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Although this site has been created primarily for my students, everyone is welcome. In these pages you'll find many sources of information.

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Quote of the Month

For many of us, clean water is so plentiful and readily available that we rarely, if ever, pause to consider what life would be like without it.

~Marcus Samuelsson

Numbers of the Month

Water is the key environmental issue of the century. Most of the Earth’s water resources are as inaccessible as if they were on Mars, and those that are accessible are unevenly distributed across the planet. Water is hard to transport over long distances, and our needs are growing, both for food and industry. Everything we do requires water, for drinking, washing, growing food, and for industry, construction and manufacturing. With more than 7.5 billion people on the planet, and the population projected to top 10 billion by 2050, the situation is set to grow more urgent.

In a ground-breaking new study based on data from the NASA Grace–Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment, satellites over a 14-year period discovered 19 hotspots around the world where water resources are being rapidly depleted, with potentially disastrous results. They include areas of California, north-western China, northern and eastern India, and the Middle East. Overall, as climate change scientists had predicted, areas of the world already prone to drought were found to be getting drier, and areas that were already wet getting wetter.

Currently, 844 million people – about one in nine of the planet’s population – lack access to clean, affordable water within half an hour of their homes, and every year nearly 300,000 children under five die of diarrhea, linked to dirty water and poor sanitation. Providing water to those who need it is not only vital to human safety and security, but has huge social and economic benefits too. Children lose out on education and adults on work when they are sick from easily preventable diseases. Providing affordable water saves lives and reduces the burden on healthcare, as well as freeing up economic resources. It would cost just 0.1% of global GDP a year to 2030 to provide water and hygiene to all those who need it, but the World Bank estimates that the economic benefits would be $60bn a year.

The poor are worst hit. Competing demands for water means that those who are poorer or marginalized find it more difficult to get water than the rich and powerful. Many governments and privatized water companies concentrate their provision on wealthy districts, and prioritize agriculture and industry over poorer people, while turning a blind eye to polluters and those who over-extract water from underground sources. Sharing access to water equitably requires good governance, tight regulation, investment and enforcement, all qualities in short supply in some of the world’s poorest and most water-scarce areas..

Then and Now

   07/01/1862 - The first federal polygamy legislation was enacted.

   07/01/1863 - The Civil War battle of Gettysburg began.

   07/01/1898 - During the Spanish-American War, Theodore Roosevelt and his Rough Riders waged a victorious assault on San Juan Hill in Cuba.

   07/01/1943 - 'Pay-as-you-go' income tax withholding began.

   07/01/1944 - Delegates from 44 countries began meeting at Bretton Woods, NH, where they agreed to establish the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank.

   07/01/1946 - The US exploded a 20-kiloton atomic bomb near Bikini Atoll in the Pacific.

   07/01/1963 - The US Post Office first began using Zip Codes.

   07/01/1968 - The US, Britain, the Soviet Union and 58 other countries signed the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty.

   07/01/1991 - President GHW Bush nominated Clarence Thomas to the Supreme Court ... and the battle began!

   07/01/1997 - Hong Kong reverted to Chinese rule after 156 years as a British colony.

   07/02/1776 - The Continental Congress passed a resolution saying that these United Colonies are, and of right, out to be, Free and Independent States.

   07/02/1926 - The US Army Air Corps began.

   07/02/1962 - Ernest Hemingway, the winner of the 1954 Nobel Prize in literature, died at 62 of a self-inflicted gunshot wound.

   07/02/1964 - President Lyndon Johnson signed a sweeping civil rights bill.

   07/02/1976 - The Supreme Court ruled the death penalty was not inherently cruel or unusual.

   07/02/2017 - Salvation Army Founders Day

   07/03/1608 - Samuel de Champlain founded the city of Quebec.

   07/03/1775 - General George Washington took command of the Continental Army at Cambridge MA.

   07/03/1930 - Congress created the US Veterans Administration.

   07/03/1962 - Algeria became independent after 132 years of French rule.

   07/03/1971 - Jim Morrison died in Paris. The official cause of death was a heart attack.

   07/03/2018 - Festival of Cerridwen – Wicca, Celtic

   07/04/1776 - The Continental Congress adopted the Declaration of Independence.

   07/04/1802 - The US Military Academy officially opened at West Point NY.

   07/04/1831 - Dr. Samuel Francis Smith, a Baptist minister in Boston wrote America. He scribbled his original words to a melody he found in a German songbook not realizing the tune was that of the British national anthem. Hours later, the congregation of Boston's Park Street Church sang it for the first time.

