Daily Archives: June 23, 2021

WAVERLY, Iowa (KWWL)--- The Waverly Fire Department has a new home for a truck previously used in the department 100 years ago.

The American LaFrance was the first "new" truck used by Waverly Fire in 1921.

After the truck retired service it was sold to Redfield, Iowa, who then later sold it to Dale Miracle. After that, it stayed with a family in Indianola for sixty years.

After three years of negotiations the century-old vehicle finally wheeled its way back home to the Waverly Fire Department.

Assistant Fire Chief Kevin Miller says it's about doing what you can to bring history home.

"Anytime you can get your history back, you only get one shot at that," Miller said. "There's always another house or another car, but in this case, there isn't another truck. This is documented that this is our first piece of equipment."

Miller feels this piece of history gives to the community as well as the fire department's families, as many of them have been involved for generations.

"It's not just in the equipment you see that tradition, it's also in our personal lives," he said.

Waverly Fire Department Training Officer Jim Mckenzie, has 182 years of combined service between all the generations of his family.

"It shows a rich dedication and history of the Waverly Fire department," Mckenzie said.

Miller hopes to restore the truck as soon as possible so it can "serve Waverly once again," whether that be for parades, funerals or weddings.

The public can see the truck at Waverly's Fire Museum. It's alongside two other important trucks from the department's history.

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Waverly Fire Department brings home history with 100-year-old truck - kwwl.com

Police dog bites send thousands of people to emergency rooms every year.

Studies show that in some places they have been disproportionately Black. That may not be a coincidence, history shows.

Mauled, a new short film produced by Reckon examines how dogs have been used to terrorize and control Black people and communities of color for centuries.

The documentary film is based on reporting from a year-long investigation by AL.com, The Marshall Project, USA Today, IndyStar and the Invisible Institute. The collaboration won the 2021 Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting.

It begins with an account from Ashley White, who was 26-years-old in 2015 when she was mauled by a police dog in Talladega. A local attorney who represented victims of police dogs in the town, said the department sought out a dog that would attack Black members of their community.

The film features Charlton Yingling, a history professor at the University of Louisville, who points to a long history in the Americas -- dating back to the 1520s -- of using dogs to enforce racial hierarchies and to extract and exploit Black labor.

Tyler D. Parry, a history professor at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, who co-authored a book on the subject with Yingling, said dogs became central to the penitentiary system, including to capture escaped prisoners, and suppress civil rights demonstrations and attack protesters in cities such as Birmingham.

No national database of police dog bites exists, and there is little accountability or redress available for victims. Police officers are often shielded from liability and jurors generally favor the dogs.

The Marshall Project and AL.com will continue their reporting on police dog attacks. You can share your experience with police dogs here.

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Ugly history of using dogs to attack, suppress Black people told in new documentary - AL.com

An undated photo of Broadbent's General Store in Lehi. Various photos and other items from the Broadbent family will soon be digitized thanks to a grant by a state agency issued last week. (City of Lehi)

Editor's note: This article is a part of a series reviewing Utah and U.S. history for KSL.com's Historic section.

SALT LAKE CITY Ever wanted to watch a jazz legend perform in Cedar City or read what Salt Lake County commissioners met about back in 1852? You may soon be in luck.

The Utah State Historical Records Advisory Board, under the Utah Division of Archives and Records Service, last week approved a little more than $25,000 in grants that will go toward six organizations working to digitize pieces of Utah history and make it more accessible.

With the funding, thousands of documents from across the state will soon be made better available as they are converted from photos, film and paperwork to digital formats.

"Digitization makes records really, really accessible to the public," said Mahala Ruddell, an archivist with the Utah Division of Archives and Records Service and executive secretary for the board. "For many historical records that are on film ... even old video cassette tapes, that kind of footage is really prone to degradation and decay. That film is not forever, so being able to pull that record to digitize it, I think, is really important."

The Hutchings Museum in Lehi received the largest grant from the board this year. It approved a $7,500 grant to digitize items from the Broadbent Collection, which features various items from a prominent family in Lehi history.

