Tag Archives: american history

New York Might Never Top the 1949 Rockefeller Center Tree

by saadsdecd Posted on December 5, 2013

Image: LIFE

Every year, the giant tree in Rockefeller Center is unveiled to some fanfare. But no tree is likely to top the tree that the city had in 1949. After years in which war-time trees stood stoically without lights, New Yorkers got a tree to remember. The Bowery Boys describe the spectacle:

Perhaps knowing the mild temperatures that awaited that season — it would only snow two inches between November 1949 and January 1950 — the Rockefeller Center holiday designers decided to spray paint the gigantic 75-foot tree in hundreds of gallons of whimsical silver paint.  It was then engulfed in 7,500 electric lights in pastel colors — pink, blue, yellow, green and orange, described as “plucked from a sky in fairyland.”

Not only was the tree covered in silver paint and lights, the walkway leading up to it was lined with 576 snowflakes that whirled dizzily. In fact, the display was so bright and wild that it caused one of the worst traffic jams the New York Times had seen in years. Cars were reportedly trapped between 72nd Street and 41st Street for hours.

Although this years tree has far more lights (45,000 in total) and induce plenty of traffic, it won’t be quite the silver, spinning whirlwind of 1949.

More from Smithsonian.com:

“Holidays on Display” at American History Museum
Dreaming of a Green Christmas

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New York Might Never Top the 1949 Rockefeller Center Tree

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This Map From 1812 Is Missing a Whole Continent

by bfys19 Posted on October 21, 2013

1812 was a weird year. The U.S., as a country, was still a baby. For the second time, America was at war with the British, and Canada had just burned down the White House. Looking back after 200 years, this map, made by esri, provides a view of how things have changed: it’s an interactive window on political geography, that layers the old and the new.

So how was the world of 1812 different from today? Well, for one, the U.S. was much, much smaller.

Photo: esri

The U.S., in green, is just a fraction of its current size. Louisiana, now part of the U.S., fresh off the Louisiana purchase of 1803, is in yellow. But off to the west, large tracts of land were still controlled by Spain, while the northwest was under British control.

North America wasn’t the only country with shifting political boundaries. Australia, until 1824, was known as New Holland.

Photo: esri

In 1812, European mapmakers like John Pinkerton (who published the older map) were lacking in knowledge of certain parts of the planet. Colonial interest in Africa didn’t reach its fever pitch until a few decades later, and in 1812, a mapmaker could get away with leaving blank huge parts of sub-Saharan Africa and labeling them “Unknown Parts.”

Photo: esri

In Africa, Eurocentric mapmakers at least thought it was worth noting what they didn’t know. But, elsewhere, whole parts of the Earth were missing. The map of 1812 was shorter than the world as we know it. The North was cut off past Svalbard, and Antarctica is entirely absent, despite the fact that the southern continent was discovered nearly half a century earlier. Then again, even today maps often skip Antarctica, even though it’s a fair bit larger than the U.S.

Photo: esri

Photo: esri

More from Smithsonian.com:

170 Years of America’s Evolution In One Animated Gif
Today We Celebrate the Time Canada Burned Down the White House

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This Map From 1812 Is Missing a Whole Continent

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America’s Chinatowns Are Disappearing

by ztx6uu6c Posted on October 11, 2013

Image: Dan Nguyen

When was the last time you took a trip to Chinatown? You might want to head there soon, because they might not be around for much longer. According to the Asian American Legal Defense and Education fund, Chinatowns all over the United States are being squeezed into smaller and smaller areas due to gentrification. At Wired‘s Map Labs blog, Greg Miller breaks down this break-down. Based on the maps, Boston has it the worst:

According to Census records, the percentage of the population that claims Asian heritage in Boston’s Chinatown dropped from 70 percent in 1990 to 46 percent in 2010. New York and Philadelphia’s Chinatowns did not see big change either way by that measure during the same time period, but in all three cities the proportion of homes inhabited by families and the proportion of children in the population dropped considerably. To Li that suggests that multigenerational immigrant homes are breaking up — or moving out.

