NASA Pub: Earth as Art

WOW! Sometimes our tax dollars are used to add beauty to our lives.

This is not really a genealogy-related post except maybe peripherally. But it is a subject dear to my heart so ...

As beautiful as earth can be from land-bound eye level, it is even more fascinating when seen from above, especially high above. Years ago I would sit mesmerized watching the NASA channel as it broadcast the view from the window of the space shuttle. Even when I should have been doing something more productive, I couldn't tear my eyes away from the beautiful images on the screen and the game of trying to figure out where on earth this feature was. I haven't seen this series on the NASA channel recently. I wish NASA would reinstitute the feed of images from the space shuttle missions. For me, this is much better than most of the "reality" shows some of us watch.

There are beautiful images of earth from space illustrated and described in "Earth As Art" created by NASA.¹ I learned of this publication on the Free Technology for Teachers blog. This is a blog useful to every genealogist who writes (all of us, right?) or does presentations.

As beautiful as the NASA images are as art, don't skip over the descriptions which explain the colors and important features in each image. This image is a portion I cropped from an image of the Lena River Delta in Russia.² Compare it to the image of the Mississippi River Delta in the U.S. on pages 84–85 of the book.

The images might be useful as art on Powerpoint slides (faded as background images or cropped for a border decoration or as a bullet image) or for a presentation on interesting place names (like Lake Disappointment, Australia) or if you happen to have ancestral events in one of the locations depicted on the images shown (like the Mississippi River).

I'm not a lawyer. You should confirm status of the images before using them. But, in general, creations of the U.S. government are considered to be in the public domain. The book has no copyright statement included and does not indicate any restrictions on use. But be sure to properly cite the images to avoid plagiarism.

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1. Lawrence Freidl, et al., Earth as Art (Washington, D.C.: National Aeronautics and Space Administration, 2012); electronic edition (http://www.nasa.gov/pdf/703154main_earth_art-ebook.pdf : accessed 23 December 2012).

2.Cropped portion of "Lena River Delta, Russia," Lawrence Freidl, et al., Earth as Art (Washington, D.C.: National Aeronautics and Space Administration, 2012), 76–77; electronic edition (http://www.nasa.gov/pdf/703154main_earth_art-ebook.pdf : accessed 23 December 2012).

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To cite this blog post:
Debbie Parker Wayne, "NASA Pub: Earth as Art," Deb's Delvings Blog, posted 23 December 2012 (http://debsdelvings.blogspot.com/ : accessed [date]).

© 2012, Debbie Parker Wayne, CG, All Rights Reserved

History of Highway Construction in Texas - TSLAC Exhibit

The Texas State Library and Archives Commission (TSLAC) has a new online exhibit. One of many freely offered on their website.

"Put the Money Under the Rubber: The Texas Highway Department Transforms Texas 1917-1968" is a new online history exhibit from the Texas State Library and Archives. Historians have called the construction of the Texas highway system one of the greatest building projects in world history. Now history lovers, engineering buffs, and travelers alike can discover this epic story with TSLAC's extensive new online exhibit. Dozens of vintage photographs and documents from TSLAC's collection of Texas Highway Department project files tell the story of Texas's journey from frontier backwater to transportation power player.

The exhibit has interesting photographs from rural areas and small towns as well as big cities. It also has biographies of the state engineers and a lot of history. One page has a great Dallas map and indicates:

In developing this 1943 map, planners used a ratio of one car for every three Dallas residents, creating a plan to accommodate between 190,000 and 222,000 vehicles by 1970. The actual number proved to be closer to 367,000. Also note the estimated "possible limits of future urbanization."

Having lived in Dallas for my first thirty years and visited almost every year thereafter, I can tell you that by the early 1960s Dallas had exceeded the estimated possible limit of future urbanization. By 1970 urbanization would have been off the map (no pun intended, but I'll take it). I can estimate where my childhood homes were situated using the roads and waterways illustrated on the map even though residential streets are not shown.

