Tag Archives: historic

Mannahatta – Eric W. Sanderson & Markley Boyer

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Mannahatta

A Natural History of New York City

Eric W. Sanderson & Markley Boyer

Genre: Nature

Price: $11.99

Publish Date: December 1, 2013

Publisher: ABRAMS

Seller: Harry N. Abrams, Inc.


On September 12, 1609, Henry Hudson first set foot on the land that would become Manhattan. Today, it’s difficult to imagine what he saw, but for more than a decade, landscape ecologist Eric Sanderson has been working to do just that. Mannahatta: A Natural History of New York City is the astounding result of those efforts, reconstructing in words and images the wild island that millions now call home. By geographically matching an 18th-century map with one of the modern city, examining volumes of historic documents, and collecting and analyzing scientific data, Sanderson re-creates the forests of Times Square, the meadows of Harlem, and the wetlands of downtown. His lively text guides readers through this abundant landscape, while breathtaking illustrations transport them back in time. Mannahatta is a groundbreaking work that provides not only a window into the past, but also inspiration for the future.

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Mannahatta – Eric W. Sanderson & Markley Boyer

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The World of Laura Ingalls Wilder – Marta McDowell

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The World of Laura Ingalls Wilder

The Frontier Landscapes that Inspired the Little House Books

Marta McDowell

Genre: Nature

Price: $1.99

Publish Date: September 20, 2017

Publisher: Timber Press

Seller: Workman Publishing Co., Inc.


“For gardeners, botanists, and fans of Laura Ingalls Wilder, this book looks at the beloved Little House on the Prairie author’s relationship to nature.” — Publishers Weekly The universal appeal of Laura Ingalls Wilder’s books springs from a life lived in partnership with the land, on farms she and her family settled across the Northeast and Midwest. In this revealing exploration of Wilder’s deep connection with the natural world, Marta McDowell follows the wagon trail of the beloved Little House series. You’ll learn details about Wilder’s life and inspirations, pinpoint the Ingalls and Wilder homestead claims on authentic archival maps, and learn to grow the plants and vegetables featured in the series. Excerpts from Wilder’s books, letters, and diaries bring to light her profound appreciation for the landscapes at the heart of her world. Featuring the beloved illustrations by Helen Sewell and Garth Williams, plus hundreds of historic and contemporary photographs, The World of Laura Ingalls Wilder is a treasure for anyone enchanted by Laura’s wild and beautiful life. 

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The World of Laura Ingalls Wilder – Marta McDowell

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Sorry, Donald: Pittsburgh Thinks You Are Wrong About Climate Change

Mother Jones

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On Thursday, President Donald Trump portrayed his decision to pull the United States out of the historic Paris climate deal as a key part of his campaign pledge to put America first. “I was elected to represent the citizens of Pittsburgh, not Paris,” the president said.

There’s just one problem: The citizens of Pittsburgh are strongly supportive of climate action. According to a recent study from the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication, 68 percent of adults in the Pittsburgh metro area support strict limits on carbon emissions from coal-fired power plants—a key element of the US commitment under the Paris deal. For Allegheny County, which includes Pittsburgh, that number is 74 percent. For Pennsylvania’s 14th Congressional District, which also includes Pittsburgh, it’s 78 percent.

Roughly two-thirds of Pennsylvanians—and Americans as a whole—believe the United States should remain in the Paris agreement, according to the Yale research.

There doesn’t appear to be any data on the popularity of the Paris agreement within Pittsburgh itself, but it’s worth noting that the city’s mayor, Bill Peduto, actually traveled to Paris during the 2015 negotiations to help press for an agreement. “Pittsburgh and other cities are on the front lines of the climate change crisis, and it is our responsibility to address the deep challenges it is creating for us, our children and our grandchildren,” he said in a statement at the time, according to the Pittsburg Post-Gazette.

