Grant Six Degrees of Ulysses Grant

The 1876 Centennial Exposition!

http://mentalfloss.com/article/25483/party-its-1876-12-items-centennial-exposition

"The Corliss steam engine was assembled on a platform in the center of Machinery Hall, the main attraction inside the most popular building at the fair. After presiding over the opening ceremonies, President Ulysses S. Grant and his guest, Brazilian Emperor Dom Pedro, each pulled a lever to set the famed engine in motion. The impressive machine, which symbolized the United States' rise to industrial prominence, was nearly 50 feet tall and powered most of the machines within the 13-acre building."
Suze, you are awesome!
See? This is what I love about this. Everyone comes up with something different!

I was gonna go either the Panama route or the Wendell Berry route.

Panama route:
1. Ulysses Grant had to cross the isthmus of Panama to get to California for his Army service after the Mexican War, and the raging cholera epidemic that hit his group when they got there made it a horrific but seminal experience in his life. He performed heroically, but it was such a nightmare that at least one biographer believes it contributed to his problems with alcohol beginning shortly thereafter. Another biographer attributes to the Panama experience Grant's later acceptance of high-casualty battles that he thought would end the war more quickly in lieu of dragging it out and having soldiers die by the thousands of the diseases that always ran rampant when they sat around in camps. Memories of the horrible land passage over Panama also influenced Grant when he was later President to be supportive of the idea of building a canal across the isthmus.
2. One of Panama's chief exports is bananas, and of course, production of that crop has historically been one of the chief factors in the politics of all the Central American countries including Panama.

Wendell Berry route:
1. Wendell Berry, the guru of sustainable agriculture, raises nearly all his own food, but the one exception he makes is bananas, which he eats regularly.
2. Wendell Berry is a native son of, and farms the ground his family has farmed for generations in, Kentucky.
3. Ulysses Grant's parents and a couple of his siblings spent significant portions of their lives in Kentucky, where Ulysses' aunt and uncle lived; Ulysses' wife, Julia, stayed with his parents in Covington, KY, through periods during the Civil War, and Ulysses' father, Jesse, died there.
 
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