My original interest in this exhibit (and in other road building history and records) was because my grandmother told me her grandfather built roads in East Texas, Arkansas, and Louisiana, and that he died while working on a road in Arkansas when a snake spooked his horse. Grandpa fell and was killed, perhaps from a broken neck, when the horse reared in panic. My grandmother was only seven when this happened so I am not sure how much she remembered or how often her memory may have been refreshed by discussions at family gatherings after she grew up. Her memories of getting soaked while traveling from Dallas to Smackover, Arkansas, in an open-top vehicle in a rain storm in August 1923 seemed pretty vivid.

One of my back-burner to-dos is to find out more about who this grandpa worked for and try to find records about this work. Many of the family members worked for timber companies in this piney woods area of East Texas where they lived most of the time. I've never known if Grandpa built roads for the timber companies or for county or state governments or maybe even other companies.

I am thankful for all of the historical and genealogical societies, archives, university and public libraries, GenWeb volunteers, and other good people who place information and records online freely available to all. Think of this the next time your state government is cutting the budget for the groups that support historical preservation. Some of my reasons to be thankful:

1. While viewing the exhibit I received clues of several sets of records I can now search.
2. While viewing the exhibit I learned general history and background information that helps me understand my family history better.
3. Viewing something like this exhibit with your older relatives at a holiday gathering may generate some wonderful family stories. When I saw a photo of the Dallas-Fort Worth Turnpike it reminded me of my uncle who would speed down the road then pull over and wait. When the toll booth clocked his arrival time they could not tell he had driven well in excess of the speed limit between the toll booths. We were always told you could get ticketed for speeding based on the timestamps at the beginning and ending toll booths. I'm not sure if that was true, but obviously my uncle believed it was. I wonder when we'll discover the gene that makes some people incapable of driving at the posted speeds?

Thanks to TSLAC I have more interesting reminiscences to add to my family narrative before I forget again and I have potentially productive record sets to add to my to-do list.


Update 20 Dec 2011: See "Henry Everett Johnson (1871-1923) - East Texas Road Builder?" for more on Grandpa Henry and photos of what I think is his road crew.

© 2011, Debbie Parker Wayne, All Rights Reserved

Enhancing Genealogy with Teacher Resources

A lot of websites designed to help history teachers are also useful to genealogists who want to add social context to the story of their ancestor. Richard Byrne added a new post titled "9 Sources for Historical Images, Documents, Videos, and Audio" to his Free Technology for Teachers blog. Techie genealogists are probably familiar with some of these sites. He mentions a few of my favorites:

• Yale University's Avalon Project—documenting laws from ancient BCE times to the 21^st century—and with a chronology of American history through the included documents
  
  
• The Commons on Flickr—where I have found some great copyright-free images to use in my Powerpoint presentations (check out some of the dance images to represent the genealogy happy dance)
  
  
• Google Books—where I can find full text copies of old legal reporters and digests (descriptions of cases your ancestors may have been involved in)
  

Check out "9 Sources for Historical Images, Documents, Videos, and Audio" and see if he has a site you haven't used yet.

What other great history sites have you used that are not on his list?

I often use the East Texas Research Center at Stephen F. Austin State University in Nacogdoches, Texas. A list of their collections and digital exhibits is here.


© 2011, Debbie Parker Wayne, All Rights Reserved

1860 Map of U.S. Slave States

The Map Room is one of my favorite blogs. Mapping American Slavery is a recent post with a link to a very detailed map of the American slave states showing slave and free populations and an article by Susan Schulten. Schulten states the map was even included in a portrait of Lincoln with his cabinet. The image of the portrait in her article is interactive—be sure to move your mouse over the image. I had not heard of Schulten before, but now her book The Geographical Imagination in America, 1880-1950 (Univ. of Chicago Press, 2002) is on my wish list.

This map (almost 30MB in size) can be extremely useful to genealogists and historians researching the southern states.

© 2010, Debbie Parker Wayne, All Rights Reserved