A new outbreak of David Barton has been noted. The Centers for Disease Control offer no help, but you can find some relief here, at American Creation, in a post by Brad Hart.
Tip of the old scrub brush to Ed Brayton at Dispatches from the Culture Wars, “Another Barton Debunking.”
Leave a Comment » | 
Accuracy, Bogus history, Education, Historic documents, History, History Revisionism, Hoaxes, Politics, Voodoo history | Tagged: Accuracy, History, Hoaxes, Politics, Voodoo history | 
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Posted by Ed Darrell
That’s the real headline from the Salt Lake Tribune.
Wedgie killer?
Reality once again demonstrates that hoaxes can’t keep up. Truth is either stranger than fiction, or just better.
You just can’t make this stuff up:
The Utah Supreme Court today threw out the manslaughter conviction of Erik Kurtis Low, who killed a Park City man after the victim gave him a “wedgie.”
Low, now 40, claimed in his 2005 trial he was defending himself when he shot 38-year-old Michael Jon Hirschey following a night of drinking, drug use and horseplay.
Ah, the old drinking, drug use and horseplay excuse.
The Utah Supreme Court said the trial court erred in instructing the jury on possible sentences, giving the jury too many ways to find the man guilty. The conviction was tossed out. Prosecutors cannot retry on the old charges, but new charges are possible.
Watch that space. Accurate history is always better than the hoax stuff.
Other resources:
5 Comments | History, Hoaxes, Jurisprudence, Justice, Law, Travel | Tagged: History, Hoaxes, Justice, Travel, Weird News | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell
Remember to fly the flag on July 4, 2008, the 232nd anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. (Postcard above, from 1907, from collection of James R. Heintze)
Flags may be flown sun-up to sun-down. The U.S. flag should be run up the pole quickly, and be left to fly unfettered in the breeze. The flag may be left flying after sundown, if it is lighted.
Resources:
Leave a Comment » | Flag etiquette, Fly your flag today, Freedom - Political, History, History and art, History images, Patriotism | Tagged: Flag etiquette, Fly your flag today, Fourht of July, Fourth of July, History, Patriotism | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell
[2008] Today’s the 52nd anniversary of a horrendous accident in the air over the Grand Canyon. Two airliners collided, and 128 people died.
In 1956 there was no national radar system. When commercial flights left airports, often the only contact they had with any form of air traffic control was when the pilots radioed in for weather information, or for landing instructions. Especially there was no system to avoid collisions. As this 2006 story in the Deseret News (Salt Lake City) relates, the modern air traffic control system was spurred mightily by this tragedy.
About 9 a.m. Saturday, June 30, [1956], the TWA flight bound for Kansas City, Mo., and the United flight bound for Chicago left Los Angeles International Airport within three minutes of each other. The TWA flight, carrying 70 people, filed a flight plan to cruise at 19,000 feet. The United flight, with 58 people on board, planned to cruise at 21,000 feet.
About 20 minutes into the flight, TWA pilot Capt. Jack Gandy requested permission to climb to 21,000 feet. An air traffic controller in Salt Lake City turned down Gandy’s request. Then Gandy asked to fly “1,000 on top,” meaning at least a thousand feet above the clouds, which that morning were billowing as high as 30,000 feet. That request was granted.
By the time both planes were over the Grand Canyon, the pilots were flying in and out of the clouds, on visual flight rules and off their prescribed flight plans, apparently typical in those days as pilots veered off course to play tour guide.
No one knows exactly what happened.
It was the last big accident before instigation of the “black box,” so investigators had to piece together details from debris on the ground.
They decided that the left wing and propeller of the United plane hit the center fin of the TWA’s tail and cut through the fuselage, sending Flight 2 nose-first into the canyon, two miles south of the juncture of the Colorado and Little Colorado rivers. The United DC- 7, which had lost most of its left wing, began spiraling down. Capt. Robert Shirley radioed Salt Lake City a garbled message that controllers understood only after they slowed down the recording: “Salt Lake, ah, 718 . . . we are going in.” Flight 718 smashed into a cliff on Chuar Butte.
