As a child growing up in Puerto Rico, Arturo Schomburg was told by his teachers that people of African descent “had no history and no heroes worth noting.”  He knew this couldn’t be true and it sparked his life long search to find, preserve, and share the history of his people.  When his collection grew so large that it nearly took over his house, he approached the New York Public Library.  The library lacked the funds to buy and house the collection but the Carnegie Corporation bought it and donated all the materials to the library where it became the heart of Harlem.  Not only is the life story and passion of Schomburg explored within the pages of Schomburg:  the Man Who Built a Library by Carol Boston Weatherford (author) and Eric Velasquez (illustrator), but the black heroes that he researched are introduced in this powerful book including inventor Benjamin Banneker, poet Phillis Wheatley, abolitionist Frederick Douglass, revolutionary Nat Turner, and many more.  He worked and excelled as a law clerk because of his keen memory. When not working, he passionately searched for and collected letters, pamphlets, books, music, and art from the African diaspora.  Arturo became an integral part of the Harlem Renaissance, helping authors and artists in their hunt for references and information.  He wrote and spoke about African’s place in world history.  Schomburg:  the Man Who Built a Library is not just a book for young people but it should be a starting point for all people to learn about people who had been written out of history.  It should be on everyone’s reading list and is a must for school and public libraries.  Claire Annette Noland  Read about "books, places, and books that take you places" at  http://afieldtriplife.com/

What’s a Drumthwacket?  You may ask how and why did New Jersey's gubernatorial mansion get such a name.  You might make a guess that it is some Native American name.  However, you would be mistaken.  Maybe you would think it was a prestigious individual’s name like “General Drumthwacket.”   But again, you would be wrong.  Drumthwacket was built in 1835 by Charles Smith Olden, a businessman who made his wealth in business ventures, and as was fashion for the times, he chose the Gaelic words which meant “wooded hill” to name his new home.  Olden was active in his community, served as state senator and eventually, in 1860, was elected governor of New Jersey.  This made him the first governor to live at Drumthwacket (his own home).  At that time it was not “officially” the Governor’s Mansion, and it didn’t become so until 1982, after 2 more prominent families owned and renovated it.  Before 1982, the New Jersey Governor’s Mansion was Morven, built by Richard Stockton, a signer of the Declaration of Independence.  His wife named Morven after a mythical Gaelic kingdom in a poem by Ossian.   https://www.nuvonium.com/blog/view/whats-a-drumthwacket

"Politicians live to be noticed, it's like photosynthesis to them, attention is their light—and that's why they're so easy to manipulate."  "This is America he's in.  They don't do self-deprecation."  Winterland, a novel by Allan Glynn

Alan Glynn is a graduate of Trinity College.  His first novel, Limitless (originally published as The Dark Fields), was released as a film in March 2011 by Relativity Media and as a TV series in 2015 by CBS.  He is also the author of Winterland; Bloodland, a finalist for the Edgar Award for Best Paperback Original; Graveland; and his most recent novel, Paradime, is currently under option with ITV Studios America and One-Two Punch Productions.  He lives in Ireland.    https://us.macmillan.com/author/alanglynn/

Greenwashing (a compound word modelled on "whitewash"), also called "green sheen",is a form of spin in which green PR or green marketing is deceptively used to promote the perception that an organization's products, aims or policies are environmentally friendly.  Evidence that an organization is greenwashing often comes from pointing out the spending differences:  when significantly more money or time has been spent advertising being "green" (that is, operating with consideration for the environment), than is actually spent on environmentally sound practices.  Greenwashing efforts can range from changing the name or label of a product to evoke the natural environment on a product that contains harmful chemicals to multimillion-dollar advertising campaigns portraying highly polluting energy companies as eco-friendly.  While greenwashing is not new, its use has increased over recent years to meet consumer demand for environmentally friendly goods and services.  The problem is compounded by lax enforcement by regulatory agencies such as the Federal Trade Commission in the United States, the Competition Bureau in Canada, and the Committee of Advertising Practice and the Broadcast Committee of Advertising Practice in the United Kingdom.  Many corporate structures use greenwashing as a way to repair public perception of their brand.  The term greenwashing was coined by New York environmentalist Jay Westervelt in a 1986 essay regarding the hotel industry's practice of placing placards in each room promoting reuse of towels ostensibly to "save the environment."  Westervelt noted that, in most cases, little or no effort toward reducing energy waste was being made by these institutions—as evidenced by the lack of cost reduction this practice effected.  Westervelt opined that the actual objective of this "green campaign" on the part of many hoteliers was, in fact, increased profit. Westervelt thus labeled this and other outwardly environmentally conscientious acts with a greater, underlying purpose of profit increase as greenwashing.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenwashing 

See also What Is Greenwashing?  at https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/greenwashing-green-energy-hoffman/.

