History

Remains from CU's Medical School still in Boulder

Anonymous — Fri, 25 Oct 2024 20:20:38 +0000

Remains from CU's Medical School still in Boulder Anonymous (not verified) Fri, 10/25/2024 - 14:20

Silvia Pettem

Cadavers used in anatomy classes were buried in unmarked lots in Columbia Cemetery

The University of Colorado Department of Medicine and Surgery opened in Boulder in 1883 with two students. By 1890, the medical school included more than a dozen students, two of them women. In order to graduate, each student was required to dissect an entire human body.

Records of these cadavers reveal a little-known cross section of life and death in Boulder County. The body parts were interred in unmarked lots, where they remain today, in Boulder's Columbia Cemetery.

Prior to the school's opening, Dr. Lumen M. Giffin moved to Boulder from New York to become professor of anatomy and physiology. In the early days, tuition for the three-year program was a one-time fee of $5 for in-state students and $10 for those from out of state. The courses included lectures, chemical laboratories and dissections.

CU Boulder alum Silvia Pettem is an acclaimed local historian and author of Separate Lives: Uncovering the Hidden Family of Victorian Professor Mary Rippon.

One of the bodies donated to Giffin's class was that of miner Frederick Nelson. He had sought refuge from a forest fire and suffocated in the shaft of the Bald Mountain Mine near the town of Sunset. His relatives were unknown, and no one claimed his remains.

Many of the deceased met similarly unusual or violent deaths. According to coroners' records, in 1909 Herman Schmidt's skull was crushed by a falling rock while he worked as a laborer on the construction of Barker Dam, below Nederland. Schmidt was a recent immigrant with no known family or friends.

No one knew anything about Michael Clifford at the time of his death except his name. He was murdered in a drunken brawl in the town of Marshall. The university also welcomed his body.

Few, if any, of the cadavers used in the classroom dissections were female until 1914, when Cyrus Deardoff donated the body of his 70-year-old wife, Ellen, who had been declared insane and starved herself.

Cyrus had, at one time, been a prominent gold miner in Ward. However, he died destitute a few months after Ellen's death. He saved the expense of a funeral and the stigma of being consigned to a pauper’s grave by agreeing in advance to give the university his body, as well.

The year was a busy one for the medical students. By then, CU had purchased its second cemetery lot, and bought a third one a couple years later.

Additional bodies came from people who died by suicide or from influenza or other infectious diseases. Some, like Thomas McCormick, died from an overdose of morphine in the county jail.

Then there was William Ryan, a farmer, who had suffered from chronic alcoholism and was found dead in bed. He had no family, but he did have a watch and chain and a horse and buggy. CU got those items, too.

In 1924, citing a lack of appropriate medical facilities, CU's medical school moved to Denver. In 2008, the school transformed itself again with a move to the Anschutz Medical Campus in Aurora.

A year before the school left Boulder, Giffin died of a stroke at age 72. At the time, he was the oldest physician in Boulder. He, too, was buried in Columbia Cemetery—intact and in his own grave with family members. But while Giffin is resting is peace, the other bodies in Columbia Cemetery are resting in pieces.

Top image: Luman M. Giffin (center) and his class in the CU Medical School during the late 1890s. (Photo: courtesy Carnegie Library for Local History, Boulder)

Silvia Pettem is a CU Boulder alum (1969) and is the author of Separate Lives: Uncovering the Hidden Family of Victorian Professor Mary Rippon. This column originally appeared in the Daily Camera. She can be reached at silviapettem.com.

Cadavers used in anatomy classes were buried in unmarked lots in Columbia Cemetery.

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Veteran sees Vietnam the country beyond the war

Anonymous — Fri, 25 Oct 2024 17:30:37 +0000

Veteran sees Vietnam the country beyond the war Anonymous (not verified) Fri, 10/25/2024 - 11:30

Rachel Sauer

CU Boulder alum and regent emeritus Peter Steinhauer shares Vietnam experiences with students, to be featured in the in-progress documentary Welcome Home Daddy

Peter Steinhauer joined the U.S. Navy because that’s what young men of his generation did.

“I was brought up to finish high school, go to college, join a fraternity, get married, spend two years in the military, then work the rest of my life,” he explains. “Of everybody I went to high school with in Golden, most of the boys went in (the military).”

So, after graduating the University of Colorado Boulder in 1958—where he met his wife, Juli, a voice major—he attended dental school in Missouri, then completed a face and jaw surgical residency, finishing in 1965. And then he joined the Navy.

Peter Steinhauer (left) and Steven Dike (right) after Steinhauer's presentation during the Oct. 18 class of The Vietnam Wars, which Dike teaches.

He had two young daughters and a son on the way, and he learned two weeks after being stationed at Camp Pendleton that he’d be shipping to Vietnam, where he served from 1966-67.

“How many of your grandparents served in Vietnam?” Steinhauer asks the students seated in desks rimming the perimeter of the classroom, and several raised their hands. Steinhauer has given this presentation to this class, The Vietnam Wars, for enough years that it’s now the grandchildren of his fellow veterans with whom he shares his experiences of war.

Even though Steinhauer had given the presentation before, the Oct. 18 session of The Vietnam Wars, for students in the Honors Residential Academic Program (HRAP), was different: It was filmed as part of the in-progress documentary Welcome Home Daddy, which chronicles Steinhauer’s experiences during and after the war and his deep love for the country and people of Vietnam.

“Pete told me once that he dreams about Vietnam all the time, but they’re not nightmares,” says Steven Dike, associate director of the HRAP and assistant teaching professor of history, who teaches The Vietnam Wars. “He’s spent his life as a healer and an educator, and I think one of the values (for students) is hearing how his experiences in the war informed his life after it.”

‘An old guy there’

Steinhauer, a retired oral surgeon and CU regent emeritus, served a yearlong tour with the 3rd Marine Division, 3rd Medical Battalion in Da Nang, Vietnam. Lt. Cmdr. Steinhauer was a buzz-cut 30-year-old—“an old guy there,” he tells the students—with a Kodak Instamatic camera.

He provided dental care and oral surgery to U.S. servicemen and servicewomen as well as Vietnamese people, and he took pictures—of the rice paddies and jungles, of the people he met, of the nameless details of daily life that were like nothing he’d experienced before.

“This was the crapper,” Steinhauer tells the students, explaining a photo showing a square, metal-sided building with a flat, angled roof. “There were four seats in there and no dividers, so you were just sitting with the guy next to you.”

When the electricity went out, he and his colleagues worked outside. When helicopters came in with the wounded, it was all hands on deck.

Left image: Pvt. Raymond Escalera holds the since-deactivated grenade that Peter Steinhauer (to Escalera's left) removed live from his neck, in a photo that made the front page of The Seattle Times; right image: Peter and Juli Steinhauer (on right) visit Raymond Escalera (white shirt) and his wife in California.

“They’d be brought off the helicopter and taken to the triage area,” Steinhauer says, the photo at the front of the classroom showing the organized chaos of it. “A lot of life-and-death decisions were made there, catheters and IVs were started there. The triage area is a wonderful part of military medicine.”

Steinhauer also documented the casualties, whose starkness the intervening years have done nothing to dim. One of his responsibilities was performing dental identification of bodies, “one of the hardest things I did,” he says.

