Apples have been a sweet addition to Jewish cooking for centuries, even if they probably weren’t actually found in the Garden of Eden. //

One of the most widely grown fruits in the world, the apple (Malus domestica) is said to originate in the mountainous region of Kazakhstan, Tajikistan, and northwest China, where forests of wild apples (Malus sieversii) have been growing for more than 4 million years. In fact, Almaty—the largest city in Kazakhstan—literally means “the place of apples.” From Central Asia the apple was brought to the Middle and Near East via the Silk Road, and then introduced to Europe by the Romans.

Christopher Columbus’s perseverance and courage in his four transatlantic crossings inspired later explorers and seekers of freedom. //

Columbus Day is worth keeping and honoring because it remains foundational to the establishment of a new nation by people who largely shared the core beliefs and the qualities of character Columbus exhibited. Columbus Day commemorates character, embodies freedom, and celebrates the uniqueness that is America.

From million dollar slide shows to Steve Jobs’ introduction of the iPhone, a bit of showbusiness never hurt plain old business. //

To celebrate the launch of the 1987 Saab 9000 CD sedan, an audience of 2,500 was treated to an hourlong operetta involving 26-foot-tall projection screens, a massive chorus, the entire Stockholm Philharmonic, and some 50 performers.
DOUGLAS MESNEY/INCREDIBLE SLIDEMAKERS //

To call the Seagram-Vitarama a slideshow is an understatement. It’s an experience: hundreds of images of the distilling process, set to music, projected across five 40-by-15-foot screens. “It is composed of pictures, yet it is not static,” comments one awed witness. “The overall effect is one of magnificence.” Inspired by an Eastman Kodak exhibit at the 1939 World’s Fair, the Seagram-Vitarama is the first A/V presentation ever given at a sales meeting. It will not be the last.

So, let’s amend. It’s not that historical fiction is no longer published, it’s that the relatively few openings are designated for rather particular types of history. First, history is rewritten with fantastical elements or really a fantasy set in a historical setting. History is also rewritten altogether with “gender swaps” of key historical figures (e.g., King Arthur as a girl) or modern issues and ways of thinking implanted into characters from the past.

It’s enough to convince a young reader that praiseworthy women were always champions of feminist ideals, that every century grappled with the same racism spoken of today, and that every noble family had a progressive daughter who wanted everyone to be equal. All of which bends more toward fantasy than history. (Netflix’s adaptation of the highly engaging, highly beloved classic Anne of Green Gables, “Anne with an E,” was rendered unwatchable with the imposition of modern sensibilities not found in the book such as racism, sexuality, and feminism.)

Second, many agents willing to take on historical projects specify only “non-Western” historical fiction, fables, settings, etc. Ostensibly, the purpose is to write something new and increase the range of stories available to readers. Which would be a good thing if the “inclusivity box” had been widened, instead of merely shifted away from the Western world.

Third, only particular time periods with particular types of protagonists make the cut. If you’re an adult reader, you may have noticed the oversaturation of World War II stories on historical fiction shelves. Notably, these aren’t usually Holocaust stories (though those usually get published, too), but “untold” stories about the women of the war. Victorian England. The latter half of the 1900s. The occasional Greek gods and mythology, a dash from ancient India or Arabia, and that basically covers the entire range of historical fiction on offer. Moreover, any historical reference during war, tyranny, or other trying times is usually a simple narrative of “evil man was bad” instead of an introduction into some of the social and political complexities that encourage any particular event or era to come about. //

Like anyone, teens will pursue information about things they care about, and what better way to get them to understand what we went through to get to this point, what life was like before, and what was endured to build society, than connecting to a character living and dealing in the nuances of those times?

Let young readers imagine themselves in the shoes of their historical counterparts. Let them draw courage from those who fought and endured and dedicated themselves to something bigger. Let them live through characters who have to make tough choices because history isn’t black and white, but a whole gradient of gray. And, once they’re interested, let them go looking for more. See if they don’t get better at understanding history then.