Thomas Cole inspired the generation of American landscape painters that came to be known as the Hudson River School.  Born in Bolton-le-Moors, Lancashire, England, in 1801, at the age of seventeen he emigrated with his family to the United States, first working as a wood engraver in Philadelphia before going to Steubenville, Ohio, where his father had established a wallpaper  manufacturing business.  Dissatisfied in the business, Cole received rudimentary instruction from an itinerant artist, began painting portraits, genre paintings, and a few landscapes, and set out to seek his fortune through Ohio and Pennsylvania.  By 1823, he was working for his father again in Pittsburgh, where his family had relocated, but soon moved on to Philadelphia to pursue his art, inspired by paintings he saw at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts.  Moving to New York City in spring 1825, Cole made a trip up the Hudson River to the eastern Catskill Mountains in the vicinity of the recently opened Catskill Mountain House hotel.  Based on his sketches there and along the river, he executed three landscapes that a city bookseller agreed to display in his window.  Colonel John Trumbull, already renowned as the painter of the American Revolution, saw Cole’s pictures and instantly purchased one, recommending the other two to his colleagues William Dunlap and Asher B. Durand.  What Trumbull recognized in the work of the young painter was the perception of wildness inherent in American scenery that landscape artists had theretofore ignored.  Trumbull brought Cole to the attention of various patrons, who began eagerly buying his work.  Dunlap publicized the discovery of the new talent and Cole was welcomed into New York’s cultural community, which included the poet and editor William Cullen Bryant and the author James Fenimore Cooper.  Cole became one of the founding members of the National Academy of Design in 1826.  https://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/cole/hd_cole.htm

In Chinese, the two characters for chop suey are pronounced "tsa sui" in Mandarin or in Cantonese "shap sui," meaning "mixed small bits" or "odds and ends."  As a culinary term, shap sui refers to a kind of stew made of many different ingredients mixed together.  Shap sui probably first came to the United States with the waves of Chinese immigrants drawn to the California gold fields.  Most came from the South China coast’s Pearl River Delta and particularly the town of Toishan.  In the 1870s, the Chinese were pushed from the American West by racial violence, migrating to cities like Philadelphia, Boston, and New York.  There Americans first noticed a dish called "chow-chop-suey."  https://www.thespruce.com/history-of-chop-suey-694582  Find a different point of view on chop suey origins at https://www.snopes.com/food/origins/chopsuey.asp

The remains of an ancient inhabitant of Egypt has been discovered:  paleontologists for Mansoura University have uncovered something that's never been seen before—the newly named Mansourasaurus Shahinae, which takes its name both from the university itself, and one of the founders of the paleontology department at the college.  The Mansourasaurus looks like it's around 80 million years old, which would put it during the mid-Cretaceous period, several million years before the mass extinction event that killed off most species of dinosaur.  If this dating proves accurate, this will be the first time that a specimen of this era has been found in Egypt.  While there are still plenty of tests to be completed on the new fossil, the Mansourasaurus looks to be an undiscovered species of herbivore.  Matthew Loffhagen  Read more and see graphics at https://www.outerplaces.com/science/item/17725-newfound-species-egypt-hiding-dinosaur-discoveries

http://librariansmuse.blogspot.com  Issue 1839  February 7, 2018  On this date in 1973, on the occasion of his 90th birthday, Eubie Blake was honored by ASCAP, the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers.  In 1946, with a five-decade career as a successful performer and composer behind him, Eubie Blake retired.  He was 63 at the time. In 1899, while still a teenager, Blake penned a classic:  “The Charleston Rag.”  In 1915, he formed a songwriting partnership with a talented young singer named Noble Sissle, and, in 1921, the two men produced “Shuffle Along,” a smash-hit Broadway show that fused ragtime and operetta and proved to be a major influence on the classic Broadway musicals of the 1920s and 30s.  In the 1950s, a revival of interest in ragtime music coaxed Blake out of retirement, and the successful use of ragtime music in the 1973 film “The Sting” transformed the ragtime revival into a major pop culture phenomenon.  Composers Datebook

Word of the Day  wordster  noun  One who is skilled at using words; a wordsmith.  One who studies words.  (pejorative) One who uses words instead of actions; a hypocrite, a verbalist.  Scottish lexicographer and philologist Sir James Murray, who was the first editor of the Oxford English Dictionary, was born February 7, 1837.