Matt and the Thundergods @mattthundergods-blog - Tumblr Blog

60 floors above Chicago during a snowstorm

America’s Forgotten Black Cowboys

Like many people, Jim Austin - a college-educated, 45-year-old businessman - hadn’t heard about the black presence in the Old West.

The discovery inspired him and his wife Gloria to set up the National Multicultural Western Heritage Museum in Fort Worth, Texas. It pays tribute to some of the forgotten black cowboys - men like Bill Pickett, a champion rodeo rider who invented bulldogging, a technique where he would jump from a horse on to a steer and take the animal down by biting on its lip.

“The kids who are learning history in our schools are not being told the truth about they way the West was,” says Austin.

“I bet you nine out of 10 people in this country think that cowboys were all white - as I did.”

In the real Old West, as opposed to the film depiction, black cowboys were a common sight.

“Black cowboys often had the job of breaking horses that hadn’t been ridden much,” says Mike Searles, a retired professor of history at Augusta State University. His students knew him as Cowboy Mike because he gave lectures dressed in spurs, chaps and a ten-gallon hat.

“Black cowboys were also chuck wagon cooks, and they were known for being songsters - helping the cattle stay calm,” he says.

Searles says his research, which included poring over interviews with ex-slaves in the 1930s, suggested black cowboys benefited from what he calls “range equality”.

“As a cowboy you had to have a degree of independence,” he says. “You could not have an overseer, they had to go on horseback and they may be gone for days.”

from America’s Forgotten Black Cowboys, BBC News, March, 22, 2013

#cowboys #west

lhsk-sanches

#Cities #lakes #setting

valtsv

ok but the concept of a rivalry is just so funny. it’s like “i’m literally obsessed with you. you’re the only motherfucker on the planet worth my undivided time and attention. i spend hours planning in detail exactly what i’m going to say and do the next time that we meet. but, like, i fucking hate you.”

#Rivals

pollyjean

the inherent homoeroticism of pinning your rival against a wall as an intimidation tactic

pollyjean

the inherent homoeroticism of having a rival

#Hmm #rivals

indigenouscontemporaryart

Lawrence Paul Yuxweluptun | Medicine Man on the Land. 1988

Lawrence Paul Yuxweluptun is a contemporary Canadian artist of Coast Salish and Okanagan descent. He lives and works in Vancouver, British Columbia. His paintings and sculptures combine Coast Salish cosmology, Northwest Coast design, and Western landscape painting.

Yuxweluptun’s paintings can be brutal critiques of issues affecting Canada’s First Nations. He broaches topics such as stolen land, residential schools, and the destruction of the environment by corporations. In addition to being an influential First Nations artist, Yuxweluptun is a strong advocate for Indigenous issues.

#Art #first nations

historyarchaeologyartefacts

Rattlesnake effigy (34.7 x 34.4 x 35.2 cm), Mexico no date available on the museum site.[1601x1800]

#Snakes #mexico #objects

cold

Woodrow Wilson Crumbo (Native American Potawatomi, 1912 - 1989), Three Leaping Blue Deer and Three Birds, mid-20th century, watercolor and tempera on paper; Gilcrease Museum, Tulsa.

#Art #deer

ms-mandy-m

Veteran storm chaser and photographer Mike Olbinski captures the beauty of hurricanes in timelapses and stills while chasing storm systems around Arizona.

#Lightning #southwest

kuttithevangu

Monkey brain: lightning… dangerous

Human brain: I wanna get RAINED ON

#words

nasa

What's Made in a Thunderstorm and Faster Than Lightning? Gamma Rays!

A flash of lightning. A roll of thunder. These are normal stormy sights and sounds. But sometimes, up above the clouds, stranger things happen. Our Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope has spotted bursts of gamma rays - some of the highest-energy forms of light in the universe - coming from thunderstorms. Gamma rays are usually found coming from objects with crazy extreme physics like neutron stars and black holes.

So why is Fermi seeing them come from thunderstorms?

Thunderstorms form when warm, damp air near the ground starts to rise and encounters colder air. As the warm air rises, moisture condenses into water droplets. The upward-moving water droplets bump into downward-moving ice crystals, stripping off electrons and creating a static charge in the cloud.

The top of the storm becomes positively charged, and the bottom becomes negatively charged, like two ends of a battery. Eventually the opposite charges build enough to overcome the insulating properties of the surrounding air - and zap! You get lightning.

Scientists suspect that lightning reconfigures the cloud’s electrical field. In some cases this allows electrons to rush toward the upper part of the storm at nearly the speed of light. That makes thunderstorms the most powerful natural particle accelerators on Earth!