Broadbent's General Store opened in 1882 and operated in Lehi for 135 years before it closed in 2017, according to the city. The collection to be digitized includes about 9,000 photos, maps and other records from Lehi history, officials with the Utah Division of Archives and Records Service said.

Meanwhile, the Moab Museum received $5,196 to digitize images from the massive Francis "Fran" and Terby Barnes Collection. Their collection features more than 50,000 photos of southern Utah landscapes ranging from 1960 to 2008, according to the museum. The collection also includes maps and written works from the lives of the prolific lives of the Moab couple.

Fran Barnes was credited with writing 46 books about the desert landscapes and history of southeast Utah, while Terby Barnes served on both the Grand County Travel Council and the Bureau of Land Management Advisory Board in her lifetime.

"The Fran and Terby Barnes Photograph Archive is an invaluable display of the Barnes' efforts to promote the history of Moab and the Four Corners region a region that's popularity has surpassed, in many towns (especially Moab) its infrastructure many times over in recent years," the museum wrote. "The collection highlights backcountry areas which are at risk due to commercial development and resource extraction."

The board also granted Southern Utah University $4,627 to digitize 16mm film reels that document student life dating back to when it was still called Branch Agricultural Culture in 1947 and ending when it was Southern Utah State College in 1970. Some of the films include a trip to Zion National Park in 1948, a Louis Armstrong concert in 1962 and a taping of "Taming of the Shrew" from the inaugural year of the Utah Shakespeare Festival in 1961.

Other items include commencement ceremonies in 1949 and 1962. State officials said the footage should be available in time for the 60th anniversary of the Shakespeare Festival this year and the 125th anniversary of SUU's founding, which is next year.

The Duchesne County Library received $4,000 to preserve its cemetery database and move it to cloud storage. The database holds "extensive" records from the county's 14 cemeteries, including pictures of gravestones and obituaries.

Another $2,240 went toward the Salt Lake County Archives to help digitize minutes from county commission meetings dating all the way back to 1852. The documents include all sorts of discussions and decisions involving zoning, roads, schools, election districts, business licenses and irrigation canals.

The final grant went toward the Cache Daughters of Utah Pioneers Museum in Logan. The museum is working to digitize pioneer histories written between 1930 and 1970, according to the Division of Archives and Records Service.

Ruddell explained the grants are approved by the Utah State Historical Records Advisory Board annually from funds received by National Archives and Records Administration. Every year, the board receives about $25,000 to $30,000 it can reapportion to various nonprofits in the state that qualify for the grants.

Board members then use a rubric to pick the projects that best fit state and federal guidelines but are also beneficial for the general public.

Though the pieces will soon be digitized, Ruddell said there will still be plenty of care provided to preserve digital collections that always run the threat of being erased. Still, it offers additional protection for pieces that may have otherwise disappeared from existence.

"Once something is digitized, you have to care for it with sort of just the same amount of detail that you would a physical collection," she said. "You need to make sure the files you have are kept safe and you have lots of backup copies."

Once converted to a digital format, the organization overseeing a project will have the ability to make it available in the way it best sees fit, but there will be several access points. For example, Ruddell said the Moab Museum will have photos available online while Salt Lake County will work with the state archives offices to make sure it's public information.

Many items will also eventually be available through the Mountain West Digital Library.

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Board grants $25K to digitize pieces of Utah history. Here's what is getting preserved - KSL.com

On his very first day in office the new President Biden sent a comprehensive immigration bill to Congress to fulfill one of his major campaign promises. Will it work this time? A short look back at history shows just how difficult immigration reform can be. There have been two attempts at comprehensive immigration reform in the 21st century: one in 2007 and one in 2013. In both instances the political environment started out looking promising, and in both instances the legislation failed.

