The Ninemile Historic Remount Depot introduces the public to a historic and working Ranger Station. The Visitor Center has information about the pack animals and firefighters that worked the Northern Rockies during the 1920s and 1940s.
A second website for the site can be found here.
The site offers exhibits and tours.
The escarpment's scenic canyons were home for Indians of several cultures, including the Folsom culture of more than 10,000 years ago. The region's historic era began when Spanish explorer Coronado traveled across the plains in 1541. After Spanish colonies were established in New Mexico around 1600, two-way trade between Plains Indians and New Mexicans began and gradually increased. The Plains Apache acquired horses and became proficient buffalo hunters. They were displaced by the Comanche, who arrived in the early 1700s and dominated northwestern Texas, until they were finally subdued in the 1870s. During the Comanche reign, trade prospered and New Mexican buffalo hunters, known as ciboleros, and traders, known as Comancheros, were frequent visitors to this area. Las Lenguas Creek, a few miles south of the park, was a major trade area, and a site excavated on Quitaque Creek has produced artifacts indicating that it may have been a cibolero camp.
The park offers tours and educational and recreational events and programs.
This extensive archive offers more than 13,200 photographs taken in California between 1921 and 1965 by Jervie Henry Eastman. The collection includes photographs, negatives, and postcards "for a wide variety of northern California locations and events, including dam construction, logging, mining, food processing, and community buildings and activities." Eastman established his photo studio in 1921.
Clicking on the thumbnail images brings up a larger version of the photograph with descriptive data. For some of the images it is necessary to select "more information about this image" to find the specific subject of the photograph. This selection also provides a subject cross-reference list. Search is by keyword only. The collection is of interest to those researching the history of northern California and those interested in urban history or historical geography.
Kenneth Jackson, Jacques Barzun Professor in History and the Social Sciences at Columbia University, describes the ways in which 19th-century cities evolved from disorganized, unregulated communities into modern cities focusing on order, safety, and public health. Professor Jackson looks at the motivations behind these developments as well as implementation strategies.
According to BackStory:
"In 1815, a volcanic eruption in Indonesia sent enough ash into the sky to disrupt the world’s weather for the next year. In New England, 1816 became known as 'The Year Without a Summer.' Snow fell in June and July. Crops and animals died. Tens of thousands of people picked up and left; their search for greener pastures became an early chapter in a larger story of westward expansion.
This week on BackStory, we tackle extreme weather: how we’ve tried to predict it, control it, make sense of it. Along the way, we discover that our responses to wind, sleet, and rain have said as much about us as about the natural world."
This collection of essays, commissioned from distinguished scholars, is designed to deepen content knowledge and offer fresh ideas for teaching. Essays begin with a thorough overview of the topic. “Guiding Discussion” offers suggestions on introducing the subject to students, and “Historians Debate” notes secondary sources with varied views on the topic. Notes and additional resources complete each essay. Essays include links to primary sources in the National Humanities Center’s Toolbox Library and are part of the larger TeacherServe project.
Visitors can browse 17 essays, divided into "Native Americans and the Land," "Wilderness and the American Identity," and "The Use of the Land." These focus on the changing ways in which North Americans have related to the natural world and its resources. Topics include, among others, “The Columbian Exchange,” “The Effects of Removal on American Indian Tribes,” “Cities and Suburbs,” and “Environmental Justice for All.”
Useful for teachers looking to expand their content knowledge beyond the information and viewpoints presented in textbooks, and to get a taste of historians' debate over the interpretation of history.
Was it successful for everyone?
Most begin by describing how industrialization marred the environment and wasted natural resources. They then describe how President Theodore Roosevelt secured new laws that gave the federal government power to curb environmental abuses and manage natural resources.
Sources show how conservation laws designed to protect wasteful and damaging uses of natural resources created entirely new categories of crime. They redefine traditional “pioneering” activities such as carving farmland out of the public domain, building log cabins, and hunting animals for food as the crimes of squatting, timber theft, and poaching. They also reveal how conserving Yosemite and the Grand Canyon for public enjoyment carried significant costs for Native Americans who called these places home.
Historians describe the conservation movement as significantly more diverse, both geographically and politically, than textbook accounts suggest. They tend to emphasize the movement’s strong ties to the larger Progressive movement, explore conservation’s national scope, and highlight the work of local grassroots leaders. Historians have also emphasized the significant human costs and unintended environmental consequences of key conservation policies.
Textbooks celebrate the conservation movement as an unalloyed success: New forestry laws prevented widespread clear-cutting, erosion, and fires. Game preservation laws protected wildlife from overhunting. Reclamation laws reformed the haphazard use of scarce water resources in the American West, enabling agricultural expansion. Preservation laws protected areas of scenic beauty from privatization and tacky commercial development. Yet historians have depicted the conservation movement much more broadly—and have assessed its legacy more critically. Why?
With its origins in the rising environmental awareness of the 1960s and '70s, Earth Day gives students a chance to consider how human relationships with the natural environment have changed over time. How did pre-colonial and colonial North Americans relate to nature? How were their lives shaped by it? How did the industrial revolution in the U.S. change these relationships? What changes have occurred since then?
If you're looking for resources to teach the relationship of geography and natural science to U.S. history, visit our Earth Day spotlight page. You'll find website reviews, teaching strategies for using maps and the environment, quizzes, and more.
Many other organizations also offer Earth Day resources. Here are some ideas to keep you browsing:
Colonial Williamsburg's Harmony Hunter interviews Bly Straube to discuss the importance of the well discovered at James Fort on Jamestown Island.
For information regarding the excavation of the well, see the podcast The John Smith Well.
In this podcast, Colonial Williamsburg's Harmony Hunter interviews archaeologist Bill Kelso. Kelso is the director of archeology on Jamestown Island and is currently working on excavating a well that was created in 1609 under the orders of Captain John Smith. Hunter and Kelso discuss the excavation process and the importance of the discovery.