Category: History
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Fernando de Noronha
Longtime reader “jlumsden” knows that I love to hear about the geo-adventures of my Twelve Mile Circle audience. Thankfully he’s kind enough to share some of his experiences with us. I haven’t encountered a lot of the world personally. That being the case, at least I can travel there vicariously through the adventures of others.…
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Tunnels, Bridges, Lifts and Inclines
I’d love to spend a few weeks on a narrowboat traveling through the canals and inland waterways of Great Britain. The nation offers literally thousands of miles of publicly-accessible routes with much of it interconnected into a single system, allowing one to experience the countryside at four miles per hour. This article isn’t so much…
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My Unnatural Fixation with the American Meridian
I’ll go ahead and crank up the old cliché generator. See if you can select the one you think would be most appropriate to the current situation: I’m like a dog with a bone; I’m pulling a thread from the sweater; I’m beating a dead horse, or all of the above. The American Meridian continues…
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More Oddities in Washington, DC
It was great to be offered an opportunity to submit a guest post on Google Sightseeing, following in the footsteps of Kyle Kusch of The Basement Geographer. Google Sightseeing is one of my all-time favorite blogs and I read it often. So it was a pleasure working with its principal authors, Alex and James Turnbull.…
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Presidential Places
The mailbag continues to overflow with great topics submitted by readers. It’s wonderful to receive this kind of feedback. I hope to create articles around many of your observations and recommendations as I find the right context and opportunity.[1] Recently I heard from Jason J. who wanted to know if I’d been aware of a…
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Jackson’s Mill (39°05’49.19″N, 80°28’00.72″W)
It’s not everyday that an advertisement comes complete with a mysterious Latitude/Longitude coordinate. My local newspaper included a special section on the upcoming 150th anniversary of the Civil War in the United States. This image from West Virginia filled the entire back page. The copy reads, “A nation was nearly torn in half. A state…
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Tunnel Under the Border
Tunnels under the border aren’t anything new but they’re usually about smuggling. I can think of several examples off the top of my head including tunnels between Mexico and the USA for drugs, Egypt and Gaza for basic goods, and the former East and West Berlin for people. Those are all interesting and I don’t…
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County with (Another) State’s Name
It makes great intuitive sense for a state to include a component county with the same name. Imagine living in Oklahoma City. Not only do the residents live in a city named Oklahoma, they also live in a county and a state named Oklahoma. That’s not imaginative, in fact it’s rather boring. Ditto for Arkansas,…
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Improbable Connections
What do the following three entities all have in common?: An obscure Union general from the American Civil War A well-known advertising icon A poisonous weed Improbably, a single tenuous thread actually connects each of these items. I imagine that it’s nearly impossible to associate these widely varied topics unless one stumbles upon the answer…
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New Highpoint for the Netherlands
My brief vacation in Vermont over the weekend must have distracted me. Somehow I completely missed the news about the dissolution of the Netherlands Antilles on October 10, 2010. So it took an email message from loyal reader Greg to bring its true significance to my attention. I’m not referring to the dissolution of the…