In 2006 there was every reason to be optimistic about the prospects for immigration reform. President George W. Bush was in his second term and thus had nothing to fear from a far-right challenge for his partys nomination. In addition, as a former governor of Texas, he had great familiarity with the issue and wanted very much to do something about it. He had bipartisan support in the Senate from two of its most revered members: Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) and Sen. Ted Kennedy (D-MA). In the 2006 elections, Democrats took control and Rep. Nancy Pelosi (CA) became the first woman speaker of the House. There was reason to assume that a strong, bipartisan coalition could be put together in favor of a comprehensive bill.

But that coalition never happened.

In the winter and spring of 2006 pro-immigration reform groups, many of them Mexican-American political action organizations, decided that they could help the prospect of the Comprehensive Immigration Reform Act by organizing a series of high-profile national marches. Not content with the fact that President George W. Bush and most of the liberals in the Senate, including Senator Ted Kennedy, were planning to work together on a bipartisan bill, organizers assumed that bringing the fight out of Washington and to the country would help their cause.

All through the spring of 2006 organizers put together mega-events. A march in Chicago drew 100,000 marchers. It was followed by demonstrations in Tampa, Houston, Dallas and even Salt Lake City. The biggest demonstration of all took place in Los Angeles on March 25, 2006, when more than 500,000 people marched and attended rallies at the Civic Center and in MacArthur Park. Even more marches took place on May Day (May 1) a day otherwise known as International Workers Daya traditional time of demonstrations for trade unions and other left-wing political causes.

The marches were widely covered by a mostly favorable media. Marchers waved American flags (some upside downwhich can be a sign of distress or of disrespect) and Mexican flags. Signs were in Spanish and EnglishSi se puede was a popular one, as was Today we march, tomorrow we vote. In both breadth and enthusiasm, these marches evoked the large civil rights demonstrations of the 1960s.

However, the consensus immediately after the fact was that the demonstrations backfired. Even though organizers had tried to get marchers to leave the Mexican flags at home, their argument was only partially successful against arguments about ethnic pride. The Federation for American Immigration Reform, an anti-immigration group, saw its membership increase. Members of Congress felt the backlash. Republican lawmakers saw their offices flooded with phone calls as a result of the marches. Senator Trent Lott (R-MS) said They lost me, when I saw so many Mexican flags.[1] The size and magnitude of the demonstrations had some kind of backfire effect, said John McLoughlin, a Republican pollster working for House members and Senators seeking re-election.

With a large chunk of the Republican Party energized by their nativist base to oppose the 2007 bill, President Bush needed solid Democratic support. But the Democrats had their own factional problems. In April 2006 the Chairman of the Democratic National Committee, Howard Dean, referred to the guest worker provisions in the bill as indentured servitude. And AFL-CIO President John Sweeny openly opposed the guest worker provisions as well. Opposition came from Black lawmakers too. Speaking on National Public Radio, political scientist Ron Walters pointed to the response of the Congressional Black Caucus to a liberal immigration bill produced by one of its own members, Sheila Jackson Lee of Texas. Only 9 of the 43 caucus members supported it.

The factional divides among House Democrats were present among Democratic voters as well. A 2005 Pew poll asked Democrats questions about immigration and divided them into liberals, conservatives and disadvantaged democrats (referring to economic disadvantage). Note the stark differences between liberals and both disadvantaged Democrats and conservatives.

Table 1: Other Fissures in the Democratic Coalition (Source: Pew Research Center)

The immigration bill died in the summer of 2007 when proponents failed to garner the 60 votes in the Senate required to move the bill forward. And in the House, Speaker Pelosi needed 50 to 70 Republican votes to move forward but a resolution in the Republican conference opposing the Senate bill passed by 114 to 21. She decided not to bring it to the floor.

