What Sarah Hale Did for You

In 1621, famous pilgrim William Bradford proclaimed a day of feasting to commemorate the first harvest after a long year of suffering. That became America's first Thanksgiving Day. But as the colonies grew prosperous, the people forgot all about Thanksgiving and the meaning it held for their ancestors. The holiday was revived for a time under George Washington, but general interested in it dropped steadily. Finally, it was observed in only a few communities and that was sporadic because there was no set date.

Then, a determined woman named Sara Hale appeared on the scene. She was a young widow from New Hampshire. In 1822, she found herself with five children to support. She turned to literature and became the editor of a woman's magazine. Like most editors, Sarah was a crusader. It was her belief that the government should make Thanksgiving a national holiday. She pounded away at her idea for years. Three presidents turned her down. But the fourth finally agreed with her. In 1863, Abraham Lincoln proclaimed the last Thursday of every November as our national day of Thanksgiving.

Now, you probably never knew that Sarah Hale did that for you. Her fame rests more on the ditty she wrote in 1830. We’ll never forget her for that simple poem that begins, “Mary had a little lamb…”

Derric Johnson

A Look back at the Biggest Events of the 2010s

2010

The deadliest natural disaster of the decade happens in the first month of 2010: A 7.0 earthquake hits Haiti. 

Scientists at the Large Hadron Collider successfully trap anti-matter for the first time.

Another team of scientists became the first to successfully create "synthetic life.”

Apple debuts the iPad.

Instagram and Pinterest launch. 

2011

The death of Osama bin Laden.

The space shuttle fleet is retired.

The world’s first synthetic organ transplant.

Occupy Wall Street.

The Arab Spring rises.

The number of social media users around the world reaches 1 billion.

Google+ and Snapchat launch.

2012

Hurricane Sandy hits the US East Coast.

A mass shooting at a movie theater in Aurora, Colorado is followed months later by the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting.

The first license is issued in the United States for a self-driven car.

2013

The Black lives matter hashtag is first used.

A terror attack takes place at the Boston Marathon.

The Mayan calendar reaches the end of its cycle—leading to a bit of hysteria.

Personalized DNA sequencing is available for under $100.

The Oxford English Dictionary selects “selfie” as the word of the year.

2014

Google Glass is launched.

The deadliest outbreak of Ebola starts in West Africa.

The US begins restoring diplomatic relations with Cuba.

The ALS Ice Bucket Challenge begins.

2015

The first Apple watch is officially released. 

The Supreme Court strikes down state bans on same-sex marriage. 

195 countries agree to the Paris Climate Agreement.

The number of PCs used around the world reaches 2 billion (it took 30 years to reach one billion but only 8 years to reach two billion).

The number of social media users (worldwide) also reaches 2 billion.

3D printing enters the consumer market.

The New Horizons probe arrives at Pluto while Voyager I enters the heliopause (the outer edge of our solar system).

2016

The US gets its first female presidential nominee of a major political party.

Britons vote in favor of Brexit—the UK withdrawal from the European Union.

The Chicago Cubs ends the longest drought in baseball by winning the World Series (the last time the Cubs won a World Series was in 1908, 108 years earlier).

2017

TicToc is released.

Hundreds of thousands of people descended on Washington, DC for the Women's March. Though an activist first coined the phrase #MeToo back in 2006, what’s typically known as the #MeToo movement exploded in late 2017 when a New York Times article revealed accusations against an influential Hollywood producer.

2018 

A school shooting takes place at a high school in Parkland, Florida. 

California becoming the sixth state to legalize the sale of recreational marijuana. 

In the wake of Hurricane Maria, much of Puerto Rico is left without electricity—for almost an entire year.

2019

Simone Biles raises her medal count to 25 world medals and 19 gold—the most of any gymnast, male or female, in history. 

Donald Trump becomes the 4th US president to face possible impeachment.

The world’s top supercomputers achieve exaflop speed—that’s a million trillion calculations per second (a thousandfold improvement over machines at the beginning of the decade).

I survived the Warsaw ghetto

Do not ever imagine that your world cannot collapse, as ours did. This may seem the most obvious lesson to be passed down, but only because it is the most important. One moment I was enjoying an idyllic adolescence in my home city of Lodz, and the next we were on the run. I would only return to my empty home five years later, no longer a carefree boy but a Holocaust survivor and Home Army veteran living in fear of Stalin’s secret police, the NKVD. I ended up moving to what was then the British mandate of Palestine, fighting in a war of independence for a Jewish homeland I didn’t even know I had.

Perhaps it is because I was only a child that I did not notice the storm clouds that were gathering, but I believe that many who were older and wiser than me at that time also shared my childlike state.

If disaster comes, you will find that all the myths you once cherished are of no use to you. You will see what it is like to live in a society where morality has collapsed, causing all your assumptions and prejudices to crumble before your eyes. And after it’s all over, you will watch as, slowly but surely, these harshest of lessons are forgotten as the witnesses pass on and new myths take their place.

Stanisław Aronson, 93 years old, writing in The Guardian 

Tech history is poorly documented and poorly understood

It’s often near impossible to know why certain technologies flourished, or what happened to the ones that didn’t. While we’re still early enough in the computing revolution that many of its pioneers are still alive and working to create technology today, it’s common to find that tech history as recent as a few years ago has already been erased. Why did your favorite app succeed when others didn’t? What failed attempts were made to create such apps before? What problems did those apps encounter — or what problems did they cause? Which creators or innovators got erased from the stories when we created the myths around today’s biggest tech titans?

All of those questions get glossed over, silenced, or sometimes deliberately answered incorrectly, in favor of building a story of sleek, seamless, inevitable progress in the tech world. Now, that’s hardly unique to technology — nearly every industry can point to similar issues. But that ahistorical view of the tech world can have serious consequences when today’s tech creators are unable to learn from those who came before them, even if they want to.

Anil Dash writing in Medium

The Victorian Internet

Tom Standage writes in his book The Victorian Internet, “That the telegraph was so widely seen as a panacea is perhaps understandable. The fact that we are still making the same mistake today is less so. The irony is that even though it failed to live up to the utopian claims made by about it, the telegraph really did transform the world.”

The Internet, like the telegraph, offers tremendous potential for altering the world in a positive way. But we would be wise to temper our enthusiasm.

As Standage suggests, “Better communication does not necessarily lead to a wider understanding of other points of view: the potential of new technologies to change things for the better is invariably overstated, while the ways in which they will make things worse are usually unforeseen.”

Stephen Goforth

The multitude Books is a great evil!

Flash back to the year 1455. German Johannes Gutenberg prints his first book, the Latin Vulgate Bible. As Gutenberg’s press reaches across Europe, the Bible is translated into local languages. Poorly-produced copies of the Bible and mediocre literature soon thrive, leading to claims that the printing press must be controlled to avoid chaos and loss of intellectual life. Martin Luther complains, “The multitude of books is a great evil. There is no measure of limit to this fever for writing.” 

Comparisons are being made between the effects of the printing press to the advent of the internet.

Stephen Goforth