remembering history

In honor of Black History Month, and at a time when the current government seems hell-bent on deleting every single thing our first African-American president has done, it's appropriate to remember some of the contributions the first African-American legislators in the 1870s made while they were in office.

Sen. Hiram Rhodes Revels fought against school segregation and other discrimination issues and supported amnesty for former Confederates as part of a general program of reconciliation, as did Rep. Benjamin S. Turner, who also worked against a cotton tax that caused hardship for poor farm workers. Josiah T. Walls introduced bills for education funding and veterans' benefits. Joseph H. Rainey and Robert Brown Elliot were instrumental in the passage of the Enforcement Acts against the Ku Klux Klan and in protection of voting rights and the 1875 Civil Rights Act.

By the way, they were all Republicans, which obviously meant something different at the time.

for genealogists, historians, and the just plain curious

The Internet Archive has views of the microfilm scans of the U.S. census, along with other genealogical records. Just leave the site search set at "All Media Types" and use the county and state name as your search terms. Alternately, you can search using the phrase, "Registers of births, etc" and the name of the state. It's completely free, with no fees or need to set up an account -- as all public documents ought to be.

podcasts (thing 21) revisited

This time adding the RSS feed to the reader (Google Reader) went smoothly. I chose podcasts from BackStory With the American History Guys, a highly interesting and entertaining radio show about various topics in American history.

However, in this case as in many others, it's more convenient simply to have the page marked and go straight to the source, rather than signing in to the reader.

tech that wasn't, isn't, and probably won't be

"#7: Blog about technology." -- Uh, like this whole thing is about technology .... O.k. "... anything technology-related."

The Present? -- Nah, already doing enough of that.

The Past? -- Lots of cool stuff there. The Great Exhibition of 1851. The first fax, demonstrated at the Great Exhibition. Color photography in WWI. Silent movies. The earliest t.v. broadcasts. Old cars. Old planes. Old typewriters. Ancient computers. Old, but not ancient computers. Computers my daughter thinks are ancient. Automata.

The Future? -- Ooo, yeah -- Nanotech. Quantum computing. Space elevators. Humans on Mars. Starships.

How about the technology of a futuristic past? Some of it was real. Some of it was imagined at the time, but never happened. Some of it is being imagined retroactively now. It's called "steampunk."

(Now in handy book form. Check your local public library.)