Television has been around for a long time, but what we point to and call a TV these days is a completely different object from what consumers first fell in love with. This video of RCA factory tours from the 1950s drives home how foreign the old designs are to modern eyes.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lxQS58t39_U //

The next youtube video that came up is a great watch also if you’re interested in the cathode ray tube alone details: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qp6tNaUvfNI

For those of us who lived through the Cold War, there’s still an air of mystery as to what it was like on the Communist side. As Uncle Sam’s F-111s cruised slowly in to land above our heads in our sleepy Oxfordshire village it was at the same time very real and immediate, yet also distant. Other than being told how fortunate we were to be capitalists while those on the communist side lived lives of mindless drudgery under their authoritarian boot heel, we knew nothing of the people on the other side of the Wall, and God knows what they were told about us. It’s thus interesting on more than one level to find a promotional film from the mid 1970s showcasing VEB Fernsehgerätewerk Stassfurt (German, Anglophones will need to enable subtitle translation), the factory which produced televisions for East Germans. It provides a pretty comprehensive look at how a 1970s TV set was made, gives us a gateway into the East German consumer electronics business as a whole, and a chance to see how the East Germany preferred to see itself.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P0xMK6UZBys

Can you pass the U.S. citizenship exam?

Every year, the United States welcomes nearly 1 million new citizens through naturalization ceremonies, all of whom must pass the American citizenship exam by answering 6 out of 10 questions correctly.

While 90% of legal immigrant applicants pass the exam, only 30% of U.S. adults and just 3% of public high school students in America can pass it!

PragerU is determined to educate millions of young people about American history, civics, and the values that have made this country great. If you've watched enough PragerU videos, passing the exam should be a breeze.

The fact is, no amount of appeasement short of total capitulation will ever satisfy Armenia’s powerful Muslim neighbors, Azerbaijan and its “big brother,” Turkey.

Appropriating Artsakh has always been only the first step of a larger project. As Azerbaijani president Ilham Aliyev once openly proclaimed, “Yerevan [the capital of Armenia] is our historical land and we Azerbaijanis must return to these historical lands.” He has also referred to other ancient Armenian territories, including the Zangezur and Lake Sevan regions, as “our historic lands.” Taking over those territories “is our political and strategic goal,” Aliyev maintains, “and we need to work step-by-step to get closer to it.”

But as Tigran Balayan, spokesman for Armenia’s foreign ministry, responded: “The statement about territorial claims of the president of Azerbaijan, a state appearing on the political map of the world only 100 years ago … yet again demonstrates the racist character of the ruling regime in Baku.”

This is a rather restrained and diplomatic way of saying that, not only are Azerbaijani claims absolutely false but they are also — as most falsehoods nowadays tend to be — the exact inverse of the truth.

Armenia is one of the oldest nations in the world. Armenians founded Yereyan, their current capital, in 782 BC — exactly 2,700 years before Azerbaijan came into being in 1918. And yet, here is the president of Azerbaijan waging war because “Yerevan is our historical land and we Azerbaijanis must return to these historical lands.” //

Fast forward nearly a millennium to Azerbaijan’s war on Armenia in 2020, a Muslim fighter was videotaped triumphantly shouting “Allahu Akbar!” while standing atop an Armenian church chapel where the cross had been broken off.

Such is an idea of what the Turkic peoples did to Christian Armenians — not during the Armenian Genocide of a century ago when some 1.5 million Armenians were massacred and even more displaced — but one thousand years ago when the Islamic conquest of Armenia first began.

This unrelenting history of hate makes one thing perfectly clear: all modern-day pretexts and “territorial disputes” aside, true and permanent peace between Armenia and its Muslim neighbors will only be achieved when the Christian nation has either been conquered or ceded itself into nonexistence.

Nor would it be the first to do so. It is worth recalling that the heart of what is today called “the Muslim world” — the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) — was thoroughly Christian before the sword of Islam invaded. Bit by bit, century after century after the initial seventh-century Muslim conquests and occupations, it lost its Christian identity. Its peoples were lost in the morass of Islam so that few today even remember that Egypt, Iraq, Syria, etc., were among the first, oldest, and most populous Christian nations.

Armenia — the first nation in the world to adopt Christianity — is a holdout, a thorn in Islam’s side, and, as such, will never know lasting peace from the Muslims surrounding it — not least as the West has thrown it under the bus.

