<KP> Taft Avenue is still a main thoroughfare - so he must be remembered favorably ;-)

Seriously, I am not really one to ask because I was not a history major. My Philippine history classes were mostly in primary education. From what I recall, all American historical figures affecting the Philippines were portrayed positively. Some of this changed in high school with more nationalistic authors. I guess partly because of Taft Avenue, this president remains one of the more well known to Filipinos.

I don’t know whether you have read my recent messages at Kibitzer’s Café or not and so I am posting it here too. On Monday of last week I have become proud father of (the second) daughter named Aneta. You can see her picture on the site of regional newspaper “Kladensky denik” (Kladno’s Daily) at http://kladensky.denik.cz/miminka/m... where is just now till this Friday (12:00 A.M. CET) running a polling contest for the most sympathetic baby born last week in regional maternity hospitals organized by the newspaper. Personally I am not much interested in such a kind of competitions but my wife likes it very much and she would be much happy to see our little girl on the top. Right now we are on the second place in very tense and close race with two other contenders and so every additional vote is very important for the final outcome. If you would like to help me to make my wife even happier than she already is now, just click on the link above, flag “Aneta Cervenkova, Stredokluky” (the first name in gray box on the right side on the screen) and hit the “hlasovat” button below. It is possible to vote repeatedly always after 60 minutes from one IP address... :-D

Knowing you're a big fan of Lasker, I thought you might get a kick out of this analysis I just completed:

How refreshing to see this large dollop of sanity on the Match Page-

I'm going to forward your findings to the "history administrators" so they can correct the Match Summary.

Your account of the timeline for each city is also confirmed in Kurt Landsberger's biography of Steinitz which I'm currently holding in my hands.

Well ok I'm typing this but it's right beside me.

I have a question- how did you download the book from google? I went to the link you supplied but I can't figure out how to download the book.

I'm referring to your posts on the <Steinitz-Lasker 1894 Match> page.

Ok thanks for posting that great information from the book, at any rate.

By "this" I meant your games collection here which I just found today:

Game Collection: St. Petersburg 1895-96

I especially appreciated your logic in the explanation of why you doubted the so oft repeated story that <Pillsbury> suffered from syphillis at the time of this tournament.

I will be making a historical video about Pillsbury next.

I wonder if you could tell me- in your opinion, which book would you recommend as the best biographical source for Harry Pillsbury?

I'm especially looking for a source that provides some insight- or any kind of reliable information- about his character, his personality, and his activities away from the chess board.

I've been searching around the web, but to tell you the truth I'd trust your recommendation over that of a stranger.

Thanks for that very detailed and helpful response about Pillsbury books and Chess Biography in general.

I agree with you, and so obviously does Edward Winter.

The Chess films I make are like Silent Film previews before the main feature- they show parts of famous games but there's no real analysis.

The goal is to show the life and times of the player in question, so the interesting/poignant anecdote is precisely what I'm looking for.

Unfortunately, as you know, these "anecdotes" are all too often apocryphal and they keep getting passed on through history by one uncritical biographer after another.

So yes contemporaneous sources.

This is why Kurt Landsberger's biography of Steinitz was so valuable to me- it's comprised mainly of Steinitz's own words and the words of contemporaneous chess writers and newspaper articles.

And I believe I have read every single page of Edward Winter's site at least once now over the last five months.

Not every word on every page mind you.

I will follow your trail of sources for Pillsbury and thanks again for such generous and materially useful aid.

Is the actual text of Tarrasch's premature obituary of Steinitz extant on the internet, or in a book?

Do you have it, or do you know where it could be found?

In case you were curious about what all my research is for, here's the first part of a video biography of <Wilhelm Steinitz>.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6-TY...

As I mentioned, your many posts on Steinitz in particular, and chess history in general, have been very helpful to such projects.

Anyway, I digitized a few relevant pages for Jess, and thought you might like to take a look in case you don't have ready access to the book. It's a bit long to post at CG. You might want to delete this post at some point because the link will only be good for a few weeks.

I tried to catch all the little spots where my OCR software got confused, but inevitably something slips past...