R. Mark Melville

This is the best dog post I have ever seen. 👁️

The Bluesky Dictionary Can Bluesky say every word in the English language? Well this is your chance to find out.

This site by @avibagla.com is keeping track of every English word written on Bluesky—and every English word that has yet to appear. Like, until now, hovercrafts.

The sausages are the smartest of all, then.

I always thought it was excessively harsh to punish (maim) Violet Beauregarde simply for chewing gum.

But spitting your gum out where someone might step on it or get it on their clothes? *That* merits turning you into a blueberry. 🫐

A medieval wall illustration of a man with a hooked crook and a mitre, next to a man with a monk-style haircut. There are three children in a basin.

If I understood the tour guide correctly, this is a fourteenth-century fresco of St. Nicholas saving children from being turned into sausage. Since I mainly work in nineteenth- and twentieth-century history, it's wild to see something this old! In Haddon Hall, England.

This reminder seems fitting today:

There is no evidence that Marie Antoinette ever said "Let them eat cake", it is a misquote from a book about someone else .

www.britannica.com/story/did-ma...

snippetsofparis.com/marie-antoin...

teaattrianon.blogspot.com/2007/09/let-...

x.com/invitinghist...

NANCY BY ERNIE BUSHMILLER P1-NANCY IS RIDING HER SCOOTER WHEN SUDDENLY A MAN IN A CONVERTIBLE HITS A MUD PUDDLE AND SPLASHES WATER ALL OVER NANCY P2-NANCY IS VERY ANGRY,SHE FOLLOWS THE CONVERTIBLE ON HER SCOOTER P3- NANCY SEES THE MAN STOPPING HIS CONVERTIBLE P4- AS SOON AS THE MAN STEPS OUT OF HIS CONVERTIBLE NANCY RUSHES BY HIM ON HER SCOOTER AND SPLASHES WATER ON THE MAN

Nancy By Ernie Bushmiller
July 30,1951

I “finished” writing my book last November. But I still had 50+ hours of work to do before it actually went to print. Here’s what that included:

1. Reading the final manuscript out loud to myself to catch any weird wording or sentences that needed to be clearer

2. Prepping the files for submission

An airplane wing with Scottish land and water below.

I hope the good folks of Scotland like me better than they liked their last American visitor. 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿

What a good boy! 😻

Where are the parents to this kid!…
But wait for it… 👏🏼❤️

Why does this look like a live Looney Toons cartoon?? 👀😅🤣

Only today did I realize that I wrote "question" instead of "questions" on the first post of this thread. 🤦‍♂️

A screenshot of newsweek.com with three different modal overlays obscuring the story.

Trying to read a news story, 2025.

Drones in the sky (partly blocked by a tree) assemble Salt Lake City's official Progress Pride flag. It features rainbow-colored stripes, pink and blue triangles on the side, and a sego lily in the upper left corner.

Drones assemble to make a trans Pride flag, with pink, blue, and white stripes, with a sego lily in the upper left corner.

I was happy to see that Salt Lake City's "Uniquely Utah" Pioneer Day drone show last night included the city's official Pride flags.

Feather stars — relatives of sea stars — have existed for over 450 million years, long before the dinosaurs.

I feel this. I am very sensitive to cheeses. Feta and parmesan ruin everything they touch.

On July 24, 1849, the residents of Great Salt Lake City awoke to the sound of a cannon firing, followed by martial music. At seven thirty, a sixty-five-foot-long “national flag” was raised, and a procession led Church leaders and spectators to the Bowery, a public open-air structure in Salt Lake City. The procession included twenty-four young men carrying copies of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution of the United States, twenty-four young women carrying copies of the Bible and the Book of Mormon, and twenty-four older men called “Silver Greys” carrying staffs. Once everyone had assembled at the Bowery, they listened to music and speeches about the Declaration of Independence and the persecution of the Latter-day Saints, including the murder of Joseph Smith and the actions of the mobs that drove the Saints from Missouri and Illinois. Following the program, thousands of Latter-day Saints joined in a community dinner of bread, cucumbers, beets, and more. The city was also full of gold-seeking emigrants on their way to California, and hundreds of them joined the feast. Dozens of Native Americans also came to the meal. After dinner, William W. Phelps read twenty-four official toasts were read,; he was followed by Thomas Bullock reading “volunteer toasts” that were less formal than the official toastshad not been planned beforehand. The crowd heard more music and speeches before retiring to their homes. A holiday had been born. This new holiday, however, did not spring up out of nothing. In most respects, it was identical to nineteenth-century celebrations of the Fourth of July: the cannon fire, the procession (including groups of young men and young women), the political and patriotic speeches and reading of the Declaration of Independence, and the symbolic number of toasts.