There have been many depictions of the debate in Philadelphia at Independence Hall of both the signing of the Declaration of Independence and the meetings to hammer out and pass a federal framework for the colonies, which eventually became the United States Constitution. Most, I imagine, have been by American citizens who felt a connection to our founding document and were able to project a passion for this nation's beginning.

Yet none of them stand a chance or hold a candle to the portrayal of William Shatner as Captain James T. Kirk of the USS Enterprise and his explanation of the piece of paper that starts off with WE THE PEOPLE.

Shatner, who is Canadian by birth, became a legend for his portrayal of the fictional Captain in Star Trek: The Orginal Series, and in the clip below he tipped the Shatner Ham O' Meter at full blast.

The Enterprise crew discovers a parallel world where the United States lost a nuclear war to Communist China. Centuries later, the descendants of the Americans cherish the documents of their ancient heritage but have forgotten their meaning. Kirk explains it to them.

https://youtu.be/uGO-SldLrNA

Although many travellers will have heard of the rock-hewn churches of Lalibela in Ethiopia, few will know about the "new Lalibela" being carved out of the rockface by a devoted monk.

Legend has it that the dramatic rock-hewn churches of Lalibela were created with the help of a team of angels. Buried deep into the rock in the highlands of northern Ethiopia, the 11 monolithic churches were built in the late 12th and early 13th Centuries by King Lalibela, who, so he claimed, had built the churches on the instruction from God.

With the Crusades in full swing and the pilgrimage sites of Jerusalem too dangerous to visit, the Lalibela churches were envisioned to be a "new" Jerusalem and a place of pilgrimage for Ethiopia's large Orthodox Christian community.

Today, the churches remain a major place of pilgrimage for Ethiopia's Christians. They're also a Unesco World Heritage site, and international travellers flock here to see one of Africa's most extraordinary historical spots.

They were labelled a waste of time and money, but in 1957 the bulging tips of two exhaust shafts rising above Sellafield arguably saved much of northern England from becoming a nuclear wasteland. The towers of Windscale Piles have been a landmark for decades but soon the last of these Cold War relics will be gone.

Cumbria's skyline will change with the removal of the towers - known as Cockcroft's Follies - but had they not been in place 57 years ago, the entire landscape may have been drastically different.

The US Department of Agriculture is changing the name of Wayne National Forest in Ohio to something less offensive, like the "Buckeye National Forest," after a coalition of leftist Karens; I'm sorry, I meant "American Indian Tribes and local community members" objected to a national forest named after a legitimate American hero.

The national forest is currently named after General Anthony Wayne, whose complicated legacy includes leading a violent campaign against the Indigenous peoples of Ohio that resulted in their removal from their homelands. The current forest name is offensive because of this history of violence. Buckeye National Forest is one of the names suggested to the Forest Service by American Indian Tribes. Other proposed names considered included “Ohio National Forest” and “Koteewa National Forest.” //

Before I go too far, I’d like to start this essay with a land acknowledgment statement.

My home sets on land first explored by English and Scots-Irish freemen who had migrated from their homeland in search of freedom and opportunity or sometimes on the run from the law. The land was settled primarily by Germans from the Palatinate, who, through their industry, created farms, pastures, and orchards where only unproductive, fallow wilderness had existed. These men and women held savage tribes at bay and together created a nation that has been the beacon of hope to the world for over two hundred years. This land was conquered, not stolen, and any acknowledgment we make is owed to those who, with axe and musket, created the most powerful nation in the history of the world and we don’t owe a damn thing to anybody for being proud of their accomplishment. //

For those unacquainted with "Mad" Anthony Wayne, he was one of George Washington's most effective regimental and divisional commanders. He didn't take shortcuts. He trained his men hard. When he was embarrassed by the enemy, such as at the Battle of Paoli, where his regiment was mauled by British light infantry in a bold night attack, he learned the lessons and paid his adversaries back severalfold using their own tactics; see the Battle of Stony Point.

He was called back to active duty after two stunning defeats were inflicted upon the US Army (Hamar's Defeat and the Battle of Wabash) by the Miaimi Confederacy, led by Little Turtle of the Miami and Blue Jacket of the Shawnee, contested American ownership of what is now Ohio.

one of the signals that a war is over and peace is achieved is when the defeated enemy is allowed to honor their war dead.

“If the victorious side starts to desecrate their enemies war memorials, it means the war is back on,” he said.