Peduto took to Twitter Thursday to express his displeasure with Trump’s comments:

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Sorry, Donald: Pittsburgh Thinks You Are Wrong About Climate Change

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Donald Trump Doesn’t Like Dealing With Peasants

Mother Jones

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The Washington Post reports that President Trump prefers to receive his daily intelligence briefing in comic book form, but we already knew that. However, this is new to me:

Most mornings, often at 10:30, sometimes earlier, Trump sits behind the historic Resolute desk and, with a fresh Diet Coke fizzing and papers piled high, receives top-secret updates on the world’s hot spots. The president interrupts his briefers with questions but also with random asides. He asks that the top brass of the intelligence community be present, and he demands brevity.

….Though career intelligence analysts often take the lead in delivering them, Trump likes his political appointees — Pompeo and Coats — to attend, along with national security adviser H.R. McMaster. Pompeo and Coats, whose offices are in McLean, Va., have had to redesign their daily routines so that they spend many mornings at the White House.

It’s appropriate for the intelligence chiefs to be present periodically. But forcing two of them to blow off an hour or two of their time every day isn’t. It’s dumb management.

So why does Trump do it? Mostly for ego and dominance reasons, I suppose. He might also still be convinced that the intelligence community is his enemy and will play games with the orders he gives them. So he wants his own appointees present to make sure they do what he wants.

These are both the marks of an insecure leader. It’s not a good sign.

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Donald Trump Doesn’t Like Dealing With Peasants

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Why Remembering Japanese-American Internment Really Matters This Year

Mother Jones

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Flowers were distributed prior to the interfaith service at the end of the ceremony. Matt Tinoco

As the long line of cars, trucks, and more than two dozen charter buses pulled into dusty, makeshift parking lots in the high desert below California’s snowcapped Eastern Sierra Nevada Mountains on Saturday morning, they were greeted by a National Park Service ranger. “Welcome to Manzanar,” she said. “It is very dry. Drink a lot of water.”

They’d descended on the remote Owens Valley, four hours north of Los Angeles, to commemorate the 75th anniversary of Executive Order 9066—President Franklin Roosevelt’s February 1942 decision to forcibly detain 120,000 Japanese Americans until the end of World War II. Manzanar War Relocation Center, as the facility was formally called, was one of 10 internment camps nationwide; at its peak, the 5,415-acre site held more than 10,000 people in army-style barracks behind barbed wire.

In the language of the Roosevelt’s order, these actions were taken to establish “every possible protection against espionage and against sabotage to national-defense.” Approximately two-thirds of those incarcerated without due process were fully enfranchised American citizens by birth. The remainder were lawful permanent residents.

President Donald Trump’s harsh rhetoric about Muslims, Mexicans, and other immigrants has reignited scrutiny of this dark period in American history. Internment even made headlines in November when Carl Higbie—the former spokesman of the pro-Trump Great America PAC—cited American treatment of Japanese residents in WWII as an example of appropriate action to protect national security.

Banners signifying the 10 camps erected by the US government Matt Tinoco

So perhaps it was no surprise that the 2,500 people who showed up as part of the 48th-annual Manzanar Pilgrimage on Saturday were a record for the event, according to the Park Service. The blowing dust, the whipping wind, and the beating sun all set an elemental tone for the day’s program—a not-so-subtle reminder how, as Manzanar Committee co-chair Bruce Embrey later would tell me, “there was a vicious, just despicable drive to make sure that these camps were sites of suffering. That the people here were going to be isolated psychologically and physically, far from civilian populations, in desolate areas intended to make people suffer.”

Though the camp was almost entirely disassembled after World War II—concrete slabs and the occasional piece of rusted metal are all that remain of the camp’s former living areas—the pilgrims visiting Manzanar walked past full-size reconstructions of the camp’s latrines, its mess halls, and its tar-paper barracks on their way to the day’s ceremony. Wooden Park Service signs marking the locations of long-disappeared structures—a recreation hall, an outdoor theatre, a pet cemetery, an elementary school—dotted the path.