It took six years before a second comprehensive immigration bill was introduced into Congress. As in 2007, many political experts thought that this time the stars were aligned. Democrats had picked up seats in the Senate in the 2012 elections that gave them a comfortable majority. And Democratic President Barack Obama had won a second term in office with a strong backing from Hispanic voters, leading national Republicans to discuss the need to deal with immigration in the face of the growing Hispanic vote. While Republicans still controlled the House, Democrats had picked up seats. On June 27, 2013, Senate bill 744, a second comprehensive immigration bill, passed the Senate on a 68 to 32 vote. The bill had been created by a bipartisan gang of 8 four Democratic senators and four Republican senatorsand its passage created the expectation that there would be quick action in the House as well.[2]

Contributing to this optimism was the fact that this time around the Democratic coalition was less divided. In the six years since failure of the 2007 legislation, the labor movement had changed and included many more Hispanics in its membership. Rick Trumka, President of the AFL-CIO had this to say about the new legislation:

Our role is to make sure that road map leads to citizenship achievable not only in theory but in fact. Workers care for the elderly, mow our lawns or drive our taxis, work hard and deserve a reliable road map to citizenship. And so the labor movements entire grassroots structure will be mobilized throughout this process and across this country to make sure the road map is inclusive.

The Congressional Black Caucus was a bit less enthusiastic but still expressed support for the effort while complaining that the Diversity Visa Program had been eliminated.[3] And the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the agricultural lobby were on board as well.

Meanwhile, the Obama administration had continued efforts begun during the Bush administration to prove that the United States could police the borders. In 2013 federal prosecutions for immigration crimes reached an all-time high.

But Obamas get-tough actions at the border infuriated Hispanic activists and failed to convince some Republicans that the border was under control.

If the factions of the Democratic Party had softened in the years between 2007 and 2013, the factions in the Republican Party had hardened. In 2013, Speaker John Boehner was facing significant intra-party infighting, largely due to the growing voice of the Tea Party activists in his conferencea group that would contribute to his historic resignation just two years later. To please the hard-liners in his party he rejected the Senate bill in favor of a series of smaller bills and then, when suspicion was that these smaller bills would go to conference with the hated Senate bill, he had to promise not to compromise.

And then, as is so often the case in politics, something happened that on the face of it had nothing to do with immigration reform but that killed it nonetheless. Majority Leader Eric Cantor, widely expected to succeed Boehner as speaker, lost his Republican primary to a right-wing tea party supporter who among other things campaigned on opposition to immigration reform. Republicans were spooked by Cantors loss. If a member of the leadership could lose to an unknown Tea Party challenger, they could too. Boehner never brought the legislation to the floor, in spite of the fact that it probably could have passed with a united Democratic caucus and some more moderate business-oriented Republicans.

What will happen this time around is anyones guess. Immigration reform has always had a way of eluding the best-laid plans of powerful people. The Republican Party is still in limbo, with many members clearly anti-immigrant and others fearful of an anti-immigrant primary electorate. While Democrats are less divided than Republicans, their margins are so small that they cant afford to lose anyone.

Immigration reform may be as difficult in the third decade of the 21st century as it was in the first and second. This is in part because of a fundamental paradox. On the one hand, the United States is a country of immigrants; on the other hand, it is a country that has always been worried about being overrun by immigrants. And this makes reform especially difficult.

[1] Otis L. Graham Jr. Immigration Reform and Americas Unchosen Future (Bloomington Indiana, Author House 2008), page 437.

[2] The Democrats were: Michael Bennett (CO) Dick Durbin (ILL) Bob Menendez (NJ) and Chuck Schumer (NY). The Republicans were: Lindsey Graham (South Carolina), Jeff Flake (AZ) John McCain (AZ) and Marco Rubio (FLA)

[3] The Diversity Visa Program is a lottery for obtaining a green card to work in the United States.

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Can Biden pass immigration reform? History says it will be tough - Brookings Institution

Inflation is on the rise, hitting some of the highest levels seen since the early 1980s. Back then, the Federal Reserves Paul Volcker killed off rampant price rises, hitting the economy hard initially, but ushering in decades of repeated rallies in stocks and bonds.

If todays post Covid-19 pandemic inflation proves sticky, will it be like the years before Volcker, or could it be more like the happier growth that followed World War II? These periods hold lessons about how financial markets might perform.

After World War II, stocks did well despite bouts of inflation. But that only lasted until the mid-1960s. Returns for stocks and Treasurys then struggled until after the 1970s inflation was crushed.