Then there was Dec. 21, 1966: “A guy came in—it was pouring rain, and we had mass casualties—and he came in with trouble breathing,” Steinhauer recalls. “We discovered he had an unexploded M79 rifle grenade in his neck. We got it out, but a corpsman said, ‘Doc, you better be careful with that, it can go boom.’”

Not only did Marine Pvt. Raymond Escalera survive a live grenade in his neck, but about 12 years ago Steinhauer tracked him down and visited him at his home in Pico Rivera, California. “We call four or five times a year now,” Steinhauer says.

Building relationships

Steinhauer and his colleagues also treated Vietnamese civilians. “One of the most fun parts of my year there was being able to perform 60 or 70 cleft lip surgeries,” Steinhauer tells the students, showing before and after photos.

Peter Steinhauer (left) and medical colleagues in Vietnam, with whom he worked during many of his 26 visits to Vietnam since the end of the war.

He then shows them a photo of the so-called “McNamara Line” between North and South Vietnam—a defoliated slash of brown and gray that looks like a wound that will never heal.

Healing, however, has happened, and continues to. “I was blessed by the ability to go back to a place where so many horrible things happened during the war and make something beautiful of it,” Steinhauer says.

In the years since he returned from war—and met his almost-one-year-old son for the first time—Steinhauer has gone back to Vietnam more than two dozen times. Acknowledging that his experience is not all veterans’ experience, he says he has been blessed to learn about Vietnam as a country and not just a war.

“How veterans dealt with the war, how they’re still coming to terms with it as we’re getting further away from it, are really important issues,” says Mark Gould, director and a producer of Welcome Home Daddy. “It’s not just a war that we quote-unquote lost, but it was the most confusing war the United States has ever fought. We never had closure, but that didn’t stop Dr. Steinhauer from reaching out. Our tagline is ‘Governments wage war, people make peace,’ and that’s what he stands for.”

The idea for the documentary originated with Steinhauer’s daughter, Terrianne, who grew up not only hearing his stories but visiting the country with him and her mom. She and Gould served in the CalArts alumni association together, and several years ago she pitched him the idea for Welcome Home Daddy, which they are making in partnership with producer Rick Hocutt.

Peter Steinhauer with his children upon his return home after serving in the Vietnam War; the "Welcome home daddy" message inspired the title of the documentary currently being made about Steinhauer's experiences during and after the war.

The documentary will weave Steinhauer’s stories with those of other veterans and highlight the relationships that Steinhauer has built over decades—through partnering with medical professionals in Vietnam and volunteering his services there, through supporting Vietnamese students who study in the United States, through facilitating education and in-person visits between U.S. and Vietnamese doctors and nurses. At the same time, Juli Steinhauer has grown relationships with musicians and other artists in Vietnam. Both parents passed a love for Vietnam to their children.

An ugly war, a beautiful country

The stories of Vietnam could fill volumes. In fact, Steinhauer attended a 10-week course called Tell Your Story: A Writing Workshop for Those Who Have Served in the Military in 2008—offered through the Program for Writing and Rhetoric and the Division of Continuing Education—and wrote Remembering Vietnam 1966-67, a collection of his memories and photographs of the war that he published privately and gives to family, friends and colleagues.

About 10 years ago, Steinhauer asked to audit The Vietnam Wars—“wars” is plural because “we can’t understand the American war without understanding the French war,” Dike explains—in what was only the second time Dike had taught it.

“So, I was a little nervous,” Dike remembers with a laugh, “but he comes in and is just the nicest guy in the world. I asked if he’d be interested in sharing his experiences, and he’s given his presentation during the semester every class since.”

In the Oct. 18 class, Steinhauer shares stories of bamboo vipers in the dental clinic, of perforating vs. penetrating wounds, of meeting baseball legends Brooks Robinson and Stan Musial when they visited the troops, of a since-faded Vietnamese tradition of women dyeing their teeth black as a symbol of beauty.

“It was an ugly war, but it’s a beautiful country,” Steinhauer says. “Just a beautiful country.”

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CU Boulder alum and regent emeritus Peter Steinhauer shares Vietnam experiences with students, to be featured in the in-progress documentary Welcome Home Daddy.

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William Wei is again named Colorado’s state historian

Anonymous — Wed, 23 Oct 2024 14:43:11 +0000

William Wei is again named Colorado’s state historian Anonymous (not verified) Wed, 10/23/2024 - 08:43

Adamari Ruelas

CU Boulder historian serving second term in position, focusing on an accurate and comprehensive portrayal of Colorado’s history

William Wei, a University of Colorado Boulder professor of history and faculty affliate in the Center for Asian Studies, has been named state historian by History Colorado, his second time receiving the honor.

William Wei, CU Boulder professor of history and Colorado state historian, is the author of Asians in Colorado: A History of Persecution and Perseverance in the Centennial State.

Wei was one of the five founders of History Colorado’s State Historian’s Council, which “reaches across the state to aid in the interpretation of the history of Colorado and the West, providing opportunities to expand the understanding of the historical perspectives, cultures and places of Colorado.”

The State Historian’s Council was founded in 2018 and comprises five interdisciplinary scholars who provide complementary perspectives and rotate the state historian position every year on Aug.1, Colorado Day. Wei’s first term as state historian was from 2019-2020.

"It is a great honor to be appointed the Colorado state historian again,” Wei says. “I remain committed to ensuring that Coloradans receive an accurate and comprehensive portrayal of the Centennial State's history. This commitment naturally extends to Colorado's marginalized communities, whose stories have often been neglected, overlooked and forgotten.”

Wei was named the 2022 Asian American Hero of Colorado and is the author of Asians in Colorado: A History of Persecution and Perseverance in the Centennial State. He also was a founding editor-in-chief of History Colorado’s Colorado Encyclopedia and a lead advisor for the organization’s Zoom In: The Centennial State in 100 Objects.

“William brings a broad global perspective alongside an encyclopedic interest in Colorado to the role of State Historian,” notes Jason Hanson, chief creative officer and director of interpretation and research at History Colorado, in announcing Wei’s second term. “He is passionate about how historical perspective can help us see the present more clearly and in ways that can truly improve people’s lives. I am excited for him to share his knowledge and passion with the people of Colorado as the state historian once again.”

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CU Boulder historian serving second term in position, focusing on an accurate and comprehensive portrayal of Colorado’s history.

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The Wilderness Act turns 60

Anonymous — Tue, 03 Sep 2024 06:00:00 +0000

The Wilderness Act turns 60 Anonymous (not verified) Tue, 09/03/2024 - 00:00

Daniel Long

CU Boulder’s Paul S. Sutter looks back on the history of the Wilderness Act as it approaches its diamond jubilee

Passage of the Wilderness Act was anything but a foregone conclusion.

First introduced in Congress in 1956, the “often-sidetracked Wilderness Bill,” as New York Times writer William M. Blair called it, underwent 65 revisions before finally surviving the House and the Senate and being signed into law by President Lyndon B. Johnson on Sept. 3, 1964.

“It was an eight- or nine-year period,” says Paul S. Sutter, professor of environmental history at the University of Colorado Boulder and author of Driven Wild: How the Fight against Automobiles Launched the Modern Wilderness Movement. “There are not too many pieces of legislation with such a lengthy history.”