To figure out the composition of these Chinatowns, volunteers went out and surveyed what types of restaurants, businesses and residential properties were in the area. Restaurants in particular are good barometers for a neighborhood’s service to immigrants. In other words, more Asian restaurants means a more robust Chinatown. But as the survey found, other restaurants and shops are moving in quickly.

The very existence of Chinatowns are a product of discrimination—immigrants created these communities to live in because they were excluded from pre-existing ones. And that tradition continues today, according to Bethany Li, author of the report. But with pressure from condominiums and high-end shops from all sides, many Chinatowns are slowly shrinking. While communities are fighting back, Li’s report says that without help they’ll be pushed out again:

Without the fights against unfettered development led by members from groups like the Chinese Progressive Association in Boston, Chinese Staff & Workers’ Association in New York, and Asian Americans United in Philadelphia, these Chinatowns would likely contain even more high-end and institutional expansion. City governments removed and replaced working-class immigrant residential and commercial land uses in each of these Chinatowns.

Bonnie Tsui at Atlantic Cities breaks down what some of those actions might be:

What’s to be done? Recommendations include allocating public land and funds for low-income housing development and retention at a more reasonable proportion to current high-end development; supporting small, local businesses to offset rising rents, given the symbiotic relationship with residents; prioritizing public green spaces; and engaging community organizations, residents, and the larger satellite communities to maintain Chinatowns as shared cultural history and home to working-class immigrants.

For many, Chinatowns are an attraction to a city, and many cities boast about their robust cultural neighborhoods. But they might not be around for much longer.

More from Smithsonian.com:

The Many Chinatowns of North America
San Francisco’s Chinatown at night

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America’s Chinatowns Are Disappearing

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What Isaac Asimov Thought 2014 Would Look Like

by OfeliaPPN Posted on August 29, 2013

Photo: PLCjr

Past predictions about the future oftentimes fail miserably—or at least produce a few giggles. In 1949, Popular Mechanics predicted that future computers would at least “weigh no more than 1.5 tons.” In 1967, U.S. News predicted that scientists would be able to control the weather, and astronauts would have set foot on Mars by 2000.

Sometimes, however, futuristic predictions can be surprisingly accurate. Isaac Asimov, writing for the New York Times about the 1964 World’s Fair, was nearly spot-on with a few predictions for what would turn up at a 2014 World’s Fair.

“Complete lunches and dinners, with the food semiprepared, will be stored in the freezer until ready for processing. I suspect, though, that even in 2014 it will still be advisable to have a small corner in the kitchen unit where the more individual meals can be prepared by hand, especially when company is coming.”

“Robots will neither be common nor very good in 2014, but they will be in existence. “

“Large solar-power stations will also be in operation in a number of desert and semi-desert areas — Arizona, the Negev, Kazakhstan. In the more crowded, but cloudy and smoggy areas, solar power will be less practical.”

“By 2014, only unmanned ships will have landed on Mars, though a manned expedition will be in the works and in the 2014 Futurama will show a model of an elaborate Martian colony.”

“Mankind will suffer badly from the disease of boredom, a disease spreading more widely each year and growing in intensity. This will have serious mental, emotional and sociological consequences, and I dare say that psychiatry will be far and away the most important medical specialty in 2014. The lucky few who can be involved in creative work of any sort will be the true elite of mankind, for they alone will do more than serve a machine.”

Of course, Asimov didn’t get everything right. Most people’s ceilings do not glow softly, and flying cars are still on Google’s to-do list. We haven’t moved into underground cities in order to replace the Earth’s surface with “large-scale agriculture, grazing and parklands, with less space wasted on actual human occupancy,” either. While Asimov predicted a world population of 6.5 billion, we’ve topped that at more than 7 billion.

