tingilinde

properly fixing a lighthouse

Using the old fresnel lens at Montauk Point.

 

a historian comments on the day

Heather Cox Richardson on the history of Thanksgiving - it's probably not what you think it is.

 

the federalist papers

A Fascinating BBC 4 In Our Time episode - a chat with Early American History profs about the 1780s - the fact that the US was not a nation and the forces that led to the Constitution.  I had a remarkable American History teacher in the 11th grade who strayed from the syllabus to spend a fair amount of time on the period.  About six years ago I audited a History course from Yale on the road to the Constitution... many things you don't realize.  We spent a lot of time on Federalist 10 and Federalist 78.  Much of what the courts do is not in the Constitution (like being able to declare something unconstitutional, but is something argued for in 78.  Much of the papers are grey areas, which is what the "originalists" like to play.  In any event this is a great 50 minute discussion on the subject.

 

lincoln logs

What many American kids got before Lego came onto the scene..  

and an inventor from a famous father.

 

the pro-dictatorship gop

Historian Heather Cox Richardson on the vision that the GOP appears to be backing.

 

mario segale

The namesake for a very popular game.

 

the heksenwaag of oudewater

The witches's scales were used to give people accused of witchcraft an official certificate proclaiming they weren't witches.  The idea at the time was a witch was souless and souls had a weight, so a witch weighed less. 

It was a way to defy the church.

 

on china

A New Yorker piece by Evan Osnos on where China is, how it got here and where it may be going.

snip

...

China’s present troubles are about far more than the economy. Four decades after Deng and his peers put their country on a path of “reform and opening up,” his successors have reversed course, in politics and in culture. For ordinary Chinese citizens, that reversal is as jarring as it would have been for American homesteaders if the U.S. had retreated from the frontier. Joerg Wuttke, the president emeritus of the European Union Chamber of Commerce in China, who has lived there for more than thirty years, told me, “China always had comeback stories. But not now.” He recalled addressing a roomful of students at Peking University: “I said, ‘Who among you is optimistic?’ It was one-third—which means two-thirds are pessimistic at the best university in China. There’s this feeling of ‘What are we here for?’ ”

...

 

 

 

on the myth of rural america

A Daniel Immerwahr essay in The New Yorker.

snip

...

All that was generations ago, yet the obsession with rural authenticity sounds all too familiar. In 2008, the Republican Vice-Presidential candidate Sarah Palin insisted that small towns were the “real America,” where hardworking, patriotic people lived. That sentiment has only gained political potency since. Underlying the country’s red state–blue state polarization is a more profound, and widening, rural-urban split. Donald Trump’s election was, Politico declared, the “revenge of the rural voter.”

Scholars who have spoken with those voters, such as Katherine Cramer, in “The Politics of Resentment” (2016), and Robert Wuthnow, in “The Left Behind” (2018), report a sense of deep alienation. Rural people feel—in terms much like those Grant Wood laid out in 1935—that their authentic, independent way of life is under threat from an out-of-touch urban élite.

But is that picture accurate? A piercing, unsentimental new book, “The Lies of the Land” (Chicago), by the historian Steven Conn, takes the long view. Wistful talk of “real America” aside, Conn, who teaches at Miami University, in Oxford, Ohio, argues that the rural United States is, in fact, highly artificial. Its inhabitants are as much creatures of state power and industrial capitalism as their city-dwelling counterparts. But we rarely acknowledge this, Conn writes, because many of us—urban and rural, on the left and the right—“don’t quite want it to be true.”

...

 

 

a fast motorcycle

Daredevils have always been around - a fast motorcyclist from the 30s. (the title should read 300 mph)