It was on this day in 1819 that the infamous Peterloo Massacre occurred at St. Peter's Field in Manchester England.
If you're in the United States, odds are when you think of "corn" you think of that delicious, starchy plant that's good in bread form or on the cob. In Britain, when they say "corn" they mean "wheat" (when they mean "corn" they say "maize"). The Corn Laws were a series of laws in Britain that hiked the tariffs on wheat and other foods. This was great for the wealthy landowners because their crops' value went through the roof but sucked for pretty much everyone else who had to buy the food. They were extremely unpopular but, as those same wealthy landowners controlled Parliament, they weren't getting repealed anytime soon.
The Napoleonic Wars had also just ended a few years ago so there were thousands of demobbed soldiers with nothing to do (I can't imagine what the House of Lords of the day would have thought of the GI Bill) . Manufacturing had also slowed down as the need for war material had dropped so so tons of people were out of work, too.
On top of that they were int he middle of a famine. You've got thousands of out-of-work, hungry, pissed off people who feel their government isn't adequately addressing their needs. A group, the Manchester Patriotic Union (who might be considered "Social Justice Warriors" of the day, if that's cool) decided to have a rally in favor of, among other things, a change in how things worked in Parliament.
A crowd of up to 80,000 people showed up. I tried to find out if this was a larger crowd than was expected, like at Woodstock, but I couldn't find anything that indicated that. At any rate, it was a really big crowd. The local government got nervous and asked the local military to arrest the organizers and run off the crowd. The military took "disperse the crowd" to mean "charge into the crowd on horseback with sabres drawn hacking and slashing." Well, it dispersed the crowd but it also killed 15 people and injured 400.
Peterloo was one of those defining massacres of a generation, like Kent State or Amritsar. Soldiers who had fought with Wellington at Waterloo were among the dead.
Tuesday, August 15, 2017
Monday, August 14, 2017
History Spotlight, 8/14
The first of the Tillamook Burn series of forest fires started on this day in 1933 in Oregon's Northern Coast Range. Between 1933 and 1951, this series of fires would burn more than 350,000 acres of old growth forest.
It was all actually an accident. A steel cable pulling a downed tree dragged against the dry bark of another tree. Friction did its work and the fire started. It wouldn't be extinguished until the fall rains came in September. Ships as far as 500 miles at sea could smell smoke from the fire. Total estimated loss of wood was estimated to be 8.5 billion dollars (in current terms).
A combination of low humidity and dry, blustery conditions led to the fire spreading at an unheard of rate. At its fastest, it was burning at a rate of 21 square miles an hour along a 15 mile front.
After the last of the fires a determined effort was made to reforest the region. Because paper and lumber companies can't pay taxes on land that doesn't have any trees on it, much of the land had fallen into the hands on the local governments because of foreclosure sales. Everyone from schoolchildren to prisoners to specially-designed helicopters planted over a millions trees. This was only a fraction of the estimated 72 million trees that had been lost but still, a quality effort. In 1973, the Oregon governor Tom McCall dedicated the Tillamook Burn as the Tillamook State Forest.
The current controversy is that, now that those trees are reaching maturity, should they be harvested. Every one in the 40's thought that was the plan, but people these days aren't so sure.
In his book "Northwest Corner: Oregon and Washington" author Stuart Holbrook said:
[Reforestation] can never compensate for that tragedy we call the Tillamook Burn, as somber a sight as to be viewed this side of the Styx. There they stand, millions of ghostly firs, now stark against the sky, which were green as the sea and twice as handsome, until an August day of 1933, when a tiny spark blew into a hurricane of fire that removed all life from 300,000 acres (1,200 km2) of the finest timber even seen. It was timber, too, that had been 400 years in the making. It was wiped out in a few seething hours which Oregon will have reason to remember well past the year 2000. To this day the forest stands powerless against the threat of wildfires.
It was all actually an accident. A steel cable pulling a downed tree dragged against the dry bark of another tree. Friction did its work and the fire started. It wouldn't be extinguished until the fall rains came in September. Ships as far as 500 miles at sea could smell smoke from the fire. Total estimated loss of wood was estimated to be 8.5 billion dollars (in current terms).
A combination of low humidity and dry, blustery conditions led to the fire spreading at an unheard of rate. At its fastest, it was burning at a rate of 21 square miles an hour along a 15 mile front.
After the last of the fires a determined effort was made to reforest the region. Because paper and lumber companies can't pay taxes on land that doesn't have any trees on it, much of the land had fallen into the hands on the local governments because of foreclosure sales. Everyone from schoolchildren to prisoners to specially-designed helicopters planted over a millions trees. This was only a fraction of the estimated 72 million trees that had been lost but still, a quality effort. In 1973, the Oregon governor Tom McCall dedicated the Tillamook Burn as the Tillamook State Forest.
The current controversy is that, now that those trees are reaching maturity, should they be harvested. Every one in the 40's thought that was the plan, but people these days aren't so sure.
In his book "Northwest Corner: Oregon and Washington" author Stuart Holbrook said:
[Reforestation] can never compensate for that tragedy we call the Tillamook Burn, as somber a sight as to be viewed this side of the Styx. There they stand, millions of ghostly firs, now stark against the sky, which were green as the sea and twice as handsome, until an August day of 1933, when a tiny spark blew into a hurricane of fire that removed all life from 300,000 acres (1,200 km2) of the finest timber even seen. It was timber, too, that had been 400 years in the making. It was wiped out in a few seething hours which Oregon will have reason to remember well past the year 2000. To this day the forest stands powerless against the threat of wildfires.
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