Thoughts & Musings from James McNiven
In 1832, a son, Octave, was born to the Chanut family in Paris. When Octave was six, his father, estranged from his wife, took him and sailed to New Orleans to teach at the newly-created Jefferson College. The deepening financial crisis following the 1837 Crash led to his soon losing his job, so he took… Continue reading Octave Chanute and the Wright Brothers
A while back, my wife Jane and I took a 5-day trip into New England for a short break. From our home in Nova Scotia, Canada, the drive is a long one - some 500 miles into central Maine. Some Americans don’t realize that North America extends some 900-1000 miles east and north of the… Continue reading Interchangeable Parts and The American Precision Museum
Early in 1870, while the Wyoming Governor was away in the East, Edward Lee became the Acting Governor. He, with the legal help of one of the state Supreme Court Justices, appointed three women to vacancies for Territorial Justice of the Peace positions. The terms were shortened in order to put them on a consistent… Continue reading Wyoming, 1870 – The Accidental First Suffragettes: a Political Breakthrough for Women
Updated from an earlier version published in May 2017 in factsandopinions.com. Like a lot of people in North America and Europe, I lived through years and years of paying attention to the Soviet Union, and later, Russia. It always seemed to me that this huge country, with the largest land area in the world, and possessor… Continue reading Why Bother with Russia?
There is a famous Army recruiting poster from World War I that shows Uncle Sam in his current ‘look’. He is sternly looking and pointing at the viewer, and the caption below him reads “I Want You For U.S. Army!” Generally, all the representations of Uncle Sam since 1917, and including the one my son… Continue reading About Uncle Sam
You might want to follow this explanation on a map. How US 20 (America's longest highway and the subject of my book trilogy The Yankee Road) ended in Newport, or even at Yellowstone, is a complex story. First and foremost, it begins with boundaries. After the American Revolution, the British kept control over the eastern seaboard… Continue reading Boundaries
Something that seems to be left out of most accounts of travelling overland across the continent is how long it took, especially for those going west from the Mississippi River valley, and what the introduction of the railroad and then the automobile meant to the traveller. For the wagon going to Oregon, or the Mormon… Continue reading Some Rough Travel Comparisons
With the publication of Volume 3 of The Yankee Road launching August 2020 (here's a bit of the story behind US 20, America's longest highway. US 20 stretches across the United States nearly 3400 miles, from Boston to Newport, Oregon. It is a designation connecting a number of largely pre-existing roads rather than a singular… Continue reading The Creation of US20 – The Yankee Road
The Rock River issues from a swamp in central Wisconsin and its waters flow south, crossing under US 20 in northern Illinois near the John Huy Addams (Jane Addams’ father) homestead. It then begins to flow southwesterly, passing Grand Detour and Dixon before joining the Mississippi at a rocky rapids/falls in what is informally called,… Continue reading John Deere’s Steel-Tipped Plow
The oils from different coals require different treatment. The oils of Albert coal (ashphaltum) [New Brunswick, Canada], Boghead coal [Scotland] and Breckenridge coal [Kentucky] are easily purified, while the oils from ordinary American, English and Scotch cannels, require more skill….The author has made more than 2000 experiments in reference to the manufacture and purification of… Continue reading The Unlucky Inventor
Old Professor by the Sea 