The Latter-day Saint settlers in what would become Utah did not celebrate the Fourth of July in 1849, and considering how some of their speeches complained about the way America had treated them, it might be easy to assume that they consciously chose July 24 instead of July 4 as a subtle affront to the United States. (When the settlers had arrived in the Salt Lake Valley two years earlier, the land still belonged to Mexico, but the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo of 1848 transferred the land to the United States.) Yet the historical record is inconclusive. The Saints had not celebrated July 4 in any large manner since Joseph Smith’s 1844 murder. In fact, they consciously resented the holiday in 1845, when they were still residing in Nauvoo, Illinois—that year Lyman O. Littlefield wrote, “The people of Nauvoo have too much candor and intelligence to celebrate a thing that has no existance [sic]. . . . American liberty expired with the prophets at their martyrdom in Carthage jail.” In 1847, as Church Patriarch John Smith was making his way west, he recorded, “the 4 of July we Do not feel to celebrate it as the birthday of the Independence of the united States as we have ben Driven from her because we worship God according to his Laws.” However, that same year, members of the Mormon Battalion participated in a large celebration in California, even though it occurred on a Sunday.

It is unclear whether these bitter feelings explain why they did not celebrate July 4 in 1849. According to Brigham Young, they had a practical reason: “Why do we not celebrate the 4th of July? The Declaration of Independence is just as precious to me to-day as it was 20 days ago! has it not the same validity, that it had in 1776? Is it not as good to-day as it was 20 days ago? We choose this day that we might have a little bread to set on our tables; to day we can see the bread, cucumbers, and beets, that we could not have seen 20 days ago.” Some historians believe Young was being sarcastic, as he well may have been, but his statement cannot be dismissed so easily. For one thing, Latter-day Saints in Kanesville, Iowa, including Apostle George A. Smith, observed the Fourth of July in the usual manner in 1849. Additionally, throughout the 1850s, the Mormon settlers enthusiastically celebrated the Fourth of July, in addition to the Twenty-Fourth. It appears that 1849 came right between periods of apathy (or disdain) and enthusiasm for the Fourth of July among Latter-day Saints. The legacy of the 1849 Twenty-Fourth of July meant that the pioneers had not replaced the Fourth of July; instead, they had simply created an additional independence day. Though the first pioneers set foot in the valley on July 21, they selected July 24 as the day of celebration. It is not clear why they chose this day, but there are a few possibilities. It might seem simplistic, but it is possible they selected July 24 to be a numerical counterpoint to July 4, since they celebrated the Twenty-Fourth as they would have celebrated the Fourth. July 24 was also the day that the last of the vanguard company arrived, so they might have chosen to celebrate the completion of the arrival, rather than the beginning of the arrival. And they might have selected July 24 because that was the day Brigham Young arrived.

I talk about this in my article on the holiday (which unfortunately is not available online): R. Mark Melville, “The Twenty-Fourth of July: An Overview of Utah’s State Holiday, 1849–2022,” Latter-day Saint Historical Studies 24, no. 1 (Spring 2023): 69–114.

Great context! Thanks for this video.

I do want to clarify that the 24th of July (later called Pioneer Day) has *always* been celebrated like a second or delayed 4th of July. Ever since 1849.

On Thursday, Utah Overpass Action held a Pioneer Day-themed protest in support of undocumented immigrants and protesting the Trump administration's hearltess cuts to refugee admissions to the United States.

To participate with UOA, email us at UtahOverpassAction@gmail.com

There was a July 24 parade in Salt Lake City in 1849, but these parades were held only sporadically until the 1930s.

That quibble aside, it is amazing to see the artistry of these floats! Many are made by volunteers.

"This year marks the 176th year of the Days of '47 Parade."

Not so. July 24/Pioneer Day is not the same thing as Days of '47. Days of '47 only goes back to 1931, when it was called Covered Wagon Days.

When I was little, the U.S. military came to our home at gunpoint and took me and my family away. We were imprisoned for years in barbed wire camps simply because we were Japanese American. I have spent my life telling that story, hoping it would never be repeated.

I'm happy to answer any questions you may have!

Originally, "pioneers" in Utah referred only to Brigham Young's vanguard company of July 1847. It later included any company that arrived in 1847, and by the early twentieth century, it included anyone who arrived before the transcontinental railroad in 1869.

If you include handcarts in your Pioneer Day festivities, you have already expanded the holiday beyond its original commemoration.

Q. What about handcarts?
A. Only a small percentage (around 5 percent) of Mormon pioneers used handcarts, yet they have an outsize presence in the memory of pioneers. They did not become a major part of the holiday until the 1890s.

A screenshot from "Gravity Falls." Dipper and Mabel (who is wearing a top hat) talk to Stan, who is standing next to an open stock (device for public humiliation). A banner that says "Pioneer Day" is in the background.

Q. Are there similar holidays in other places?
A. Yes! There are numerous regional holidays throughout the US. Utah isn't even unique in using the "Pioneer Day" name (which didn't come around until the 1870s).

Native peoples have been included in various ways since the first celebration of 1849, when they were invited to the community meal. They were often included in problematic or patronizing ways. Since 1995, Native American groups have hosted an annual Powwow in Liberty Park to honor their heritage.