   07/04/1826 - Thomas Jefferson, author of the Declaration of Independence, died at Monticello VA.

   07/04/1826 - John Adams died in Quincy MA.

   07/04/1884 - France presented the Statue of Liberty to the US as a gift.

   07/04/2018 - Happy Independence Day!

   07/05/1811 - Venezuela became the first South American country to declare its independence from Spain.

   07/05/1865 - William Booth founded the Salvation Army in London.

   07/05/1946 - The bikini made its debut during an outdoor fashion show at the Molitor Pool in Paris.

   07/05/1975 - Arthur Ashe became the first black man to win a Wimbledon singles title as he defeated Jimmy Connors.

   07/05/1984 - The Supreme Court weakened the 70-year-old "exclusionary rule," deciding that evidence seized with defective court warrants could be used against defendants in criminal trials.

   07/06/1854 - The first official meeting of the Republican Party took place in Jackson MI.

   07/06/1923 - The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics formed.

   07/06/1933 - The first All-Star baseball game took place at Chicago's Comiskey Park. The American League defeated the National League 4 to 2.

   07/06/1945 - President Truman signed an executive order establishing the Medal of Freedom.

   07/06/1967 - The Biafran War erupted. The war lasted over two years and claimed over 600,000 lives.

   07/06/2018 - Birth of the Dalai Lama – Buddhism

   07/07/1865 - Officials hanged four people in Washington for conspiring with John Wilkes Booth to assassinate President Lincoln.

   07/07/1898 - The US annexed Hawaii.

   07/07/1958 - President Eisenhower signed the Alaska statehood bill.

   07/07/1981 - President Reagan announced he was nominating Arizona judge Sandra Day O'Connor to become the first female justice on the US Supreme Court.

   07/08/1663 - King Charles II of England granted a charter to Rhode Island.

   07/08/1856 - Charles Barnes of Lowell, Massachusetts patented the first machine gun.

   07/08/1889 - The Wall Street Journal was first published.

   07/08/1947 - The US Army swore in its first women recruits.

   07/08/1950 - General Douglas MacArthur became commander-in-chief of UN forces in Korea.

   07/09/1872 - John Blondell of Thomaston MN patented the doughnut cutter.

   07/09/1893 - Doctors performed the first successful open-heart surgery.

   07/09/1896 - William Jennings Bryan delivered his famous Cross of Gold speech at the Democratic national convention in Chicago.

   07/09/2018 - Martyrdom of the Bab – Baha’i

   07/10/1850 - Vice President Millard Fillmore assumed the presidency following the death of President Taylor.

   07/10/1919 - President Wilson personally delivered the Treaty of Versailles to the Senate and urged its ratification.

   07/10/1991 - Boris Yeltsin took the oath of office as the first elected president of the Russian Republic.

   07/10/1992 - A federal judge in Miami sentenced former Panamanian leader Manuel Noriega, convicted of drug and racketeering charges, to 40 years in prison. The sentence was later cut to 10 years.

   07/11/1533 - Pope Clement VII excommunicated England's King Henry XIII.

   07/11/1798 - A congressional act formally reestablished the Marine Corps and created the Marine Band.

   07/11/1864 - Confederate forces led by General Jubal Early began an abortive invasion of Washington DC, turning back the next day.

   07/11/1977 - The Medal of Freedom was awarded posthumously to the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr.

   07/11/2018 - World Population Day

   07/12/100BCE - Roman Dictator Julius Caesar was born.

   07/12/1817 - Naturalist-author Henry David Thoreau was born in Concord MA.

   07/12/1862 - Congress authorized the Medal of Honor.

   07/12/1881 - William H. Bonney Jr., aka Billy the Kid, was shot and killed by Sheriff Pat Garrett in Fort Sumner NM.

   07/13/1960 - John Kennedy won the Democratic presidential nomination at his party's convention in Los Angeles.

   07/13/1977 - A blackout lasting 25 hours hit the New York area. (There were a lot of kids born 9 months later!)

   07/14/1798 - Congress passed the Sedition Act making it a federal crime to publish false, scandalous or malicious writing about the US government.

   07/14/1933 - The German government outlawed all political parties except the Nazi Party.

   07/14/1958 - The army of Iraq overthrew the monarchy.

   07/15/1606 - Dutch painter Rembrandt was born.

   07/15/1870 - Georgia became the last Confederate state readmitted to the Union.

   07/15/1964 - Senator Barry Goldwater won the nomination for president at the Republican national convention in San Francisco.