One reason why stocks did well in the 1950s was that money flowed into the market as pension funds and other institutions bought equities for the first time, according to Ian Harnett, chief investment strategist at Absolute Strategy Research. That helped push down the so-called equity-risk premium, which measures the extra returns stock investors demand over government bonds for the risk of losing their money.

In the 1970s, the risk premium rose again and stocks underperformed when inflation took hold. The clues to why this happened are elsewhere in the economic backdrop.

Read more:

What Investors Can Learn From the History of Inflation - The Wall Street Journal

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The Top 15 best rookie season players in NY Giants history

The NY Giants have had many successful players play for the franchise.

Several of those players have shown it all during their rookie season with the team.

From Phil Simms making a run at Rookie of The Year in 1979 to Odell Beckham Jr. immediately emerging as one of the NFLs premier wide receivers, and most dangerous deep threats in the vertical passing game, several NY Giants have made impressive first impressions as rookies.

In his rookie season, Diehl started all 16 games, becoming the first Giants rookie to do so since Mark Bavaro in 1985. He was the only rookie to start at the same position each game during the 2003 season.

Simms won his first five starts of his rookie year. He was 6-4 as a starter, threw for 1,743 yards and 13 touchdown passes, and was named to the NFL All-Rookie team. He was also a runner-up for Rookie of the Year.

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Ranking the top 15 NY Giants rookie seasons in team history - GMEN HQ

This article originally appeared inZcalo Public Square.

If you were a devoted reader of Soybean Digest in the middle decades of the last centurylikely a farmer who was either growing soybeans or seriously considering ityou might have witnessed a quiet invasion taking place on the series of maps printed in conjunction with the magazines annual review of new soy cultivars.

Cultivars, or cultivated varieties, are variants of domesticated plants adapted to specific uses, climates, and soils. Soybean Digest printed the names of varieties recommended for specific locations over an outline map of the U.S. that extended far enough west to include a corner of Texas.

Unlike names for apples or other public-facing produce, the names for soy cultivars were not intended to entice consumers with appetizing imagery. Instead, they were a pragmatic means to keep a wealth of genetic lineages straight: single proper names chosen, it often seemed, for reasons known only to the breeders. What to make of Clark and Kent, often recommended for neighboring counties in the North? Or, in the South, such varieties as S-100, CNS, and JEW 45 (bred by South Carolina farmer John E. Wannamaker, who lent his initials)?

There were, however, discernible shifts in naming practices. In the early 1900s, when the USDA began taking an active hand in importing thousands of samples of soybeans from Asia and sorting them into cultivars for American farmers, names indicating geographic origin, such as Peking, were common. By the late 1940s, names like Mandarin and Hongkong had become increasingly rare. Breeders instead chose names for soybeans, still widely regarded as a botanical immigrants, that more firmly rooted them on American soil. Northern breeders favored the names of presidentsAdams, Madison, Lincolnand tribal nations: Chippewa, Blackhawk, Ottawa. Southern names of the time included Arksoy, Volstate (for Tennessee, the Volunteer State), and Pelican (in honor of South Carolinas state bird).

These practices were inconsistent, though, next to one that emerged in the South in the mid-1950s that embodied a very specific regional identity. Somehow, a century after losing the Civil War, Confederate generals had returnedat least on the inside pages of an obscure trade journal. A new form of geographic identity was appearing in the South, beginning with a smattering of Jackson and Lee cultivars. By the last map of the series, in 1966, the rout of older varieties was nearly complete. They were crowded out by Hood, Hill, Hampton, Stuart, Bragg, Hardee, and Pickett.

This was not simply an invasion on paper. It pointed to a dramatic transformation of Southern agriculture, in which new soybean varieties played a major role once held by cotton. It was also a vivid indication of how this transformation largely excluded African Americans sharecroppers, who were being actively pushed off the land.

As much as the Confederate cultivars reflected large structural forces at play, they were largely the work of a single man, responsible both for the painstaking scientific work it took to breed them and for the choice of this particular naming practice. Edgar E. Hartwig was not a born Southerner. He grew up in Minnesota and received his Ph.D. in agronomy from the University of Illinois. He joined the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) in 1941. Founded in its current form during the Civil War, the USDA was tasked with conducting research of direct benefit to American farmers, often in cooperation with state agricultural research stations.