Matt Tinoco

Several people in the crowd wore shirts from various California-based Muslim organizations. Among them was Syed Hussaini, an organizer with CAIR’s Los Angeles chapter. Hussaini explained that, for the past few years, CAIR-LA has participated in the Manzanar Pilgrimage in order to keep alive the memory of internment—it is only briefly mentioned, if at all, in most schools—in the Muslim community.

“We have to stand very vigilantly, and make sure that we are upholding the tenants of democracy. If good people don’t do anything, this is what could happen again,” said Hussaini, who came to Manzanar on one of the three buses CAIR-LA chartered this year.

“When the executive order was signed back in the ’40s, only the Quaker community openly voiced dissent,” said Hussaini, echoing a point made a few minutes earlier by one of the event’s speakers. “But we have seen an outpouring of support from many other faith communities and many other civil rights organizations coming out to say that Trump’s words are not in keeping with American values, and will not stand.”

Preserving the memory of internment is the guiding mission of those who organized Saturday’s pilgrimage, as well as those who work to maintain and expand the facilities at Manzanar National Historic Site. It wasn’t until the 1960s that the generation of Japanese Americans born after internment began pushing for recognition and reparations. The Manzanar Pilgrimage, for example, began in 1969, kicking off decades of work to establish Manzanar as an officially recognized National Historic Site, which finally happened in 1992.

Matt Tinoco

The theme for this year’s pilgrimage was “Never Again, to Anyone, Anywhere,” emblazoned in red text on black banners and T-shirts scattered throughout the event. That message, it seems, is resonating more than ever: In 2016, more than 105,000 people visited Manzanar, a record attendance year. A few employees noted that, since Trump’s election, there have been better, deeper conversations between Manzanar’s guests and those who work at the site.

A couple of hours after the ceremony concluded, several hundred people made their way to Lone Pine High School, about 10 miles south, for Manzanar at Dusk. In the school gymnasium, the Nikkei Student Unions at several LA-area colleges put on a three-hour program that spawn intergenerational conversations about their daytime experiences at the Manzanar Pilgrimage, and to spread the oral tradition of those who spent years confined in the camp.

After a spoken word performance that wove together FDR’s E.O. 9066 with Trump’s E.O. 13769, a.k.a. the travel ban, the 300 attendees broke into two-dozen randomly sorted small groups for an informal, hourlong conversation. Sprawled out on high school’s front lawn in the twilight shadows of the Sierra’s highest peaks, the small group I joined consisted of 10 people, the youngest in high school, the oldest in his 70s.

We listened to the grandson of a woman who lived at Manzanar relay one of her stories about the dust, and how she remembered seeing the outline of her sleeping body sketched out in her bedsheets when she got up each morning. We discussed why people remained quiet about their time in camps for years following their internment. And, by the end of our hour, we were sharing the history of our own personal names, comparing notes about whether our parents gave us a name from the old country or one considered more traditionally “American.”

“History is always relevant. But there are times when what’s happening in the world magnifies that relevancy,” said Alisa Lynch, the chief of interpretation at Manzanar National Historic Site, said to me after Manzanar at Dusk had concluded. “Our job is to share history, not to please whoever’s in office. We’re here to help people learn about the history, and if they want to make parallel connections, they’re free to. People see them. We don’t have to point them out.”

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Why Remembering Japanese-American Internment Really Matters This Year

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Reversing Obama’s course, the Trump administration has declined to ban a dangerous pesticide.

Some kids dream of being a movie star or an astronaut, but not Karina Castillo. “Hurricane Andrew hit when I was 6, and it changed who I was,” she says of the historic storm that devastated a swath of South Florida near where her family lived. She decided right then to become a hurricane forecaster.

The youngest daughter of Nicaraguan immigrants, Castillo pursued her dream with the intensity of the storms that fascinated her, earning two meteorology degrees at the University of Miami, then working at NOAA and the Miami-Dade County Office of Emergency Management. But the young scientist soon made an important discovery: “I didn’t want to sit behind a computer and program models,” she says. “I knew I could help communicate science to the public.”