The accident plays a key role in a Tony Hillerman mystery, Skeleton Man — Hillerman writes about two Navajo Nation policemen.
I’m thinking of the crash today for two reasons. I’m off for a tour of canyons, including both rims of the Grand Canyon, in the next two weeks. The last time I was there was 1986, with the President’s Commission on Americans Outdoors. We flew in on a Twin Otter, coming up from Phoenix, over the Roosevelt Dam, up over the Mogollon Rim, over the Glen Canyon Recreation area and stopping it Page. From Page to Grand Canyon, we took full advantage of the huge windows in the Otter — seeing first hand the sights that the controversial tourist flights were designed to reveal. Safety was a key concern, and we talked about it constantly with the pilots.
A few weeks later, on June 18, 1986, that DeHavilland Twin Otter collided with a Bell Jet Ranger helicopter over the Canyon. 25 people died in that crash.
I have flown over the Canyon a dozen times since then — no longer will airliners dip down to give passengers a better view, not least because airliners cruise tens of thousands of feet higher now than they did then. I think of those airplane accidents every time I see the Canyon.
We’re driving in. We’ll spend a day and a half on the South Rim, and another couple of nights on the North Rim. We’re taking our time on the ground. But if we had time, and we could afford it, I’d love to get up in an airplane or helicopter to see the Canyon from the air again.
7 Comments | Airplanes, Disasters, History, Transportation, Travel | Tagged: airplane crash, Aviation, Disasters, Grand Canyon, History, Transportation, Travel | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell
An ISP called Toast.net has an interactive Independence Day Quiz — feeling patriotic? Go see how your knowledge of U.S. history and lore stacks up against others. The questions are very good, really.
Remember to fly your flag on the 4th of July!
2 Comments | 1776, Education, History | Tagged: 4th of July, History, Patriotism, Quiz | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell
I love the headline: “Anti-science law signed by Louisiana’s exorcist governor.”
Tony Whitson’s quick analysis is good, too.
One might begin to think Louisiana really is cursed. Katrina, Rita, other political troubles — and then they elect the bright, young reformer as governor, and he turns out to be a voodoo history and voodoo science practitioner — heck, maybe he practices just plain old voodoo.
All this comes at a time when it may have saved John McCain from making a mistake that would make George McGovern’s selection of Tom Eagleton look like wisdom of the ages (when news came out that Eagleton had undergone convulsive shock therapy for depression, he was replaced on the ticket by Sargent Shriver, but not after much damage had been done to the credibility and viability of the McGovern campaign — why Nixon thought it necessary to sponsor burglary to defeat this ticket is one of the mysteries of the ages of Shakespearian tragedy come to life in in American politics).
Mind you, I like and respect McGovern, and I found working with Tom Eagleton on the Senate Labor Committee a great joy.
Leave a Comment » | Campaigns, Creationism, Education, Evolution, History, Intelligent Design, Politics, Science, War on Education, War on Science | Tagged: 2008 campaign, Creationism, Education, Evolution, History, Intelligent Design, War on Education | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell
It’s clear that U.S. relations with North Korea (the Peoples Republic of Korea, or PRK) still suffer from institutional memories of the USS Pueblo incident. For both sides the Pueblo incident remains a sore point from 1968, a very trying year for the U.S. anyway.
PRK was scheduled to detail its nuclear activities in a report last Thursday when I started pondering this issue — part of the continuing negotiations to close down nuclear weapons production in PRK. PRK hoped to get off the U.S. list of “terrorist nations.“
Al Jazeera featured this story, below, in September 2007. In addition to footage of the Pueblo, still illegally held by PRK, and used as tourist site and propaganda opportunity, the piece explores the effects of the incident on more recent events, the negotiations to de-nuclearize the Korean Peninsula.
And now we know the rest of the story. PRK delivered the report; Bush announced the nation would be taken off the list of supporters of terrorism. (Report below from CBS News)
PRK destroyed the cooling towers to their offensive reactor.