And Asimov did fall flat on one other point: sadly, World’s Fairs are now a nostalgic fixture of the past.  Today, we instead have Expos whose primary focus is improving their host country’s branding rather than inspiring dreamy visions of the not-too-distant future.

(H/t Dan Fagin)

More from Smithsonian.com:

The Origins of Futurism 
The Future Is Here 

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What Isaac Asimov Thought 2014 Would Look Like

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Watch How America’s Lands Changed From Forests to Fields

by MayeskiLatouf679 Posted on August 19, 2013

From 1700 to 2000, the evolution of American anthromes. Photo: Erle Ellis

In the maps above, Erle Ellis, a professor of geography at University of Maryland, Baltimore County, has mapped the “anthromes”—the concept is similar to a biome, but based on humanity’s effect on the landscape—of the United States. Cities are red, woodlands are green, wild land is gray, croplands are yellow, and rangelands are orange. While biomes are used to classify the world’s various ecosystems, as an acknowledgement of the human influence some researchers, including Ellis, have turned to thinking about anthropogenic biomes—”a matrix of human-altered croplands, pastures, towns and cities…’anthromes’ for short,” explains Ensia magazine.

The U.S. spans a huge range of biomes, from temperate humid to Mediterranean, with deserts hot and cold and a cap of boreal forest (both humid and semi-arid). But humans have amassed a huge amount of control over our environments. Here, we’ve used Ellis’ images to showcase how land use in the U.S. has evolved over the past 300 years. You can see woodlands turn to croplands, wild lands turned to expanding rangeland, and cities sprout where none existed.

More from Smithsonian.com:

How The Fukushima Exclusion Zone Shows Us What Comes After The Anthropocene
What is the Anthropocene and Are We in It?

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Watch How America’s Lands Changed From Forests to Fields

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Obama Is Actually the Third President to Install Solar Panels at the White House

by greenenergy4 Posted on August 16, 2013

Photo: AgnosticPreachersKid

While the Obamas are away on vacation this week, ABC reports, their famous residence will be outfitted with energy-saving solar panels. But this is actually the third time that a sitting president has had solar panels installed on White House. In the past, however, solar installations at the presidential mansion have been met with less support—and less fanfare.

Jimmy Carter was ahead of the times. In 1977, he declared that the country was entering an energy crisis. To set a good example, he set about installing 32 solar panels on the White House in 1979. Carter declared that, “a generation from now, this solar heater can either be a curiosity, a museum piece, an example of a road not taken, or it can be a small part of one of the greatest and most exciting adventures ever undertaken by the American people; harnessing the power of the Sun to enrich our lives as we move away from our crippling dependence on foreign oil.” 

When Ronald Reagan took office, however, he promptly stripped the residency of its recently installed solar panels: his chief of staff reportedly thought the panels were “a joke,” says the Washington Post. Ten years later, those downtrodden panels were given a second though less glamorous chance at life, this time at Maine Unity College’s cafeteria.

In 2003, George W. Bush, seemingly acting out of character, brought solar back to the White House. American City and Country reported on the development a decade ago:

The National Park Service, which manages the White House complex, installed a nine kilowatt, rooftop solar electric or photovoltaic system, as well as two solar thermal systems that heat water used on the premises.

Two solar thermal systems, one to heat the pool and spa and one to provide domestic hot water, were also installed.

“With solar systems popping up on homes, businesses and farms across the country, it’s most appropriate to have solar providing energy for America’s most recognizable home,” said Glenn Hamer, executive director at the Solar Energy Industries Association (SEIA).

With the Obama administration’s latest additions, the White House will increase its solar capacity with 20 to 50 new panels, USA Today reports. The administration added that the installation should pay for itself within eight years.

