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| History |
| The History Forum :: Ask us a Question! |
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History :: The road to understanding why things are as they are today, is by learning what came before. History is the study of "what came before".
If you are intrigued by the past, if you want to understand and appreciate how different events shaped the world as we now know it, the History Forum is for you. In this Forum any aspect of history may be discussed, debated and examined. Since we have people here from all over the world, the History Forum is an exciting place to share thoughts and observations from varying cultural standpoints.
Because this forum is visited by people just about everywhere, there may be some subjects that might be viewed by some in totally different contexts than others. The expectation in this forum is that each person's cultural difference is respected. The purpose of this Forum is not to denigrate one another’s cultures, but to share intelligent debate and discussion.
This is the place to ask a question about historical facts that have heretofore intrigued you, but that you have never really understood. This is the place to share some historical knowledge that you have gleaned in your travels through life. Polls may be created concerning some aspect of history, allowing members to perceive varying views on the same subject.
For both history buffs, and those simply curious about history, the History Forum is for you. Ask us a Question!
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| When did garages become commonplace? |
Posted by boomerang on May, 15. :: 15 Comments
We are going to have to build a new garage so when I'm out ambling wih the dog I've been snooping through the neighborhood looking at garages.
Most of the houses in my neighborhood were built between 1920 and 1930. It is hard to tell if the garages are original to the structure/plot or not. Would they have been?
At some point some builder had to say "We're putting a garage on every house we build." When might that have been?
I did try a quick Google on the topic but didn't come up with anything really related to the architectural history of garages so I decided to post here hoping someone might just know something about it.
Thanks!
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| For Eva: Scientists Decode Dust Bowl |
Posted by BumbleBeeBoogie on May, 11. :: 2 Comments
Sunday, May 11, 2008
Scientists Decode Dust Bowl
By John Fleck
Albuquerque Journal Staff Writer
The dust storm that rolled across Clayton on May 29, 1937, looked like it wanted to swallow the world. For farmers across mid-America, in some sense, the dust storm and a host like it really did swallow their world. Drought during the 1930s turned their fields to dust, wind blew the dust away and farming on America's Great Plains was never the same. They call it the Dust Bowl.
It has been known since the 1930s that farming practices helped cause the dusty part the Dust Bowl, removing natural vegetation that held the dirt in place. Precious topsoil simply blew away, degrading farmland. Major changes in farming practices adopted in response continue to this day.
But new research suggests that the effect of agriculture may have been worse than anyone realized at the time. All that dust actually decreased rainfall, according to a team of scientists from Columbia University and NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies, both in New York.
A drought that might otherwise have been limited to Mexico, New Mexico and Texas instead spread across much of the Great Plains, according to the scientists.
The extent of the drought has always been a puzzle to climate scientists, according to Ben Cook, a researcher at both Columbia and Goddard who was lead author on a new paper reporting the findings.
Scientists say they have a handle on the way changing ocean temperatures influence drought across North America. The slow warming and cooling of the Pacific and the Atlantic over periods of years to decades influences rainfall patterns.
When the oceans are in the right alignment, droughts result.
Richard Seager, a professor at Columbia and one of Cook's co-authors, fed ocean temperature data into computer simulations to re-create many of the major North American droughts of the last two centuries.
But the Dust Bowl drought has always been a puzzle, Seager and Cook said in interviews.
Ocean temperatures at the time were consistent with a drought centered over Mexico, eastern New Mexico and Texas— a "classic Southwestern drought," Cook called it. But the Dust Bowl drought stretched far to the north and east, to the Dakotas and across much of the Great Plains.
Looking for an explanation, Cook and his colleagues found data on dust and added the information to their computer simulation. The resulting drought patterns the computer spit out looked much more like what actually happened during the 1930s.
Cook said all the extra dust reflected sunlight. This cooled the air, reducing evaporation from the ground and thus decreasing the amount of moisture available for rainfall.
Farming practices today are much different than in the 1930s, said David Graham, county extension agent in Union County.
The county, in New Mexico's northeast corner, was the area of the state hit hardest by the Dust Bowl.
Back then, every acre of ground was plowed, Graham explained. When the soil wore out, a farmer would move to the next available acre, leaving the ground bare and unprotected. The economic incentive, Seager said, was to plow every bit of ground.
Today, Graham said, grass is planted on land that is not in use for farming, and "conservation reserves" of unfarmed land are set aside to help soil conservation. Cook and his colleagues say those practices, instituted immediately after the Dust Bowl, can prevent a worst-case repeat of the Dust Bowl conditions here.
But they say their findings might apply to other parts of the world, including China and sub-Saharan Africa, where the same practices that triggered the Dust Bowl here are still in use today.
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| Do You Think Augustus Caesar Hidden the True History? |
Posted by Franklin51 on May, 07. :: 6 Comments
looking back to the history of Roman
Augustus Caesar was the most powerful man in his times, and he could force anyone in Roman to tell the lies.
do you think Augustus Caesar hidden the truth?
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| Chinese Religion |
Posted by randomhero on May, 06. :: 1 Comment
I'm trying to find information for a research paper we're working on. The topic is Chinese religion. The time period is 1870 - 1920. Where can I find sources for that time period?
Thanks.
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