And now we’re right back where we were in 1995. Eight years of Bush’s work pushed us backwards 13 years. Partial compliance by PRK, but the bomb-building project is on hold.
Nuclear non-proliferation mades some strides this last week. Still I can’t help the feeling that January 21, 2009, cannot arrive quickly enough.
Remember the Pueblo veterans. The Pueblo Affair still dogs relations between the U.S. and the PRK, through no fault of the crew of the Pueblo who endured a year of brutal captivity, and then seem to have been forgotten by the nation they served so well.
5 Comments | 1968, History, Korea, Nuclear weapons, Santayana's ghost | Tagged: 1968, History, Korea, Nuclear Proliferation, Politics, USS Pueblo | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell
Hoax complaints against presidential candidates are old ideas. In 1796, Alexander Hamilton paid newspaper editors to print stories saying Thomas Jefferson was atheist. It was a minor theme in that campaign, but after John Adams’ political fortunes foundered on the Alien and Sedition Acts, among other missteps, Hamilton stepped up the attacks in the election of 1800.
Jefferson’s great biographer, Dumas Malone, estimates that by election day, fully half the American electorate believed Jefferson was atheist. Jefferson made a perfect target for such a charge — staunch advocate of religious freedom, he thought it beneath the dignity of a politician to answer such charges at all, so he did not bother to deny them publicly. Ministers in New England told their congregations they would have to hide their Bibles because, as president, Jefferson would send troops to confiscate them.
In a warning to hoaxers, we might hope, Americans elected Jefferson anyway.
Such nefariousness plagues campaigns today, still. Boone Pickens, who helped fund the Swiftboat Veterans’ calumny against war hero John Kerry, has an offer to pay $1 million to anyone who can show the charges false. In a replay of Holocaust denial cases, Pickens refuses to accept any evidence to pay the award, last week turning away the affidavits of the men who were present at the events.
At the Bathtub, we’ve already sampled a crude and steady attempt to brand Hillary Clinton a Marxist with creative editing of a few of her speeches.
The assaults on Barack Obama are already the stuff of legend. The comic strip, “Doonesbury,” is running a story line with a volunteer for the internet rumor stopping part of the campaign, FighttheSmears.com. The smears are real.
Matthew Most of the Washington Post wrote a lengthy piece in yesterday’s paper, “An attack that came out of the ether,” on the research done by a woman at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, on the origins of the internet hoax that Barack Obama is a Muslim — a rumor so potent that Georgetown University Prof. Edward Luttwak repeated it in a New York Times op-ed article, without the fact checkers catching it (the Times consulted five scholars of Islam who all agreed the foundation for the claim is incorrect).
Danielle Allen has tracked the rumor back to its sources, in a failed campaign against Obama in Illinois and a candidate who admittedly was looking for mud, and one constant sniper at FreeRepublic.com. It’s impressive sleuthing, and the article would be a good departure for study of how media affect campaigns in a government or civics class.
The “how to” list is really very short:
According to the Post story: [A] search showed that the first mention of the e-mail on the Internet had come more than a year earlier. A participant on the conservative Web site FreeRepublic.com posted a copy of the e-mail on Jan. 8, 2007, and added this line at the end: “Don’t know who the original author is, but this email should be sent out to family and friends.”
Allen discovered that theories about Obama’s religious background had circulated for many years on the Internet. And that the man who takes credit for posting the first article to assert that the Illinois senator was a Muslim is Andy Martin.
Martin, a former political opponent of Obama’s, is the publisher of an Internet newspaper who sends e-mails to his mailing list almost daily. He said in an interview that he first began questioning Obama’s religious background after hearing his famous keynote speech at the 2004 Democratic National Convention.
The story is well worth reading. It can help educate us to how to avoid being victims of such rumors in the future.
Tip of the old scrub brush to e-mail correspondent MicahBrown.
