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Looking back on some of the historical events of 2005. For some reason, it seemed to me to be an interesting year for centennial events also.

2005:

• The Huygens probe landed on Titan (Saturn's moon).
• One Pope died and a new Pope was selected.
• Deep Throat's identity was revealed.
• Hurricane Katrina destroyed much of New Orleans, Bixoli, and the Gulf Coast. It was an unusually dense and destructive year for tropical storms.
• Civil unrest hit France in the Paris suburbs.
• A 7.6-magnitude earthquake stuck the Kashmir region in Northern Pakistan, killing nearly 90,000 people.
• NASA more-or-less successfully launched a projectile into a comet for study.

Centennial notes (1905):

• Einstein published his Special Theory of Relativity.
• Bend, Oregon became officially incorporated.
• Las Vegas was founded.

Bicentennial notes (1805):

• Lewis and Clark arrived and wintered at the Pacific Ocean.
• The Battle of Trafalgar: Admiral Nelson defeats a combined French and Spanish naval fleet.
• Napoleon, meanwhile, soundly defeats the Russians and Austrians at the Battle of Austerlitz.

Obviously I'm only touching on a very, very abbreviated list. A good one to review (and getting better each day) is Wikipedia's 2005 page. But, I think it's a decent touchpoint to start with, and it definitely stimulates the thinking. At any rate, those are some of the first things I thought of or stood out to me when I was looking back at 2005.

What 2005 events are significant to you?

I'm not sure if people are stupid, ignorant, lacking in a proper education or some combination of those, but the following example should illustrate my point. At work today I was talking with a co-worker about education (her son is in second grade and learning history) and the name Susan B. Anthony came up. I asked, "You know who she was, right?"

"Uh, someone famous—I know she was on a coin," was the reply.

Pretty bad. I'm always highly disappointed when I run into this type of thing at work... I should know better by now.

What's worse, though, is when I asked another (female) co-worker the same question:

"I know she's on a coin."

Ug.

Here's a site containing links to the texts of diaries from the Oregon Trail. Interesting stuff; it would be worth collecting it and turning it into a Palm Reader ebook. (If I can find the time.)

Today is (exactly) the 200th anniversary of the start of the Lewis and Clark expedition, on May 14, 1804. Did anyone realize this? I almost missed this entirely, but for Reuter's Oddly Enough RSS feed: "Lewis and Clark's List: Opium and 'Portable Soup'" lists some of the provisions they took on their expedition, including opium, "portable soup" ("paste made of boiled-down beef and cow's hooves, eggs and vegetables"), quills, inkstands, and 10 yards of linen.

Wikipedia has a decent start on an article on Lewis and Clark, but it needs fleshed out more.

Among other things, I seem to remember reading once that the Lewis and Clark expedition was one of the most successful such expeditions in history, because in a 28-month, cross-country trip they only lost one out of 33 members: Sergeant Charles Floyd died from acute appendicitis. Seems pretty good to me.

I found this passage from Frontier Doctor to be particularly interesting:

When I came to eastern Oregon in 1905, all of the beautiful pine timber was an open park-like forest, without any underbrush, where game could be seen for a long distance. Each summer there were many forest fires, the vast majority of which were caused by lightning. As there was no underbrush, these fires consumed nothing but the dead pine needles, cones and twigs that had been blown to the ground by the winds. The little blaze, only a few inches high, crept slowly over the ground and cleaned the floor of the forest of all debris, killing the pine beetles on the ground, but did no damage whatever to the green trees. There were a few dead trees scattered through the forest that had been killed by the pine beetles. These dead trees almost invariable took fire and burned up and the beetles with them. It was these annual fires which had existed for centuries that had produced the beautiful open forests free from dangerous underbrush, and killed so many of the pine beetles that they were held in check. The tiny blaze of these fires was not hot enough to injure the pine seed. When the timber was cut off and the sun was allowed to strike the ground, these little pine seeds began to germinate and a new second growth of trees immediately sprang up.

No one tried to put these annual fires out, as they were known to be a benefit to the timber. When the big lumber companies began to buy the timber, their representatives in the field saw to it that their holding were burned over every year. If the lightning did not start enough fires, the timber men started more of them.

Nearly one hundred years later, I've never known these forests not to be thick with underbrush, and the "normal" forest fire is a raging inferno that destroys everything it touches.

What happened? Ignorance. As usual.

Here's a link to a good image of the Piri Reis map. For all you mystery-history buffs out there.