Give Us Each Day Our Daily Pan: General Grant Statue Slide Show

A Quote From The Original Give Us Each Day...

It's url is here:
In March of 2006 I started reacquainting myself with QuickTime VR movies. I remembered how relatively easy they were to make and how their file size was relatively small. Susan Abdulezer, distinguished Apple Educator, media developer for District 75 (NYCDOE) and QuickTime guru, taught the CSD1 tech staff the basics of the program about 6-7 years ago. At that time we used QuickTime VR 2.0. This time in OSX I experimented with VR Worx. Panoramic movies are used extensively in real estate and tourist sites. I often felt it's potential has gone untapped for social studies education. By linking one panorama to another, using hot spots, you can explore a given scene's both indoor and outdoor environments. You can also connect two or more outdoor environments with a kind of leap frog effect to help explore larger geographic areas. I've found in my years as a NYC public school teacher that many kids' knowledge of the city only extends to the 10 square block area of their neighborhoods. Perhaps the creation of libraries of city-wide quicktime vr movies can provide some help in broadening their horizons. Certainly the kids can be taught the basics of the program as well and they could be turned loose to create their own portfolios. All you need is a digital camera and a tripod. Freeware and shareware VR programs are readily available. There is also a vast potential for literacy education as such movies can inspire students to write about the neighborhood scenes that they create and explore. Liz Sevcenko, from the Lower East Side Tenement Museum, many years ago had introduced the term "Mapping Memories" to a group of CSD1 teachers with pencil and paper and Tom Beller from his excellent site "Mr. Beller's Neighborhood" has employed such a technique digitally with a NYC base map. I felt that these movies that I was creating needed a home of their own, rather than being thrown into the chaotic mix of my blog, pseudo-intellectualism. Synchronicitiously came along another great Google For Educators innovation called Google Pages, which allowed me to do this as well as link to such helpful tools and widgets such as Google Maps and YouTube. It also allowed me to place an mp3 player below the image above for a musical dedication to my parents Sol and Eva Bellel and to my Uncle Hyman Genee

Wednesday, June 25, 2008

General Grant Statue Slide Show

from nycparks. I used the Lincoln Funeral March as a soundtrack. Many of the images come from the bridgeandtunnel club

ULYSSES S. GRANT, Grant Square Gore
This large bronze equestrian statue by William Ordway Partridge (1861-1930) depicts Civil War General and 18th United States President Ulysses Simpson Grant (1822-1885). Though Grant’s reputation was tarnished after serving as President amidst one of the most corrupt administrations in the nation’s history, he is revered for his decisive action in bringing about the end of the Civil War.
Born on April 27, 1822 in Point Pleasant, Ohio, Grant distinguished himself as a frontier soldier and commanding officer in Missouri after the Civil War erupted in 1861. Selected by President Abraham Lincoln (1809-1865) in 1864 to succeed a series of failed Union generals, Grant deftly orchestrated the removal of Confederate General Robert E. Lee’s (1807–1870) forces from Union soil and forced their surrender at Appomattox Court House, Virginia on April 9, 1865. After serving two terms as U.S. President (1868-76), Grant retired to New York City in 1884 and lived at 3 East 66th Street until his death in 1885.
The sculpture of Grant was commissioned by the Union Club of Brooklyn and unveiled on April 27, 1896, the 74th anniversary of his birth. Partridge depicts a determined Grant in his military outfit, including his signature wide-brimmed hat. The work is one of the first large-scale bronzes cast in the United States. Well known in his day, Partridge also sculpted statues of New York Governor Samuel Tilden on Riverside Drive, American Revolutionary Alexander Hamilton in Washington Heights, and a Pieta in the south ambulatory of Manhattan’s St. Patrick’s Cathedral. The monument was conserved by the City in 1991. Grant is also depicted in relief on the eastern pier of Brooklyn’s Soldiers’ and Sailors’ Memorial Arch, and is interred in Grant’s Tomb, located in Riverside Park at 122nd Street and Riverside Drive.