3 Comments | Accuracy, Barack Obama, Campaigns, Cartoons, Education, Free press, Free speech, History, Hoaxes, Obama 2008, Politics, Technology | Tagged: 2008 campaign, Barack Obama, Campaign Technology, Education, Elections, History, Hoaxes, How to, Media, Politics | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell
Dr. David Suzuki is a Canadian scientist who writes popular science chiefly for Canadians. We in the U.S. might do well to pay more attention to him.
Below, his e-mail newsletter/column, with observations about the 50 years of science progress since his graduation from college. FYI.
Dear Friend:
Here’s your weekly Science Matters column by David Suzuki with Faisal Moola.
What a difference 50 years makes
Last month, I attended the 50th anniversary of my college graduation. A week later, I celebrated my grandson’s graduation from high school. I don’t think I was much different from the kids in my grandson’s class when I went away to college in 1954 (give or take a few rings and tattoos). Like them, I was filled with trepidation but also excitement about testing my physical and intellectual abilities beyond high school. But my how the world has changed in 50 years!
I began my last year of college in 1957. On October 4 that year, the Soviet Union electrified the world by successfully launching a satellite, Sputnik 1, into space. Little did we dream that out of the ensuing space race between the U.S.S.R. and the U.S.A. would come 24-hour television news channels, cellphones, and GPS navigation. In 1958, the only trans-Atlantic phone lines were cables laid on the ocean floor, so phone calls to England had to be booked hours or sometimes days in advance. I flew from Toronto to a roommate’s wedding in San Francisco on a propeller plane that made several stops during the 22-hour trip.
In 1958, scientists were still debating about whether genetic material was DNA or protein, we didn’t know how many chromosomes humans have or that the Y chromosome determines sex, and the Green Revolution was yet to come. Polio was still a problem in North America, smallpox killed hundreds of thousands annually, and oral contraceptives, photocopiers, personal computers, colour TV, and DVDs didn’t exist. In 1958, parts of the Amazon, Congo, and New Guinea had not been explored. We were yet to learn of species extinction, depletion of fish in the oceans, the effects of CFCs on the ozone layer, acid rain, global warming, PCBs, and dioxins.
In half a century our lives have been transformed by scientific, medical, and technological advances, as well as a host of environmental problems. No one deliberately set out to undermine the planet’s life-support systems or tear communities apart, but those have been the consequences of our enormous economic and technological “success” over the past five decades. Beset by vast problems of wealth discrepancy, environmental issues, poverty, terror, genocide, and prejudice, we are trying to weave our way into an uncertain future.
I began speaking out on television in 1962 because I was shocked by the lack of understanding of science at a time when science as applied by industry, medicine, and the military was having such a profound impact on our lives. I felt we needed more scientific understanding if we were to make informed decisions about the forces shaping our lives. Today, thanks to computers and the Internet, and television, radio, and print media, we have access to more information than humanity has ever had. To my surprise, this access has not equipped us to make better decisions about such matters as climate change, peak oil, marine depletion, species extinction, and global pollution. That’s largely because we now have access to so much information that we can find support for any prejudice or opinion.
Don’t want to believe in evolution? No problem – you can find support for intelligent design and creationism in magazines, on websites, and in all kinds of books written by people with PhDs. Want to believe aliens came to Earth and abducted people? It’s easy to find theories about how governments have covered up information on extraterrestrial aliens. Think human-induced climate change is junk science? Well, if you choose to read only certain national newspapers and magazines and listen only to certain popular commentators on television or radio, you’ll never have to change your mind. And so it goes. The challenge today is that there is a huge volume of information out there, much of it biased or deliberately distorted. As I think about my grandson, his hopes and dreams and the immense issues my generation has bequeathed him, I realize what he and all young people need most are the tools of skepticism, critical thinking, the ability to assess the credibility of sources, and the humility to realize we all possess beliefs and values that must constantly be reexamined. With those tools, his generation will certainly leave a better world to its children and grandchildren 50 years from now.
Take David Suzuki’s Nature Challenge and learn more at www.davidsuzuki.org.
