Recent content by BClick

And passed to @Nanwe

Looks great, thx

This one's less about famous people and more about the circumstances - during the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge occupation, the Bundys' men almost shot the reporter embedded with them, because he'd tried to open a door that was off-limits and the folks on the other side had assumed he was a...

There is always "Hunter S. Thompson blows himself and Nixon up by smoking near a refueling jet engine," although who knows how much of a tall tale that was.

I suppose "more money for NASA" is too obvious

I'm not very knowledgeable about Canadian history but I know this area was claimed by at least some people in New York, as part of those "sea to sea" grants many of the American colonists believed in. The prospect of having exclusive control over the Great Lakes might make NY very reluctant to...

This is fascinating. I've heard of Afrofuturism as a cultural movement (Sun-Ra, Parliament-Funkadelic) but never of this real life story. I wonder whether Terry Bisson was inspired by the Zambian space program when he had New Afrika be the first ones to Mars in that book I mentioned in my...

For those unfamiliar, the Hetch Hetchy Valley lies towards the northern end of Yosemite National Park. Formed by the Tuolumne River, which flows from the glaciers of the Sierra down into the Central Valley of California, it resembles nothing so much as a smaller version of the famous Yosemite...

I'm just half-remembering this from my college notes, but didn't Freud pretty thoroughly revise his theories in 1913 to generalize the Oedipus complex to a general examination of the dawn of our selfhood, and then again after WWI to introduce eros and thanatos? I think you're right in that his...

There were Irish Nationalist political parties active in the Irish diaspora communities in England and Scotland (the ones in Liverpool continued to elect an MP to the UK Parliament after Irish independence), not sure about anywhere else. I think in the States it was mostly fraternal and...

If there were no Democrats and the dominant Republicans were sufficiently nativist not to allow immigrant communities to join and affiliate to their organization, yeah, the most likely result seems like it would be an earlier Socialist Party or some other form of general opposition party. But...

I've always loved the idea of American branches of international political movements popping up among immigrant communities if the Democrats vanished in the North. Imagine the Irish Parliamentary Party and Jewish Labor Bund as players in New York politics. I don't know how realistic this would...

Davis Bacon Teaches Typing

Fantastic stuff as always Gary. Looking forward to the next one - will be interesting to compare Liberia's history with these nominally similar stories.

I'm sure it would become a point of differentiation in the Anglosphere. In Canada and Australia I could see spelling being a less politically significant cousin of the debate over a republic - a sort of culture-war proxy for broader questions of Commonwealth identity. Oh yeah, I very much...