I've been studying up on the Puritans lately, and their curious notions about "early" America as an "uninhabited wilderness." The Pilgrims were a sort of Puritans; close enough for government work. They made friends with the heathen Indians, with whom they celebrated the first Thanksgiving. This feast included corn, cranberries, pumpkin pie, Wild Turkey, and the occasional shot of Jack Daniels. Things got a little out of hand, which is why we celebrate multiculturalism today.

For a variety of reasons--their probable migration through cleansing Alaskan ice fields, better hygiene, no livestock or livestock-borne microbes-Americans were... "a remarkably healthy race" before Columbus. Ironically, their very health now proved their undoing, for they had built up no resistance, genetically or through childhood diseases, to the microbes Europeans and Africans now brought them. In 1617, just before the Pilgrims landed, the process started in southern New England. A plague struck that made the Black Death pale by comparison.

Today we think it was the bubonic plague, although pox and influenza are also candidates.... Whatever it was, within three years this plague wiped out between 90 percent and 96 percent of the inhabitants of southern New England. The Indian societies lay devastated. Only "the twentieth person is scarce left alive," wrote British eyewitness Robert Cushman, describing a death rate unknown in all previous human experience....

During the next fifteen years, additional epidemics, most of which we know to have been smallpox, struck repeatedly. Europeans caught smallpox and the other maladies, to be sure, but most recovered.... Indians usually died. Therefore, almost as profound as their effect on Indian demographics was the impact of the epidemics on the two cultures, European and Indian. The English Separatists, already seeing their lives as part of a divinely inspired morality play, inferred that they had God on their side. John Winthrop, Governor of Massachusetts Bay Colony, called the plague "miraculous." To a friend in England in 1634, he wrote: "But for the natives in these parts, God hath so pursued them, as for 300 miles space the greatest part of them are swept away by the Smallpox which still continues among them. So as God hath thereby cleared our title to this place, those who remain in these parts, being in all not fifty, have put themselves under our protection..."

from: The truth about the first Thanksgiving by James W. Loewen
source: Monthly Review, 1 November 1992
via: HighBeam Research

Not sure this baby was torched off from Houston, but it sounds just like they say in the movies, don't it? And I've been thinking obsessively about the launch of this site for the past few weeks. Here's roughly what I've been envisioning...

The Rossi X-ray Timing Explorer (RXTE), a satellite designed to measure radiation emanating from the universe's oddball denizens, is already poised to become the space agency's next celebrity. Launched in 1995 to little fanfare, the $195 million RXTE probes the enigmatic celestial objects created by the deaths of giant stars. Last week, two teams of astrophysicists--one Italian, one American--announced that data collected by the RXTE had guided them to a groundbreaking discovery: Black holes and neutron stars, two of the heavens' most mysterious residents, literally drag space and time around them as they spin--a phenomenon called "frame dragging."

from: A new wrinkle in time by Brendan I. Koerner
source: U.S. News & World Report, 17 November 1997
via: HighBeam Research

Ralph Waldo Emerson is not exactly my favorite guy. He will figure prominently in the book I've been (endlessly) researching as perhaps the person most responsible for much of today's New Age hairbrainism (I was going to claim first use of that last term, but google shows one other hit; damn). Looking for an image of the old... fellow, I found this 1950 archive photo. Of course, that's not when it was taken, as RWE himself was "archived" in 1882 in Sleepy Hollow Cemetery in Concord, Mass.

The foremost figure of the American Transcendentalist Movement, the poet, writer and philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson began during the 1830's to lecture and promote his views, emphasizing man's unique spiritual place in nature. Condemned by the church for his liberal philosophy (especially in his 1840's journal "The Dial"), he helped signal the independence of American thought from European influence in his famous 1837 Harvard lecture.

from: Ralph Waldo Emerson
source: Archive Photos, January 1, 1950.
via: HighBeam Research

btw, the aforementioned famous lecture was on "The American Scholar," in which Emerson spoke of divers matters, including, and I quote "the sluggish and perverted mind of the multitude." Would that our Waldo had but lived to see the Internet!

You'd think these folks were old friends on a happy outing -- taking in the third race at Churchill Downs, say -- cheerful despite the bad weather. That is, unless you understood that Chelsea had been strategically placed between then, it being hoped that her charm and sunny disposition might prevent outright carnage and mayhem. It seems to have worked.

Former US president Bill Clinton (R) points something out to his wife Senator Hillary Clinton (2nd R) as their daughter Chelsea (C) and US President George W. Bush (2nd L) and First Lady Laura Bush look on during the opening ceremony of the William J. Clinton Presidential Center in Little Rock, Arkansas.

from: US-Clinton Library-Opening by Tim Sloan
source: Agence France Presse, November 18, 2004.
via: HighBeam Research

Meanwhile, back at the ranch (so to speak) 15 years ago...

President Ronald Reagan responds to applause in his honor as George W. Bush and Laura Bush (background), applaud during George Bush, Sr.'s swearing-in ceremony, January 20, 1989, in Washington, D.C.

from: Reagan responds to applause by Joe Burbank
source: KRT Photos, January 20, 1989.
via: HighBeam Research