After a stint developing climate curricula at the Miami-based CLEO Institute, she took a job with Moms Clean Air Force, a national coalition of parents and caretakers fighting climate change and air pollution. Castillo is now the point of contact for Florida’s nearly 100,000 MCAF members, guiding them through meetings with policymakers, media appearances, and other climate and clean-air advocacy work. She also conducts national Latino outreach for the group, work she’s eager to ramp up in 2017.

“In the Latino community, the ideas of legacy and conservation are really important,” says Castillo. “When you talk about protecting children, the mama bear comes out of people. And that’s an unstoppable force.”


Meet all the fixers on this year’s Grist 50.

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Reversing Obama’s course, the Trump administration has declined to ban a dangerous pesticide.

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A Federal Judge Just Issued A Stay Against Donald Trump’s "Muslim Ban"

Mother Jones

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A federal judge in Brooklyn just issued an emergency stay against Donald Trump’s executive order banning immigration from certain predominantly Muslim countries, temporarily allowing people who have landed in the US with a valid visa to remain.

The historic ruling—a stunning first defeat for President Donald Trump coming at the end of his first week in office—protects anyone with a valid visa who arrived after the executive order (or were en route when the ruling was filed) from deportation under Trump’s order.

The director of the ACLU’s Voting Rights Project announced the victory on twitter:

The stay, granted by Judge Ann M. Donnelly of the US District Court, is temporary and a court will have to decide whether to make it permanent at a later date—and it only affects people who have already arrived in the United States or are currently in transit—but for now, people will not be deported because of Trump’s executive order:

The lawsuit was brought by the ACLU on behalf of two men detained at JFK airport in New York. The men were subsequently released.

You can read the ACLU’s original complaint below:

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width: 630,
height: 500,
sidebar: false,
text: false,
pdf: false,
container: “#DV-viewer-3436833-The-ACLU-Is-Suing-To-Stop-Donald-Trump-s-Muslim”
);

This is a developing story. We’ll update as more news comes in.

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A Federal Judge Just Issued A Stay Against Donald Trump’s "Muslim Ban"

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Reuters: 3,000 Neighborhoods Have Higher Lead Levels Than Flint

Mother Jones

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Reuters reports on lead poisoning:

ST. JOSEPH, Missouri — On a sunny November afternoon in this historic city, birthplace of the Pony Express and death spot of Jesse James, Lauranda Mignery watched her son Kadin, 2, dig in their front yard. As he played, she scolded him for putting his fingers in his mouth.

In explanation, she pointed to the peeling paint on her old house. Kadin, she said, has been diagnosed with lead poisoning. He has lots of company: Within 15 blocks of his house, at least 120 small children have been poisoned since 2010, making the neighborhood among the most toxic in Missouri.

Of course, it’s not just St. Joseph. Reuters got hold of neighborhood-level lead testing records and found thousands of high-lead communities across the country:

Reuters found nearly 3,000 areas with recently recorded lead poisoning rates at least double those in Flint during the peak of that city’s contamination crisis. And more than 1,100 of these communities had a rate of elevated blood tests at least four times higher.

The poisoned places on this map stretch from Warren, Pennsylvania, a town on the Allegheny River where 36 percent of children tested had high lead levels, to a zip code on Goat Island, Texas, where a quarter of tests showed poisoning. In some pockets of Baltimore, Cleveland and Philadelphia, where lead poisoning has spanned generations, the rate of elevated tests over the last decade was 40 to 50 percent.

Here’s a map of the worst hotspots in the country:

The whole piece is worth reading. My only disappointment is that the authors spent most of the article talking about the dangers of lead paint. That’s worth talking about, but lead-saturated soil is even more worth talking about. That’s why Lauranda Mignery doesn’t want her son digging in their front yard: there may not be any paint there, but there’s probably lots of old lead that settled in the soil decades ago when we were all burning leaded gasoline.

