Still on track

It seems like the Institute can't get enough of trains; I still have a few memories to relate and maybe I'll get to them but the stories from you guys are more interesting to me.  When Uncle Ken mentioned his interest in photographing trains I remembered an exhibit I saw many years ago at Roosevelt University, photos by O. Winston Link.  They were terrific, all black and white photos as part of a project showing steam engines of one of the Pennsylvania rail lines.  Very dramatic and you could almost feel the trains rumbling through the gallery.  There was only one time that I recall that I saw a working steam locomotive up close and personal; must have been in the early 50s and the Old Dog was a mere pup.  The family was meeting some friend or relative, I forget which, but it wasn't at a downtown station.  It could have been at a station on the northwest side, maybe the Milwaukee Line.  Anyhow, I could see the train approaching and I was probably less than ten feet from the tracks but, having only seen steam engines on TV and at the movies, I was not prepared for the reality.  The noise, the smells, and the heat left me stupefied.  It was frightening and exhilarating, a wondrous tonic for a little kid.

Steam engines are long gone but there is a railway museum (in Union, Illinois?) that still fires them up once in a while.  It's another one of those places that I've always meant to go to but never got around to.  There was a not too shabby facsimile of the steam engine experience at the Smithsonian in the late 60s, a  beautifully restored locomotive with a looping soundtrack.  Close your eyes and you could hear the train approaching in all of it's clanging glory.  Except for the lack of the oily and steamy odors you would swear that it was the real, live thing.  It was that loud, and wonderful to behold.

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Some time back a topic of discussion was the territorial nature of the United States and, because the Institute is finely attuned to the cosmic zeitgeist, there is a recent book discussing the same.  This one was written by a history professor at Northwestern, Daniel Immerwahr, and it's titled How to Hide an Empire: A History of the Greater United States.  I haven't read it yet but according to the book reviews (mostly very positive) and a few audio interviews, it sound like a doozy.  There is a lot of information I didn't know, such as even though residents of US territories are considered US citizens they do not have the same protection of the US Constitution that we in the states enjoy.  If you go to Puerto Rico and are arrested you are not guaranteed a trial by jury.

And I've wondered why the US has so many military bases on tiny and obscure islands and the reason is The Guano Islands Act of 1856.  This is heady stuff, the fact that if an American citizen finds guano on an uninhabited and unclaimed island that island can be considered US territory.

The biggest surprise to me involves the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor and what we were not taught in school.  I did not know that there were simultaneous attacks on Guam and Wake Island, both US territories, and the next day the Philippine Islands, a major US territory, was attacked and occupied by the Japanese.  But FDR's "day of infamy"  speech doesn't mention the Philippines, a tremendous loss of territory for the US.  There are complex nuances at play and racism is a major factor.

The last tidbit about the book concerns the design of the US dollar bill, which was based on the 1903 Filipino ten peso note; I did not know that.  What a world we live in.