Photoessay #2066 - 19th Century demographic breakdown

This is more a scan than a photo.  Hope you can read it.  Yes, click on it.  I'm slowly plowing through my devotional exercises paper.  I really wanted to start it off with an attention-getting dramatic scene of the hoity toit committee of ministers presenting their plan to the Board of Education.  But, no matter what I do, it just gets too 19th century and I don't have enough visual detail.  I just don't think that I'm going to make it work.

But I will add this demographic breakdown of the students in the public schools in New Haven in 1878 (excluding the high school).  It's included in their publication of majority and minority opinions of the Board regarding dispensing with the morning devotional exercises on Feb 1, 1878.

Their point is rather startling, even more startling to modern eyes is how they classified children by ethnic group.

Their main point is that the majority of children in New Haven Public Schools were not from Protestant families.  New Haven started as a Puritan colony.  Puritans were not known for their tolerance.  Disestablishment of the Congregational Church as the State Church didn't happen until 1818.  Many of the arguments for keeping the Protestant prayers was that New Haven was a Protestant Christian community and the traditional prayer of their ancestors must be honored.  The Catholics were taking quite a stand and would not be dismissed by the demeaning label of Romish or Papish.

But this table shows Protestant in the minority.  Mainly due to the large number of Irish born children presumably Catholic.

And look how they did it!  Made perfect sense to them, I'm sure but it blows our mind.  First, by native, they don't mean Native American (who apparently don't count AT ALL) but born in the United States.  Colored (African American) lumped in with native-born whites.  Jews thrown in with the Germans.  Please, my head is hurting.  But look at the Irish-born!

Ducks won their second World Series game.  Will face Cal later today, we might be gone.

Tons of writing work to do.  I critiqued Ann's piece for tomorrow morning.  I have another one to do for an ad hoc writing group meeting Tuesday.  Also have to have a Gardening piece done for Tuesday.  I'm working on this devotional exercise piece, I would love to turn it in on Thursday but seems unlikely.  I do have a piece that will appear in Your Teen, don't know if I mentioned it before.  I took my spring quarter piece for Theo (2100 words) and knocked it down to 880 word.  Not, that's a cut job!