Paul S. Sutter, a professor of environmental history in the CU Boulder Department of History, notes that understanding the 60-year history of the Wilderness Act requires understanding what wilderness is.

A lengthy history and a rocky one, with as many ups and downs, peaks and valleys as the terrain the Wilderness Act protects. But to understand that history, says Sutter, one must first understand what wilderness is.

The modern wilderness idea

The Wilderness Act defines “wilderness” as follows:

A wilderness, in contrast with those areas where man and his works dominate the landscape, is hereby recognized as an area where the earth and its community of life are untrammeled by man, where man himself is a visitor who does not remain.

That peculiar word, “untrammeled,” is crucial, says Sutter. “A lot of people assume it means ‘untrampled,’ but it doesn’t.”

To “trammel” something, Sutter explains, is to hinder or restrict its freedom of action. “So to trammel wild nature is effectively to harness it to human economic forces and activities.”

This desire to safeguard large stretches of land against such forces led to what Sutter calls the modern wilderness idea, or “the idea that we ought to be protecting lands from modern development as much as possible.”

That means, among other things, no roads. Roads are the oil to wilderness’s water.

“[T]here is no use fooling ourselves,” wrote Ansel Adams, whose photography captured the ethos of the modern wilderness idea and posthumously earned him a wilderness area in his name, “that nature with a slick highway running through it is any longer wild.”

It’s this roadlessness, along with prohibitions against motorization and mechanization, that distinguishes wilderness areas from other nationally protected lands, says Sutter.

“A wilderness area doesn’t have visitor centers, doesn’t have bathrooms, doesn’t have the amenities we come to expect when we go to somewhere like Yellowstone or Yosemite. You have to go into a wilderness area either carrying everything you need or living off the land.”

Howard Zahniser, Washington wizard

Once it became law, the Wilderness Act immediately protected just over 9 million acres and established the National Wilderness Preservation System (NWPS), which consists of congressionally designated wilderness areas within the lands controlled by the National Park Service, U.S. Forest Service, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and Bureau of Land Management.

Now, six decades later, the Act protects 111 million acres (about 173,000 square miles), a marked increase made possible, Sutter says, by mechanisms within the act itself that allow Congress to add more wilderness to the NWPS over time.

A sign at the boundary of Colorado's Collegiate Peaks Wilderness. (Photo: Tyler Lahti/Wikicommons)

The man behind those mechanisms was Howard Zahniser, former executive director of The Wilderness Society, the Wilderness Act’s primary author and someone who, according to Sutter, didn’t quite fit the environmental-activist mold.

“When you look at the pantheon of famous wilderness activists in American history—from John Muir and Henry David Thoreau to Aldo Leopold and Bob Marshall and Olaus and Margaret Murie—they tended to be these rugged outdoor people. Many of them were trained foresters or avid hikers. Zahniser was different.”

Though Zahniser—who wore a specially tailored overcoat with four large inside pockets for carrying books, Wilderness Act propaganda and Wilderness Society membership information—felt comfortable in the outdoors, his real strength was his political savvy, Sutter claims.

“He was this Beltway insider who was a mastermind at pulling together support for this bill.”

And pull together support he did, from both sides of the aisle.

“One of the most fascinating things about the Wilderness Act, and really all of the major environmental legislation that came after it—the Endangered Species Act of 1973, the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act, all of the hugely important environmental legislative achievements of that era—is that they were overwhelmingly bipartisan.”

Not so anymore, Sutter says, noting that environmental politics now is far more polarized and partisan than it was in Zahniser’s day.

“When I teach this to my students, that’s one of the things I really harp on—whether there’s any way we can reclaim some of that bipartisanship.”

Loving nature to death

The Wilderness Act has met its share of resistance over the years. One major source was the Sagebrush Rebellion of the 1970s and 1980s.

The Sagebrush Rebellion, says Sutter, sought to transfer ownership of western federal lands to the states. “A lot of people in the West had come to rely on public lands for their well-being and saw the Wilderness Act as a major threat.”

Though it eventually fizzled out after gaining little traction in Washington, D.C., the Rebellion did manage to garner a fair amount of support, most notably from Ronald Reagan, who said during a July 1980 campaign speech in Salt Lake City, “I happen to be one who cheers and supports the ‘Sagebrush Rebellion.’ Count me in as a rebel.”

Another challenge that has continuously dogged wilderness activists is how to strike a balance between making wilderness accessible to as many people as possible without simultaneously undermining its wilderness qualities.

“Back in the early years of wilderness advocacy, one of the frequent critiques of wilderness was that it was elitist, that it was a way of preserving nature for people who wanted to access it in a certain way,” says Sutter.

A wilderness area doesn’t have visitor centers, doesn’t have bathrooms, doesn’t have the amenities we come to expect when we go to somewhere like Yellowstone or Yosemite. You have to go into a wilderness area either carrying everything you need or living off the land.”

“So critics of wilderness would say, ‘Well, if we build a road into a wilderness area, far more people are going to be able to see it and experience it.’ And the wilderness advocates would say, ‘But if you build a road into it, it’s not wilderness anymore.’”

This tension between preservation and accessibility—between loving nature and loving it to death—has always been central to discussions about wilderness, says Sutter. And it’s a tension he predicts won’t slacken any time soon. Currently, for example, there are debates about whether fixed rock-climbing anchors ought to be allowed in wilderness areas or whether areas long used by mountain bikers ought to be added to the NWPS, as the Wilderness Act prohibits any form of mechanized or motorized transport.

“We think of wilderness politics as being about environmental preservation and recreation versus mining, timber-cutting, grazing. But there are conflicts within the recreational community that have always demanded subtler forms of preservation. The modern wilderness idea emerged from such conflicts.”

And so, 60 years on, the work of the Wilderness Act continues, adapting to the demands of the present moment yet remaining rooted in the belief that wilderness areas provide an essential, if intangible, service—a service perhaps best articulated by none other than Zahniser himself, who died four months before the bill he’d spent the better part of nine years defending graduated into law.

“[W]e have a profound, a fundamental need for areas of wilderness,” Zahniser wrote, “a need that is not only recreational and spiritual but also educational and scientific, and withal essential to a true understanding of ourselves, our culture, our own nature, and our place in all nature.”

Top image: the Uncompahgre Wilderness in the north-central San Juan Mountains of Western Colorado (Photo: Bureau of Land Management)

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CU Boulder’s Paul S. Sutter looks back on the history of the Wilderness Act as it approaches its diamond jubilee.

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Remembering Nixon’s resignation, five decades later

Anonymous — Thu, 08 Aug 2024 06:00:00 +0000

Remembering Nixon’s resignation, five decades later Anonymous (not verified) Thu, 08/08/2024 - 00:00

Bradley Worrell

CU Boulder political science professor Kenneth Bickers reflects on what made the ex-president’s decision to step down following the Watergate scandal a watershed moment in American history and how it has influenced politics today

In a solemn television address 50 years ago this week, on Aug. 8, 1974, President Richard Nixon announced he would resign from office—becoming the first American president ever to do so.

