In the late 1800s, Republicans turned to religion, racism, and social Darwinism to justify their ideology. It didn’t end well for them.
Category: History
The Feudal Origins of America’s Most-Hated Tax – The Atlantic
Property tax—one of the most criticized taxes on U.S. residents—stems from a system put in place by William the Conqueror.
Source: The Feudal Origins of America’s Most-Hated Tax – The Atlantic
The Despair of Poor White Americans
Waste people. Rubbish. Clay-eaters. Hillbillies. Reckoning with the long, bleak history of the country’s original underclass.
The gloomy state of affairs in the lower reaches of white America should not have caught the rest of the country as off guard as it has—and mobilizing solutions for the crisis will depend partly on closing the gaps that allowed for such obliviousness.
After 100 years World War I battlefields are poisoned and uninhabitable
An estimated 720 million shells were fired during the Great War, with approximately 12 million failing to detonate. At places like Verdun, the artillery barrages were so overwhelming, 150 shells hit every square meter of the battlefield.
Though the Zone Rouge started at some 460 square miles in size, cleanup efforts reduced it to around 65 square miles. With such massive amounts of explosives left in the ground, the French government estimates the current rate of removal will clear the battlefields between 300 and 900 years from now.
Source: After 100 years World War I battlefields are poisoned and uninhabitable
A brief history of the nuclear triad | Restricted Data
Source: A brief history of the nuclear triad | Restricted Data
— Alex Wellerstein, a historian of science at the Stevens Institute of Technology
How the US came to have three major strategic nuclear platforms, and why it started calling them a “triad.”
The redundancy was a hedge: the goal was to pick the top two of the programs and cancel the rest. Instead, Sputnik happened. In the resulting political environment, Eisenhower felt he had to put into production and deployment all six of them — even though some were demonstrably not as technically sound as others (Thor and Polaris, in their first incarnations, were fraught with major technical problems). This feeling that he was pushed by the times (and by Congress, and the services, and so on) towards an increasingly foolish level of weapons production is part of what is reflected in Eisenhower’s famous 1961 warning about the powerful force of the “military-industrial complex.”
What I find interesting about the “triad” concept — and what it leaves out — is that it is ostensibly focused on technologies and strategies, but it seems non-coincidentally to be primarily concerning itself with infrastructure. The triad technologies each require heavy investments in bases, in personnel, in jobs. They aren’t weapons so much as they they are organizations that maintain weapons. Which is probably why you have to defend them: they are expensive.
According to one estimate, the various long-term cultural foot-dragging about ballistic missiles in the United States delayed the country from acquiring the technology for six years. Which puts Sputnik into perspective.