“Look at what happens when divers find a sunken Japanese battleship,” he said.

“They will inform the Japanese government, and they would turn that into a memorial, a gravesite--not allowing anybody near it,” he said. “We don't desecrate those memorials, even though they're a thousand feet underwater.” //

Kennedy said no one was worse to American soldiers than the Japanese soldiers, but Southerners are no longer given the same respect.

“We are American citizens, Americans, descendants of the founding fathers, our heroes cannot be honored, and we're not allowed to honor their graves.” //

Just an old soldier...
a day ago edited
America is turning into one, long Maoist/Communist struggle session. America must be made to hate her past. All evidence of the evil past must be destroyed and defamed. Great American Forts like Bragg, Benning and Hood will be renamed so soldiers who served there will know they served at evil locations for an evil cause. You will be ashamed of your history!
How did America hating leftists get to be in charge of EVERYTHING? //

C. S. P. Schofield anon-055q
19 hours ago
Like you, I have scant patience with the Confederacy and its mythology. But I cannot help but notice that the political party most closely concerned with erasing traces of the Confederacy is the party that supported it. And that that party STILL divides people by race… //

emptypockets
20 hours ago
How very ISIS-like so many in America have become. Destroying art because some don't like what or who it represents or commemorates even though it is true remembrance of our actual history. The Left screeches about how so much of our history hasn't been honest--as they forge ahead destroying bits that don't comport with their delusional dystopian narrative.

Besides, sculptor was a Jewish American so hit them with "ANTI-SEMITES!"

It's a beautiful piece of artistry and workmanship remembering a very unbeautiful part of our history. //

Jerry1955 anon-1etz
15 hours ago
Cutting heads and noses off statues. Blowing up Buddahs. Some create. Some appreciate. Some as are so pitiful they can only destroy. //

laughinglordwithweepingeyes
a day ago
The great conquerors make honorary monuments to the best from their enemies and inspire.

The small-minded conquerors try to pretend they were never threatened by erasing their foe. //

Michael1745
19 hours ago
The tragedy is this is a symbol of America’s national reconciliation. It has nothing to do with the dead institution of slavery or secession. One would think the Army would have more important issues to deal with than promoting hate, division and regional bigotry.

One of the things that is really starting to annoy me is the whinging from the children that the Senate “Doesn’t represent the population”, “Gives outsize control to smaller States”, and the like.

Statements like this, and others, display an appalling lack of knowledge of what the Senate of the United States was created to do. Or it displays a contempt in that the speaker actually does know the purpose of the Senate and is lying through his, or her, snaggle teeth in a bold-faced attempt to subvert the Constitution.

“Oppenheimer” is a 3-hour epic about the life of J Robert Oppenheimer. In certain ways, it’s reminiscent of how movies used to be made. The dialogue is smart. The editing was crisp, and (because I know the sound editor), the soundtrack was terrific—being “big” when it was needed and subtle when required. It’s also a “whodunit” wrapped in soft commie propaganda inside leftist messaging. //

The film bends time by blending Oppenheimer’s 1954 security clearance revocation hearing with the 1957 Senate Commerce Committee hearing on the nomination of former AEC chairman Lewis Strauss. Christopher Nolan flips back and forth from Oppenheimer’s security clearance hearing (shot in color) to the Commerce Committee public hearing, as if they are being held contemporaneously. //

The movie soft-pedals Oppenheimer’s lack of personal morals throughout. //

Oppenheimer recognized Nazis as imperialists and evil, as Jew-hating madmen but apparently couldn’t see the Jew-hating Karl Marx and mass-murdering Joe Stalin in the same light. The film follows a well-worn script that communists weren’t “all that bad”. It tracks the oft-used illustration of how communists were “ruined” just for being communists. It never mentions that most American communists were counting on and willing to foment a Soviet-style revolution in America. //

“Oppenheimer” is an interesting story, but the film is way too long. It spends too much time mythologizing a conflicted (mostly immoral) man and ultimately left me empty – not caring for the man beyond the fact that (if he liked it or not) helped end the war against Japan with the deaths of 100,000 dead civilians. Oppenheimer had an unintended hand in my dad coming home from the war. For only that reason, I thank him.