5 Comments | Education, Environmental protection, History, Science | Tagged: David Suzuki, Education, Environmental protection, History, Science | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell
Rare color photograph of President John Kennedy addressing a crowd in the then-divided city of Berlin, June 26, 1963
From the Smithsonian Magazine site:
June 26, 1963: “Ich bin ein Berliner”
In West Berlin, President John F. Kennedy delivers the famous speech in which he declares, “Ich bin ein Berliner.” Meaning literally “I am a citizen of Berlin,” the statement shows U.S. solidarity with democratic West Berlin, surrounded by communist territory.
View a video of President Kennedy’s speech at American Rhetoric, Top 100 Speeches.
Photo of President Kennedy addressing Berlin’s citizens, photographer unidentified; from American Rhetoric site.
[end of encore post]
Kennedy’s entire speech was good. It was well drafted and well delivered, taking advantage of the dramatic setting and the dramatic moment. John Kennedy well understood how to give a speech, too.
Below is most of the speech, nearly five minutes’ worth, from a YouTube file — another indication that schools need to open up their filters to allow at least some of the best YouTube material through:
You may also want to note these posts:
6 Comments | Accuracy, Cold War, Communism, Famous quotes, Freedom - Political, History, History audio sources, History video sources, Quotes, Video and film | Tagged: Berlin Wall, Cold War, Communism, Famous quotes, freedom, History, John F. Kennedy | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell
Here’s a video on the 100th anniversary of the Boy Scouts of America, coming in 2010.
Vodpod videos no longer available.
Scouts, Scouters, friends and media should probably bookmark this site, and use it to coordinate events planned for the centennial year.
Among other fun things, there was a contest to pick a logo for the year-long festivities. The logo is below, left.
The winning design came from an Eagle in California
Name: Philip Goolkasian
Hometown: Fresno, Calif.
Scout Rank: Eagle Scout
Council: Troop 223, Sequoia Counci
1 Comment | Boy Scouts of America, History | Tagged: 2010, Boy Scouts, History, Scouting American Centennial | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell
My earlier post urging readers to contact Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal to urge him to veto the latest creationist eruption the Louisiana Lege gave him, produced an interesting comment. A fellow named Wayne provided links to a presentation by some guy named Perry Marshall, in which Marshall flails vainly against evolution theory. The video is billed as one the Louisiana Coalition for Science “fears.” Wayne wants to know, should we keep children from seeing it?
Marshall apparently isn’t even an engineer, but instead designs ads for internet placement — at least one step removed from the usual joke about engineers as creationists. Of course, that doesn’t help any of his arguments.
Wayne linked to three YouTube presentations, about half of the presentation Marshall made at an unidentified church (there are five segments total, I gather). What you see is bad PowerPoint slides, with audio. Marshall suggests that evolution couldn’t get from the American pronghorn antelope to the African giraffe, but in classic creationist form, he doesn’t address the unique signs of evolution we find in giraffes (neck, vagus nerve, for example) nor in pronghorns (bred for speed to beat the American cheetah, which is now extinct, and thereby hangs a great tale of sleuthing by evolution).
Marshall’s presentation is insulting. To me as a historian, it’s astounding how he can’t accurately list sequences of events well known to history. The science errors he makes are errors any 7th-grade student might make — but he’s passing them off as valid criticism of evolution theory.
Here’s the first YouTube presentation, and below the fold, my response to Wayne.
These presentations are an omen. They are sent to us as a warning for what the Discovery Institute will try to sneak into classrooms if Jindal signs that bill into law — heck, they’ll try anyway, but we don’t have to drill holes in our kids’ heads to make it easier for con men and snake oil salesmen to get their fingers in there.
My response below the fold.