Sadly, there’s barely any money in the federal budget these days for testing, let alone remediation. It would cost tens of billions of dollars to clean up all the old lead, which is mostly a problem in poor communities populated by people of color. And though it’s not polite to say this, nobody cares enough about them to spend tens of billions of dollars.

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Reuters: 3,000 Neighborhoods Have Higher Lead Levels Than Flint

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Will Orange County Finally Turn Blue This Year?

Mother Jones

Orange County, California. Conservative suburbia. Reagan country. Ground zero for decades of cold warrior political domination. And above all, a reliable generator of Republican votes and Republican fundraising. But just as the demographics of America have been changing, so have the demographics of this famous conservative bastion:

In 1990, whites made up nearly two-thirds of the county’s population. Now, they are a minority. The county’s Latino and Asian populations have grown enormously—some in low-income neighborhoods, particularly in Santa Ana, but many in newly diverse, affluent communities.

As the region has grown more diverse, GOP margins have narrowed…Trump’s disparaging rhetoric about Mexicans and Muslims, his breaks with past Republican stands on trade and the overall tone of his campaign seem likely to create the final tipping point this month.

There are only seven days to go before we find out if Trump manages this historic task. It would be fitting if he’s the one to put the final nail in the coffin of 80 years of GOP domination of my hometown. Only seven days!

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Will Orange County Finally Turn Blue This Year?

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When Bruce Springsteen Helped Destroy the Berlin Wall

Mother Jones

The fall of the Berlin Wall has been attributed to lots of things, from Mikhail Gorbachev’s reforms and Ronald Reagan’s famous plea to the ineptitude of the Politiburo and the collective courage of the East German protesters. But there’s little doubt that David Bowie and Bruce Springsteen did their own small part.

When Bowie died this past January, the German Foreign Office noted as much in a memorial tweet: “Good-bye, David Bowie. You are now among #Heroes. Thank you for helping to bring down the #wall.” For Springsteen’s role, you can read the 2013 book Rocking the Wall: Bruce Springsteen—The Berlin Concert That Changed the World. But Springsteen’s recent memoir, Born to Run, offers his full account of that epic concert for the first time.

Many Americans are surprised to learn that our rock stars were even allowed to play in East Germany while the wall, constructed in 1961, remained in place. But Communist Party leaders, noting the tremendous buildup of anger and tension among their young people during the Gorbachev “glasnost” era, decided to provide a safety valve of sorts by allowing major rock concerts starting in 1987. Tens of thousands of East German kids were already flocking to the wall to listen as Bowie and others played just on the other side—and there had been clashes between the music-starved youth and East German police.

Bowie’s June 1987 performance was remarkable on several levels. The stage was set up in West Berlin, very close to the wall, with the old Reichstag building as a backdrop. Unlike most Western performers, he had a fitting song for the occasion: “Heroes,” written a few years earlier and purportedly inspired by Bowie’s time living in Berlin. The line about standing by the wall while “the guns shot above our heads” may refer to dramatic attempts by East Germans to escape the East—which happens to be the subject of my new book, The Tunnels: Escapes Under the Berlin Wall and the Historic Films the JFK White House Tried to Kill. (You can watch Bowie’s performance that day on YouTube.) And here, from a 2003 interview, is how he described it:

It was one of the most emotional performances I’ve ever done. I was in tears…And there were thousands on the other side that had come close to the wall. So it was like a double concert where the wall was the division. And we would hear them cheering and singing along from the other side. God, even now I get choked up. When we did “Heroes” it really felt anthemic, almost like a prayer. However well we do it these days, it’s almost like walking through it compared to that night, because it meant so much more. That’s the town where it was written, and that’s the particular situation that it was written about.

By then, Bob Dylan had been invited by a youth arm of the Communist Party to play in Treptower Park in the East on September 17, 1987, along with touring mates Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers and Roger McGuinn. Protests were building against the regime and the wall, and East German officials hoped to defuse tensions with a few signs of openness.