It was a stunning turn of events for Nixon, who just two years earlier won his reelection bid by a landslide. However, as details of a break-in at the Democratic National Committee headquarters at the Watergate Complex in Washington, D.C., became public, leading to congressional hearings and impeachment proceedings, Nixon finally bowed to pressure from Congress and the public to leave the White House.

“By taking this action,” Nixon said in an address from the Oval Office, “I hope that I will have hastened the start of the process of healing which is so desperately needed in America.”

Kenneth Bickers, a CU Boulder professor of political science, notes that Richard Nixon's resignation "exposed the kind of deceit and corruption that can reach the highest office in the land."

At the time, Kenneth Bickers was a young teenager spending the summer at his grandparents’ house in Cheyenne. In the days leading up to Nixon’s resignation, Bickers would spend his mornings watching TV broadcasts of the congressional hearings regarding the Watergate break-in, as new damning details became public about the White House’s involvement and its attempts to cover up the affair.

“That was my education in politics. It was what got me interested in what would eventually be a major in political science and later a PhD in political science, and it was the seminal event of my development,” says Bickers, a University of Colorado Boulder Department of Political Science professor since 2003, whose area of focus is American politics and public policy.

With the 50th anniversary of Nixon’s resignation, Bickers recently reflected on what he believes made Nixon’s resignation a watershed moment in U.S. history, its lasting impact upon American politics, and offered his thoughts on how things might have gone very differently if Nixon had pursued a different path. His remarks have been lightly edited and condensed.

Question: Can you set the scene prior to Nixon’s election in 1972 and into 1973, as details of the Watergate break-in started to become public?

Bickers: In 1972, Nixon was the incumbent going into that election, and the economy was actually in really good shape. We were certainly mired in the Vietnam War, and there had been a lot of protests in the street, but those had kind of diminished from the high point of 1968 to 1969.

And then the Democrats had a catastrophic convention in 1972, with the naming of a Democratic vice-presidential choice, (Thomas Eagleton), who was subsequently replaced. It was one of the most poorly managed conventions since the 1920s, and so Nixon benefited from the ineptitude of the Democrats in 1972.

But Nixon also had a lot of assets going into that year, which was part of what made the whole Watergate break-in totally inscrutable. I mean, it should have been clear to anybody that he was going to win in a huge way. Nobody could have foreseen the magnitude at the time, but it certainly looked like he was going to win.

So why the third-rate burglary of the DNC in the Watergate building? And then why cover it up? None of that made any sense.

Question: Today, some may see Nixon’s resignation as inevitable, but a poll taken in 1973 found only 25 percent thought he did anything wrong that would reach the level where he should be removed. So, he still enjoyed widespread support at the time?

Bickers: That’s true. He still enjoyed wide support, and I think there was disbelief at the time that things could be as bad as the allegations suggested.

And I think if he’d been honest about how stupid that burglary was, if he had simply fessed up and taken his lumps at the time, none of that would have happened (the congressional investigations ultimately leading to his resignation).

This is where we learned that the cover-up is often worse than the crime, because it was the cover-up that was at the heart of the allegations against Nixon. He didn’t break into the Watergate; it was this team of former CIA operatives that did that, or it included some former CIA operatives. Whether it was paid for by his campaign or not, obviously a presidential candidate isn’t in charge of the books for a multimillion-dollar campaign operation.

So, it was the cover-up. And then the thing that ultimately sealed the deal was the Oval Office tapes with the famous missing section that had somehow inadvertently been erased.

Remember, at the time trust was still very high of our national leaders. And remember, huge majorities had voted for him just before that in the 1972 election—it was the second-largest victory in American history at that point. So, there were a lot of people who had supported him. And it takes a lot to move people away from their prior commitments, their prior beliefs and their prior expectations.

[video:https://youtu.be/IwQMpSxRPvc?si=Boz10O72_MCVpnCm]

Question: Is it fair to call Nixon’s resignation a watershed moment in American political history? If so, what makes it so?

Bickers: It certainly was watershed, because he was the first president and the only president to resign. We’d never experienced that before.

The other thing is that it’s a watershed event because it exposed the kind of deceit and corruption that can reach the highest office in the land—and it changed the way people view politicians.

Confidence in the national government—trust in the institutions of our national government, the presidency, Congress, and so forth—absolutely craters starting in about 1973 and 1974, and it has never recovered. It has come back some, but never to the levels that existed when Nixon was first elected president, or when he was reelected president.

That loss of confidence in public officials has been a permanent change, and I don’t think it was just Watergate. The shifting (and in many cases untrue) stories about the Vietnam conflict, the protests and riots over civil rights, and the assassinations in 1968 of Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Jr.—all of those play into the absolute loss of faith in our leaders.

Here we are five decades later, and that’s still true. People are much less trusting of national leaders than was routinely the case before Nixon’s resignation. We are a much more jaundiced people than we were in the pre-Watergate era.

Question: In the 1970s, Republican and Democratic lawmakers came together in a bipartisan way on challenging issues, including pushing for Nixon’s ouster once details of the Watergate break-in came to light. Do you think it’s possible for Democrats and Republicans to work together that way today?

Bickers: We’re living in one of the most polarized periods in American history. We’ve had periods that were as polarized, but you’d have to go back a long way to find that, as in the decades leading up to the Civil War, and obviously the Civil War itself.

Maybe unusually, in the period coming out of World War II—when America was clearly on the top in the world in terms of its economic and military and political powers—while there were obviously differences between Republicans and Democrats, those differences were smaller, and there were more places where they could agree. It was Nixon who created the Environmental Protection Agency. It was under Nixon that the Clean Air Act and the Clean Water Act were passed, with Democratic support.

That’s gone. It’s hard to imagine anything big happening in a bipartisan way today.

Richard Nixon leaving the White House grounds in Marine One on Aug. 9, 1974. (Photo: Bettmann Archive/Getty Images)

Question: In his resignation announcement, Nixon said he hoped his action would hasten the healing process in the country. Do you believe it did that?

Bickers: Probably. We don’t get to replay history with a change where Nixon doesn’t resign and compare what did happen to what might have happened, but probably it did. And I think Vice President Gerald Ford showed quite a lot of courage in pardoning him. That may well have cost Ford the opportunity to be elected in 1976.

There were a lot of people—particularly on the Democratic side—who wanted to see Nixon criminally charged and potentially sent to prison, and that was short-circuited by the pardon.

But the pardon probably did help lower the temperature some, because I think to watch a former president tried in court for crimes and then potentially sent to prison, that inflames the supporters of that party and unites them in a way that might otherwise not happen.

Question: Any thoughts as to how Nixon would be remembered today, had it not been for Watergate?

Bickers: There were a lot of other things happening after Nixon’s reelection in 1972. The economy began to start showing signs of problems that were later going to swamp the Carter administration in the late 1970s. So, wage and price controls were instituted by Nixon after his reelection to try to bring down inflation. The post-World War II legacy of American manufacturing that was in Nixon’s period as president had turned and started going south—and permanently so at that point.

In the war in Vietnam, we were not getting out in a way that looked like it was going to be a success. We were going to have to abandon South Vietnam in some way, which of course did happen, but not until after Ford was president.

All of that was happening, and so that would have been part of his legacy. Had he finished the second term successfully, those would have been marks against him. But a lot of presidents have had recessions. A lot of presidents have had economic issues. Unfortunately, a lot of presidents have had foreign policy failures.

