On this day in 1864, Abraham Lincoln made Yosemite Valley the first national park ever. That includes other nations. No one had ever done that before. It was dedicated “for public use, resort, and recreation.” And if you have ever been there — or if you just know who Ansel Adams was — then you know what a beautiful place it is. But let’s not harp on something as nice as that. It isn’t the Frankly Curious way!

People have been living in Yosemite Valley perhaps as far back as 8,000 years. The first people we have records of living there are the Ahwahnechee people. If you are like Ayn Rand and, really, most Americans, then you probably know that the Ahwahnechee people defeated Custer at Little Bighorn. Because, you know, as Gertrude Stein would have put it: an Indian is an Indian is an Indian. But of course, you don’t think that because you are a Frankly Curious reader and so you aren’t silly and evil.

I bring it up, however, because the Ahwahnechee people used to burn the Yosemite Valley floor each year to promote the growth of the black oak that grew there. You know, they managed their land — just as humans have been doing for tens of thousands of years, even though the Ayn Rand crowd seems to think it was something invented in Great Britain shortly before James Watt’s got his steam engine going. But the Ahwahnechee started having problems with westerners around 1849.

Was it, as Ayn Rand would expect, that the westerners wanted to use the land in more productive ways? No. It was just a gold rush — they needed to get to Columbia and get all that gold that the Miwok didn’t care about. You know, because gold is such a useful industrial metal! Let’s face it, that’s one thing you can depend upon in the constant mistreatment of native peoples throughout the continent: they needed to be moved because there was some resource under them that the westerners wanted.

But barely a year later, the gold rush was over. And 15 years later, I don’t think there were any Ahwahnechee people left in the valley. Regardless, becoming a national park was a good thing. After all this time, it is still lovely.

I mentioned yesterday that it was interesting that the Supreme Court legalized same sex marriage throughout the United States just the day before San Francisco Pride, which is always held at the end of June each year. I didn’t think to ask why that was. Well, I should have. According to Wikipedia, “The festival is traditionally held in the last full weekend in June. This commemorates the Stonewall riots.” On this day in 1968, the Stonewall riots started. It is generally taken as the beginning of the gay rights movement.

Even people of my age don’t generally know the horrible state of the institutional oppression of the LGBT community in the past. (Of course, it is as bad or worse in some places.) The most obvious example of this was the forced castration of Alan Turing. But the gay community in cities throughout the United States were subjected to constant police harassment. The Stonewall Inn was a very low-rent gay bar in Greenwich Village in the late 1960s. And so from time to time, the police would come by and arrest people because… Well, frankly, because the police have always been more interested in abusing marginalized members of the society than fighting real crime where they might get hurt.

Very early on 28 June 1968, four plain-clothes police officers raided the bar. But things did not go as planned. Part of it was certainly that resentment had been building up for years — decades — centuries. But the bigger issue was the police screwed up. They weren’t prepared. Things got delayed. And before long, a crowd of a hundred or more people gathered outside the bar. The mood was at first festive as the onlookers mocked the police, but there was also anger. Eventually, the police got into a scuffle with a lesbian who was complaining about her handcuffs being too tight. (Entirely typical — a common form of torture police officers use when they don’t like the person they are arresting.) After they beat her up, she yelled at the crowd, “Why don’t you guys do something?!” And it exploded. Wikipedia provides a good overview. Read it; it’s very exciting!

Anyway, the riot led to more riots and then to demonstrations and a much more active “gay liberation” movement. I don’t believe in violence. Just the same, the authorities will never do anything but abuse you unless you push back. The Mattachine Society was very important. But the Stonewall riots marked a turning point — something new and more radical was required. And Friday’s Supreme Court decision was one of the many good results of that. Of course people are still getting beaten up, raped, and murdered because of sexual orientation and gender identity. But it cannot be denied that things have greatly improved.

Happy anniversary Stonewall riots!

On this day in 1483, Prince Richard, Duke of Gloucester became King Richard III of England. I’ve long been fascinated by him because of the play, “If King Edward be as true and just, as I am subtle, false, and treacherous…” Who can’t help but love a hunchback with a shriveled arm who not only became the king of England but ended up being the last king to die the proper way: in battle. The problem is that Richard had no shriveled hand nor was he was a hunchback. He did, however, have distinct curvature of the spine. And it is hard not to think of him as Tyrion Lannister — although apparently Richard’s scoliosis did not occur until his adolescence.

The most recent research indicates that Richard’s deformity probably wasn’t big enough that the public would even have known. But certainly the aristocracy knew. I tend to think that the treachery that led to Richard’s death at the Battle of Bosworth Field was due primarily to his deformity. Let’s face it, even today, people rate beautiful people as smarter, kinder, and every other metric of goodness in comparison to ugly folk. And at that time, deformity was doubtless thought to indicate that God looked down on the sufferer.

None of this is to say that Richard was a saint. I’m sure he was just as vile as the other kings of that time. But I suspect much of his horrible legend is also due to the same distaste that led to his death. Still, it made a hell of a play — one of Shakespeare’s best. And I’ve come to think that no one has ever been as good as Ron Cook in the role:

Happy King Day, Richard; I hope you enjoyed it while it lasted!

On this day in 1876 was the Battle of the Greasy Grass, or as the losers call it, the Battle of the Little Bighorn, or sometimes just Custer’s Last Stand. It was part of the Great Sioux War of 1876. And what was that? Well, it was the usual: previous treaties between the United States and the Lakota Sioux and Northern Cheyenne had designated boundaries of their territory. But gold was found and so the Americans came to take over the land because, well, they wanted it and the tribespeople didn’t matter.