   07/15/1998 - The Congressional Budget Office estimated federal surpluses of $1.55 trillion over the next decade. (My, how times have changed!)

   07/16/1790 - The District of Columbia became the seat of the US government.

   07/16/1918 - The Bolsheviks executed Russian Czar Nicholas II and his family.

   07/16/1945 - The US exploded its first experimental atomic bomb in the desert near Alamogordo NM.

   07/16/1951 - JD Salinger's Catcher in the Rye was first published.

   07/16/1964 - In accepting the Republican presidential nomination in San Francisco, Barry Goldwater said "extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice." Does anyone still believe that?

   07/16/1979 - Saddam Hussein became president of Iraq.

   07/16/2018 - Chokhor Duchen – Buddhism

   07/17/1821 - Spain ceded Florida to the US.

   07/17/1945 - President Truman, Soviet leader Josef Stalin and British Prime Minister Winston Churchill began meeting at Potsdam in the final Allied summit of WWII.

   07/17/2018 -   World Emoji Day

   07/18/64CE - The Great Fire of Rome began.

   07/18/1947 - President Truman signed the Presidential Succession Act, which placed the speaker of the House and the Senate president pro tempore next in the line of succession after the vice president.

   07/18/1969 - Ted Kennedy drove off the Dike Bridge killing Mary Jo Kopechne. He received a two-month suspended sentence for leaving the scene of the accident.

   07/19/1848 - A pioneer women's rights convention opened in Seneca Falls, NY.

   07/19/1941 - British Prime Minister Winston Churchill launched his "V for Victory" campaign in Europe.

   07/19/1969 - Apollo 11 and its astronauts, Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin and Michael Collins, went into orbit around the moon.

   07/19/1979 - The Nicaraguan capital of Managua fell to Sandinista guerrillas two days after President Anastasio Somoza had fled the country.

   07/19/1993 - President Clinton announced a compromise allowing homosexuals to serve in the military if they refrained from all homosexual activity ... the "don't ask, don't tell" policy. It probably should have been called "don't ask, don't act."

   07/20/1861 - The Congress of the Confederate States began holding sessions in Richmond VA.

   07/20/1881 - Sioux Indian leader Sitting Bull, a fugitive since the Battle of the Little Big Horn, surrendered to federal troops.

   07/20/1942 - The first detachment of the Women's Army Auxiliary Corps, later known as WACs, began basic training at Fort Des Moines IA.

   07/20/1944 - An attempt by a group of German officials to assassinate Adolf Hitler with a bomb failed.

   07/20/1969 - Apollo 11 astronauts Neil Armstrong and Edwin "Buzz" Aldrin became the first men to walk on the moon.

   07/21/1861 - The South won the first Battle of Bull Run at Manassas VA.

   07/21/1925 - The Monkey Trial ended in Dayton, TN with John Scopes convicted of violating state law for teaching Darwin's Theory of Evolution. The conviction was later overturned.

   07/21/1949 - The US Senate ratified the North Atlantic Treaty ... which created NATO.

   07/21/1954 - France surrendered North Vietnam to the Communists.

   07/21/1980 - Draft registration began in the US for 19- and 20-year-old men.

   07/21/2018 - Tisha B'av begins at sunset (ends tomorrow at nightfall) – Judaism

   07/22/1934 - Federal agents shot John Dillinger to death in Chicago.

   07/22/1937 - The Senate rejected President Roosevelt's proposal to add more justices to the Supreme Court.

   07/22/1975 - The House joined the Senate in voting to restore the American citizenship of Confederate General Robert E. Lee.

   07/22/2018 - Parents’ Day

   07/23/1846 - Protesting slavery and the US involvement in the Mexican War, Henry David Thoreau refused to pay his $1 poll tax and the Concord MA constable jailed him. This experience moved him to write Civil Disobedience.

   07/23/1904 - Charles Menches invented the ice cream cone during the Louisiana Purchase Exposition in St. Louis.

   07/23/1914 - Austria-Hungary issued an ultimatum to Serbia following the killing of Archduke Francis Ferdinand by a Serb assassin. The dispute led to WWI.

   07/23/1979 - Ayatollah Khomeini banned Rock and Roll music in Iran.

   07/23/2018 - National Hotdog Day

   07/23/2018 - Birthday of Haile Selassie I – Rastafarian

   07/24/1929 - President Hoover proclaimed the Kellogg-Briand Pact, which renounced war as an instrument of foreign policy.

   07/24/1946 - The US detonated an atomic bomb at Bikini Atoll in the Pacific in the first underwater test of the device.