In 1948, Hartwig was assigned to oversee the cooperative soybean breeding program for 12 Southern states: the 11 former Confederate states, plus Oklahoma. The North/South divide in cultivar breeding was not unusual. Soybeans, like many crops, are sensitive to conditions that vary markedly from north to south, such as summer daylength and the length of the growing season. An unintended consequence: soybean breeding did rather precisely map onto American sectional divisions.

Hartwigs outsized influence on Southern soybeans was, in part, due to his consummate skill at the exacting and time-consuming technique of backcrossing. Previous generations of American soy breeders had largely focused on sorting through existing lineages from the rich genetic heritage of Asia to find those well adapted to the countrys needs. Backcrossing was a more active form of breeding, in which two variants were mated, and then one was bred with successive generations of the resulting crosses until the others contribution was diluted to a small cluster of genes or even a single desirable trait.

This ability to mix and match genes was crucial for the success of soybeans in the South. Earlier in the 20th century, existing cultivars in the region were generally short and bushy plants, grown for hay. Increasingly, however, the real money in soybeans was coming from growing beans that could be processed into oil and animal feed. This required plants tall enough to be harvested by combines, pods not easily shattered by mechanical harvesting, and high yields of long-maturing beans rich in fat and protein. Northern cultivars had these traits, but breeders needed to combine these qualities with adaptations to Southern conditions, including shorter summer days and more numerous plant diseases. Hartwig was adept at the work, and as his cultivars went into circulation, soybean acreage in the 12 states in his program increased sixfold between 1954 to 1974 to almost 16 million acres, one quarter of the nations total at the time.

While the supply of new cultivars was crucial for this growth, it was only because fundamental changes in the agricultural economy of the South had created demand. New Orleans, for instance, grabbed a big share of the growing soybean export market to Europe, which sought the crop to help raise the postwar standard of living through increased meat production. Initially, this benefitted Midwestern farmers who could ship down the Mississippi, but Southern farmers soon recognized the opportunity as well. Soy acreage in Louisiana accordingly shot up from 73,000 acres in 1954 to 1.8 million in 1974. This period also saw the rise of the broiler belt, ranging from Arkansas, down into the Gulf states, and up through Georgia and the Carolinas, where caged chickens bred for breast meat were fattened on soy-enriched feed. The poultry industry helped Georgias soy acreage increase by a factor of 31 in 20 years.

Above all, soy appealed to farmers because it was not cotton. For decades, the region had struggled with gluts of its main cash crop and consequent low prices. The government periodically attempted to limit supply through acreage allotments and marketing quotas, but with limited success. Reformers had long sought to convert the Souths cotton monoculture to mixed rotations of small grains, oats, and winter wheat, but the Southern landowners were uninterested in any system that did not provide them a robust cash flow. This is what Hartwigs soybeans provided, enabling them to cut back cotton production. By 1960, American farmers were planting a little more than 15 million acres of cotton, down from almost 45 million acres at the crops peak in the 1920s.

This might provide the best clue for Hartwigs commitment to naming cultivars after Confederate generals. (Beyond acknowledging the obvious fact that this was his practice, he never publicly discussed his reasons.) As an agricultural modernizer, he was selling Southern landowners on an entirely new, mechanized system of agriculture, of which soybeans were only one element. Confederate generals, memorialized throughout the region in monuments and the names of parks, towns, and military bases, were a readily available form of nostalgia to drape over disruptive innovation.

Key to the effectiveness of this pitch was the race of the intended audience, which remained a constant as the region shifted from sharecropping to mechanized farming. Nearly 90 percent of landowners were white, who were initially attracted to the prospect of increased earnings. With cotton, they had customarily sold the fiber while allowing their tenants to sell the cottonseed to local mills. Now they could dispense with the labor of sharecroppers and keep the profits from soybeans for themselves. As a Louisiana State University bulletin calculated in 1943, it took 184 hours of labor for each acre of cotton, compared to 10 hours for soybeans.

