Buy Jeannette Walls’ The Glass Castle!

Buy Ricky Jay’s Learned Pigs & Fireproof Women: Unique, Eccentric and Amazing Entertainers!

Buy Jerome Greene’s Nez Perce Summer, 1877: The US Army and the Nee-Me-Poo Crisis

This one will interest anyone who has lived in Southeast Washington and Eastern Oregon, especially the Wallowa region.

The settlers were able to seize much of the Nez Perce treaty land simply because the tribe wasn’t physically there to defend it. They roamed over a large area of treaty land, often leaving an area for a year or more. A group of settlers would show up in Oregon, find some empty land, clear it and start farming it, establishing communities.

They either didn’t know or didn’t care that their settlement was illegal. They probably figured that after carving out a life there, htey were naturally entitled to be there. The Nez Perce would return after a year to their land and find illegal settlers who were in no mood to leave and who weren’t eager to share. The tribe could either appeal to the U.S. government, move to some other piece of treaty land, or try to push the interlopers out on their own.

You know where this is headed, and we all know the book ends.

The Nez Perce were better riders, better marksmen, and had superior military leadership throughout the conflict, but it wasn’t enough.

If you live near the intersection of Washington, Oregon, and Idaho, you should take a long weekend to drive many of the historic sites of the conflict, including Wallowa, Fort Lapwai, Grangeville, Cottonwood, and Clarkston.

Buy John Hodgman’s More Information Than You Require

Buy Sarah Vowell’s Assassination Vacation

Buy Ron Hall’s Same Kind of Different As Me: A Modern-Day Slave, an International Art Dealer, and the Unlikely Woman Who Bound Them Together

Buy Henry Bettenson’s The Early Christian Fathers: A Selection from the Writings of the Fathers from St. Clement of Rome to St. Athanasius!

Buy Max Brooks’ World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War!

Buy John Hodgman’s The Areas of My Expertise!

Buy The Numbers Game: Baseball’s Lifelong Fascination with Statistics!

Buy Christine Garwood’s Flat Earth: The History of an Infamous Idea

Crackpots are fascinating people. What makes a person cling to irrational beliefs in the face of mountains of evidence? Holocaust deniers, moon shoot doubters, and young Earthers all have their charms, but the flat-earthers are the cream of the nut crop.

Some of my friends who reject evolutionary theory claim that they don’t trust anything they can’t observe directly. Their basic position is something like “I interpret the Bible literally and the Biblical texts tell me that God created the earth and everything in it and exactly seven days and that is that.” Their position is a weak one, but I can understand their point of view. They apply a fundamentalist interpretation to the Bible, human knowledge contradicts that interpretation, therefore they don’t trust science. Fine.

But the flat earthers go beyond mistrusting science. They destroy science. They are science Luddites! What makes them so nutty is that we don’t even need science to observer the rotundity of the Earth. Just watch a ship disappear over the horizon and you can see that we live on a globe. This fact is so obvious, so tied to our physical experience, that a globe-shaped Earth has been the standard position of educated Earthlings for about 3,000 years. By the time Columbus set sail, everyone already knew the earth was a globe. Even the most strident Biblical fundamentalists don’t claim that the earth is flat! Yet a handful of plane-loving yahoos insist that we live on a disc-shaped plane.

Garwood’s survey of flat earth believers is mildly disappointing in that there isn’t a lot to know about them. First, there just aren’t many of them around. Sincere flat earth beliers are extremely rare, so Garwood is only able to profile fewer than a half dozen of these people. Second, the foundation of the flat-earthers’ belief is so weak that it’s not even interesting. Their cranky view of topology is based on extremely fundamentalist, literal readings of Biblical texts, like a poor man’s young earth creationists. There’s just no arguing with a regligious fundamentalist who looks to infallible sacred texts for geological knowledge.

Christine Garwood does an entertaining job of documenting all there is to know about the flat-earthers. Sadly, there just isn’t much to know. They’re crackpots, and not very interesting ones at that.

Flat earth resources

Here is a list of flat earth links from the bibliography. Brace yourself for extra nuttiness:

A hundred proofs the Earth is not a Globe

“De Sun Do Move” Sermon by John Jasper (1812-1901)

The late Bob Schadewald interracted with several flat-earthers and wrote about it. His website offers links to some of his work.

More nuts!

If anyone knows about the hollow-earthers or geocentric earth people, let me know. I won’t call them movements, but they are persistent.

Buy David Michaelis‘ Schulz and Peanuts: A Biography!

Buy Bill Milkowski’s Jaco: The Extraordinary and Tragic Life of Jaco Pastorius!

Buy John Boyne’s The Boy in the Striped Pajamas!

Buy the The Golden Compass (His Dark Materials, Book 1) by Philip Pullman!

Buy Christian Theology: An Introduction (4th Edition) by Alister E. McGrath!

The Worst Hard Time: The Untold Story of Those Who Survived the Great American Dust Bowl

Buy The Early Church: Origins to the Dawn of the Middle Ages

Buy Rip It Up and Start Again: Postpunk 1978-1984

Buy Whatever Happened to the Hall of Fame!

More than you ever wanted to know, or knew could be known, about the Major League Baseball Hall of Fame (and museum!).