   07/24/1974 - The Supreme Court unanimously ruled that President Nixon had to turn over subpoenaed White House tape recordings to the Watergate special prosecutor.

   07/24/2018 - Pioneer Day – LDS

   07/25/1593 - France's King Henry IV converted from Protestantism to Roman Catholicism.

   07/25/1952 - Puerto Rica became a self-governing commonwealth of the US.

   07/25/2018 - Papa Ogou (St Jacques le Majeur) – Voudon

   07/26/1775 - Benjamin Franklin became Postmaster-General.

   07/26/1947 - President Truman signed the National Security Act, creating the Department of Defense, the National Security Council, the Central Intelligence Agency and the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

   07/26/1953 - Fidel Castro began his revolt against Fulgencio Batista with an unsuccessful attack on an army barracks in eastern Cuba. Castro ousted Batista in 1959.

   07/26/1990 - President GHW Bush signed into law the Americans with Disabilities Act.

   07/26/2018 - Gran'Dlai et Gran'Aloumandia (Sainte Anne) – Voudon

   07/27/1794 - French revolutionary leader Maximilien Robespierre was overthrown and placed under arrest. He was executed the following day.

   07/27/1953 - The Korean War armistice was signed at Panmunjom, ending three years of fighting.

   07/27/1974 - The House Judiciary Committee voted to recommend President Nixon's impeachment on a charge that he had personally engaged in a course of conduct designed to obstruct justice in the Watergate case.

   07/27/2018 - Korean War Veterans Armistice Day

   07/27/2018 - Guru Purnima or Vyasa Purnima – Hinduism

   07/28/1868 - The 14th Amendment to the Constitution, guaranteeing due process of law, took effect.

   07/28/1945 - A US Army bomber crashed into the 79th floor of New York's Empire State Building, killing 14 people.

   07/29/1030 - The patron saint of Norway, King Olaf II, died in battle.

   07/29/1890 - Artist Vincent van Gogh died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound in France.

   07/29/1958 - President Eisenhower signed the National Aeronautics and Space Act, which created NASA.

   07/29/2018 - Maitresse Silverine – Voudon

   07/30/1729 - The city of Baltimore was founded.

   07/30/1885 - Jean Francois Gravelet stepped out over Niagara Falls for the first tightrope walk over the famous waterfall. She did it on a 3" rope stretched 1,166 feet.

   07/30/1942 - President Roosevelt signed a bill creating a women's auxiliary agency in the Navy known as the WAVES (Women Accepted for Volunteer Emergency Service).

   07/30/1965 - President Johnson signed into law the Medicare bill ... which went into effect the following year.

   07/31/1777 - The Marquis de Lafayette, a 19-year-old French nobleman, became a major-general in the American Continental Army.

   07/31/1919 - Germany adopted its Weimar Constitution.

   07/31/1991 - President GHW Bush and Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev signed the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty in Moscow.

Online Resource Links

   What ISIS Really Wants: The Islamic State is no mere collection of psychopaths. It is a religious group with carefully considered beliefs, among them that it is a key agent of the coming apocalypse. Here’s what that means for its strategy and for how to stop it  |  ISIS Claims Responsibility, Calling Paris Attacks First of the Storm  |  Syria Iraq: The Islamic State Militant Group  |  Isis: The Inside Story  |  Frontline: The Rise of ISIS  |  Council on Foreign Relations: A Primer on ISIS Iraq  |  Cracks in ISIS Are Becoming More Clear  |  How ISIS’ Attacks Harm the Middle East

   What it’s like to live on $2 a day in the United States (PDF)

   Check out Today's Front Pages. Each day, you can see the front pages of more than 800 newspapers from around the world in their original, unedited form.

   Whether or not you noticed, the earth's population passed 7 billion a while back. You might enjoy NPR's wonderful video, Visualizing How a Population Grows to 7 Billion.

   Check out the St. Louis Fed's presentation The Financial Crisis: What Happened?. The original video is no longer available but you can view the power point presentation.

   Want to take a survey but not sure how many responses to collect? This Survey Calculator gives you the number for any given population size and desired confidence level. A reverse calculator lets you enter characteristics of an existing survey and gives the confidence interval (±X%) to apply to the results. The Survey System site, sponsored by a survey software company, also gives clear explanations of statistical significance, survey design and related concepts. Also check out 20 Questions a Journalist (and You, too!) Should Ask About Poll Results.