The tradeoff was the need to invest more heavily in equipment, such as combines, as well as fertilizersparticularly potash and phosphatesand pesticides. As Hartwig emphasized in the many articles he wrote for such venues as Soybean Digest, the large yield of beans promised by his new varieties required this kind of capital investment. At a meeting of farmers in 1975, he in fact chided them for only getting 22 bushels of beans per acre. You ought to get 35, he told them. At the same meeting, however, an agricultural economist reported that soybean processors had soybean meal coming out of their ears in a tight buyers market, indicating that there was no guarantee that farmers would recoup their investment.

This highly competitive environment cut both ways. As the number of farm operators decreased by more than half between 1954 and 1987, the number of farms in the South partly or fully owned by their operators rose from 71 percent to 91 percent, making the regions agriculture in this sense more equal. But it was those best positioned to receive credit and government aid who benefitted. Such farmers were predominantly white. African Americans, poorer to begin with, suffered from discriminatory practices by both private and public lenders, notably the Farmers Home Administration, which systematically shut out Black applicants from government loans.

In 1920 there were 920,000 nonwhite farms in the South, a majority of them operated by tenants. In 1954, this had fallen to 430,000, or 26 percent of the regions farms. By 1987, the number would drop to a mere 27,000, or 3 percent of farms in the South. This decline represented the virtual disappearance of Black sharecroppers, but also of tens of thousands of Black owner-operators unable to compete on a fair basis. Ten years later, the number was 19,000.

So as Southern agriculture became less unequal, it also became much whiter. Even at the peak of the Civil Rights Movement, Hartwig could avoid pushback from Black farmers over his choice of symbolism.

The influence of the Confederate cultivars waned after the 1970s, when commercial seed developersgiven more patent rights to their seeds through the Plant Variety Protection Actlargely took the reins from USDA breeders like Hartwig. With a deluge of new cultivars, proper names were supplanted by alphanumerical designations like AG2702 and 5344STS.

In the meantime, Hartwig persisted in his enthusiasm for Confederate cultivar names, suggesting an embrace of Lost Cause mythology that went beyond strategic persuasion. He used all three of Ku Klux Klan Grand Wizard Nathan Bedford Forrests names on separate cultivars. Lamar was probably named after Charles Augustus Lafayette Lamar of Georgia, who, while not a general, was famed for being the last Confederate officer killed in the Civil War. Lamar also invested in the illegal trans-Atlantic slave trade as late as 1858. Hartwigs last Confederate soybean was Lyon, released in 1993, three years before his death.

By then, he was widely honored as the father of soybeans in the South. An endowed chair in Soybean Agronomy at the University of Mississippi was named after him and his wife. He was awarded the USDA Superior Service Award and the USDA Distinguished Service Award.

The Confederate soybean cultivars have receded into the past, but they were part of a larger pattern of systemic racism whose legacy can be felt to this day. Facing decades of pressure, the federal government has made halting progress toward redressing the wrongs it committed to farmers of color, most recently by promising them $4 billion of debt relief in the latest COVID aid package. Critics such as Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC) have decried this as reparations. In this context, is worth recalling Hartwigs soybeans as one illustration of the USDAs longstanding, built-in assumption that it served, above all, the interests of white farmers.

Continue reading here:

Confederate nostalgia, the Lost Cause, and the history of soybeans in the South - Slate Magazine

Posted: Jun 22, 2021 / 06:25 PM EDT / Updated: Jun 22, 2021 / 09:44 PM EDT

SUMMER HAS STARTED?

We are barely two days into the start of summer and what a cool off in central Indiana. For the second time in under a week, very mild air returns and this brand of cool is even cooler than the last!

The heat index surged to 100 Friday afternoon after most of last week remained mild but behind a few cold fronts, low temperatures fell Tuesday morning to the upper 40s in many outlying locations. Some of the coolest lows included 48 at Tipton, New Castle, Crawfordsville and Zionsville with the coolest locations 47 Marion (Grant county) and 46 in Frankfort (Clinton county).