Nixon would have had all of those things on his record, but were it not for Watergate, he would have finished out his term of office and been viewed as a president of two consequential terms. That’s not how we remember him today.

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Thomas Andrews is new director of the Center of the American West

Anonymous — Wed, 07 Aug 2024 17:54:43 +0000

Thomas Andrews is new director of the Center of the American West Anonymous (not verified) Wed, 08/07/2024 - 11:54

Thomas Andrews, University of Colorado Boulder professor of history, has been appointed faculty director of the Center of the American West. His appointment became effective in July.

Thomas Andrews

Andrews’ research and teaching focus on western American, environmental, animal, Indigenous and 19th- and 20th-century U.S. history. He is the recipient a Guggenheim Fellowship, a National Library of Medicine/National Institutes of Health Grant for Scholarly Works in Biomedicine and Health, a National Endowment for the Humanities Public Scholars Award and other fellowships.

He is the author of Killing for Coal: America’s Deadliest Labor War, which won six awards, including a Bancroft Prize; Coyote Valley: Deep History in the High Rockies; and a book in progress about the Great Horse Flu of 1872-73.

Andrews was born and reared in Boulder and graduated from Fairview High School in 1990 before earning his BA at Yale and his MA and PhD at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Before joining the CU Boulder Department of History in 2011, he taught at CU Denver.

Andrews is one of only a handful of second-generation faculty members at CU Boulder. His mother, Martha Andrews, was a research librarian at the Institute for Arctic and Alpine Research (INSTAAR), and his father, John T. Andrews, joined INSTAAR and the Department of Geological Sciences in 1968 and is an emeritus faculty member.

“Professor Andrews is an exceedingly skilled and respected historian who has helped broaden and deepen our understanding of the history of the American West,” said Daryl Maeda, interim dean of the College of Arts and Sciences.

“The Center of the American West makes critical contributions to national thought and discourse about the American West, and Professor Andrews is particularly well suited to stand at its helm.”

The Center of the American West is a nationally recognized hub for illuminating the role of the western United States in regional, national and global issues, describing its mission as bringing people together to “explore the ongoing complexities of and challenges facing the western United States through education, research, programs and projects.”

Thomas Andrews, University of Colorado Boulder professor of history, has been appointed faculty director of the Center of the American West. His appointment became effective in July.

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Loving the losing baseball team

Anonymous — Mon, 15 Jul 2024 21:48:38 +0000

Loving the losing baseball team Anonymous (not verified) Mon, 07/15/2024 - 15:48

Bradley Worrell

In advance of Tuesday’s Major League Baseball All-Star game, CU Boulder history professor Martin Babicz offers thoughts on why some fans remain loyal to baseball’s perennial losers

Every season, one Major League Baseball team earns champion success in the World Series while the rest place behind. And within that second group are a few teams that are the absolute stinkers of the league.

Think the Colorado Rockies in 2023, with just 59 wins versus 109 losses—and with a record of not scoring better than fourth place in their division for five years in a row.

Why do some fans stay loyal to such losers?

Martin Babicz, a CU Boulder associate teaching professor of history, co-wrote the 2017 book National Pastime: U.S. History Through Baseball.

Martin Babicz, a University of Colorado Boulder associate teaching professor of history, has some ideas. An instructor in the Department of History, the Stories and Societies RAP (Residential Academic Program), the Creative Minds RAP and the CMCI RAP, Babicz teaches a course called America Through Baseball, which examines American history since the Civil War, exploring how the social, cultural, economic and political forces shaping America were reflected in the national pastime. He’s also the co-author of the 2017 book National Pastime: U.S. History Through Baseball.

Growing up in New England in the 1960s and 1970s, Babicz had plenty of chances to see Boston Red Sox and New York Mets fans lament their losing baseball teams on an almost-yearly basis. It’s given him insights on why fans stay loyal to losing teams, what factors can cause fans to lose faith in their teams and what he sees as the value of having a team to root for—no matter how bad they are, which he discussed with Colorado Arts and Sciences Magazine.

Question: In sports, Americans generally love winning teams. Why do you think some people stay loyal to perennial losers?

Babicz: That’s a good question, and I’ve thought about this on and off for years.

Baseball teams—in fact all sports teams—are local institutions. The Broncos, for instance, are a part of the fabric of Denver, just like the Rocky Mountains or Casa Bonita. But it is more than that. Sports teams are also family institutions. They are a part of our DNA, as support for the team is often passed along in a family from one generation to another. And just like a family won’t reject a child who is not as smart or as good looking as his siblings, it also won’t reject a sports team that is not as good as its competitors.

I think the Chicago Cubs and the Boston Red Sox might provide an illustration, as they both have very loyal fans. In 1998, both the Cubs and the Red Sox qualified for a wild-card playoff team. The wild card, which at the time was a relatively new thing in baseball, is a playoff berth awarded to a team that did not finish in first place.

Both the Red Sox and the Cubs had reputations for going on a very long losing streak of not winning the World Series, and there was some concern in baseball about what would happen if either of those teams ended up winning the World Series. Would the sport lose some of its luster among those fans? Would the teams lose some of their following?

Well, neither team won it in 1998, but the Red Sox won the World Series in 2004, and the Cubs won it in 2016—and it didn’t damage the teams at all. Winning hasn’t hurt their popularity, so it’s not like you have to be a loser to be loved.

But if you look at the history of baseball, there have been baseball teams who did not do so well.

Think about the Washington Senators, the St. Louis Browns, or the Philadelphia Athletics. They went decades and decades with lousy teams and yet baseball remained popular in those cities. …

Disappointed Chicago Cubs fans watch their team lose to the Colorado Rockies during a May 2019 game. (Photo: Nuccio DiNuzzo/Chicago Tribune)

Question: It sounds like if a team has deep roots in a city, that can be a strong factor on whether fans will generally remain faithful?

Babicz: Yes, fans tend to remain faithful to teams that have deep roots in the community. Support for the team—even a losing team—becomes routine, almost ritualistic.

Take opening day, for instance. Some fans develop habits of skipping work or school and attending opening day every year, no matter how good or bad the local team is. And for many fans, tuning in the game on the radio is something they do whenever they are doing yardwork or work around the house, and they’ll continue to tune in, even if the team is lousy. And, of course, when an opportunity presents itself to attend a game, they’ll take it, even if they think their team won’t win.

And as I said, support for a sports team is often passed from parent to child. But if there wasn’t a team when your father and mother grew up, then there’s nothing to pass to you. …

If you look at football, Denver got a football team in 1960, and Miami got a football team in 1966. In those two markets, football had several decades to get established and to build a fan base before they were competing (for fans’ attention) against baseball teams. So, I wonder, had Denver gotten a baseball team in the early 1960s, would that team be as popular in the media as the Broncos are?

It really surprises me that almost every night it’s the Broncos who lead the sports news—even when it’s not football season. And it’s not like that in some other markets; it’s certainly not like that back east. Football is popular there, but the other sports get their day as well.

Question: Which professional baseball team has the worst record? Were they able to eventually turn things around?