   PBS's 30 Second Candidate allows you to view more political ads than you ever knew existed. Choose the Historical Timeline link to see how political ads have changed over the years. Start with the infamous Daisy Ad that Lyndon Johnson used against Barry Goldwater. Click on Watch Johnson ads. Then click on either the QuickTime link or the Real Video link next to Daisy.

   Check out Political Compass. The site does a good job of explaining political ideologies (although with definitions different from those I use) and gives you a chance to discover your own political philosophy.

   Law Library of Congress: North Korea: Collection of links to websites on North Korean government, politics and law. Includes legal guides, country studies and links to constitutions and branches of government (where available). Council on Foreign Relations: North Korea: Background, articles and opinion pieces about North Korea government and politics. Many of the articles focus on North Korea's nuclear program. From the Council on Foreign Relations, "an independent membership organization and a nonpartisan think tank and publisher."

   State of the Union (SOTU): The site uses an interactive timeline to provide a visual representation of prominent words in presidential State of the Union addresses by displaying significant words as "determined by comparing how frequently the word occurs in the document to how frequently it appears throughout the entire body of SOTU addresses." The Appendices section describes the statistical methods used. Also includes the full text of addresses.

   Small Town Papers: This site provides access to scanned images of recent issues of dozens of small town newspapers from throughout the United States. Newspapers are updated periodically, 2-3 weeks after publication. The site also includes a searchable archive (of articles, photos and advertisements), which covers different periods for each paper, some as far back as the 1890s. Access to the archives requires free registration.

   This website serves as a centralized location to learn about the Congressional Research Service and search for CRS reports that have been released to the public by members of Congress. (CRS Reports do not become public until a member of Congress releases the report.) Features a searchable database with more than 8,000 reports, a list of recently released reports, other collections of CRS reports and a FAQ about CRS.

   Stem Cell Research: See the official NIH resource for Stem Cell Research. In 2005, NOVA aired an overview of The Stem Cell Issue.

   Instances of the Use of United States Armed Forces Abroad, 1798 - 2004: This report lists hundreds of instances in which the United States has used its armed forces abroad in situations of military conflict or potential conflict or for other than normal peacetime purposes. It was compiled in part from various older lists and is intended primarily to provide a rough survey of past US military ventures abroad, without reference to the magnitude of the given instance noted.

   Government Product Recalls

   Homeland Security Knowledge Base

   If you're worried about retirement, try some of the following sites.
        IRS Tax Information for Retirement Plans
        Social Security Retirement Planner
        Retirement Planning Resources from Smart Money

   Keeping the Shi'ites Straight Based on the opinion that no story has been more confusing for the Western news media to cover in postwar Iraq than the politics of the country's Shi'ite majority, this article provides a basic outline of Shi'ite religious history. Discusses the Sadr family (Muhammad Baqir as-Sadr, Ayatollah Muhammad Sadiq al-Sadr, and Muqtada as-Sadr), Muhammad Baqir al-Hakim and other figures.

   This commercial site presents brief information about dozens of Black Inventors from the United States. Some entries include portraits and images. Also includes a searchable timeline covering 1721-1988. Does not include bibliographic information.

   Annenberg Political Fact Check: This site describes itself as a nonpartisan, nonprofit, consumer advocate for voters that aims to reduce the level of deception and confusion in US politics. The site provides original articles, with summaries and sources, analyzing factual accuracy in TV ads, debates, speeches, interviews and news releases. Searchable. From the Annenberg Public Policy Center of the University of Pennsylvania.

   White House Tapes: The President Calling: Three of America's most compelling presidents -- Kennedy, Johnson and Nixon -- bugged their White House offices and tapped their telephones. In this documentary project, American Radio Works eavesdrops on presidential telephone calls to hear how each man used one-on-one politics to shape history. Includes audio, a transcript of the documentary and background information on each president and the tapes.

   The State of State and Local Finances: New studies afford a state-by-state or city-by-city analysis of fiscal well being. The Year of Living Dangerously: While leaders in a growing number of states appear to believe they're serving the public good by squeezing government dry, there's little question that minimizing management carries a host of dangers that directly affect the lives of citizens.

   Government Debt by Country Map: Shows countries' general government gross debt as a percentage of GDP in 2012.

   First Amendment Library: Provides info on Supreme Court First Amendment jurisprudence,  including rulings, arguments, briefs, historical material, commentary and press coverage.

 

Community Service

If you need a presentation or workshop for your group,

use this Community link or the link at the top of the page.
The link will take you to a list of the topics I currently have available.
To schedule a date or for more information, feel free to contact me at dramyglenn@gmail.com