Naturally, the Stasi (East Germany’s notorious secret police) were on top of it. Their six-page preview was filed at their headquarters under “Robert Zimmerman, No. HA XX 17578.” It mainly covered logistics and security—no secret bugging of Dylan, apparently—and the dispersal of 81,000 tickets, with at least one-third going to party officials and their pals. The Stasi didn’t seem too worried that Dylan, then in a down period in his career, would prove to be a rabble-rouser, as he was merely “an old master of rock” with no particular “resonance” with the youth of the day. The crowd, they predicted, would be mostly middle-aged and older. Dylan would act in a “disciplined” way and not cause undo “emotions.”

In the end, the gig played out pretty much as the Stasi had anticipated. By most accounts, Dylan—whose lyrical work just earned him the 2016 Nobel Prize for literature—gave a rather lackluster performance (his norm for the time), consisting of a couple of Christian tunes mixed in with hits like “Blowin’ in the Wind,” “Rainy Day Women” and “Like a Rolling Stone.” He reportedly did not speak a single word from the stage.

This was not the case with Springsteen, who arrived in East Berlin 10 months later to play his biggest concert ever. More than 200,000 showed up, twice what Dylan had attracted. Springsteen opened, pointedly, with “Badlands,” but the indisputable highlight was his cover of “Chimes of Freedom,” a Dylan tune that Dylan himself had overlooked. The show, which in typical Springsteen style lasted nearly four hours, was beamed to millions of East Germans via state television. Many middle-aged Germans I interviewed for my book fondly recalled attending the performance or watching it on TV. “It was a nail in the coffin for East Germany,” one fan told the Guardian years later.

In Born to Run, Springsteen recounts a previous visit to East Berlin with bandmate Steve Van Zandt. “You could feel the boot,” he recalls. The wall, in Springsteen’s view, seemed almost “pornographic.” The experience helped shock the then-apolitical Van Zandt into decades of activism. “The power of the wall that split the world in two, its blunt, ugly, mesmerizing realness, couldn’t be underestimated,” Springsteen writes. “It was an offense to humanity.”

When Springsteen returned to East Berlin for his epic 1988 show, as I note in my own book, he unhappily discovered that the state was billing it as a “concert for the Sandinistas,” the pro-Communist Nicaraguans. So he delivered an impassioned speech. His German was grade-school level, but he got the point across: “I’m not here for any government. I’ve come to play rock and roll for you in the hope that one day all the barriers will be torn down.” East German officials backstage had somehow learned about Bruce’s original statement, which included the explosive word “walls,” and Springsteen’s manager, Jon Landau, had convinced him at the last minute to change it to “barriers.” But after finishing his statement, Springsteen quickly launched into “Chimes of Freedom,” which includes the key reference: “while the walls were tightening.”

The next day, he and the band “partied” at the East Berlin consulate, Springsteen writes, before heading back to the West to play a show for a mere 17,000 people—which “felt a lot less dramatic than what we’d just experienced.” Referring to the “stakes” of rock and roll, he writes, “The higher they’re pushed, the deeper and more thrilling the moment becomes. In East Germany in 1988, the center of the table was loaded down with a winner-take-all bounty that would explode into the liberating destruction of the Berlin Wall by the people.”

German historian Gerd Dietrich would later tell Rocking the Wall author Erik Kirschbaum, “Springsteen’s concert and speech certainly contributed in a large sense to the events leading up to the fall of the wall. It made people more eager for more and more change,” he said. “Springsteen aroused a greater interest in the West. It showed people how locked up they really were.”

As Springsteen himself would later put it, “Once in a while you play a place, you play a show that ends up staying inside of you, living with you for the rest of your life. East Berlin in 1988 was certainly one of them.”

Greg Mitchell is the author of The Tunnels: Escapes Under the Berlin Wall and the Historic Films the JFK White House Tried to Kill.

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When Bruce Springsteen Helped Destroy the Berlin Wall

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