Babicz: The worst team ever was the 1899 Cleveland Spiders. They won 20 games all year, but that was in the 1890s. The National League had a monopoly on teams and there were 12 teams in total. After that season was over, the National League decided to cut back to eight teams—and one of the four teams they eliminated was the Cleveland Spiders. So, they never had the opportunity to recover.

Baseball teams—in fact all sports teams—are local institutions. The Broncos, for instance, are a part of the fabric of Denver, just like the Rocky Mountains or Casa Bonita. But it is more than that. Sports teams are also family institutions. They are a part of our DNA, as support for the team is often passed along in a family from one generation to another.”

Question Are there any corollaries between winning and losing teams and the impact upon game attendance?

Babicz: Some interesting numbers can be seen with the New York Mets. New York City lost two teams in 1958, when the New York Giants and Brooklyn Dodgers moved to California. And so the Yankees were left to dominate New York baseball until the Mets were created in 1962.

The first thing that just amazes me, and it doesn’t make any sense, is that if you look at the attendance of the Yankees in 1957, they drew 1.5 million people. The following year, they drew 1.4 million. Why would the Yankee attendance go down in 1958, if they no longer have competition? And the Yankees won the World Series in 1958, so it’s not like they were no longer a good team.

So, that’s the first thing that surprises me. But the second thing that surprises me is what happened when the Mets came to New York in 1962. That first year, they were absolutely terrible, but they drew 922,000 fans. But in 1963, the Mets, who were still a bad team, drew over a million people—and the attendance at Yankee stadium fell to 1.3 million, even though the Yankees were still pennant winners.

And in 1964, when the Mets were still a last-place team, they drew 1.7 million fans while the Yankees—who won the American League pennant that year—only drew 1.3 million fans. So, this last-place team is drawing 400,000 more fans than the American League pennant winners. And by 1969, when the Mets finally won the World Series, the Yankees drew just over a million fans, and the Mets drew 2 million fans.

I find those numbers interesting in that there’s something else going on in addition to not having competition or just being a winning team. … My thought is that baseball fans in New York, at least some of them, felt betrayed when they lost the Giants and Dodgers, and then they rallied to the Mets, even though they were bad for so many years.

Colorado Rockies fans watch the team lose to the Arizona Diamondbacks in a August 2023 game. (Photo: Hugh Carey/The Colorado Sun)

Question: Is there any evidence to suggest fans will stop being loyal to their losing team at some point?

Babicz: Well, the example of that is in the San Francisco Bay area right now, where the Oakland Athletics are leaving Oakland after the end of the season. Last year, the Athletics were the only major league team to draw fewer than a million fans; I believe there were about 800,000 people who went to an A’s game last year.

Now, in the Bay area, they already have the Giants, so there is another team there. But there is also frustration by many Oakland fans, who blame the team owner for not trying in good faith to stay in Oakland. So, you have to consider how much that has to do with the decline of attendance.

The other city that we saw lose a lot of fans was in Montreal, and that can almost completely be traced to the 1994-95 baseball strike that canceled the World Series. The Expos had the best record in baseball at the time and a strong fan base.

Many fans really expected Montreal to make it to the World Series, and perhaps even win it, but it was all scratched when the strike took place and the World Series was canceled. A lot of Expos fans felt betrayed, and they did not return to the game the following season. After a few seasons, Expo fans were still no longer supporting their team.

Major League Baseball later transferred the Montreal Expos to Washington, D.C., where they became the Washington Nationals.

So, it wasn’t so much having a losing team as it was this sense of betrayal. And I think there’s some of that in Oakland as well. That may be a bigger factor on (fan loyalty) than having a winning or losing team.

Question: Some teams were losers for years—even decades—and then eventually turned things around. Does that mean Rockies fans should keep the faith, or is that asking too much?

Babicz: I’ve thought about that since I moved here from the East Coast. So, the Rockies aren’t in the playoffs. I’d say, ‘Be excited that you have a baseball team and go to the games.’

Colorado Rockies pitcher Kyle Freeland lies on the field after an RBI single during a game against the Houston Astros in July 2023. (Photo: Kevin M. Cox/AP)

In the first 68 years of the 20th century, only one team in each league qualified for post-season play, and from 1969 to 1993, only two teams in each league qualified for post-season play. Baseball is about a lot more than just making the playoffs.

I think back to being a kid, remembering those Red Sox fans who would keep going to Fenway Park year after year even though the team hadn’t won the World Series since 1918. The other thing I think about is, although I grew up in southern New England, I was born in upstate New York, and one of the cities that competed with Denver to get a Major League Baseball team was Buffalo.

When MLB announced the Rockies and the Marlins as the expansion teams, Buffalo didn’t get a team. In fact, other than during the pandemic, when the Toronto Blue Jays played in Buffalo—because Canada wasn’t admitting people from the U.S. into Canada—Buffalo hasn’t had a Major League Baseball team in over a hundred years. I’m sure fans in upstate New York would love to have a baseball team—even if it was a losing team.

Now, you may think, ‘The Rockies are a terrible team.’ True. But at least there’s a team. Those fans in Buffalo don’t even have a major league team to root for.

Just because your team doesn’t make the playoffs is no reason to give up turning out to support your team. With playoff berths, there’s always a chance … next year.

Top image: Rockies fans react to a play during a game between the Colorado Rockies and the Arizona Diamondbacks at Coors Field on Aug. 16, 2023.(Photo: Grace Smith/The Denver Post)

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In advance of Tuesday’s Major League Baseball All-Star game, CU Boulder history professor Martin Babicz offers thoughts on why some fans remain loyal to baseball’s perennial losers.

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60 years after the Civil Rights Act, ‘the activism continues’

Anonymous — Tue, 02 Jul 2024 06:00:00 +0000

60 years after the Civil Rights Act, ‘the activism continues’ Anonymous (not verified) Tue, 07/02/2024 - 00:00

Rachel Sauer

CU Boulder scholar Ashleigh Lawrence-Sanders reflects on what has and hasn’t changed since 1964

Over a five-year span between 1865 and 1870, following the end of the Civil War, three constitutional amendments were ratified to end slavery (the 13^th), make formerly enslaved people U.S. citizens (the 14^th) and give all men the right to vote regardless of “race, color, or previous condition of servitude” (the 15^th).

In the decades that followed, however, and despite provision that “the Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation,” various states and municipalities passed “Jim Crow” laws, abused poll taxes and literacy tests to limit voting and condoned racially motivated violence to enforce segregation and disenfranchise African Americans.

But on July 2, 1964, in the midst of a civil rights movement that had been growing in voice and numbers for many years, President Lyndon Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964 (CRA) into law. This act integrated public schools and facilities; prohibited discrimination based on race, sex, color, religion and national origin in public places and in hiring and employment; and created the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission.

Ashleigh Lawrence-Sanders, a CU Boulder assistant professor of African American and U.S. history, notes that the Civil Rights Act of 1964 "shows what a major legislative change can accomplish, but beyond that, what else happens? The activism continues.”

Sixty years later, the Civil Rights Act is still considered a landmark of U.S. legislation, but does it mean today what it did in 1964?

“Similar to the Voting Rights Act of 1965, the CRA is something we almost take for granted as something that has existed for a good chunk of most people’s lifetimes,” says Ashleigh Lawrence-Sanders, an assistant professor of African American and U.S. history in the University of Colorado Boulder Department of History. “Everything from Brown v. Board on—the Montgomery bus boycott, sit-ins, all these things were leading to this Civil Rights Act.