28 Comments | Accuracy, Biology, Charles Darwin, Creationism, Darwin, Education, Education quality, Ethics, Evolution, History, Junk science, Pedagogy, Politics, Public education, Rampant stupidity, Religion, Science, Teaching, Textbooks, Voodoo science, War on Education, War on Science | Tagged: Bobby Jindal, Creationism, Education, Evolution, History, Intelligent Design, Louisiana creation law, Rampant stupidity, Religion, Science | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell
The Texas State Archives offers a succinct history:
Juneteenth, celebrated on June 19, is the name given to emancipation day by African-Americans in Texas. On that day in 1865 Union Major General Gordon Granger read General Order #3 to the people of Galveston. General Order #3 stated “The people of Texas are informed that, in accordance with a proclamation from the Executive of the United States, all slaves are free. This involves an absolute equality of personal rights and rights of property between former masters and slaves, and the connection heretofore existing between them becomes that between employer and hired labor. The freedmen are advised to remain quietly at their present homes and work for wages. They are informed that they will not be allowed to collect at military posts and that they will not be supported in idleness either there or elsewhere.”
Large celebrations on June 19 began in 1866 and continued regularly into the early 20th century. The African-Americans treated this day like the Fourth of July and the celebrations contained similar events. In the early days, the celebration included a prayer service, speakers with inspirational messages, reading of the emancipation proclamation, stories from former slaves, food, red soda water, games, rodeos and dances.
The celebration of June 19 as emancipation day spread from Texas to the neighboring states of Louisiana, Arkansas and Oklahoma. It has also appeared in Alabama, Florida, and California as African-American Texans migrated.
In many parts of Texas, ex-slaves purchased land, or “emancipation grounds,” for the Juneteenth gathering. Examples include: Emancipation Park in Houston, purchased in 1872; what is now Booker T. Washington Park in Mexia; and Emancipation park in East Austin.
Celebration of Juneteenth declined during World War II but revived in 1950 at the Texas State Fair Grounds in Dallas. Interest and participation fell away during the late 1950’s and 1960’s as attention focused on expansion of freedom for African-Americans. In the 1970’s Juneteenth revived in some communities. For example, in Austin the Juneteenth celebration returned in 1976 after a 25 year hiatus. House Bill no.1016 passed in the 66th legislature, regular session, declared June 19, “Emancipation Day in Texas,” a legal state holiday effective January 1, 1980. Since that time, the celebration of Juneteenth continues across the state of Texas with parades, picnics and dancing.
Texas State Library Reference Services 3/95
Celebrations across Texas started last Saturday, and will continue for another three or four days, I gather. Thought it’s an official State of Texas holiday, few people take it off. So celebrations are scheduled when they can be.
The great mystery to me is why the holiday seems to have spread so far outside Texas. Juneteenth is based on a uniquely Texas event — it involved notifying only the slaves in Texas that they had been freed. Celebrations go much farther today, even to places the Civil War didn’t touch.
Resources:
1 Comment | Civil War, History, History museums, History video sources, Juneteenth | Tagged: Civil War, Emancipation Proclamation, History, holiday | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell
Strange Maps features federally-owned lands. Those of us who grew up in the west tramping those federal lands, and those of us who worked policy for those lands rarely think they should be listed as “strange” maps. Beautiful land maps, perhaps. God’s Country. It’s funny others regard it as so strange.
But we get clues. In comments at Strange Maps I noted a corporate meeting where I was chastised and ostracized for making a simple statement of fact about the ownership of lands in the west. Other than we veterans of the Sagebrush Rebellion (on all sides), ranchers, miners, and members of the Sierra Club, Wilderness Society, National Recreation and Parks Association (NRPA) [Barry Tindall? Are you still out there?], National Parks Conservation Association (NPCA), and enrolled tribal members, who pays attention to that stuff?
Too few in government pay enough attention. Fewer people outside government pay attention, especially if they don’t live in states in which the federal lands reside.
Public lands are all around us, yet we don’t see them as anything much different from any other land. Too often we don’t even see them for the resources they are. It’s as if we had a treasure of diamonds, rubies and gold, and we put it on display, and no one could see it.
For example, there was a major decision in federal district court on an issue of federalism last Friday — did you hear of it in your local newspaper, or on your local television or radio news? Nor are most people familiar with the move to amend the 1872 Mining Act, nor could most Americans describe for you what the 1872 Mining Act is or why it’s worth billions of dollars annually to the federal government, state governments, and mining corporations.
