The Hueco Tanks area in Texas was home to indigenous people for thousands of years.

Hueco Tanks rock art photo from WikiCommons
Continue reading Hueco Tanks, TexasThe Hueco Tanks area in Texas was home to indigenous people for thousands of years.
Hueco Tanks rock art photo from WikiCommons
Continue reading Hueco Tanks, TexasThe Braceros Program was implemented during World War One and Two to recruit farmworkers from Mexico to work in the United States.
An exhibit of Braceros artifacts in the El Paso Museum of History
Continue reading Los BracerosIn the midst of a bitter war, the German government began to round up people of particular ethnicities which it considered to be subhuman enemies, gathered them into concentration camps, and worked them to death as slave labor in a deliberate policy of extermination and genocide. But this was not the Third Reich in Europe in 1940. It was the Second Reich in Africa in 1904.
The Hodges Meteorite, on display in Tuscaloosa AL, is the first known example of a space rock that hit and injured a human.
The Hodges Meteorite, on display at the Alabama Museum of Natural History
Continue reading The Hodges MeteoriteThe Battle of Lake Okeechobee was part of the Seminole Wars, which have now been mostly forgotten.
General Zachary Taylor photo from WikiCommons
Continue reading The Battle of Lake OkeechobeeThe earliest history of Chinese aviation actually began in the United States.
Fuselage of Chinese Shenyang J8-II fighter on display at the Combat Air Museum in Kansas
Continue reading The People’s Liberation Army Air ForceToday, “unidentified flying objects” are usually associated with extraterrestrial spacecraft, but in the pre-space race days of the 1940’s, they also had a different interpretation: the Cold War was raging, and it was assumed by many that the “discs” were actually some sort of secret Soviet aircraft, on surveillance missions over the US. By the 1950s, however, thanks to scifi movies and sensational books, the idea of UFOs as ET spacecraft was firmly fixed in the public’s imagination. And it was sealed forever by a famous report from Kentucky which made the phrase “Little Green Men” world-famous.
Hopkinsville Space Alien photo from WikiCommons
Continue reading The Hopkinsville Space AliensBilled as a “Geological Park”, Devils Millhopper, in Gainesville, contains a very large sinkhole which houses a profusion of humidity-loving tropical and semi-tropical native plants and wildlife.
Rushed into production during World War II, the P-80 Shooting Star was the US’s first operational jet fighter.
What was the first “automobile” … ?
The first modern “automobiles”—self-propelled wheeled carriages run by gasoline-powered internal-combustion engines—were built in Germany by Karl Friedrich Benz and Gottlieb Wilhelm Daimler in 1885. But if we look at an “automobile” as being simply a self-propelled wheeled vehicle, the history goes back further, and the earliest one that we know about was a steam-powered cart built in 1769 by a French Army officer named Nicholas-Joseph Cugnot.
Continue reading The Cugnot Steam AutoTotolospi is a racing game that was played by the Hopi Native Americans of the southwest desert.
Totolospi gameboard
Continue reading The Hopi Game of TotolospiThe area of the Minnesota/Canada border has an interesting early geological history.
The Tupolev-22 Blinder caused near-panic among NATO air forces when it appeared, but it never lived up to its promise.
The very fine people in the Florida State Legislature have in their infinite wisdom introduced a bill into the Assembly:
“Florida Sen. Jason Brodeur (R-Lake Mary) wants bloggers who write about Gov. Ron DeSantis, Attorney General Ashley Moody, and other members of the Florida executive cabinet or legislature to register with the state or face fines.
Brodeur’s proposal, Senate Bill 1316: Information Dissemination, would require any blogger writing about government officials to register with the Florida Office of Legislative Services or the Commission on Ethics.”
Continue reading A Necessary Political InterludeThe Mar-a-Lago Resort is best-known because of its association with a certain divisive and demagogic political figure. But the history of Mar-a-Lago extends for almost a century before that.
Mar-A-Lago in 1967 photo from US Library of Congress
Continue reading Mar-A-Lago, Florida