“I think for civil rights activists, though, it’s a complicated story. A lot of the actual issues that lead to material conditions being different for Black people still have not changed enough. We haven’t closed the racial wealth gap, there’s still structural racism in policing, housing and employment. As violent as the moments at lunch counter sit-ins were, in a way the harder thing is saying, ‘Black people should be able to live in this neighborhood’ or ‘Black and white kids should be going to the same schools’ or ‘Black people are experiencing discrimination at these jobs and people in positions of power are keeping them away.’ People now are being told it’s either unfixable or it’s not a problem, and this is where we’re at 60 years later.”

Protecting civil rights

For almost 100 years following the end of the Civil War and Reconstruction, and despite three constitutional amendments that ostensibly ensured equal rights and legal protections for African Americans, most experienced anything but—and not just in the South, but throughout the United States. In Plessy v. Ferguson in 1896, the U.S. Supreme Court even ruled that segregation didn’t violate the 14^th Amendment.

So, it wasn’t just a culmination of big events that occasionally garnered media attention—Ku Klux Klan marches, the Tulsa and Rosewood massacres, the murder of Emmett Till—but the daily experiences of “redlined” neighborhoods, “sundown” towns, denial of employment, wage inequity, separate entrances and a hundred other inequalities and injustices that germinated the civil rights movement.

Residents of Montgomery, Alabama, walk to work during the 381-day bus boycott that began in December 1955. (Photo: Don Cravens/LIFE Images Collection/Getty Images)

“One of the things I always show my students about the March on Washington is what people were actually asking for, and that the desire for jobs and equal employment were such a huge part of why the march occurred,” Lawrence-Sanders explains. “We get caught up in MLK’s famous speech about integration, but one of the demands of the march was an end to police brutality and police violence, which is something they wanted in the Civil Rights Act that didn’t make it in there.”

As the civil rights movement increasingly gained footing and voice, federal officials were increasingly called on to respond. In the Civil Rights Act of 1957, Congress established the civil rights division of the Department of Justice as well as the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights “to provide means of further securing and protecting the civil rights of persons within the jurisdiction of the United States.”

When John F. Kennedy took office in 1961, he initially postponed supporting anti-discrimination measures, but soon couldn’t ignore the state-sanctioned violence being perpetrated against civil rights activists and protesters throughout the country. In June 1963, Kennedy proposed broad civil rights legislation, noting in his announcement that “this nation, for all its hopes and all its boasts, will not be fully free until all its citizens are free.”

After Kennedy’s assassination, Lyndon Johnson continued pursuing civil rights legislation. After a 75-day filibuster, the Senate voted 73-27 in favor of the bill and Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964 into law July 2.

‘The activism continues’

“Now we tend to forget that this was not the end of the movement,” Lawrence-Sanders says. “A lot of further legislation followed. We were still seeing violent desegregation and busing well into the ‘70s.”

The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. at the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom Aug. 28, 1963. (Photo: AFP/Getty Images)

Housing discrimination, addressed in the Civil Rights Act of 1968, was another big issue—and remains one today, Lawrence-Sanders says. “We still deal with housing segregation and discrimination, and it’s often treated as the exception instead of structural racism, which has become a boogeyman term. The act in ‘68 had provisions about how renting and selling and financing a house can’t be discriminatory based on race or sex, and people violate that constantly. There was an article in The New York Times last month about a woman trying to buy a condo and the seller backed out because she’s Black.

“The frustrating thing about this is that Black people have always suspected that these incidences of racism happen and been called crazy or paranoid, and when these articles appear, Black folks are saying, ‘No, we’ve proven it, not just with the knowledge of how we’ve been treated over time, but it’s finally been exposed by data.’ When I was living in New York City, there were undercover investigations that discovered that taxis don’t stop for Black people, rental apartments don’t rent to Black people at same rate as white people, real estate agents are steering Black people to certain places and steering white people away.”

An important legacy of the CRA is that it established enforcement mechanisms for addressing discrimination, but it stopped short of addressing all the ways structural racism exists in society, Lawrence-Sanders says. It also often gets caught in selective historical memory.

“I think that’s why people tend freeze Martin Luther King in 1963 and the March on Washington,” she says. “Because after the CRA passed, activists were asking for things that went too far for the government. Collectively, we tend to have no use for activists when they demand more and say, ‘That wasn’t enough, we want more, we want to go further.’ The CRA shows what a major legislative change can accomplish, but beyond that, what else happens? The activism continues.”

Top image: President Lyndon Johnson signs the Civil Rights Act of 1964 into law. (Photo: Cecil Stoughton/Lyndon B. Johnson Library and Museum)

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CU Boulder scholar Ashleigh Lawrence-Sanders reflects on what has and hasn’t changed since 1964.

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Why the first Earth Day went viral (pre-social media)

Anonymous — Thu, 18 Apr 2024 16:30:26 +0000

Why the first Earth Day went viral (pre-social media) Anonymous (not verified) Thu, 04/18/2024 - 10:30

Doug McPherson

CU Boulder professors explain Earth Day’s history, impact, what it’s become and if it’s still relevant

If you were at the University of Colorado Boulder in April 1970, you were likely aware―very aware―of the first Earth Day on April 22. CU Boulder was all in and almost stretched the day into a full week, kicking things off on April 18 when the campus was dotted with green flags and abuzz with special events, speeches, films, symposiums, rap sessions and panels.

CU Boulder was just one of about 1,500 universities celebrating Earth Day, not to mention 20 million Americans and more than 10,000 cities, churches and other organizations, says Paul Sutter, a CU professor of environmental history.

That first Earth Day went viral long before viral was cool. No social media, no email blasts, no group texts. Just TV, radio, word of mouth and, in Boulder, an old-fashioned paper-and-ink brochure listing the scheduled events.

“One of the remarkable things is that Earth Day came out of nowhere and was organized quickly, bringing together large numbers of activists who had worked separately before and had not put a name to their movement yet,” Sutter says.

CU Boulder scholars Paul Sutter (left) and Steve Vanderheiden have studied Earth Day's history and impact.

“Earth Day was also decentralized, which meant that it manifested itself in different ways in different places. This was one key to its success. In many ways, we’ve forgotten how powerful and radical these events were. Organizing these events helped to democratize environmentalism.”

So what led to that first Earth Day? And have subsequent Earth Days had the same impact?

Some, including Sutter, say the time was right and argue that even though it sprouted quickly, there were forces at work decades before its birth.

“Americans emerged from WWII concerned about the destructiveness of the war and the state of the global environment―particularly the relationship between population growth and natural resources,” Sutter says. “Early postwar environmental concern was decidedly global.”

And there was worry about the atomic bomb and nuclear technology. “The first detonation of an atomic bomb … was a watershed moment in the nation’s environmental history, and postwar antinuclear activism culminated with the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty of 1963,” Sutter says.

Many cite Rachel Carson’s book on environmental science, Silent Spring, as an added spark as well.

Another factor: The space program, which allowed humans to view Earth from space for the first time. Sutter says that sight gave people “a sense of the planet’s finitude and limits.”

