Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Humanities/2017 December 24

= December 24 =

Mysterious Statute
Can someone please tell what this small statute is (marked by a redish outline in the picture) ? Jon Ascton    (talk)  11:35, 24 December 2017 (UTC)
 * I assume it is supposed to be a Garden gnome. Blueboar (talk) 11:46, 24 December 2017 (UTC)


 * Note statute vs. statue. ←Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots→ 11:53, 24 December 2017 (UTC)
 * Its a comic. Ask the author. --Kharon (talk) 21:40, 24 December 2017 (UTC)
 * Sales of garden gnomes rose by 42% this year, reveals eBay (UK, October 2017). Alansplodge (talk) 17:19, 29 December 2017 (UTC)

Tempest at Fisk
Carol Anderson writes of the US and Fisk University:


 * A morally and sexually compromised president had come to power promising a regime fundamentally different to his predecessor’s. The new administration was packed with conmen, hucksters, and unqualified shills raiding the public treasury and selling public lands to Big Oil. . . . In the midst of the maelstrom, an intellectual brawl broke out among African Americans. . . . [O]ne African American intellectual openly and mercilessly challenged another over what was essentially ephemera. Du Bois looked on at the row within Fisk University, Tennessee, and shook his head.

About the Harding "administration", of course. But what's this "row"? (The Fisk University article doesn't explain.) -- Hoary (talk) 23:58, 24 December 2017 (UTC)


 * The most famous dispute among African American be civil rights leaders at the turn of the 20th century was between W.E.B. Du Bois and Booker T. Washington over the Atlanta compromise though I am uncertain what it had to do with Fisk University.-- Jayron 32 02:21, 25 December 2017 (UTC)


 * According to this site, there was major internal turmoil at Fisk University in 1924-1925 (a few years after Harding). AnonMoos (talk) 04:13, 25 December 2017 (UTC)


 * Thank you both, Jayron32 and AnonMoos. But unless something has gone awry in the article I quote, it can't be either of these: Du Bois is presented as a bemused/appalled outsider, not an instigator or participant. (Oh, and Harding isn't specified: he's just my guess. But "It was the 1920s".) -- Hoary (talk) 10:20, 25 December 2017 (UTC)


 * The references to the presidency are clearly to Harding. See Teapot Dome scandal and Warren G. Harding. --76.69.117.217 (talk) 04:41, 26 December 2017 (UTC)