History

The hand-drawn map (not done to scale) comes from the Library of Congress’s panoramic maps collection. The full version can be downloaded or viewed here. Here’s some other historical maps from Oklahoma. If you zoom in you’ll notice there’s a baseball stadium between Brady and Archer from Cincinnati to Detroit, a block west of the current ONEOk Field. The drawing could be a reference to Association Park, which was located between Archer and First from Elgin to Cincinnati according to a timeline of Tulsa’s baseball stadiums. Association park, however, closed in 1917. ...

George R. Stetson writing about the belief in Vampirism amongst the population in rural Rhode Island during the nineteenth century: …[I]t is perhaps fortunate that the isolation of which this is probably the product, an isolation common in sparsely settled regions, where thought stagnates and insanity and superstition are prevalent, has produced nothing worse. (Via Smithsonian Magazine’s “The Great New England Vampire Panic,” October 2012)

Former Senator Jim Abourezk discussing his visit to the occupied town of Wounded Knee in 1973 with the South Dakota CBS affiliate: “We got into the Indians’ perimeter and there’s all these Indian Vietnam vets who were there with AK-47′s Kalashnikovs, I don’t know where they got them all, but they had them. And we were driving slowly right, and they were following us, just like that. And the tension, I’m telling you was thick enough to slice,” Abourezk said. ...

There are three types of the genus vagrant: the hobo, the tramp, and the bum. The hobo works and wanders, the tramp dreams and wanders and the bum drinks and wanders. In Hoboes: Bindlestiffs, Fruit Tramps, and the Harvesting of the West by Mark Wyman.

The American Indian Movement’s Thanksgiving anti-commemoration in 1970

We tossed the cakes to them and I fed them like chickens with small pieces of cake and like chickens they ate it. Mr. Stevens kept guard with a whip with which he pretended to whip a small boy. We made them open their mouths and tossed cake into it. For a ‘Coup de Grace’ we threw a lot of them in a place and a writhing heap of human beings. We drove on very soon in the moonlight, It was beautiful.…We made the crowds that we gave cake to give three cheers for the U.S.A. before we gave them cake…. ...

Finding Cheers’ opening photos in the archives

Even the entertainment could be traumatic in No Man’s Land. People would gather at makeshift rodeo stands near Boise City, OK on Saturday afternoons to watch the cow dip. Cattle were herded into a chute and down into a vat of water. Once they hit the water, they were drowned by two cowboys, on either side of the vat, who held their heads down while the beeves bucked. Some of the children didn’t like it–an amusement ride with a sudden death at the end. ...

While conducting some research on Leon Russell I managed to come across a gem of a Rolling Stone article from February of 1972. In response to the destruction of four airliners in 1970 by Palestinian guerrillas, Richard Nixon implemented an anti-hijacking program which RS panned as ineffective and setting “a dangerous precedent for future violations of two basic constitutional freedoms–freedom to travel and freedom from unreasonable search.” The article details the “one-two-three model” of airport security that is nothing compared to today’s gate rapes. The process included behavioral profiling (a profile which wasn’t released because it would endanger national security) and magnetometers. A person was only suppose to be subject to search if they both matched the behavior profile (of a hijacker) and set off the metal detector, but RS argued the process subjected those who “look freaky” (i.e. long haired hippie types) to unreasonable searches. ...

Story of a haunted Louisiana Plantation