Still relevant?

As successful as that first Earth Day proved to be, after more than a half century, some question whether it’s still relevant, and ask if there’s something else that could make a bigger difference.

Steve Vanderheiden, a CU Boulder professor of political science and environmental studies, says anything that’s been observed annually since 1970 is “bound to have diminishing returns” over time, and that today’s iteration “will be less consequential” than the first one.

One of the remarkable things is that Earth Day came out of nowhere and was organized quickly, bringing together large numbers of activists who had worked separately before and had not put a name to their movement yet.”

“I don't mean to suggest that there isn't still a role for what Earth Day has become―an occasion to teach about environmental issues or hold events where people reaffirm the importance of environmental protection―but rather that we shouldn't expect it to make much of a difference in public opinion or to build momentum for legislation, which we still need,” Vanderheiden says.

“Those goals are now better served by more oppositional forms of political organization and expression that are more willing or able to challenge the status quo.”

While Vanderheiden says that the original Earth Day was “a powerful focusing event” for the U.S. environmental movement, he sees subsequent Earth Days as having made “relatively little difference,” and that any of the past 40 Earth Days have not swayed public opinion on most environmental issues.

“Part of this is a function of the original Earth Day [that was] intended as a consciousness-raising event, for which it was wildly successful. Consciousness now having already been raised about such issues, these later iterations have less potential to accomplish the same objective.”

Vanderheiden adds that Earth Day has also not evolved to reflect activism or resistance. “That might make it too threatening to the status quo to continue enjoying the wide but shallow support that it now receives. In a way, Earth Day has … maintained its popularity because it doesn't really challenge anything anymore. It’s somewhat like how we still celebrate May Day but almost never with much of its original critical content.”

Interested in learning more about Earth Day? Sutter recommends Adam Rome’s The Genius of Earth Day.

Top image: The partly-illuminated Earth rising over the lunar horizon as recorded by Apolo 11; the Earth is approximately 400,000 km away. (Photo: NASA)

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CU Boulder professors explain Earth Day’s history, impact, what it’s become and if it’s still relevant.

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Grooves in a sandstone cliff reveal ancient tool sharpening

Anonymous — Wed, 21 Feb 2024 21:11:10 +0000

Grooves in a sandstone cliff reveal ancient tool sharpening Anonymous (not verified) Wed, 02/21/2024 - 14:11

Jeff Mitton

By rubbing a spear head against stone to form or sharpen it, a groove is gouged very similar to the grooves beside the Procession Panel

Comb Ridge is a monocline spanning between southeastern Utah and northeastern Arizona—a formation 80 miles long with a north-south orientation, rising gradually on the eastern side and dropping precipitously 600 feet on the western side. It is an immense and magnificent structure and it has truly ancient Native American history, including the discovery of an intact Clovis Point spearhead and a petroglyph of a mammoth—both of which date to 13,000 years ago.

In addition, it is home to Ancestral Puebloan dwellings that were occupied from 1150 to about 1290 AD. In 1990, teachers discovered a large petroglyph panel at Comb Ridge that is now called the Procession Panel. Near the Procession Panel, I found something that I did not understand.

At the top of the page: Comb Ridge during the later hours of the afternoon. Above: The Procession Panel depicts 179 people converging at a kiva, a space dedicated to rites and political meetings. Images by Jeff Mitton.

Monarch Cave is an Ancestral Puebloan dwelling in a large alcove at the end of a canyon, beside an intermittent waterfall and high above a splash pool. The structures have some intact walls, and the cooking area is littered with small corn cobs. Several metate depressions were formed in the floor by grinding corn with a small rock called a mano. The ceiling is darkened with the smoke of cooking fires and a nearby wall is stained with the activity of tanning leather.

The two approaches to the alcove are very narrow, so the site was easily defended. Monarch Cave was occupied from 1150 to 1290 AD, when most of the people in the Four Corners area abandoned their ancestral homeland due to drought and famine.

The Procession Panel, above Monarch Cave and farther west, decorates a vertical red rock wall that catches sunlight late in the day. It is 15 feet long, and it depicts 179 people coming from three directions to converge at a kiva, a meeting place with spiritual significance.

Monarch Cave is an Ancestral Puebloan dwelling on Comb Ridge. Image by Jeff Mitton.

Two of the people wear bird headdresses, and several others are carrying hooked staffs, indicating that they are chiefs. Animals include bighorn sheep, deer, snakes and either wolves or dogs also are depicted. Hunting activity is represented by atlatls (slings to hurl spears), and two animals depicted in the panel are impaled by spears.

When I was at the Procession Panel, I looked around for other petroglyphs. Approximately 70 feet north of the panel I found two vertical grooves in the rock. They were about one foot long, about three-eights inch wide and one-half inch deep and in cross section were V-shaped. They did not look like art, but they appeared to be purposely formed. I looked up, then down, but they did not point to anything unusual. I did not know what these were.

It turns out that many Native American sites have grooves gouged into rock. The Cape Cod National Seashore in Massachusetts has a display near Nauset Marsh of a 20-ton communal sharpening stone called Indian Rock. It commemorates thousands of years of activity of the Nauset people, who used the rock to sharpen spear points, harpoons and fishhooks.

Grooves in stone were formed by sharpening of weapons. Image by Jeff Mitton.

A similar display in Chatham, Massachusetts, recognizes the long history of the Monomoyick people with one of their sharpening stones. And for thousands of years, Native American people from at least 15 tribes in the northwest traveled to Kettle Falls on the Columbia River between Oregon and Washington to harvest salmon leaping up the falls.

All who came to catch fish were invited to sharpen their spear heads on the sharpening rock, a boulder weighing one ton that is now on display on the bank above the river, commemorating the times when the river ran free and Native American people lined its banks harvesting salmon. Here in Colorado, sharpening grooves are prominent at Balcony House in Mesa Verde National Park.

Archeologists have described and demonstrated the efficacy of abrasion for sharpening stone spear heads, bone awls or needles. By rubbing a spear head against stone to form or sharpen it, a groove is gouged very similar to the grooves beside the Procession Panel. Experiments with sharpening spear points produce grooves that are straight, V-shaped in cross section and shallower at the ends, like those at the Procession Panel.

However, Native American people used many implements, from large, heavy cutting tools wielded with two hands to butcher bison to axes for cutting trees to small knives for preparing food. For each of these, the shape of the groove differs because the shape and size of the tool differed. Sharpening grooves are seen at many Native American sites and on other continents.

Comb Ridge at sunset. Image by Jeff Mitton.

The Procession Panel shows atlatls, but not bows and arrows. The rock art panel was dated to 760 to 800 AD, about the time (800 AD) that bows and arrows replaced atlatls.

Once I began a literature search on grooves in stone at Native American sites, I was humbled by my realization that I had been ignorant of something that was common here in the West and known around the world.

But I got over that and remembered the exhilaration of visiting a place where the landscape so strikingly beautiful and imagining how life was for those who lived in Monarch Cave 800 years ago and fed themselves with what they could glean from their immediate surroundings. A visit to Comb Ridge is profoundly moving.

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By rubbing a spear head against stone to form or sharpen it, a groove is gouged very similar to the grooves beside the Procession Panel.

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