Even though they won that battle, they lost the war. There was never any question of that. It would be as if Rhode Island went to war with the rest of the United States. Similarly, when the Confederacy went to war with the United States, it was doomed from the start. In fact, it is something of a miracle that the Civil War lasted as long as it did. As Rhett Butler said in Gone With the Wind, “There’s not a cannon factory in the whole south… I’m afraid it’s going to make a great deal of difference to a great many gentlemen… I’m saying very plainly that the Yankees are better equipped than we; they’ve got factories, shipyards, coal mines, and a fleet to bottle up our harbors and starve us to death. All we’ve got is cotton, slaves, and arrogance.” Just as the south had no chance, the native tribes had no chance, other than that the Americans would treat them civilly — so it was a lost cause.

The end result of the war was the annexation of the Sioux land and the shipping off of the natives to concentration camps — popularly known as “Indian reservations.” People talk about slavery being America’s original sin, but I would contest that. From the first meetings of Europeans with native Americans, we’ve seen that superior firepower and resources do not imply superior behavior or civilization. But I’m not evolved enough not to take a certain amount of pleasure in George Armstrong Custer getting himself killed. Although he took a lot of people with him. And in the end, I don’t mean to blame him for a centuries long campaign against indigenous people — a campaign that continues to this day.

We mark this day 139 years ago when Custer blew it, as part of an evil war, as part of a longstanding American policy based upon racism and hubris.

On this day in 1957, Roth v United States was decided incorrectly. It was one of the major “obscenity” cases. This was the one that said that Congress could pass laws banning material “utterly without redeeming social importance.” It was later superseded by Miller v California, in the sense of coming up with yet another definition of obscenity as anything that lacks “serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value.” Of course the question remains who is to decide. And how does any of this affect society when we aren’t talking about public expressions.

The case was about Samuel Roth, the publisher of American Aphrodite. I’ve used an image of one of its covers to give you an idea of just how “horrible” it was. And it wasn’t sold in supermarkets; it was a mail order magazine. It was mostly erotic stories. That perhaps is the biggest American disease: the compulsion to stick our noses in other people’s business. Banning erotica is a minor sin compared to our general tendency to invade any country that doesn’t do exactly what we want.

Regardless, who gets to decide what has merit is always the same: the power elite. And I find it amazing that today, the people who want to ban things like American Aphrodite are also the people who want to ban abortion and then scream about how big and intrusive the government is. As I always say: I’m a First Amendment absolutist. Only two justices agreed with me, Hugo Black and William Douglas. It makes me think back to the Soviet Union where political dissidents were put in insane asylums. So if Thomas Paine were writing today, the government would just decide that his work lacked “serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value.” Problem solved!

We mark this dark day — one of many — 58 years ago when another piece of the First Amendment was carved out.

On this day last year, the last of Syria’s chemical weapons were shipped out for destruction. Also, on this day in 1180, the Genpei War started in Japan. Also, on this day in 1758, the British beat the French at Krefeld. Also, on this day in 1940, Hitler came to Paris to celebrate the fall of France. I could literally go on and on and on. In fact, today isn’t a particularly great day for war. But every day is a great day for war!

As I do these anniversary posts, I stay away from wars. But I am inundated by them. Humans really are vile. There is always someone going to war with someone else. They all have their reasons but ultimately, they are all land grabs — whether for resources or tax revenues or just some king who wants more people to pretend that he is a god. Whatever.

What amazes me is that nothing has changed. As we went to war this most recent time in Iraq, I was struck by how gullible people were. They seem totally clueless. Why don’t people realize that the people of Nazi Germany were also given plausible sounding justifications for invading Poland? Leaders don’t go before their people and say, “I’m evil so I’m starting a war!” No, they say things like, “We don’t want the smoking gun to come in the form of a mushroom cloud.” Remember that Saddam Hussein didn’t think the US was really going to invade Iraq for a very good reason: it didn’t make any sense. Certainly all the justifications for that war were bunk.

So wars go on. And on. And on. And now the United States is constantly at war. War itself has lost its meaning for us. War is just where we are going to concentrate our attacks. But we have good reasons to support this state of things. We are all so very, very afraid. But it isn’t the “terrorists” who are making us afraid. It is our leaders. And that’s been true since at least the Neolithic period — over 12,000 years ago.

So happy anniversary war: it’s your anniversary every day!

Has it been just ten years since homicidal bigot Edgar Ray Killen was convicted of planning the murders of the civil rights workers James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner on 21 June 1964 — exactly 41 years earlier? At the time of the murders, the state of Mississippi wasn’t too interested in prosecuting the murderers. But eventually, the federal government arrested and tried 18 men. There were 7 convictions, 8 acquittals, and three hung juries. Killen was one of the men in the last group. The jury was deadlocked 11-1 in favor of conviction. The lone holdout said she could not convict a preacher. Killen was a part-time minister. For some reason, he was not retried. It sounds like a slam dunk to me.

Jumping ahead a couple of decades, investigative reporter Jerry Mitchell looked into those killings. Working with an Illinois high school teacher and three of his students, they put together a case against Killen and publicized it — pressuring the state to reopen the case, which it did on 6 January 2005, with three charges of murder. On 21 June 2005, the jury found Mitchell guilty of three counts of manslaughter. He was given 20 years for each count.

He was 80 years old when he was convicted. And he turned 90 last January at the Mississippi State Penitentiary in Parchman. In general, I feel sorry for old people who did terrible things when they were younger. But it was clear that even before his incarceration, he was just as much a hate filled bigot as he had ever been. In fact, if he had grown as a human being, it is very possible that he wouldn’t have been tried and convicted. Regardless, I actually find it a irritating that he’s still alive. It doesn’t seem right.

But we mark this day 51 years ago when Chaney, Goodman, and Schwerner were murdered, and we celebrate this day 10 years ago when a very small amount of justice was done about it.