The low of 53 in Indianapolis is the coolest this month and the normal low for September 26th. Despite the summer sunshine, Tuesdays refreshingly mild high of 71 was the coolest for this date since 1992 a very important date in June records for Indianapolis.

Twenty-nine years ago, the ALL-TIME record low for the month of June was set at 37! Frost was wide-spread that morning in outlying areas!

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Cool for the summer on a historic date in Indianapolis weather history - Fox 59

Xi Jinpings new history of Chinese communism has little room for criticism of Mao Zedong. In February Mr. Xi issued a revised version of A Brief History of the Communist Party of China, the official party history, in preparation for next months commemoration of the partys 100th anniversary. This edition plays down Maos atrocities, in particular softening the partys historic 1981 condemnation of the Cultural Revolution. That places Mr. Xi in the dubious company of dictators for whom yesterdays weather can be changed by decreea power George Orwell attributed in 1942 to Franco, Stalin and Hitler.

Many of the victims of Maos Cultural Revolution, a 1966-76 purge of counterrevolutionary elements, were respected party leaders who Mao feared might threaten his personal power. Mr. Xis father, who had previously been demoted from vice premier to deputy manager of a tractor factory, was jailed and beaten. The teenage Mr. Xi suffered as well, and his half-sister, Xi Heping, died after persecution by the revolutions Red Guards.

It is striking that Mr. Xi would play down this crime that brutalized his family and him. Perhaps because he is now emulating Mao in seeking to become general secretary for life, he wants the Chinese people to know as little as possible about the chaotic final decade of Maos prolonged reign. The analysis of Maos mistakes in launching the Cultural Revolution, which likely left a death toll of more than one million, is largely replaced by a lengthy discussion of Chinese achievements in that period.

This sanitizing of history, reported by the party-affiliated Sing Tao Daily in Hong Kong as a straightforward news item, might not be obvious to the average noncommunist reader. Communist ideological debates are often deliberately obscure. But party members must pay punctilious attention even to small changes in convoluted language. Failure to do so can have serious consequences.

In April the party launched a telephone hot line and online platform for reporting historical nihilists, who fail to comply with the official party line. Since becoming president in 2013, Mr. Xi has condemned historical nihilists in the Soviet Union for repudiating Stalin and causing chaos in Soviet ideology. That history, and the Soviet Unions eventual fall, informs his reasoning in revising Chinese communist history. The change is a warning to party members to avoid harsh criticism of Mao or the Cultural Revolution. Under Mr. Xis anticipated lifelong reign, there will be no Chinese equivalent of Nikita Khrushchevs 1956 secret speech exposing the crimes of the Stalin era.

Link:

Xis Rewriting of History Wont Stay in China - The Wall Street Journal

Wednesday, June 30, 2021

6 PM ET / 5 PM CT / 4 PM PT

The HistoryMakers

In honor ofAfrican American Music Appreciation Month,The HistoryMakersis thrilled to announce that that we are saluting thirteen MusicMakers and the musicians who inspired them withMusicMakers: This Is Our History. Tune in on Wednesday, June 30, 2021, at 6 PM ET / 5 PM CT / 4 PM PT to watch the tribute on our YouTube channel and please subscribe.

The MusicMakers highlighted include entertainment lawyer and music executive Larkin Arnold; music professor and composer William Banfield; blues harmonica player Sugar Blue; rapper and member of the Treacherous Three Kool Moe Dee, singer and member of The Originals Hank Dixon; gospel singer and television host Bobby Jones; singer and member of Gladys Knight & the Pips Merald Bubba Knight; music executive Miller London; singer and actress Freda Payne; singer and member of The Supremes Scherrie Payne; country singer Petrella Pollefeyt; trombonist and Motown musical arranger Paul Riser, Sr.; and operatic tenor George Irving Shirley.

We hope youll join us!

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MUSICMAKERS: THIS IS OUR HISTORY | The Crusader Newspaper Group - The Chicago Cusader