In 1946, a dangerous radioactive apparatus in the Manhattan Project killed a scientist when his screwdriver slipped. To tell his story, Ben Platts-Mills pieced together what happened inside the room.

Less than a year after the Trinity atomic bomb test, a careless slip with a screwdriver cost Louis Slotin his life.

In 1946, Slotin, a nuclear physicist, was poised to leave his job at Los Alamos National Laboratories (formerly the Manhattan Project). When his successor came to visit his lab, he decided to demonstrate a potentially dangerous apparatus, called the "critical assembly". During the demo, he used his screwdriver to support a beryllium hemisphere over a plutonium core. It slipped, and the hemisphere dropped over the core, triggering a burst of radiation. He died nine days later.

Last week, BBC Future explored the consequences of this fatal accident in a specially illustrated story created by the artist and writer Ben Platts-Mills:

• The Blue Flash: How a careless slip led to a fatal accident in the Manhattan Project

In this gallery, Platts-Mills explains how he composed the illustrations, based on reconstructions created shortly after the accident, archive photographs, and his own mock-up of the apparatus built from household materials.

One day in Oppenheimer's Manhattan Project, a brief, casual moment of carelessness killed one scientist and severely injured another. In this specially illustrated story, the artist and writer Ben Platts-Mills recounts what happened to these atomic bomb-makers – and why their accident holds powerful lessons for today.

"...In the search for a harmonious attitude towards life, it must never be forgotten that we ourselves are both actors and spectators in the drama of existence." – Niels Bohr, physicist //

On 21 May 1946, the physicist Louis Slotin was in his final weeks of working for the Project. He was an expert in bomb assembly and had played a central role, hand-building the "Trinity" device for the first test in July 1945, just a month before the Fat Man and Little Boy atomic bombs were dropped on Japan. But, like Oppenheimer, in the months that followed, he came to object to the continuation of the nuclear weapons programme and had decided to go back to civilian life.

Slotin was giving a tour to Alvin Graves, the scientist who was due to replace him. A little before 15:00, in the middle of one of the laboratory buildings, Graves spotted something he recognised: the "critical assembly", which was Slotin's specialism. Like an experimental nuclear bomb, it was used to safely test the reactivity of a plutonium core.

Graves commented that he had never seen the assembly demonstrated. Slotin offered to run through it for him.

From the other side of the room, Raemer Schreiber, Slotin's colleague, agreed. However, he encouraged him to proceed slowly and with caution: //

There are conflicting reports about what went wrong. An onlooker said Slotin's approach on this occasion was "improvised". Others said what he did was perfectly normal. In Schreiber's official report, he said Slotin acted "too rapidly and without adequate consideration", but that the others in the room "by their silence, agreed to the procedure".

"I turned because of some noise or sudden movement," wrote Schreiber. "I saw a blue flash... and felt a heat wave simultaneously." It seems the screwdriver had slipped and the plutonium had gone "prompt critical" as the reflector dropped down over it. It happened, as Schreiber wrote, in "a few tenths of a second." Slotin flipped the upper reflector to the floor, but his reaction was already too late. In the moments after the accident, the room was silent.

Then Slotin said quietly: "Well, that does it." //

Slotin died nine days later from organ failure. "A pure and simple case of death from radiation," as a colleague would later describe it. //

In fact his boss, Enrico Fermi, had explicitly warned Slotin only a few months earlier about his approach to critical assemblies. "You'll be dead within the year, if you keep doing that," he had said.

But it seems Fermi's was a lone voice in an institution that tended to downplay the dangers of its work. //

Relatively unscathed by the accident, Schreiber went on to help re-design the way procedures like the one that killed Slotin were conducted, with a greater emphasis on safety.

Standing at Slotin's shoulder, Graves received a high dosage of radiation and became critically ill. //

Floy Agnes Lee, the haematologist treating Graves after the accident described in a 2017 interview how severe his condition was. "His white blood cells were so low that they didn’t understand why he was still living," she said. "I don’t remember how long it took before his hair started growing back again."

As we head to Independence Day and a celebration of this nation’s founding, the angry chorus of haters with idle hands and minds gets loud. They prefer we dwell on the nation’s sins and ignore our great progress toward an always more perfect union. No longer just angry academics and activists, the press too has joined the act. It is a reminder the secular religion that dominates cultural institutions is a religion without grace or forgiveness, perpetually anchored in the grievances of the past.