More from Smithsonian.com:

Can Solar Survive the Solyndra Swirl?  
Energy Efficiency at the White House

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Obama Is Actually the Third President to Install Solar Panels at the White House

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No, You’re Probably Not Smarter Than a 1912-Era 8th Grader

by MatthiasA Posted on July 30, 2013

Exam time. Photo: University of Saskatchewan

In the early years of the 20th century, the students in Bullitt County, Kentucky, were asked to clear a test that many full-fledged adults would likely be hard-pressed to pass today. The Bullitt County Geneaological Society has a copy of this exam, reproduced below—a mix of math and science and reading and writing and questions on oddly specific factoids–preserved in their museum in the county courthouse.

But just think for a moment: Did you know where Montenegro was when you were 12? Do you know now? (Hint: it’s just across the Adriatic Sea from Italy. You know where the Adriatic Sea is, right?)

Or what about this question, which the examiners of Bullitt County deemed necessary knowledge: “Through what waters would a vessel pass in going from England through the Suez Canal to Manila?” The Bullitt geneaological society has an answer sheet if you want to try the test, but really, this question is just a doozie:

A ship going from England to Manilla by way of the Suez Canal would pass through (perhaps) the English Channel, the North Atlantic Ocean, Bay of Biscay (possibly), Strait of Gibraltar, Mediterranean Sea, Suez Canal, Red Sea, Gulf of Aden/Arabian Sea, Indian Ocean, Gulf of Thailand (may have been called Gulf of Siam at that time), South China Sea.

Eighth graders needed to know about patent rights, the relative size of the liver and mountain range geography. They had to be able to put together an argument for studying physiology. Though some of it is useful, much of the test amounts of little more than an assessment of random factoids.

So, if you’re anything like us, no, you’re probably not much smarter than an 1912 Bullitt County eighth grader. But that’s okay.

Tests like this are still done today, of course, often in the form of “scientific literacy” tests. The tests are meant to give an idea of how well people understand the world around them. But, in reality, what the these tests share in common with the Bullitt County test is that they quiz facts in place of knowledge or understanding. Designing a standardized test to quiz true understanding is of course very difficult, which is one of the reasons why these sorts of tests persist.

Writing for The Conversation, Will Grant and Merryn McKinnon argue that using these types of tests to say that “people are getting dumber” or “people are getting smarter” is kind of dumb itself. “Surveys of this type are, to put it bluntly, blatant concern trolling,” they say.

We pretend that factoids are a useful proxy for scientific literacy, and in turn that scientific literacy is a useful proxy for good citizenship. But there’s simply no evidence this is true.

Like asking a 12-year old Kentuckian about international shipping routes, “[t]he questions these [science literacy] tests ask have absolutely no bearing on the kinds of scientific literacy needed today. The kind of understanding needed about alternative energy sources, food security or water management; things that actually relate to global challenges.”

So, really, don’t feel too bad if you can’t finish your grandparent’s school exam—the fault lies more in outdated ideas of education than in your own knowledge base.

But, with all that aside, taking the Bullitt County quiz is still kind of fun:

The Bullitt County quiz for 8th graders. Photo: Bullitt County Geneaological Society

More from Smithsonian.com:

Do Teachers Need Their Own “Bar Exam”?
Document Deep Dive: What Was on the First SAT?

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No, You’re Probably Not Smarter Than a 1912-Era 8th Grader

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The New $100 Bill Will Have Thousands of Tiny Lenses Built In

by Aale Harry Posted on April 25, 2013

Photo: The US Treasury

As of October 8, a new $100 bill will be in circulation in the U.S. In an attempt to cut down on counterfeits, the Federal Reserve will add features such as a blue 3D security ribbon composed of thousands of tiny lenses and a disappearing Liberty Bell in an inkwell, USA Today reports.

The new bill is a bit late to arrive in Americans wallets. Originally, it was scheduled to be released in February 2011. But the Feds discovered an issue with unwanted wrinkles appearing in many of the notes, so they postponed its release indefinitely.

As for that blue security ribbon and its tiny lenses, the technology works by magnifying the objects underneath. When the bill is moved one way, whatever is underneath seems to move the opposite way. Though the $100 is the note most frequently targeted by counterfeiters, USA Today points out, it’s the last bill to undergo an upgrade to try and deter those fakes.