Strange Maps showed only the amount of land in federal hands in each state. Below is a map that shows where are the actual federal holdings, from the online National Atlas (nationalatlas.gov) — a map of federal lands and Indian Reservations. (A .gif preview is below; below that is a link to a .pdf file you can download.) The light green is National Forest land; the yellow is Bureau of Land Management land. The red plots are Indian reservations. Click on the map for the enlargement, you can see that Nevada, for example, has just thin threads of private lands (in white), mostly along U.S. Highway 50, and around Las Vegas.
All Federal Lands and Indian Reservations; NationalAtlas.gov, now archived at USGS
Flip the pages of most geography texts, however, and you’ll find little clue of the role federal lands play in modern America, let alone the historical roles played.
History?
Sure. Notice that most of the public lands held today are in 13 western states, generally the last states allowed into the union (not exactly; Oklahoma is a 20th century admission — but it has Indian reservations; read on). Outside the 13 original colonies, which became the 13 original states, and Vermont (#14), all the land in the U.S. was held by the federal government at one time. Much of the territory between the 13 original states and the Mississippi was ceded to the U.S. by Britain in the Treaty of Paris, which ended the American Revolution. Americans thought the land useful for farming, chiefly, so the intention was to devise the lands to private holders. To that end the various Northwest Ordinances (e.g., 1785, 1786, 1787 and later) established systems to sell off the lands into private hands.
Disposal of the lands required the creation of a bureau to do the job. The General Land Office was created in 1812, and remained part of the federal government until it was folded into the new Bureau of Land Management in 1946.
That some of the lands might have national value, and should be held in federal title, did not surface as a complete idea until the Progressive Era, with the emphasis on land stewardship, under Teddy Roosevelt, Taft, and their successors. Even then, the general idea was to get most of the lands into private ownership. Roosevelt worked to preserve the most scenic and most unique lands.
Beginning with the Northwest Ordinances, the federal government set aside two sections in every township for the benefit of education. Local governments sold the tracts and put the money to school construction, or put the schools on those sections. Some of the tracts in the far western states are still there, unsold and providing no benefits to the schools. In some cases this is because the tracts are stuck inside federally-held tracts, in National Forests, in National Parks. Texas dedicated some of its state lands to provide funding for the University of Texas. Fortunately, these tracts happened to be on a pool of oil. When oil development took off, Texas’s university systems benefited (the Texas A&M System got a third of the rights along the way).
Development of the Transcontinental Railroad was financed by massive grants of land to the railroad companies. Even today the fortunes of the old Burlington Northern Railroad (now BNSF) are swelled by coal on land granted to the original companies building the rails, land the company has held for all these years. The thin line of private land across northern Nevada originally was the route of the Central Pacific Railroad — now it is approximately the route of U.S. Highway 50, “America’s Loneliest Highway.”
President Abraham Lincoln signed the Homestead Act on May 20, 1862. Under the Act, any American could lay claim to public lands for a small fee, and if he could live on the land for five years, title was vested in that citizen. This explanation comes from a lesson plan at the National Archives:
The new law established a three-fold homestead acquisition process: filing an application, improving the land, and filing for deed of title. Any U.S. citizen, or intended citizen, who had never borne arms against the U.S. Government could file an application and lay claim to 160 acres of surveyed Government land. For the next 5 years, the homesteader had to live on the land and improve it by building a 12-by-14 dwelling and growing crops. After 5 years, the homesteader could file for his patent (or deed of title) by submitting proof of residency and the required improvements to a local land office.
When I was a child in southern Idaho, customers at my parents’ furniture store included many people who were still trying to make a go of things on homesteads north of Burley, Idaho, on “the North Side.” Much of the land granted this way could not support a family, and the failure rate of these homesteads in the 1950s and 1960s was probably more than 50 percent (I’m swagging the figure — if you have better statistics, send them along).
Overall, the Homestead Act shaped America’s character as a home for entrepreneurs:
By 1934, over 1.6 million homestead applications were processed and more than 270 million acres—10 percent of all U.S. lands—passed into the hands of individuals. The passage of the Federal Land Policy and Management Act of 1976 repealed the Homestead Act in the 48 contiguous states, but it did grant a ten-year extension on claims in Alaska.