The New York Times produced its 1619 Project to, in the words of its creator, re-tell the story of our founding. She claimed it was not to be taken as true fact, but narration. She recast the United States and its revolution as about the preservation of slavery. Widely criticized by historians across the political perspective, the damage was done and proudly so. Many people who had grievance and needed a story around which to weave their grievance latched on to the false claims.

The fabulists ignored the Northern colonies moving against slavery long before Great Britain did. They ignored the writings of our founders, including Thomas Jefferson, who knew the institution of slavery undermined the words “all men are created equal” and would have to end. They ignored the reparations paid in blood on battlefields across America as white men from the North killed their kin from the South to set slaves free. //

Reuters has gotten in on the act. A week before Independence Day, it ran a story tying most living Presidents, two Supreme Court Justices, several Governors, and over 100 legislators to ancestors who owned slaves. Ironically, the only President who did not descend from slave owners is Donald Trump, not Barack Obama.

Today Universal releases “Oppenheimer,” directed by Christopher Nolan. The IMAX biopic stars Cillian Murphy as J. Robert Oppenheimer, the father of the atom bomb.

Nolan’s film is based on the biography American Prometheus, by Kai Bird and Martin Sherwin. This review summarizes the book. Nolan’s film does not focus on the early career of this brilliant and eccentric academic. For that, we can rewatch “The Absent-Minded Professor” (1961). Cinema can remind us of the 1940s’ heroic battles as well as more cerebral endeavors to develop instruments for detection, navigation, and propulsion.

Oppenheimer’s life holds major questions about the use of power that continue to affect the world today. His team’s scientific advances warrant a much closer look. //

The design challenge for Oppenheimer’s team was enormous. They had to investigate the fission process into a near-instantaneous chain reaction based on meager experimental results. Oppenheimer’s keen ability to comprehend and extol these specialists is a testament to his diligence during those long hours. //

Our violent introduction to the atomic age taints humanity’s acceptance of it. The amazing phenomenon of atomic nuclei releasing energy by exchanging nucleons holds enormous promise.

Had fission been discovered a decade earlier or later, it could have benignly provided electrical power. But in an existential military conflict, leaders deemed such patience a luxury America couldn’t afford. So humans turned this fantastic tool into a cudgel, and continue to live under that shadow today.

A papermaker in Massachusetts named Zenas Marshall Crane is traditionally credited with being the first to include tiny fibers in the paper pulp used to print currency in 1844. But scientists at the University of Notre Dame have found evidence that Benjamin Franklin was incorporating colored fibers into his own printed currency much earlier, among other findings, according to a new paper published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS). //

The first paper money appeared in 1690 when the Massachusetts Bay Colony printed paper currency to pay soldiers to fight campaigns against the French in Canada. The other colonies soon followed suit, although there was no uniform system of value for any of the currency. To combat the inevitable counterfeiters, government printers sometimes made indentations in the cut of the bill, which would be matched to government records to redeem the bills for coins. But this method wasn't ideal since paper currency was prone to damage.

By the time he was 23, Franklin was a successful newspaper editor and printer in Philadelphia, publishing The Pennsylvania Gazette and eventually becoming rich as the pseudonymous author of Poor Richard's Almanack. Franklin was a strong advocate of paper currency from the start. For instance, in 1736, he printed a new currency for New Jersey, a service he also provided for Pennsylvania and Delaware. And he designed the first currency of the Continental Congress in 1775, depicting 13 colonies as linked rings forming a circle, within which "We are one" was inscribed. (The reverse inscription read, "Mind your business," because Franklin had a bit of cheek.) //

The most recent discovery: very thin (between 100–300 microns) indigo-colored blue fibers and threads, found in Franklin's printed currency as early as 1739. Later bills that Franklin printed in the 1770s incorporated much larger threads and microfibers, measuring up to a few centimeters in length. Those blue fibers were not found in either the non-Franklin currency or the known counterfeits. “These [colored fiber] techniques have been used later on in printing federal dollars, and then other currencies all over the world,” Manukyan told New Scientist.

DOI: PNAS, 2023. 10.1073/pnas.2301856120 (About DOIs).