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Building a Christian America

When taught well, history is a positively fascinating and enjoyable subject. Here is a positively superb example of how history should be taught:

It is impossible to understand the role of the Christian Right in American culture unless we first understand its two predecessors: the Second Great Awakening and the Fundamentalist Movement.

In this second article in this four-part series, then, we will ask how the Second Great Awakening and the Fundamentalist Movement sought to transform the United States into a distinctly Christian nation and, in that way, paved the way for the Christian Right of our own time.

By Richard Hughes: The Christian Right In Context: Building a Christian American

Introducing a subject with a statement like “It is impossible to understand ___ without first understanding ___ is almost always a positive harbinger.

I truly do admire men like Mr. Hughes who have the depth of knowledge and eloquence to simplify such a complex issue.

HDR arrives for the masses

Dynamic range has been a limitation of photography since its inception. Film and digital photographers have used a number of techniques over the years (merging film negatives, dodging and burning of film, bracketing on digital cameras) to enhance the range of their photos. The historical problem of achieving High Dynamic Range (HDR) has always been the amount of time spent post-processing the images. With film, the process could take days. With digital photos, it was reduced to hours. With the introduction of HDR on the iPhone, the process takes two seconds.

Apple added HDR functionality to the iPhone with the recently released iOS 4.1 update. With a single tap of the shutter, the camera takes three photos and merges them. When shooting a stationary subject with a steady hand, the results are excellent. Otherwise, the results are mixed. I’m certainly glad the camera I have with me has it as an option.

Michigan is no stranger to tough times

From the book, The Forests of Michigan, describing the timber industry in Michigan from about 1880 to 1920:

The final lumber tally from the Michigan timber boom is staggering: approximately 161 billion board feet of pine (50 percent more than that produced in Wisconsin and Minnesota combined) plus 50 billion board feet of cedar, hemlock, and hardwoods. … The value of lumber output from Michigan’s pineries exceeded by a billion dollars the gold extracted in the 60 years that followed the rush to California in 1849 (Wells 1978).

After the boom, virtually nothing remained of that vast Michigan pinery whose end was believed by many to be unreachable.

When the forests were depleted, the lumber barons packed up and left with their fortunes.

It’s not just backhoes

From, Mother Earth Mother Board

In 1870, a new cable was laid between England and France, and Napoleon III used it to send a congratulatory message to Queen Victoria. Hours later, a French fisherman hauled the cable up into his boat, identified it as either the tail of a sea monster or a new species of gold-bearing seaweed, and cut off a chunk to take home.

When written well, history is fascinating, and often hilarious.

The “Great Woods”

No one who has not gazed upon a beautiful, mirror-like lake, surrounded by an unbroken forest of tall pines and picturesque cedars and hemlocks, can form anything like a correct idea of the picture afforded the early settlers in the village of Clam Lake [later renamed to Cadillac]. It seems almost sacrilege that such beauty of scenery should have had to yield before the insatiable maw of the woodman’s ax and saw-mill’s glittering teeth, but the marts of commerce have no sentiment or romance, and natures loveliness must be yielded up to the demands of business, and the glory of her forests and the grandeur of its solitudes must be laid waste that man may reap fortunes out of what it has taken her centuries to produce. If the denuded lands had been turned into waving wheat fields there would have seemed to be come recompense for the ruthless slaughter of the forests, but to see the vast areas of lands covered with nothing but stumps and a stubby growth of bushes, makes one wish that the task of cutting away the great forests of pine had been much less rapidly done, so that the present and future generations could have had a glimpse of their royal beauty and sublimity. But how useless it is to moralize.

— John H Wheeler, History of Wexford County, Michigan, 1903, pp 287-288