Much of the land that open for homesteading was desert, unsuitable for farming. It was available for grazing cows and sheep, though, and much of it was overgrazed. (Grazing alone wouldn’t meet the homestead requirements.) It was not until the 1970s that people outnumbered sheep in Utah, for example. In the first three decades of the 20th century enormous flocks of sheep grazed much of what is now considered Utah’s western desert territory, flocks of thousands of sheep, or tens of thousands.
These lands, too arid for farming, too hilly for much of anything else, too far away from settlements for other commerce, eventually formed the core of lands held by the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) in the Department of Interior. BLM manages 264 million acres of land, far and away the biggest land management agency in the federal government. Much of the land was severely overgrazed by 1930, and after the harsh lessons of the Dustbowl, Congress tried to rope in grazing and set it up in a rational scheme in the Taylor Grazing Act of 1934, one of the lesser noted chunks of the New Deal era.
The major federal land management agencies today include the Department of Interior’s BLM, National Park Service, Fish and Wildlife Service, Bureau of Reclamation, and to a lesser and more complicated degree, the Bureau of Indian Affairs; the Department of Agriculture’s National Forest Service; and the Department of Defense, especially in the western public lands states (think Nevada gunnery range, Skull Valley and Dugway Proving Grounds, Utah, and Area 51).
Each area of land management policy is controversial to some degree, but even these controversies rarely rise to the level of public acknowledgment. The latest starlet’s sexcapades will grab headlines away from the major effort to overhaul mining law, for example. In the 1980s, Alaska voted on a proposal to secede from the union, but the issue barely got three paragraphs in the Washington Post or New York Times, two of the newspapers that are generally very good in covering such issues. This post barely scratches the surface of these issues.
(Digression: I first encountered Molly Ivins when she reported for the NY Times out of the Denver bureau; as a Scout I had hiked and traveled much of Utah and the west; as a Senate staffer to a western senator, I was intimately familiar with most of the land in Utah especially. Ivins wrote a story on a protection issue on a chunk of land and a formation I’d not been familiar with, and in sparring with her about the article, it became very clear that she had pulled out sources we didn’t know about, and that she knew the stuff about as well as we did. Anyone who bothers to give a damn about western lands can earn my respect with such careful research.)
As a side note, Strange Maps suggested that the District of Columbia was all federal lands, but most of the District has been devised into private property, and commenters noted that. Here is a map of the District showing its federally-maintained lands.
District of Columbia and Federal Lands; NationalAtlas.gov (now at USGS)
Other resources:
Other related posts at the Bathtub:
6 Comments | Environmental protection, Federalism, Geography - Economic, Geography - Physical, Geography - Political, History, Maps, Native Americans, Natural history, Natural resources, Politics, Science, Theodore Roosevelt | Tagged: Environmental protection, geography, History, Maps, National Parks, Public Lands, Sagebrush Rebellion | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell
IBM 360/195 playing chess, November 1974, probably in the world computer chess championships. MASTER Team, from left: Alex Bell, Peter Kent, John Birmingham, John Waldron (a British chess player)
Annual Report, C & A Division, Rutherford Laboratories, United Kingdom, 1974.
No details are offered in the 1974 report; it appears that the machine is playing someone at a remote location, linked by telephone. According to the report, “The only major hardware change made to the IBM System 195 Central Computer during 1974 was the addition in March of a third megabyte of main core. The system has now given consistently high performance for a period of three years and from this experience it is now possible to predict its maximum capability when fully loaded.”
At another section of the Rutherford Lab’s online materials you can view a short history of computer chess playing.
2 Comments | Chess, Education, History, Science, Technology | Tagged: Big Blue ancestor, Chess, History, IBM 360/195, Technology | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell
Ed Darrell on Texas's Colorado River
Come on in, the water's fine. Come often: Cleanliness is next to godliness.
Millard Fillmore's Bathtub 
