Thomas Campbell (right) with the vice minister of agriculture of the Kazakhstan Soviet Republic. For credit see below.
Thomas D. Campbell was a farmer and mechanical engineer. In 1918, when he was 36 years old and World War I was spurring demand for wheat, he started a 95,000-acre wheat farm in southeastern Montana. It was the largest farm in the United States and possibly the world. Located primarily on land leased from the Crow Indian reservation, the farm obtained a $2 million investment from New York financier J. P. Morgan.
As time went on, Soviet agricultural experts visited Campbell’s farm to learn how to use so many machines efficiently, and Campbell went to the Soviet Union as a technical adviser, where he met Josef Stalin. Campbell was famous, influential, and popular. His farm continued well beyond his death in 1966.
Braxton Bragg and Leonidas Polk have military bases named after them, Fort Bragg in North Carolina and Fort Polk in Louisiana.
Congress recently enacted (over President Trump’s veto) a defense funding law that calls for renaming military bases that honored Confederate generals.
Perhaps history can teach us, after all. Here are some fascinating stories that surfaced in the past few weeks. My paragraphs will give you highlights and I encourage you to read the originals.
‘Follow the Consensus’
Looking back, most of us see the American prohibition era (1920–1933) as a giant, foolhardy mistake. It destroyed businesses, turned average citizens into criminals, built a mafia of corruption, and more. How could it have happened?
This is a guest post by Jay Schalin, director of policy analysis for the James G. Martin Center for Academic Renewal in Raleigh.
An oft-repeated phrase is that “history is written by the winners.” That’s not always true; sometimes, history is written by those who can write the best, even if they were the losers.
That seems to be the case with the historical period that many still call “The Dark Ages,” which supposedly began with the collapse of the Western Roman Empire around 400 AD and lasted until the 800s. The commonly accepted view is based largely on written accounts by Roman or Romanized observers who lamented the collapse of their civilization, according to Peter S. Wells, a University of Minnesota anthropologist, in his 2008 book Barbarians to Angels: The Dark Ages Reconsidered. The non-Roman European world that was in ascendance was largely pre-literate until the so-called Dark Ages were well under way. Continue reading “The Dark Ages Were Brighter Than You Think”
Even though I’m not adding original posts right now, lively articles about history are all around us. Here are summaries of three, with links.
Charles Curtis: Republican, Native-American, and Vice President
Herbert Hoover’s vice president, Charles Curtis, was part-Native American, a member of the Kaw Tribe of Kansas. With Kamala Harris in the news, the Washington Posttells his interesting story (making the point that Harris will not be the first “person of color” to be an American vice president).
Curtis, whose mother was a Kaw member and whose father was white, grew up on the Kaw reservation in the late nineteenth century. As a teenager he moved sixty miles away to live with his paternal grandparents in Topeka, where he became something of a star horse jockey. When the tribe was forced to move to Oklahoma, Charles wanted to go, too, but his Kaw grandmother urged him to stay in Topeka and get an education. He did, and he was always grateful for her advice. He became an attorney and with his “winning personality,” a Kansas congressman, senator, and eventually vice president.