When those electrons run into air molecules, they emit a terrestrial gamma-ray flash, which means that thunderstorms are creating some of the highest energy forms of light in the universe. But that’s not all - thunderstorms can also produce antimatter! Yep, you read that correctly! Sometimes, a gamma ray will run into an atom and produce an electron and a positron, which is an electron’s antimatter opposite!

The Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope can spot terrestrial gamma-ray flashes within 500 miles of the location directly below the spacecraft. It does this using an instrument called the Gamma-ray Burst Monitor which is primarily used to watch for spectacular flashes of gamma rays coming from the universe.

There are an estimated 1,800 thunderstorms occurring on Earth at any given moment. Over the 10 years that Fermi has been in space, it has spotted about 5,000 terrestrial gamma-ray flashes. But scientists estimate that there are 1,000 of these flashes every day - we’re just seeing the ones that are within 500 miles of Fermi’s regular orbits, which don’t cover the U.S. or Europe.

The map above shows all the flashes Fermi has seen since 2008. (Notice there’s a blob missing over the lower part of South America. That’s the South Atlantic Anomaly, a portion of the sky where radiation affects spacecraft and causes data glitches.)

Fermi has also spotted terrestrial gamma-ray flashes coming from individual tropical weather systems. The most productive system we’ve seen was Tropical Storm Julio in 2014, which later became a hurricane. It produced four flashes in just 100 minutes!

Learn more about what Fermi’s discovered about gamma rays over the last 10 years and how we’re celebrating its accomplishments.

Make sure to follow us on Tumblr for your regular dose of space: http://nasa.tumblr.com.

#Storm #lightning #science

bearablebutch

Lesbian welders, San Francisco: 20th century

From The Library of Congress Archives

#Characters

ghostcurriculum

No matter what you learned in fourth grade, California Indians didn't conveniently vanish when the 49ers arrived.

sanguinarysanguinity

California Indian history didn’t end with the Gold Rush. It’s still in progress. California Indians make baskets and manage landscapes with fire – and drive pickup trucks and earn doctorates – in the present tense, planning for a future seven generations distant. In that sense, the thread of California Native history extends farther into the future than that of mainstream society, focused on the next fiscal year at most.

It’s probably no accident that the fourth grade curriculum stops mentioning the Native peoples of California at around the time of the Gold Rush. The Gold Rush was a period in which white settlers’ treatment of California Indians might well be too horrible for us to share with children. Even for adult Californians, looking closely at historic harms visited on Native Californians is an unsettling experience.

That sorry history makes it all the more remarkable and fortunate that California Indians are still here, still working to shape the state and its landscape, still working to heal the rift between their non-native neighbors and the landscape we all depend on.

catchaspark

“Some of the Indians’ campaigns against the missions were substantially successful. Kumeyaay warriors burned down the Mission Basilica San Diego de Alcalá in 1775. The next year, a group of Chumash people set fire to the roofs of several buildings at the Mission San Luis Obispo. The Franciscans rebuilt the destroyed buildings using adobe and tile roofs, giving birth to a signature California architectural style.

The next time you see a red-tiled stucco housing development or business park, you can reflect on the fact that that kind of building design owes its existence to California Indian rebellions.”

ghostcurriculum

Reblogging for these great additions. The Gold Rush was a period in which white settlers’ treatment of pretty much everyone, including each other, was appalling. Some tremendous fortunes were made, but so very much was lost.

What happened to indigenous people on the west coast from about 1830 to 1900 was absolutely a genocide. You look at the Yahi, or the Rogue tribes, and you are looking at a calculated program of extermination. Then there’s the loss from disease, which in some areas was over 80%. Imagine four out of five people you know, gone.

I mean, I say that, but the truth is I can’t really imagine it, myself.

And yet the Redding Ranchería is still there, and I talk on Facebook most nights with a Tolowa friend…I could go on but you get the point. Genocide: it’s not just awful, it also never really gets rid of the people you want to get rid of.

All these years the federal government’s been trying to break these people, and they still get up and sing. I learn a lot from my indigenous colleagues, not least about picking up and dusting off and going on even when the going’s bad.

We’re also going to talk about hydraulicking. And mercury. And the Chinese. Because you have to look at what happened to both people and the land, if you want to start reckoning with this – and if you live in the west, you should reckon with this. This is a story we have to carry. This is where the modern history of the Pacific west begins, is this year where everything changes.

I have been reading a lot of breathless articles this week about how history moves faster than it used to, but I think you and I know that history can turn on a dime. 1849 is one of those dimes.

#california #native #history