put the idea of "one out of many" as our common ground across the nation..... well, no-one told me! I got a little frustrated and after class I did some research on the infamous e pluribus unum only to find that what I said was correct, just not the answer she was looking for. I even sent her an email about how the once used motto was replaced by the motto In God We Trust in 1956. That is the motto I have always known.
She wrote me back something about teaching some students the "Battle Hymn of the Republic". She really is an interesting lady. Oh, and in her story she interviewed Louisa Rogers Alger- yes, related to Horatio Alger. This woman's grandmother was in church the day that President Lincoln was informed that the civil war had started. And from the story Louisa tells her grandmother and Mrs. Robert E Lee were once friends and would do tea together, until the day the war began . "Mrs. Robert E Lee, who had been a lifelong friend of my grandmother's, my grandmother spoke to her cordially, she looked at her haughtily and cut her head..." Interesting information.
I have never heard a woman speak so much about southern rebels and the confederates being conspirators and such until I met Dr. McRae. Funny how she writes one thing about us yet confesses she loved the south when she went to visit. She even wrote on my friend Amy's paper, "When I stood at the University of Virgina, over looking the Shenandoah valley, for a brief moment I wished the confederates had won."

How's that for an education, daddy? haha