But as the Wall Street Journal points out, even with fancy new technology, the counterfeiters will likely find a way around the security measures. They always do. Ben Franklin himself lost sleep over this issue. He designed the country’s first bills, which immediately triggered a wealth of counterfeits despite his adding a “mysterious anticounterfeiting device.”

This was the so-called nature print, which consisted of an image of a leaf or leaves. It was extraordinarily lifelike, and with good reason. Franklin had devised a way of taking a plaster cast of the surface of a leaf. That in turn could be used to cast a lead plate that would be used to print the notes. Because every leaf was unique—with a complex web of veins of varying thickness—the notes were very difficult to counterfeit.

No surprise, though, the strategy didn’t work for very long. The British actually used counterfeits of Franklin’s bills as a means of undermining the impending war. While we’ve moved beyond Red Coat plots to crash the U.S. economy, as the Wall Street Journal writes, however many fancy security tactics are crammed onto a small slip of green paper, counterfeiters will eventually and inevitably crack that code.

More from Smithsonian.com:

The Art of Money 
To Save Money, Ask for Pretty New Dollar Bills

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The New $100 Bill Will Have Thousands of Tiny Lenses Built In

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Tracing $1 Bills Across the United States Is a Surprisingly Useful Hobby

by gammak Posted on March 25, 2013

Image: Prince Roy

In 1998, Hank Eskin started a website called WheresGeorge.com, dedicated to tracking dollar bills across the United States. Members of this club are called Georgers. They stamp dollar bills with their website, then search for and track those bills as they travel across the United States.

At NPR, Stan Alcorn caught up with some of these trackers. He writes:

[T]ypical Georgers log in religiously to enter their dollars’ serial numbers and ZIP codes before they stamp and spend them. If one gets entered a second time, the Georger gets an email. That’s called a “hit.”

Robert Rothenberg was sitting at the table in Kabooz’s when he got a hit in New Jersey. He gets a lot of hits, since he’s entered nearly 100,000 bills into the website’s database.

“I have a hit streak going since July of 2010, every day since then. I’m trying to get to 1,000 days, which will be the end of the month,” Rothenberg says.

Now, what started as a quirky hobby has turned into a national bill hunt that’s useful for all sorts of people—like physicists. Dirk Brockmann, a physicist at Northwestern University, writes at his website about meeting a cabinet maker in Vermont who tipped him off to the site:

After the conference I decided to visit Dennis Derryberry, an old friend from college who lives within driving distance to Montreal in the green mountains of Vermont, where he works as a cabinet maker. After a few hours on the highway Dennis and his family welcomed me to their beautiful house in the woods. During this visit Dennis, one of the most witty individuals I have ever met, asked me one evening on his porch while we were having a beer, “So Dirk, what are you working on?” – “I’m interested in the patterns that underly human travel,” I replied, and told him about my efforts to better understand human mobility and our goal of developing more quantitative models for the spread of epidemics. “It’s just amazingly difficult to compile all this data,” I explained. Dennis paused a while and then inquired, “Do you know this website www.wheresgeorge.com?”

From there, Brockmann has used the bills to study how networks move move and change, infectious diseases and all sorts of other things. Eskin, for one, is surprised at both the popularity and the usefulness of his little project. And when Georgers get together, it still feels like a small club. Here’s NPR again:

At Kabooz’s Bar and Grill at New York’s Penn Station, Jennifer Fishinger is covering her table in stacks of ones. There are 500 $1 bills laid out.

At the next table over, David Henry has his stacks of cash in plastic bags. They’re paper-clipped $1 bills in groups of 10.

If only everyone else’s little hobbies could do the same amount for science.

More from Smithsonian.com:

To Save Money, Ask for Pretty, New Dollar Bills
On the Money

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Tracing $1 Bills Across the United States Is a Surprisingly Useful Hobby

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